Part 11
“You’ve probably heard me cartooned as an international character; anyway, that’s what I’m called. This touring of the camps was what started me. I had more freedom with the men than I would have if I’d been in France, and the college-boy type was what looked good to me. The reason I liked them both then and now—it’s truer now than it ever was—is that they had just as sure an intent as I for having as good a time as possible while they lasted, and I liked their ways of going about it. They liked me, too, because I was easy to be with and they could feel just as free as if they were among themselves.
“I suppose that’s the keynote of my relations with men; they can act just as if they were among themselves. I smoke with them, drink more than they do and hold it better; I tell ’em stories and sing ’em songs; they can be as free as possible, and yet with the added pep in the thought that after all, I _am_ a girl.
“At the end of the summer of 1918, I broke into pieces for a fact, and the Y put me out for a rest. I think they breathed easier when I was out, anyway. Before I was in trim again, the armistice was signed. I was some relieved. As I saw it, the decks were cleared for me. I’d done more work up to twenty than some people do in a lifetime; for a year I’d worked for my country; and now I was going to have an everlasting good time while my pep held out.
“What was the use of any other sure intent? I knew I could never care again for anybody. I hadn’t seen him or heard of him. So what was the use of anything—except having a good time? Sometimes I’ve wondered if he could see me—now—would he like me any better—even if I am polished off some from the cabaret singer he knew. But what was the use of taking the ‘Idylls of the King’ to heart, when he wasn’t there to see me? If he’d left me any other way——Men are like that; they break away clean; girls make a jagged break, or leak away. He’d gone; and when you stop to think of it, he was about the only nail I had to hold me down. So what was the use? And away I popped.
“When the colleges started their parties again, I made my début into society. I stood it all right, too. The way girls who had been brought up in front families acted, made it possible for me to get away with my varnished-over East-Side-plus Charlette style. I was only a little more so than they were, and that little more so made me a little more popular than they were.
“I decided to slip my things over to Boston and settle there. You can’t blaze around at all hours the way you can in New York, but I can always think of things to do no matter what the material is, and I was sick of New York. It had got me once and I was afraid it would again. And every time I went by Charlette’s I felt a pull—but I swore I wouldn’t go back there. Boston was the nearest all colleges except Yale and Princeton, and the numbers of little comrades I had in the other colleges, and Harvard and Tech being right there, cinched the matter. I get to Yale and Princeton when I want to just the same, and go over to New York when I feel like it, which isn’t often.
“I met Sal at a Cornell house party, and afterwards ran into her around a good deal. When I moved to Boston we agreed to hit it off in this apartment. She comes from a little New Hampshire town, was the village belle, wore spit curls, rhinestone combs and all that sort of thing till some underdone Dartmouth freshman took her to Winter Carnival and she saw she’d found her lifework. She contributed the black walnut pieces that stick out in this room in spite of my black-and-white efforts. I wanted to start right, so I got everything we needed. Some of the things were donated, but even so, what we bought took all my capital except my stocks, besides whatever few little onions she slipped into count. Perhaps you’ve gathered there’s not too much love oozing between me and Sal. I wanted someone to live with; you can see most girls wouldn’t do; Sal’s the answer. As for the rest about Sal—she can tell you if she wants to; I’ve told you just as much as touches me and makes it my business.”
Jerry stopped and drew a long breath, much as she had earlier in the story. “And so you’ve got my life history salted down, Joy. It’s not as black as the ebonies nor as white as the ivories; I should say the composite picture would be a nice medium grey, like the sweater I used to sport.”
Joy had scarcely seemed to be listening for some time now. “But, Jerry—you don’t still care for that man?”
Jerry’s mouth grew pale. “I do. I could never care for anyone else.”
“But how can you, when he has gone off and left you?”
“Grant has gone off and left you. Do you still care for him?”
Joy considered, and into her cheeks crept a startled flush. “Why—why—I don’t think I know.”
“Well, then you never felt the way I do. When you’ve lived with a thing like that for years—oh, it’s so blame all wrong! If I had been a man I could have gone out and hunted for the person I cared for—_made_ her give me at least a chance! But what can a girl do but wait and hope and wonder—and _wait_!” She caught herself up. “H’m—almost turned on the faucet then, all right. Well, Joy, I’ve spread the story for you. The present status Sal and I hold is shifty to locate—but we notice we never meet any fond relatives of our little friends. And so I see now that it was a raw deal on you in a way, coming to live with us. It puts you in our light. We’re not ashamed of it, for that’s the way we’re going to live while we last—but this morning I’ve been thinking things over, and for the first time I’ve got your side of the matter and so I think it’s the best thing, for you to go.”
“I was at Pa’s this morning——” Joy began.
“There, he’s one can tell you I’m not much good. I went to him to get back into shape after my work in the Y, and when I had been there only a couple of times he told me it wasn’t worth it for me to go on. He said I drank much too much, and smoked more than that, and he’d been watching me long enough to see I’d never shake off either. So that ended.”
“I was at Pa’s this morning,” Joy continued as if there had been no interruption, “and what he said made me decide to stay here—that is, if you still want me.”
There was a little, breathing pause. Then Jerry spoke in a detached tone. “Nothing I’ve said has made you change your mind?”
“Why, Jerry—what you’ve told—has made everything _right_! Oh, I was horrified at first—it all seemed so awful—but to have come out of it all as you did! Jerry—you’re—you’re _valiant_. I’ve always thought of that word in connection with you—_valiant_.” Joy’s voice was clothed in radiant relief. She looked at Jerry with a tenderness she dared not express—one could not imagine being tender to Jerry.
“I’m not valiant.” Jerry rose, and the pink mules sounded their way to the door. She stood with one finger on the knob, and with her hair roughed up about her face, her kimono sliding from the slim angles of her shoulders, she looked like a great butterfly, undecided whether to hover or dart away. “I tell you, Joy, I’m not good for you; I can see that now. I’m not fourteen-karat bad—but I’m an _Excitement-Eater_. That’s _a new style girl_, and the style is getting popular. I live on excitement—I feed on it. I can’t live without it. I scatter it around me—all Excitement-Eaters do. And for you, a little goes a long way—it’s taken me longer than it should have to discover that. I’m not good for you. And that’s that.”
“Pa decided me this morning,” Joy repeated; “and that’s that. You can eat your old excitement all you want—I’m going to eat music—and languages—and music——Your story just clinches my resolve to stay. Oh, Jerry, you _are_ valiant. I can see you standing up there with your chin out telling that man you weren’t Mazie-off-the-street——”
“Valiant! Knock off that word, will you? It gives me the willies. Valiant! When there’ve been times I’ve wished I _had_ been Mazie—then I’d have had _something_—and might have kept him a little longer!”
“You’re only talking now!” cried Joy; but the door was swinging, and a vanishing flutter of purple silk was her only response.
VII
Joy’s decision for steadfast endeavour, having once been made, did not waver. In the days that followed she began to feel a calm content; content that she had never known before. All the restlessness, the fits of uneasiness and depression that had been hers, had vanished in the light of a concrete objective; Pa’s talk had miraculously swept away the cobwebs in her brain. There was always the dull ache of Grant’s continued silence; but as the days wore on, it became more and more negative.
Pa sent her home for two weeks’ rest before she started in on the program he had mapped out for her, and fourteen days spent in the little town made her the more eager to begin work. Her father, after his first welcome and expression of delight at her progress, was as preoccupied as ever, the surprise incident upon Joy’s exposition of why she must return to Boston and start a more extensive (and expensive) course of study, jolting him only temporarily. After all, he knew that other girls went away to school, and he knew that his wife would have desired this for Joy.
Joy no longer felt guilty over his misunderstanding her place of residence. She had paid the penalty of deceit in hardening experience; more than the penalty in losing Grant. From now on, she was proceeding with her eyes opened. That she was to continue living with Jerry did not mean what her advent to the apartment had meant; it meant that the apartment was now the best background for her labours, with a piano hers to practice upon at all hours, and a ménage that was run to suit three girls instead of thirty, as was the case at the Annex.
The little town was preoccupied. The girls, after their first effusion of greeting, were as preoccupied as ever in trying to bring the rotation of the three or four boys in town their way. Joy was different, anyway, now that she was doing that singing stuff. She wouldn’t sing popular songs, and that highbrow stuff was awfully boring. She wouldn’t go to the movies, or bring her sewing over and gossip, so what _could_ one do with her?
Tom was working for the summer at the Foxhollow Corners bank, of which his father was president and he in turn expected to be some day, as he informed Joy in the first three minutes of his first call. He had another year at college, and in his conversation strayed collegewards.
“Remember Jack Barnett, Joy? Well, he’s married. Pulled it off the other day, I guess—just got the cards. They used to say he was engaged to some home-town specimen that he never dared to take to any of the house parties, and this looks as if there was some truth in it.”
Joy made no comment. Tom babbled on of college affairs. He was the type of youth who took it for granted that the girl whom he was favouring with his company would be enthralled with every detail of happenings that touched upon him. With this genus, the girl’s only requisite is silence that bespeaks the listening ear. Joy made no remarks until the end of his call, then she said casually: “Did you ever know Jim Dalton well in college?”
“Oh, not very. He ran with a different crowd.” It was a familiar college tone; not insulting; merely relegating Jim to the oblivion where he belonged.
“I’ve seen him several times—he’s working in Boston.”
“Oh, he’s all right—I guess his friends like him well enough.”
More praising with faint damns! But Joy did not absorb the mandate of the busy college man, as she would have last spring. She laughed amiably as she sped Tom on his way. She was still laughing as she came into the hall and passed her father, who was coming in from his evening smoke.
“What are you laughing at, my dear?” Mr. Nelson inquired, pausing for a moment although he had an excellent book of the vintage of ’61 awaiting him in the library.
“Myself, mostly!” she replied, and went on into the music room, walking slowly over the tacked-down carpet to her beloved grand piano. How standards of college changed after college, and how futilely provincial were they who still saw life through those standards! Jim Dalton was far from the nonentity class in which she had placed him last spring. If only Grant had been like Jim——
Her fingers found the accompaniment of little bells, chiming from far away—and she was murmuring the words—
“My only love is always near In country or in town——”
She broke off with a little sob, and her hands stayed without motion on the soundless keys. “The Unrealized Ideal!” And so it was.
“Lightly I speed while hope is high And youth beguiles the race I follow—follow still—but I Shall never see his face.”
“_Grant!_” she cried, then shivered as the sound travelled around the room, through the tidies and antimacassars, over to the what-not and glass candlesticks, and back again to her.
How could it all have been so dear—how could she have been so tremblingly ecstatic? How could it all be ended—leaving everything as flat and grey as the beach after the sun had been wet-blanketed by the sea mist, on that day of centuries?——But after the sun had gone—the moon had come up. She raised her head and started playing again; and this time it was an old Italian air over which she had been working.
The little town had no place for her; it was preoccupied. And so she came back at the end of two weeks, ready to plunge into work, actually longing for the feverish round of the apartment to swirl about her while she worked. _While she worked._
Pa found her a French woman and Italian professor for instructors, and he himself taught her the elements of music. “I don’t always like to bother with this myself,” he said, “but I want you to get it right—see the poetry and fascination of it—not have it dinned into you in a cut-and-dried way that only makes you aware of the toilsome mathematics of the thing.”
She threw herself into her study with an intense concentration that left her no energy for anything else—that left her almost no time to listen to the telephone and door bell, and watch the mail . . . for she still was in that vague expectancy. Surely he would not be forever gone, without a word save the fitful telephoning during her illness. She watched Jerry’s gaiety and wondered if beneath, Jerry also was hiding expectancy—if she still hoped that any day she might hear some word. . . . She could see Jerry reverting to the newsie in grey sweater and bloomers, kicking “The Idylls of the King” about the room. Jerry was not to be blamed. “The Idylls” were long out of date; and where was there a Perfect Knight?
Late one afternoon, Jerry burst in upon her while she was indulging in a little light reading: “How to Listen to an Orchestra.”
“Joy, if you study any more you’ll get eye-trouble, and whoever heard of a singer getting away with wearing glasses? We’ve absolutely got to have another girl to-night—it’ll do you good to get out! How can you stand this perpetual-motion-of-the-brain!”
Joy laughed. “Sorry, Jerry, but I couldn’t. Don’t tempt me.”
“Well—you really ought to get out—it isn’t because we’ve _got_ to have another girl that I wanted you. As it happens, there’s another available. Félicie Durant is back in town.”
Joy had heard Jerry and Sarah speak of Félicie Durant once or twice, and the name had left an impression, being about the only girl’s name they had ever taken the breath to mention.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Jerry; “you nail on your lid right now and we’ll wiggle over to Félicie’s. You’ve got to have some exercise, and there’s much more chance of my getting Félicie to go to-night by a personal interview than if I popped the project over the phone. Come on!”
Jerry was wearing a rumpled lavender linen dress of simple lines. She watched with an amused eye, as Joy changed into dark things for street wear.
“You certainly are getting Bostonian,” she jeered. “It’s balmy out if it _is_ fall, and I for one am not going to stifle if other people are sporting advance-model velvet lids!” And crushing a saucy yellow straw down over her eyes without bothering to pat her hair into position on either side, an indispensable rite with most girls in the major operation of putting on a hat, she dragged Joy forth before Joy could add a veil and white kid gloves to her costume.
“This is no afternoon-tea call,” she said, hailing a Brighton-bound street car. “Félicie’s not that kind of a girl—not that she’s my kind, either, except the way that girl swallows excitement down whole would do credit to even my digestion.”
“What is she like?” Joy asked, as they joined the circle of strap-hanging women that crowded the street car full of doggedly sitting men.
“She’s a jellyfish,” replied Jerry, treading on the toes of the man in front of her who spread his newspaper as a defensive sheath between him and the women before him. “She’s got the spine and determination of a jellyfish. Lives out here with her old great-aunt or something——But wait till you see her.”
They disembarked over in Brighton where rows of apartment houses duplicated themselves, and rang the bell at one of faded yellow brick. The door swung open, and Joy followed Jerry to the right on the first floor, where an open door awaited them.
“I’m in the kitchen,” cried a voice whose echoes carried hauntingly silver. “Come on down!”
A first glimpse of Félicie Durant was unforgettable. Large brown velvet eyes trimmed with elaborate fringes of lashes that curled up at the end, giving her face a look of starry oblivion to mundane matters; a face whose daintily regular features were brought out by a skin as smooth as the surface of a pearl, with a cobwebby maze of ringlets dark as her eyes, drifting around and away from her temples. All this Joy saw in one delighted instant. Then the lips, scarlet and full almost to pouting, parted in a smile of welcome, and Félicie waved a soapy hand at the two girls.
“Don’t come too near me—I’m washing the dog!”
Sure enough. There was the kitchen tub—and a little shivering white thing being drowned in suds. It was hard to connect Félicie with washing a dog, however little and white he might be.
“Good for you, old girl,” said Jerry. “Those poodles look like dirty dish-rags if they’re not put into Lux twice a day. Félicie, this is Joy Nelson, and you can see she did you the justice of dressing for a nice formal call.”
“Wait till I rinse him out and then I’ll shake hands,” Félicie panted. Sharing her breathlessness, the two watched while she first rinsed, then wrung out the animated mop, and put it down on the floor with an order to “go to it.” The mop whisked itself out of sight.
“He runs all around and rolls in all the rugs and gets dry all by himself,” she explained proudly.
“Is that hard on the rugs, or isn’t it? I just asked,” said Jerry.
The fringes flustered; the dark eyes drooped. “Why, I—I never—thought of that!” Félicie admitted. “But”—she brightened—“this is a furnished apartment, mostly, and the rugs are the old landlord’s. So it’s quite all right after all!”
“Does ‘the old landlord’ know you keep a dog?”
“Well—but you would hardly call Fizz a dog, now, would you?” she triumphed. “Come on in my room while I put on some clothes. She pulled off and carefully hung up the kitchen apron which had been protecting her somewhat gossamer attire from the wear and tear attendant on canine ablutions, and ran before them to a speckless white boudoir that had the air of not having quite recovered from its last cleaning. In spite of Félicie’s activities, that was also the way the kitchen had looked. Jerry’s apartment always appeared to be waiting for its next cleaning.
“I have a new picture of Greg,” said Félicie, disappearing into a closet. “There on the dressing table.”
A large photograph of a man with sleek, dark hair parted in the middle and watered back; a face whose good looking conformity could have been singled out as “a college type” —framed in ivory which carried out the scheme of the dressing table’s dainty appurtenances.
“It’s good,” said Jerry. “Still in love with him?”
A muffled but none the less sure-fire assent came from the closet. She evidently was the kind of girl who dressed in the closet if there were other girls in the room.
“Then why the devil won’t you marry him?” Jerry exploded, slamming the picture down with a force that made the ivory manicure set start shimmying. She turned to Joy. “Félicie’s in love with Greg; he’s crazy as a fool about her; and she won’t even get engaged, much less marry him!”
“Now, Jerry, you know perfectly well you wouldn’t either,” said Félicie, and again her voice trailed silver, as she came out of the closet.
“Oh, you pretty—pretty—_Thing_!” thought Joy. A white gown of foaming lace swirled about her, from which the darkness of her eyes and hair and the redness of her lips gleamed. Her figure now was unexpectedly rounded and full, proportioned so beautifully that the breath-taking entirely of the vision inspired Joy to classic simile. As she buttoned herself into her dress, she looked as Venus rising from the foam would have done well to look.
“I’m twenty years old,” Félicie was continuing; “and for a girl at my age to marry would be _sacrifice_, _human sacrifice_. If girls marry nowadays at twenty, they’re either afraid they’ve got their only chance, or they haven’t the cash to hold out, or they’re just plain fools. And you know, Jerry, I’m not any one of those.”
“Go on,” said Jerry. “Joy’ll be interested to hear your theories.”
Félicie appealed to Joy. “Don’t you think so, too?”
Her loveliness stirred none of the animosity in Joy that pretty women too often arouse in one another. Joy smiled back at her. “Don’t you think each case is different?”
“Well, take mine. I care more for Greg than anyone. But think if I should marry him now! Why—I’m only twenty. I’ve got at least four good years before me of fun and excitement, the best years of my life and looks, and why should I devote them to being domestic? After I’m married, I can never have the kind of a good time I have now. I may be fonder of Greg than anyone—but I’m fond of other men, too! I like the excitement of each new man, more than—more than——”
“More than marrying Greg,” Jerry supplied.
She nodded in relief. “Yes, that’s it, and the way I look at it is, it’s better to get it all out of my system before I marry than after, don’t you think so?”
“You never will that way.” Jerry spoke curtly. “Haven’t you read that appetite grows on what feeds it?” She lit a cigarette. Félicie’s eyes roved to her fine lace curtains in resignation before she went on.
“It isn’t as if I weren’t sure that Greg will stick for several years at least. Why, he never looks at another girl. And it isn’t as if I were the sort of girl who would expect to go right on adding up men after I marry. No, when I marry I in going to have a home and children, and I’m not going to marry until I’m ready for them.”
“It sounds reasonable,” said Joy, fascinated.
“And when I marry I want to live neatly,” said Félicie, with a comfortable glance around the glistening room. “And _neatly_ to me means _enough money_. Greg isn’t making enough for that yet—and while I live here with auntie I have enough. I wish, Jerry, you wouldn’t always pick on me about him.”
“I hate to see a waste of good material,” Jerry murmured.
“That’s what it would be, if I married,” she retorted, her voice again carrying high lights. “A girl stands to lose _everything_ by an early marriage—her looks, her youth, and her _fun_! Can you imagine me with the yowl of a baby for my only excitement? It’s not a bit like you to take this stand!”