Part 17

“‘Do you want me to come down to particulars?’ he said. ‘Or is it safer to go on—generalizing?’” Jerry clenched her hands, smiling softly the while. “I laughed at that. I had to laugh or yell—it was all so like I’d been dreaming for so long—I can’t believe yet it’s all really happened—and I said: ‘Please don’t put it up to me.’ ‘Let us both waive the responsibility, then,’ he said. ‘If what I say sounds like sheer madness, forget it. You look as if you could forget, and had forgotten, much. But—I have fallen in love twice in my life. The second time was this evening, when I saw you come walking down the room to meet me, a spirit embodied from a dream.’ Joy, he said that! Was there ever anything like it under Heaven?”

“No!” cried Joy, hysterical with conflicting emotions. “Go on!”

Jerry jumped down from the bureau to look into the mirror again. “Jerry, your luck,” she cried to her triumphant reflection. “Your luck!” She turned to Joy. “I was so scared I got to shaking. ‘A dream,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s what it was, a dream all right.’ I thought it was, too. ‘You do not understand,’ he said. ‘How could I expect it—there will never be another Brushwood Boy.’ That was one of the things he had given me to read, Joy. I guess I registered a recognition on that, for he went on:

“‘Oh, you’ve read it? You remember the Brushwood boy saw a little girl in the theatre, and afterwards he built an image of her in his dreams. His image grew in his dreams to womanhood, and bye and bye he met her in the flesh—a spirit embodied from the dream. Two years ago, in those fleeting, hectic days of war, at a time when no dreams were being left to me, I met a little girl who somehow brought me back to interest in life and—dreams. Our relationship was of the most casual; I only saw her a few times before I was suddenly put in command of a company that was sailing. She was not the sort to mean anything in my life, and I almost forgot her as herself. But her image stayed with me, always growing in little ways. She herself was so unfinished an image—she was of a type that could not change its atmosphere and environment—yet there was that in her which made me build, until the image grew to womanhood in my dreams. Am I boring you with details of a girl you never knew? But you see—the image grew to womanhood—and then I met you in the flesh, the embodiment of that dream.’ I hadn’t stopped shaking. ‘I don’t understand, except that I remind you of someone you once knew,’ I said. ‘Nor do I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s of the realm of—dreams. It’s not to be believed. What is this that makes me sure you are the complement to my existence, the one woman with everything I want, the sum total of a man’s fatuous dream that is generally too impossible to find realization?’ ‘You’d better not spread words around so,’ I said. ‘It isn’t wise to talk freely about anything you only know by sight. If I were anyone else, I’d think you were crazy.’ He snapped me up on that. ‘If you were anyone else! I must descend to the supreme idiocy and say—But you are you—and I knew you were when you came walking down the room to-night.’ ‘You must be a Southern man,’ I said. ‘I’ve always heard that they swung this line.’ He never blinked at that. ‘Do you feel nothing?’ he said. ‘If you tell me you felt nothing when your eyes met mine—if you did not feel that we had been a long time finding each other—if you tell me that—why then,—I will start in and make you realize what I know to be true.’”

She stopped, and ran to the window with a trembling laugh. “Look at old New York—that I couldn’t look at this afternoon! Joy—to think of his saying that! Asking me if I didn’t feel that we had been a long time finding each other! Joy—I was so scared I’d slip a cog and come through with some pithy talk! I spoke slow and thought twice between each word. ‘I—I really—these flashes that seem to go between two people—I never analyze them—which you seem to be doing, after all.’

“By this time you’d come back, but he didn’t even turn though I kept my off-eye alive on you. ‘That is—admission,’ he said, talking very low now. ‘We have started at the end, and defeated all the weary preliminaries.’ ‘Doesn’t it all amount to the same, though?’ I said; ‘for we’ll have to work back.’ ‘No, it’s not the same,’ he said, ‘for at the end I do not greatly care to turn back for my sake. I shall for yours, if you will; but I somehow feel, that to work back is something for which you, too, do not greatly care.’”

“What did he mean?” Joy interrupted. “How could you follow all this, Jerry?”

“Follow what he says? I’d get his drift if he made love to me in Latin! He was taking me at my face value, Joy—which wasn’t right, God knows—and dropping the remark in passing that he wouldn’t expect me to do the same thing with him, although he sort of thought that I would anyhow!”

“It’s so—so strange.”

“Strange! It’s—as he says—a dream! How did he happen to be your cousin, anyway? Didn’t you ever know he was?”

Joy explained, and the two fell into a silent labyrinth of wonder. Jerry walked restlessly about the room. “And he’s still unmarried, though every woman that passed his way must have made a grab for him!”

“He looks to me like a man who has always had his way—with women,” said Joy, trembling to break in upon Jerry’s exultation, but fearful memory driving the words out of her. “What if he was—just bandying words, Jerry? And thought you were too? Or didn’t care—what you thought? The last kind I know——You admitted too much, right off like that, it seems to me.”

Jerry laughed, running her fingers through her hair with a satisfied sigh. “Don’t you think I’ve been through enough sieges of men and their lines, in my life, not to be able to tell a real thing from a line? The real thing just thumps out. You never can mistake it. A line can be finely spun, but it can’t thump. The real thing and a line can have the same words—that’s where we women get fooled—it’s manner and looks you’ve got to watch.”

“He’s awfully cynical about women,” said Joy. “And his face, Jerry—it’s so full of—so—experienced.”

“Can you imagine me getting along well with anyone who was—not?” Jerry questioned; and then smiled again. Joy started. Her smile held in it an echo of Mabel’s peculiar radiance. “Cynical! His face looks like a kid’s who has asked for a stick of candy and been stuffed with the whole candy store.”

She began to slide out of her clothes. “And he doesn’t know—that I’m Galatea! Can you tie that?”

“You—don’t have to tell him,” and Joy watched her from the corner of one eye as she brushed her hair. “He doesn’t care about working back—he’s said so—you never have to tell him a—thing.”

Jerry shrugged her shoulders into the purple kimono. “He’s going to lunch with me to-morrow. He’ll see me in broad daylight without candles and the black velvet dress. It’ll be my turn to talk—in which case I can’t keep up my stride, and will have to slide into the American language. And I’m going to tell him—of course I’m going to tell him. Don’t you see my really being both things—starting the dream, and finishing it—makes it—better than ever? If he doesn’t see it that way—— But he will! I can’t wait to tell him.”

Joy crawled into bed with misgivings which grew faint in the face of Jerry’s firm faith. “It was just as we doped it, wasn’t it, Joy? You said he went across—and I said that I was too small and casual a matter for him to waste pains on—when it got inconvenient for him to do so. They sent him over sooner than he expected—so he simply knocked out of my life. But now! Those years were worth it—I’d go through ’em over again if I were sure this was coming at the end.”

“And he thinks he’s started at the end,” said Joy, “and ‘defeated all the weary preliminaries.’”

Jerry had snapped out the light, opened the windows and jumped into bed, but her head reared up again at this. “You think he’s had an easy time of it—compared to me—that I made it too easy for him, right off—don’t you? I—I didn’t want to make it any harder for _myself_! And look at his face, Joy—does he look as if _he_ had had an especially satisfying time along the way—before he found me?”

“Forgive me, Jerry,” said Joy after a silence. “He was right, these things should not be analyzed.”

But Jerry did not even hear her. “We have been a long time finding each other. But the finding trims everything on heaven and earth tied together, to a finish!”

And Joy was conscious of an overpowering loneliness. It was a barren feeling; she had never really loved. She had not known Mabel’s radiance or Jerry’s ecstatic fireworks, in the disturbing thrills that had been hers in the past which now seemed so far removed it was as if it belonged to another life. And now, with Jerry silent but not asleep by her side, she felt suddenly, horribly alone. Jerry was her best friend, and save for Jim, her only friend. Yet how that friendship sank into insignificance now. Jerry’s world was full; all her world and life were but one man; and Joy was outside. She lost herself in sleep, where she dreamed that the only person remaining in her world who spelled anything in life to her, had left her. She woke up sobbing bitterly, with “Jim!” on her lips. All was toneless dark, that breathless hour of earliest morning when vitality is at its lowest ebb yet sometimes the heart may beat at its highest. Things are seen at that hour with uninfluenced clarity of vision. And Joy gasped in the shock of the knowledge that was rising within her. Jim Dalton was the only person left—who spelled anything in life to her. Jerry was sleeping quietly; her tears fell unconsoled. “Jim!” she sobbed again; and with his name trembling through the black fringe of dawn, she fell asleep.

X

The next day was Saturday, and Félicie returned around noon just as Jerry left Joy in a whirlwind of breathless anticipation. Félicie was pale and sulky from dancing all night and having to come back to New York the next morning.

“I missed a dance this afternoon and a wonderful one this evening,” she crabbed, taking off her outer raiment and donning a kimono, before lying on the bed to recuperate. At Joy’s question of why she hadn’t stayed the house-party through, she batted an injured brown velvet orb. “How could I, with Greg here and acting so awfully just because I wanted to go to Princeton for one day. He needn’t think I’d give up every evening to him—especially after the way he talked Thursday. I tell you, Joy, it’s awful to be in love. I never did such an inconvenient thing as I did when I fell in love with Greg.”

Joy stifled her laughter. “Did you have a good time?”

“Marvelous—simply marvelous. Princeton is the house-party girl’s Mecca. It’s mean of Greg to act so—it isn’t as if I could be asked to Princeton for many more years.”

Joy ran a scale, poising it neatly through the air and listening to the smoothness of tone. In the morning sun, music was more alive and satisfactory, even with no piano near. It was part of her—and little fluctuations of feeling were to be ignored, when she knew that all her being was absorbed in one great purpose. It had been silly of her to grow sentimental just because she had been doused in the atmosphere of sentiment. Inconsistently, she felt angry at Félicie.

“I can’t imagine being in love with a man and going off skating with a dozen others.”

“Oh, Joy, if you’re going to take Jerry’s side I shall just pass out!” wailed the lovely thing on the bed. “Being in love doesn’t stop you from wanting something new once in awhile.”

“Nothing seems to prevent anyone nowadays from going after a new sensation! Excitement-chasing! That’s what everyone’s doing!”

“It’s all very well for those who aren’t in love to theorize about what those who are in love should do. For all Jerry’s talk, I can’t see her giving up _her_ ‘excitement-chasing’ for any man. Can you?”

The thought was a new one. What would happen if Jerry was given the opportunity to know this man so that the novelty would wear off? How would the Excitement-Eater stand a sustained love? She was silent in conjecture, and Félicie, too lazy to voice the triumph she felt, closed her eyes and worked her face down into the pillow.

Joy and Jerry had tickets for an Æolian Hall concert that afternoon, and now Joy went alone. The throngs always pressing ahead on the streets, exhilarated her, and she watched the faces of the people that urged themselves along; faces with success or failure written more or less plainly upon them. Most women, she supposed, succeeded or failed by proxy, as their husbands rose or fell in the foaming rapids of struggle. But there would be no such vicarious state for her! She was plunging directly into the rapids for herself, and some day she would walk in her own success.

She returned to the hotel in a fine enthusiasm, humming under her breath; the concert had been perfect. Her spirits were dashed, however, by the empty room. Félicie had gone out with Greg; Jerry had not returned. She would probably be alone until they assembled to take the midnight; they had decided when they came over, to go back Saturday night. To eat dinner all alone in New York! She was doing her hair without enthusiasm when the telephone bell rang. It was Jerry’s voice, eager and exultant: “That you, Joy? I’m downstairs—— Thought I was going to desert you for dinner, did you? Just wanted to see if you were back yet. Be right up.”

She finished setting in her hairpins with a lightening of spirits, as the door rattled open and Jerry came dancing in.

“Was the concert good?” she cried. Spots of colour flaunted joy from either cheek; her lips were tremulous, crinkled into softness; her eyes were a battlefield of colour.

“Very good,” said Joy, and waited.

Jerry pulled off her hat and suit, and in her customary whirlwind was making preparations for an evening toilette. “Put on your best calico, Joy; we’re dining in state. Phil’s gone to get into his cocktail-and-demitasse, too.”

“Phil!”

“Yes, of course, Phil. Do you want to hear what happened, or don’t you? Are you keeping still because I’m shooting off my mouth, or——”

“I want to hear,” Joy said; “and when people want to hear, they generally keep still.”

And then it came, with the generosity that was Jerry’s.

“Well, it seems I always tell you everything from the pop of the pistol on through. When we went down in the lobby, he asked me where I wanted to go; and I said, ‘Hanley’s.’ He looked at me queerly on that. ‘What made you pick that out?’ he wanted to know.”

She was caressing her hair with the military brushes, not raking it as was her custom.

“‘Let’s walk over,’ I said. ‘I want to stop at a place on the Avenue.’ As we went down Forty-Second Street, I rained a loose line of chatter along. I told you to-day would be my turn to talk. We got to Charlette’s before I had stuck in any background. When I saw the good old grey-silk-curtained windows, I began to get a bit shaky. But I turned to him and said: ‘We got to the end—rather sudden, last night. Men don’t like to work back, but you know—and intimated as much—that women are different that way.’ He opened the door for me, looking sort of at sea, and we came in. ‘All I ask of you,’ I said, ‘is to stand here and watch me.’ ‘The last part is something I can never omit,’ he said.

“You know Charlette’s—never many customers floating around, but oh, how they do bleed ’em when they come! I breezed forward, and the first person I ran into was Fanchon O’Brien. She tucked me into her flesh Georgette waist with a few motherly kisses, and the next minute somebody had passed the glad word and cutters, basters, fitters and designers came out and fell around me. I won’t go into details of Old Home Week at Charlette’s. When I broke away, Phil followed me to the door and on the other side I didn’t give him a chance to speak.

“‘Did you see all the poor little rats hailing me as a kindred soul?’ I said. ‘I worked in that place from twelve years old up, from messenger-girl to designer. I was a poor little rat when I started—but when I finished, I was pretty proud of myself.’ I looked up at him, and he was looking at me, sort of scowling, as if to make everything add up right,—but not one bit _changed_. ‘I should think you would be proud,’ he said. ‘I am proud of you—I shall be prouder when I can realise it more fully.’ He didn’t say anything till we got over to Hanley’s. Then he took in the name again as we went in. ‘Hanley’s!’ he said. ‘Funny——’ He didn’t say anything more and I let him look at me till we got put in our places by a waiter. Then I said: ‘You’ve forgotten what was to me one of the most important points in the Brushwood Boy. The little kid he met in the theatre who supplied the foundation of his dreams—was the same person as the woman he found. The girl had grown up; but she was the same one; she had been the kid.’

“Joy, he said nothing for two or three minutes steady, till the waiter came and he told him to bring anything, but get out. Then he said—‘I—see now! The valiance and potential beauty I saw in the spirit of the little girl who brought me back to myself—the shining hardness of the cabaret singer, whom I pitied as drawn in and around by her past and inevitable future environment—I discarded that hardness, and all that went with it, and built on the valiance and beauty. And you were discarding and building in reality—as I, with all the idiotic finality of a man, never thought you could!’

“Joy—I didn’t think I’d built. Before—he thought I was worse than I was. Last night, seeing me ooze around his sister’s drawing room, he thought I was better than I am. I began to tell him this, and he stopped me.

“When I first knew you—I knew you were better than I,’ he said. ‘As I see you now, you have all but put yourself beyond me. I have led a life of which I am ashamed; the dusty corners of which no one shall ever know, or try to sweep out. You have led a life of which you can say you are not ashamed; a life of striving against odds, from which you came out on top; a life of which to be proud.

“Joy—I was ashamed at that. For since the war—you know how I’ve been—Building, he thought! When I’d just been growing into the ways of his world. Excitement-Eating! That was the main thing I’d been growing on. I began to tell him—and he wouldn’t let me. ‘What has happened is not mine now. It is for what is to be that I plead. With your future mine, and mine yours, you can help me to forget the years we might not have esteemed so lightly.’”

Jerry had finished, at the same time that she had snapped the last catch together in her green evening gown—the same green sequin affair that she had worn that terrible night they had looked for Sarah. . . .

“Well—and then what happened the rest of the afternoon?” Joy drew out from lungs that had been deserted of breath.

“I’ve told you more than I shall ever tell anybody. The rest is mine—that and—_this_!”

Jerry flaunted her left hand before her. On the third finger was a tiny platinum circlet, so small that it had melted into the white of her hand at a distance, as gold could not have done. “I’ve tried to thrust it down your throat a thousand ways, but you would keep looking at my face and a thousand other unimportant things!”

Joy sank back upon the bed, her whole being a rag of dumfounderment. “Jerry!”

“Mrs. Philip Lancaster—and hurry up and put on some rouge! I don’t want to keep my husband waiting!”

“But—but why—how—where——”

“We tossed the subject back and forth at luncheon. We figured we’d been without each other long enough. After lunch we walked up to the nearest jewelry store and got this ring. I wouldn’t let him get a big one, or anything but this one. He’s poor, you know, Joy—the Lancasters are all poor. That is, he calls it poor, but now that he’s got me he’s going to work—you know he’s supposed to be a lawyer—and that combined with his income and my little Charlette block ought to keep us passing the buck along. We got married with a special license, at the Little Church Around the Corner——” Jerry spoke with the calmness of excitement at white heat—“and before going off on our honeymoon—we thought we’d take you to our wedding dinner. You see, if it hadn’t been for you I’d have still been excitement-eating—and he’d still be cynicing it around.”

The telephone rang, and Jerry darted to it. “Yes! Yes, this is Mrs. Lancaster! Yes, we’re coming, Phil!” The name was all endearments shaped in one. Jerry turned to hurry Joy with her last touches, and Joy, in a state of coma almost bordering on collapse, followed Jerry’s eager footsteps to the elevator and down into the lobby. Jerry’s husband was waiting for them, fierily handsome in evening dress, and at least ten years younger than he had seemed last night. Last night!—It seemed so far away. Joy could not even stammer much, but Jerry and Phil did not notice lack of anything, and swept her into the dining room.

“Let me see,” said Phil; “it’s the first time I’ve seen my wife in evening dress.”

“Second!” said Jerry swiftly. “I wore one at Hanley’s, two years ago!”

“Oh, but that was a _costume_!”

Their words were stupid, inconsequential, in the face of Joy sitting there. Their eyes were speaking to each other, saying so much that Joy dared not look. And just last night——

“I wonder what Mabel will say,” she ventured. They paid to her remark the tribute of polite inattention.

“I owe Jerry to you,” said Jerry’s husband; “but I don’t intend to pay you.”

Of course—Jerry was leaving her now! Leaving her and the apartment—alone! She considered this bleak fact, all through the course. At last, breaking in upon the conversation of eyes, she said: “What will you do with the apartment, Jerry?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jerry. “The lease will be up in July. Why don’t you stay in it till then? Phil and I are going to live in his apartment here, until we get a house in the suburbs, so I shan’t be moving out my stuff for some time.”

To stay in the apartment—with the ghost of Sarah in curl-papers and wrapper whining through the kitchenette—and the purple kimono and pink mules gone from everywhere. . . . She did not bring the thought to the surface of the table. “You two in the suburbs!” she exclaimed instead, in faint derision.

Jerry hardly smiled. People in love always lost their sense of humour, but you wouldn’t think Jerry——

“Apartment life would merely be existing for us,” said Phil. “We are going to live.”

Their eyes trembled together in close embrace. . . . Joy hurried through her dessert; the others had made no pretense of eating. Their appetite was as if they had just come in from luncheon. All three were regarding the meal as a more or less disagreeable formality to be gotten through with as quickly as possible. But when they had finished, they grew embarrassed at their haste, and everyone tried to be jovial, lingering over the coffee.

“Last night at this time,” said Phil, “I was telling our cousin just why I didn’t like younger or older women.”

“And looking at Jerry,” added Joy.

“And looking at Jerry,” he said gravely, repeating the performance.

“If you don’t like younger or older women, where do I come in?” Jerry demanded.

“You don’t,” he told her; “you are neither young nor old; you are immortal.”

At length they rose, and Joy went with Jerry while Jerry threw everything into her suitcase and crushed it shut.

“It won’t be anything but so-long,” said Jerry; “I’ll be coming over to Boston soon to get the rest of my wardrobe.”

“I’ll send it to you.”

“No—I’ll want to come. . . . Joy—you’ve been the only real girl friend I ever had—and now you’ve given me everything that there is to hang onto in this world.”

She said good-bye to them by the elevator downstairs, and watched them vanish through the same revolving doors that Jerry had helped speed around so merrily—was it only two days ago? They walked together as if they were still in an expectant dream . . . in a sort of awed breathlessness.