Part 6

They went into the music room, where Joy had already sounded out the piano. “Singing right after a meal gives me an excuse for not doing it well,” she smiled, but her fingers trembled as she played a few chords. What if he shouldn’t like it? That would be something she could not bear. Unconsciously music was already a part of herself. It would be so hard to sing to him—the hardest singing she had ever done! “I’ll sing a song called ‘The Unrealized Ideal,’” she said.

To most singers it is a handicap to play for themselves, but for Joy, to whom playing was as natural and spontaneous as breathing, it was only an added delight. She could almost hear her heart trembling as she modulated into the song.

The accompaniment stole out—a sound as of little bells chiming from far away—and then Joy’s voice, muted and shaky, but all the more poignant for that reason——

“My only love is always near In country or in town It seems that he must feel, must hear The rustle of my gown.

“I foot it after him, so young My locks are tied in haste— And one is o’er my shoulder flung And hangs below my waist.

“He runs before me in the meads And down the world-worn track He leads me on—but as he leads He never glances back.

“Yet still his voice is in my dreams To witch me o’er and o’er That wooing voice! Ah, me—it seems Less near me than before.”

A pause—a little wistful interlude of tinkling notes in a minor key.

“Lightly I speed while hope is high And youth beguiles the race I follow—follow still—but I Shall never see his face.”

Grant had risen and had come over to her, his eyes blazing.

“You have never sung that to Packy, have you? Joy——”

“No—I haven’t ever sung it to anybody.”

“Somehow—I couldn’t have borne it, if you had, Joy——”

A cool voice from the doorway smote in upon their throbbing hearts. “Dear me! Have you two not gone to the dance yet?”

Mrs. Grey came forward into the room, her chill eyes dwelling first on Grant, then upon Joy, lingering on her face where the mixed colours strove for supremacy. “It was a great pity Mr. Grey and I were delayed in town.” She turned to Joy. “So you’re a—singer! I rather thought you—expressed yourself in some way.” Her eyes still rested with emphasis upon Joy’s colour; it was almost as if she wished Grant to follow her gaze and see what she saw. But Grant was not looking at Joy with his mother’s eyes. “What are you going to do with your voice?”

Joy took a deep breath. “I am going to study for opera.” It was the first time she had admitted it, even to herself. Once the statement was out, she contemplated it with delight.

“Oh, indeed. A professional—with all that that entails.” The bleak words fell between Joy and Grant; and although neither dreamed it then, with the rose flush of the vanished day still upon them, they stayed between them.

Almost without words, it was determined that they start at once for the dance. Grant remarked that he and Joy would walk up the beach. A snowbound glance from the blue eyes, and the two left the house, with the understanding that they would meet Mr. and Mrs. Grey over there.

The tide had gone out, leaving long stretches of hard sand. The moon was up, full and round, staring down upon them with friendly curiosity.

“I always used to wonder why people raved so about the moon,” said Grant. A little farther on, and they were out of sight of the house, on a lonely stretch of beach and sky. “Joy, when you sang, I felt—I can’t explain how I felt. It’s wonderful, it’s—you.”

Somehow they came to a pause on the sands looking out on the moon’s arclight reflection on the water.

“I—I once read some of Shelley—in college,” and Grant looked down at her, suddenly scarlet——

“See the mountains kiss high heaven And the wavelets kiss the sea What is all this kissing worth If thou kiss not me?”

Almost a gasp in the murmuring ocean air—and then their lips met, brushing shyly, in a frightened thistledown of contact.

“Joy—I worship you.” His trembling whisper in her ear. “I love you—I love you so! Joy——”

This time they clung together, half frightened at the passion that surged to their lips.

And then a long interval without words—until they found themselves sitting on the sand, she with her head on his shoulder, he stroking her hair.

“You have the prettiest hair I’ve ever seen. Everything about you is the most wonderful I’ve ever seen. Your eyes, your voice, your lips—” Another interval. “Joy—I never knew what it was to feel like this. You—you’re the only girl I’ve ever kissed.”

“I didn’t know a man existed, who could say that,” said Joy with a happy laugh which died away on his next words.

“And I didn’t know there were girls like you—until I met you. For I am the first with you—am I not?”

“I’ve been kissed before—once.”

An intake of breath. Then, before she could continue: “Don’t tell me about it, Joy, dear—” a pause to accustom oneself to the unfamiliar “dear”—“don’t tell me about it—I’d rather not hear any more. I’ll make you forget him—just once isn’t much——”

After a month of whiles, they walked slowly up the beach. Their conversation was incoherent, but adequate.

“The dance will be almost over—what does it matter to _us_—isn’t it all strange and wonderful—your mother will think we were drowned——”

They came into the club house with unmistakably luminous faces. There is something about young love that stands starkly revealed, and they were as patent as if they had been hung with sandwich-man signs.

At times life seems to move in a quick succession of scenes until the scenes begin to seem unreal, and one feels apart from the drama of events, watching impersonally while life plays on with oneself. So Joy felt, as she saw Packy at the far corner of the room, and so she watched with impartial interest as he looked at them, first carelessly, then in swift incredulity, then with a face that grew thunderous, as, hands in pockets, he strode across to where they were about to join the dancers.

“Hello, Joy,” he said shortly. “Doesn’t take you a long time to change running mates, does it?”

“My goodness, look at Packy, entirely surrounded by a frown,” she tossed back at him—how easily Jerry’s line came to one’s lips.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded, blocking their way as they started again to join the dancers.

Joy remembered a saying of Jerry’s which seemed peculiarly pat at this moment: “A girl never has the right amount of men. If she has few, it’s boring; if she has many, they get in the way and cramp her style.” She laughed. Packy was really a grotesque figure, with his glowering face and childish remarks. “You make me feel like a dancing school, with all this talk of changing partners,” she observed, and turned to Grant. She was amazed at the transformation. Grant’s lips were drawn back over his teeth, his eyes glittering.

“Would you mind stating what business it is of yours, who Joy goes to a dance with?” he asked, in a voice as chill and cold as Mrs. Grey’s herself; a voice with the ring of generations of Boston ancestors behind it.

It was the end of the dance; and Joy now realized, in a sort of detached horror, that they were becoming conspicuous. Grant and Packy were facing each other in the same tense, bristly pose that dogs assume before a pitched battle; faces were turning their way; she could see Mrs. Grey rising, in impotent protest, across the room——

A voice assailed her memory. “Is it really you, Miss Nelson?” Standing close at hand, his eyes upon their little group in grave attention, was a good-looking boy of medium height, with blond, wavy hair that had been plastered back in an attempt to make it look straight—At her look of vague recognition, he stepped nearer, said to Grant and Packy in an undertone: “Couldn’t you talk it over just as well out-doors?” then smiled at Joy, and in a normal, bread-and-butter voice that seemed to have the effect of suddenly bringing everything back to an everyday basis, said: “You don’t remember me, do you? I met you at Prom this spring—my name’s Dalton.”

“Mr. Dalton—of course!” she exclaimed. “I remember you very well—” she stopped, and twinkled. The echo of his blunt lecture seemed for a moment to hang in the air. She turned to introduce him to Grant and Packy; but Packy had gone. The scene was over, and she relaxed.

“I’ll cut in later,” said Jim Dalton, and moved away. The music had started again, the orchestra-leader announcing that this was “the last dance.” In Grant’s arms she floated off to the strains of “I Love You Truly.”

“Hope that fellow who said he’d cut in, will have sense enough not to do it on the last dance,” he growled, clasping her almost fiercely to him.

“If that fellow hadn’t come up just then, I don’t know what might have happened,” Joy suggested.

“Damn Packy! Forgive me, Joy; but don’t you think Packy rates a damn or two? Of all the cake-eating parlour pythons——”

“Your mother was watching us. In fact, she still is. That was an awful scene to make, Grant.”

“Scene! Asking him one question. It was nothing to what I wanted to do. At that, though, he faded away pretty quick. Joy you dance like—like nothing at all.”

“So do you!” she thrilled up at him; and they drifted rapturously past Mrs. Grey, whose eyes, freshly iced, followed them everywhere.

Jim Dalton did not cut in until the very last encore. Grant relinquished Joy, then went revengefully to cut in on Betty, who looked far from delighted to be interrupted in the midst of “I Love You Truly” by a _brother_.

“I want to thank you for coming up when you did,” Joy said.

“It was nothing; I wanted to see you. How have you been? You look——”

“I look—what?”

“It’s not easy to describe the change. I would hardly have known you if I hadn’t overheard one of those two young men—ah—mentioning your name.”

Joy’s lips twitched. “Do I look like ‘a typical model showing off some undress creation’?” She was as surprised as he at the ease with which she remembered his words. Certainly, being with Jerry sharpened one’s wits.

“No. Of course not. You look older, for one thing—and——”

“And—what?”

“And as if—well, as if you were—unsettled in your mind—looking for something you hadn’t found.”

“Everyone—always is looking for something they haven’t found—don’t you think so?” she countered, watching Grant from the corner of her eye, while her heart beat a painful tattoo of triumph against her side. She had—found what she had always been looking for! Girlhood’s tentative dream was victorious certainty.

“I haven’t asked you how you happened to be around these parts?”

She told him she was studying music in Boston, and living with Jerry. This he received in a silence which became so long that she did not know what thread he was taking up when he finally demanded:

“Did you mean that?”

“Mean what?”

“That you were living with Jerry. Were you serious?” Receiving an affirmative answer, he fell back again into a silence which lasted until Grant cut back at the end of the dance.

They rode home with Betty and her “man,” thus escaping Mrs. Grey, and Joy and Betty went upstairs before Mr. and Mrs. Grey returned. Betty was full of thrills. She confided to Joy that she “had found someone harmonious, even to dancing, at last.” He was her escort of the evening, and they were engaged.

“Engaged!” Joy exclaimed. “You, at your age—you don’t want to be married at sixteen, do you?”

“Of course not!” Betty tossed her head. “My goodness, Joy, I’ve been engaged three times already—being engaged and getting married have got nothing to do with each other!”

Saying which, she departed, leaving Joy undecided whether to laugh or be horrified. Decidedly, there was more to these naïve, sunburned kittens than met the eye of the innocent bystander.

Sunday breakfast at the Greys’ was a late affair, and the table was not fully assembled until eleven. Joy dreaded meeting Mrs. Grey’s scrutiny again; she even shrank from seeing Grant, for in the morning sun she blushed at the memory of things under the white heat of the moon, and longed for another moon with no glaring day intervening; but finally she could not longer postpone it. Mrs. Grey was presiding at the table, immaculate and unruffled as ever, not a hair of her marcel straying from its designated path. She enquired meticulously if Joy had slept well, then talked past Joy on one side and Grant and Betty on the other, to Mr. Grey at the head. Joy and Grant met each other’s eyes for one glowing moment, then devoted their attention to their plates. After all, it was the first real meal they had had since yesterday morning. Conversation flitted its way about as noncommittally as a feather-duster, ignoring the vital corners. It was Mr. Grey who grew expansive after his soft-boiled eggs and toast.

“In my day,” he remarked with a chuckle, “we didn’t choose a club-house dance in which to pick a fight. We chose some vacant lot.”

“We weren’t fighting,” said Grant curtly.

Mrs. Grey allowed her sea blue eyes, cold and sparkling as salt water, to rest on Joy for one pungent moment. The air tingled with omission. She spoke finally, as she rose from the table: “We shall hope to hear you sing later in the day, Miss Nelson.”

A stupid, hot Sunday, composed of working through the Sunday papers, sitting on the piazza talking about weather probabilities, and keeping maids perspiring to bring cooling drinks. Grant and Joy had no excuse to slip away, with the events of the day before stalking in the minds if not the words of the Greys, and the stubborn fact that Joy was nominally Betty’s guest. Betty remarked that it was a pity church attendance had gone out of style; it did fill in part of Sunday, anyway. She had suggested golf, which Joy did not play, and tennis, which Joy had expressed a willingness to watch; and everyone had unanimously declared that it was too hot to go down on the beach in the blaze of the sun. Motoring was voted down, since on Sunday “there was such a fearful rabble in the road,” and the day groaned away in an agony of repressions for Grant and Joy.

Towards evening, as it grew cooler, some callers arrived, and Betty pointed out that now was the time for Joy to sing. So Joy sang—not the “Unrealized Ideal” this time, but some little French songs which evoked polite murmurs of appreciation from the guests who were of the type that know nothing about music and care less, but know that it is the thing to appreciate it. And then Betty, rolling her eyes in a manner she considered romantic, requested “Last Night.”

The room with its conventional puppets of listeners faded away; Joy was only conscious of one intent brown face. What if all day they had been and still were hedged about by tiresome details; she could speak to him if there were thousands listening. Oh, to make love with one’s voice:

“I think of you in the daytime I dream of you by night I wake and would you were here, love And tears are blinding my sight. I hear a low breath in the lime-tree The wind is floating through And oh, the night, my darling, Is sighing, sighing for you, for you.”

Her emotion was mastering her, so that her voice came forth in bursts of gorgeous tone or died away in a tremulous whisper; but it carried a quality that made her listeners look uncomfortable, as conventional people tend to do when they feel that their emotions are being aroused in a public place.

She ended, and there was a small moment of recapitulation before the polite murmurs started again. She left the piano and crossed to Grant—veiled under the general chatter, it was the first moment they had to speak to each other.

“I sang to you,” she said; and the Chinese masks which they had both been assuming all day, made easier by the breath-taking weather and the environment, fell away from them as they looked at each other.

“You must always sing to me, Joy—your singing’s you—and I can’t bear to have anyone else even get a part of you.”

She smiled up at him, seeing only the worship of the idea. The callers stayed to a “simple” Sunday supper of three courses and “on the sides,” then left the Grey family to settle down to a repletely quiet Sunday evening. Not so Betty; she announced that “Mr. Cortland” was coming to take her riding, and Joy and Grant could come along too. Mrs. Grey made a few quiet remarks about the ordinary people who rode Sunday evenings, but “Mr. Cortland,” Betty’s newly-acquired fiancé, arrived about that time, and the four set off without even a pretense of asking Mr. and Mrs. Grey to accompany them. They went in “Mr. Cortland’s” racer, which necessitated three-in-one seat and one-on-the-floor, always a piquant combination.

“No use taking a larger car,” said the fiancé, in a bored-man-of-the-world tone: “everyone would scrap as to who wouldn’t drive, and I’d have to, and I can’t drive with one arm—I can only stop.”

“Oh, Nick, you do tear off the worst line,” trilled Betty. “Come on—take the Jerusalem road—of course we’ll go to Nantasket. I want to ride in the roller-coasters!”

Grant turned and looked up at Betty. “You’re not going to Nantasket to-night,” he said. “I suppose you want to ride the merry-go-round too, and dance in the Palm Garden! Where do you get your lowbrow tastes?”

Betty played a tune on Nick’s shoulder. “Drive straight to the border,” she told him in a sepulchral voice, then to Grant: “Stuffy old thing! I’ve been cooped in all day till I could _scream_—, thank goodness, we can forget it’s Sunday at Paragon Park!”

What was there about visiting an amusement park on Sunday to call forth such dignity from Grant? It was almost like his mother might have spoken—Joy anxiously intervened before the brother-and-sister controversy became too distressing: “It’s Mr. Cortland’s car, so we can’t help where they go;—but we can sit and wait for them.”

So they sat in the car outside Paragon Park, while Betty went in to try her fiancé’s endurance on the roller-coaster and in eating pop-corn. The time raced by as swiftly as their heart-beats; they had a whole day to catch up with, Grant said. “Our whole lives, too, Grant,” Joy whispered against his lips.

“To think that we never knew each other—before!”

“But—loving this way is much more beautiful! If we had known each other always—love would have made no more impression than a—a candle lighted in a room blazing with electricity. But what a difference—when the candle is lit in the darkness!”

“Joy, how can you say such wonderful things? You say them all—everything that I can only feel, you say—or sing! How can a girl like you ever be satisfied with me?”

“Don’t, Grant—that’s blasphemy! Or something!”

“I can’t bear to think of you going away to-morrow. We’ve seen each other so little. I’ll be coming up to Boston every day, though.”

“Every day!—Every single day? Could—could we honestly keep that up?”

“Silly girl. . . . Now you make me feel almost up to your level. Do you realize how much we’ll have to see of each other before we dare spring an engagement on my people?”

“Oh . . . I had forgotten all about . . . people and things,” she mumbled and the exalted rhythm of her heart-beat sagged ever so little. Mrs. Grey had such adequately discouraging eyes. . . .

IV

” Pa,” said Joy, “would you let me sing Louise to-day?—I—feel—just—like it!”

It was nine o’clock of a Monday morning; Joy had ridden up to town on an early train and gone straight to her lesson. She had burst into the studio, cheeks aflame, singing almost before she entered. Her scales had gone well; her tones were carrying more point, and were delivered with a resonance that made the windows vibrate. Pa was looking exhilarated; his old eyes were almost shining.

“We shall make a Louise out of you!” he said now for the first time since that first day. “As well as a tender Mimi and a piteous Butterfly and a heart-torn Gilda! But not yet. There is no use in toying with those airs for quite a while.”

“But I want to show you,” said Joy. “Please let me, Pa—I may never be in Louise’s mood again!”

Pa threw up his hands and the accompanist played the two opening measures. Joy abandoned herself to the ecstasy of the song . . . so recently—she had been there herself. When the last blissful echo had died away, she threw back her head and looked at Pa in triumph. He looked back at her, and shook his head.

“Of course, you must remember that mood,” he said, “so that some day you may sing it, and set people to dreaming of their first love. But you must be able to take your moods out of your pocket, and hold them in your hand. Do you see, my dear? If you give yourself up to the mood, it gets out of hand—When one is thrilled oneself, one is rarely thrilling one’s audience. Mind! Mind over all—or the result is artistic chaos.”

“I don’t want to sing so that people will think of my mind—” Joy objected, rebellious. “No; but you must have yourself under control or you cannot control your audience. Be blissful, or passionate, or dreaming; but plan it out first; don’t rely upon the moment’s mood for spurts of inspiration.”

She left the studio, her spirits more dashed than a newly-engaged girl’s should have been over such a matter. The singer’s road was so long, so hard—so nerve-racking—She whiled away the trolley journey to the apartment in finding adjectives, none of which were sufficiently comprehensive. Yet, remembering the way her scales had soared—and the windows vibrated—the exultant sense of power that had been hers—the voices within her were more contented lately, she liked to fancy—Yes, music drew one on even while one despaired.

The apartment seemed changed. Had Jerry been house-cleaning in her absence? There was more furniture in the hall than usual, furniture that belonged in the reception room; and everything shone as if it had been newly scrubbed. Ordinarily, while the apartment was not really untidy, it bore an air of very light housekeeping. Joy poked her head inside the reception room, and dropped the suitcase at what she saw.

A strange woman sitting on the comfortable sofa—a woman with very blonde hair and a figure which would have been expansive if given a chance by her potent corsets. An earringed, bejewelled woman, with dark, hard hollows for eyes in a face whose pink and white layers gave her skin an ironed-out look which trembled into telltale wrinkles and creases in the neck. Jerry was standing before her—a changed Jerry in a bright, bizarre gown of some rough green silk which clung to her like a wet bathing-suit—her hair pulled back straight and confined by a ribbon of the same bright silk—jade earrings lilting from her ears. Her face was rouged; her lips a splotch of scarlet. She swayed lithely as Joy stared, spellbound, and was saying, in a silken, rustling voice which reminded Joy oddly of the dress she wore: “I am sure you will enjoy the little frock, Mrs. Bowman. Florence Fay was in Saturday, and I am creating one for her that is very similar.”

Joy felt her jaw dropping, and closed it with a click that made Jerry turn swiftly on the toes of the cream-coloured sandals she wore on her bare feet. “Mrs. Bowman” followed her glance, and lifted a jewelled lorgnette to stare at Joy. “One of your models, Madame?” she asked, in a voice as thick and flabby as her eyelids.

Jerry nodded languidly, with a swift, impinging wink at Joy.