Part 8

Joy fell back into bed, and Jerry pulled down the black and white-striped shades before tiptoeing out. From the first moment that she had known Jerry, she had liked her. Jerry had never been anything to Joy but an unselfish, true friend. If it had not been for Jerry, the glory of music that Pa was unfolding to her would never have been hers. If it had not been for Jerry, she would never have met Grant—never have known. . . . But now—now, what did she owe Jerry? Grant had said, he had to—think. How long—how long would he—think?

She had had only a few hours of fitful slumber—something that Jerry had divined with one solicitous glance. Jerry had gone out and left her without trying to talk, which might fully have awakened her. What had Packy meant? She sank into a comatose state from which, contrary to the will of her weary brain, she fell into a heavy sleep.

About four o’clock, she woke with a raging headache. Jerry had closed the windows, as the room faced on a court and was noisy in the daytime, and the air was envelopingly turgid. She dressed slowly, realizing as she became more awake that she had not really eaten for more than twenty-four hours. To ransack the kitchen at this time of the day was hopeless, she knew. There was no solution but to walk down to the nearest dairy lunch, which was quite a distance.

Hatted for the street, she passed through the hall, giving a fleeting look to the living-room before leaving the apartment. Sarah and Jerry were “rolling the bones” on the floor, with Wigs and Davy and several other youths in full cry.

“Honey, what am them?”

“Oh, babe—what will the harvest be?”

“Shine out, little seven!”

“Root, hog, or die!”

Wigs caught sight of Joy as she was about to leave, and sang out: “Oh, Jo-oy! What d’you mean, going to dinner at the Copley with Boston’s Best? We saw you getting gay in there with Whosis—sitting up just like you were at a funeral and all that!”

“Come on in!” invited Davy. “Chance to make your everlasting fortune—never saw good coin change hands so fast——”

She made her escape hastily. _What had Packy meant!_ The kind of life she led—from man to man instead of from hand to mouth——At the Dairy lunch, over some poached eggs, she reflected that it was rather hand to mouth to-day.

It was nearing evening as she paid her check and started to walk back. There could be no explanation of Packy’s words except that he had deliberately lied. Yet that did not sound like Packy. Fast and flippant he undoubtedly was, but she could not picture him lying about a girl.

Suddenly, as she approached the apartment house, her heart came up in her mouth. Surely that was Packy’s car in front—and Packy himself in the act of stepping into it. She waved her veil at him wildly. If he should drive away now just as the solution to her questionings presented itself——But he saw her, and jumped out again as she came up to him.

“Joy! What doggone good luck. Jerry said she didn’t know where you’d gone or when you’d come back——”

“I think it’s good luck, too,” she said quietly. “I have a lot of questions to ask you.”

A window banged six stories up, and Jerry shrieked above them: “That you, Joy? Come on up—there’s somebody to see you!”

“That blond ninny who bumped into Grant and me at the dance that night,” Packy elucidated.

Jim Dalton! Life was too full of complications. She had as much as told him so—“I told him I was too busy to see him,” said Joy.

“Come on—we’ll go riding,” said Packy, and called up to Jerry—“Joy’s coming riding with me—better tell her company not to wait.”

“Where are you going?” Jerry cried, hanging her head farther out of the window.

“Where are we going?” Joy repeated, as he hesitated.

“Down the Shore Road a ways!” he answered finally, and Jerry’s face disappeared.

“Hang Jerry—she acts like a regular old chaperone,” he grumbled as he helped her in the car.

“According to what you think of me, I need one,” she retorted. They were well under way before he replied, in a cool, even tone:

“Pretty crude, Joy—that’s not like you. I suppose Holy Boy Grant has been spilling a lot of chatter in your shell-pink ear.”

“Then you _did_ say something to him! Packy—how could you do such a thing!”

The small, pitiful voice evoked a quick glance from him. “How couldn’t I, you’d better say. May I remark in passing that he certainly didn’t leave the ground long untrampled. Came up late last night, did he? I had to nurse myself along a bit before I staggered about and got under way.”

A mile flashed by them while Joy thought desperately: His profile bent over the wheel looked hard and even cruel. He had admitted talking to Grant as calmly as he would have admitted sending her a box of candy. He seemed to be in a repressed state below the level of which anything might be lurking.

“I—I want to know—just what you told him,” she said at last, after coining and discarding many different methods of putting the question.

“What did he tell you?” Packy countered, eyes on the road ahead.

“He told me—he told me that you told him—that I led a man-to-man existence——”

“Yes, and for once you overdid the thing,” he said smoothly. “I told you, I could wait any reasonable length of time; but I wasn’t corked up to the extent of standing by and smirking while you paraded Old Maid Grant around under my nose. You ought to have had more sense of proportion, Joy, than to go outside your line like that. And jealousy, my dear girl, is a little item you absolutely glanced over.”

“What do you mean?” cried Joy, the wind tearing the words out of her mouth almost before they came. “What right have I given you to be jealous?”

“That’s absolutely ruled out as beside the point.” Still that level voice, although the speed of the car had increased to a breathless, horrible race that left no room for analysis. “You’ve got me so I don’t know whether I’m drinking booze or water—and I don’t propose to have you meanwhile carrying on a nice, pink-and-white little time with our mutual friend Grant. It gets me—see?”

“But—I don’t see yet why you were cad enough to go and tell him such lies about me——”

“Lies!” His lips twisted back from his teeth in silent mirth. “That’s what he said. The funny part of the whole thing is that I told the truth.”

“You can’t mean what you’re saying. You must have been drinking before you came to-day——”

“Now listen, Joy—you had me buzzing for awhile there—I didn’t know exactly where to place you. Of course, living with Jerry and Sal gave me a fairly good idea——”

“Idea _of what_?” she screamed. “_That’s what_ I want to know—that’s what I’ve been asking you. What did you say, when you told Grant what kind of girls I was living with?”

“I was about to say,” his even tones went on, “that you pulled the innocent gag fairly well, but a little too frequent. I can stand just about as much, Joy—after which, off come the brakes and away we skid!” He turned and looked at her swiftly. His eyes were bloodshot, and they glittered. She shuddered and shrank away from him to the farthest corner of the car. The last time she had seen eyes with that look in them—it had been at Prom—Jack Barnett, standing unsteadily against the wall. Miles whirled past—while she cowered against the door of the car and thought with such intensity that her hands and feet felt as if they were turned to ice. He was drunk. She should have known before they started. What could she say, to persuade him to turn back—and failing that, what was there she could do?

A veering turn into a crossroad brought a protest. “What are we leaving the Shore Road for? Is this the way back?”

“This is not the way back. I’m not going to take you back until I’m good and ready—and the devil only knows when that’ll be!”

Her agonised scream vibrated above the roar of the motor. “Packy! Take me back! You must! You——”

“Save—your—breath!” was jolted back to her, and then he laughed—a long laugh that began and ended in his throat.

No more time to think, now—she knew what she must do. Her hands crept out to the knob of the door. Mechanically she looked back and saw a car in the distance—a car that she was dimly conscious had been following them for some time. She could open the door in one second, jump out in another—and before Packy could get back to her, the other car would be upon them——

She turned the knob; Packy saw her at the same minute. With a growl he lurched towards her and seized her by one arm. She struggled violently, and he took his hand from the steering wheel and pulled her back into the seat again.

It all happened in one of those seconds of eternity. While they struggled, the car, still going at white-hot speed without a hand at the wheel, careened from the road and was stopped by a tree.

A jarring crash which made one aware of every little bone and ligament shivering one’s body; the eerie sensation of flying through space; then—nothingness.

* * * * *

Pain—nothing but pain—and floating in a dizzy white world full of needles that pricked and hummed—a strange white world in which there was no time to open one’s eyes and look, because of the pain. Agony so fearful that it seemed as if the very universe must be cracking—everything above and beyond must be coming to an end—and yet the white world hummed on, and the needles sang.

Always pain—agony so deep that when it became less, the memory of it threw her into agony again.

Joy opened her arms and looked around. The white world was gone—she could see familiar pieces of black walnut furniture. And with the white world and humming needles had gone her pain, leaving her so weak she felt as if she scarcely could open her eyes.

Jerry was sitting at the foot of the bed—a pale Jerry, with eyes large and black as inkwells, her freckles standing out in bold relief. Joy was childishly pleased to have sound travel forth from her mouth: “Jerry?”

Jerry jumped up and came to the side of the bed. “Joy! Hullo, old girl!”

Before her wide, relieved grin Joy essayed a colorless smile which merely dragged her face into little white wrinkles. “Some—smash, wasn’t it?” she quavered, anxious to show that she was in possession of her senses. “How long have I been this way?”

“Too darn long,” said Jerry sternly. “Rotten company when you’re unconscious, I’ll say that for you, Joy. Well, got to call up the doctor—I said I’d let him know when you were ready to sit up and eat.”

“Eat!” Joy murmured in objection; but Jerry was gone. It was too much trouble to lie and think. She fell asleep.

When she awoke, Jerry was standing by her bedside rattling a spoon in a glass of milk. “Do you think it’s any bouquet to a doctor to fall asleep, and stay that way all the time he’s here?” she demanded merrily. “Anyway, he says to all outward appearances you aren’t dying yet. He’ll be around again to-morrow A.M.”

Joy paused in drinking. “What—happened, Jerry? You haven’t told me yet.”

Jerry’s teeth shut down on each other. “I’ll tell you the whole darn tale to-morrow. To-day you’d go to sleep in the middle of it.” She pulled down the blinds and in the darkness of the room, Joy fell into a thick, dreamless space from which she brought herself up with a start. It was morning; chinks of glory were pouring in through the blinds; and all at once she felt hungry and almost vigorous. Jerry was asleep on the chair by the foot of the bed, but as Joy stirred, her eyes popped open and she bounced up.

“What ho!” she exclaimed, dashing for the door. “You have the look of a real breakfast in your eye!”

Joy did not talk much until the “real breakfast” was downed. Then she leaned back on her pillows expectantly. “Now, Jerry—please tell me—everything that happened. I gather from investigation that none of my bones are broken—but what did happen to me? How did I get back here? And what happened to Packy?”

Jerry pulled out her cigarette case. “Mind if I have at it? The doc would kill me for doing this here, but I’m so fuzzy since this happened——Packy, allow me to snort, got off nobly with a bump on the eye. The nasty little garter snake! You see, Joy, Jim Dalton and I were pursuing you in a taxi at ten dollars per sneeze, all the way.”

“Jim Dalton!”

“Right. He horned in on the craps, and by the way, after a round or two he began taking away everybody’s cash, so the taxi bill might not have made him as sad as it would have made me—and pretty soon Sal and Wigs and the gang faded off down town to get a club sandwich, but I stuck around and so did this Dalton bird. He had never played about with me at all, so I took a somersault when he began to mention you in an offhand way. Said he had seen you a couple of onces, and wanted to again sometime.”

“I told him I was too busy to see him,” Joy interpolated, trying to struggle to a sitting posture. Jerry raised a restraining hand.

“Take it from one who has flown about on the four winds, Joy—he’s all right. He played a hunch to come up that night, and he might have saved your life for all you know.”

Joy fell back on the pillows. “Oh, all right—but go on.”

Jerry smiled. “Don’t interrupt and I’ll spill it fast——Just at that moment dear little Packy blew in on one of the stiffest breaths I’ve come near since the first of July. Wanted to know where you were, why you weren’t there, etcetera, and I told him to go to and stay put. He paced out banging the door in good old ten-twenty-thirty style, and Dalton passed the remark that he’d seen the angel messing around you before and didn’t like the way he parted his hair. I took a glim out of the window with some small idea of drowning Packy’s pretty car with a bucket of varnish there happened to be handy, when you breezed up and stood talking to him with all the life in the world. I knew there was a nice speedy wind out which would muffle Packy’s breath, so I hove up the window and bade you come in out of the wet. But no—you would go a-riding, and I was all for letting you go, but Dalton got a taxi while I was still bandying words with you, and told me to put on my old grey bonnet and trot along with him. I trotted!” She took a long breath. “God, Joy, that was a ride! I had netted the info that you were going out on the Shore Road, but there was always the chance you’d change your minds, and we had one whirl getting you into view! Some joy-ride—cheery for me no end—with Dalton bickering along with himself to the effect that he wouldn’t let that fellow take you out alone with as enthusiastic a breath as he was exhibiting—my only recreation was making up five different stories which I told the taxi-boy, about the car we were streaking after—which made him put on all speed and sizzle along, anyhow.”

“I saw your car,” said Joy, “or else I wouldn’t have tried to jump.”

“Oh—so that’s what brought about the smash!”

Jerry whistled. “Joy, when I saw the car hit the tree——No matter; and we certainly paid Packy off. We picked you up—or rather Jim did—and put you in the taxi—and Packy was rolling about with only an eye gone wrong—so Jim put him to sleep beside his car, which was all in, too, from the looks of it; and came back home—leaving Packy to his own devices, as the saying is. Not a peep has been heard from him; he must have come to and slapped the car into shape, or there’d at least have been a squib in the papers.”

“Now you’ve gotten to me,” said Joy.

Jerry suddenly sobered, dropping the light tone she had been using to gild the narrative. “You’ve had a little—concussion of the brain. I don’t know whether the doctor wanted me to tell you or not—but he says you’ll be all right in a couple of weeks, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t have the straight facts.”

“Concussion.” Joy considered her state. “Oh, yes—that’s what football athletes are always getting, aren’t they?”

“That’s right—the idea’s the same,” said Jerry. “You tackled a tree, instead of a person.” There was a slight pause, and Jerry said briskly: “Mr. Grant Grey has called up once or twice. I told him you were ill, but I guess he thinks it’s only a stall.”

“Oh—Grant——” She dismissed the subject as a triviality that could be attended to at any time. “My father, Jerry—you haven’t let him know about me, have you?”

“No, I didn’t. I would have, if the doctor had given me any reason to; but he said that you would be all right and if you by any chance should start sliding, it wouldn’t be sudden—your father could be reached in time. I sort of thought you wouldn’t want him to know.”

“I wonder—what would have happened.” Joy tried to imagine her father’s arrival in the apartment; his meeting with Sarah and Jerry; his hearing the no doubt picturesque recital of her accident that Jerry would render. The arrival of the doctor put a stop to this conjecture, which was not a sufficiently pleasant line of thought to be reopened at any other time.

The days of convalescence that followed were long, with somber colouring. She missed her music; Grant did not call up again; the days had dreadful emptinesses that called out for Grant . . . or for her music. Sarah was almost unbearable to live with. Before, the incompatibility of the two had not been so noticeable, when Joy had been out or busy with her music most of the day; in the evenings, if they were together, there were always men around to distract their attention. But now Joy’s enforced stay in the house, threw them together a little more often; just that little more that is too much. Sarah made no bones of the fact that she nourished deep rancour against Joy for her accident, which she considered “all Joy’s fault, anyway.” As a result of the accident, Packy presumably would not put in an appearance at the apartment again; thus ran Sarah’s grievance, which she poured upon Joy instead of sympathy. It did not seem as if Sarah cherished a genuine affection for any human being, man or woman; and the more one knew of her, the more horrified one became at the hard, glassy surface which appeared to be impenetrable.

But there was Jerry who, an untiring nurse and a companion who never failed in interest, stayed constantly with Joy, turning down all invitations with an iron hand. The uneasiness that had always been there, moulded into form by Packy and Grant, was glazed over for a time. All Joy’s knowledge of and regard for Jerry spoke more coherently than unsubstantiated inference.

The two weeks set by the doctor had not quite passed when, one afternoon, Joy tired of lying in bed. She felt perfectly well; there was no reason why she shouldn’t get up and walk as far as the living-room. She did not admit to herself that the cellarette was her real objective; but it had been a long time since she had taken a prescription. Sarah was out on one of her eternal tea dates; Jerry had vanished somewhere. She slipped into her little blue crepe kimono and pattered down the hallway, exultant in the power to walk so much and so healthily.

She swung around the door of the living-room and in before she saw that someone was already there—Jerry, talking to Jim Dalton. They were both standing at the door, so that she almost rushed into them, then stood still in surprise.

Girls in fiction or plays who are surprised in negligée are always “distractingly lovely” in silks or satins, with hair becomingly flowing. But real girls in negligée, unless they know they are going to be inspected, are quite a different matter. Joy’s hair was strained back in tight braids from a face which, without rouge, was as thinly white as skim-milk. The ribbons of her night gown had had their colour laundered out of them; her kimono was—well, it was a kimono, not a negligée, nor lingerie, nor a tea gown. All this, and more, her thoughts touched upon in the first still moment.

Jim was the first to find his voice. “I’m glad to see you’re able to be around, Miss Nelson,” he said calmly. “You won’t have to go back; I was just leaving.”

Jerry went down the hall to the door with him, while Joy went into the living-room and sank down on the lounge. It was uncanny, the way that man had understood her, had spoken in a matter-of-fact voice and relaxed her, and left without making a point of leaving. She realized, as she lay among the pillows, that she could not have reached her room again with any degree of certainty; he had tactfully forestalled her; very thoughtful, for a man.

Jerry came back into the room, smoking in a desultory manner. “I didn’t think I’d tell you, Joy, because I know you don’t like him—but that boy has been here every blooming day since you’ve been sick, to find out how you were at first-hand—while your Grant has stalled at phone distance. I hate to say anything about a man I’ve never met, Joy, but Grant listens to me like a flat tire.”

Joy giggled nervously.

“It isn’t easy for Jim to come, either,” Jerry added. “He takes the trip way out here after he gets through working every day.”

“It’s none of Jim Dalton’s business,” said Joy. “He doesn’t have to come; I wish he wouldn’t. I barely know him, and he keeps turning up and acting as if he were my father or something.”

“Or something!” Jerry repeated derisively. “No—you’ve got a wrong slant on him. Of course, if you look at it that way, he _is_ being a bit outside the works—but when you think it over, the knights of old they talk about who beat it to the rescue of dames in distress, didn’t always stop to decide whether it was any of their business.”

A bitter resentment swept over Joy—resentment that it had been Jim Dalton and not Grant who had followed them on that ride; that it had been Jim and not Grant who had come to see how she was. “Jerry!” she cried suddenly. “Did you know that Grant had left me?”

Jerry had been watching her smoke rings space themselves to the ceiling, but turned swiftly. At her look of blank interrogation, Joy repeated: “Grant has left me! I—I don’t think he’s ever coming back!” Then she stopped, with a tearing intake of breath.

There was an interval while Jerry’s smoke rings turned to curlicues and gargoyles, and Jerry remained seemingly lost in admiration of her skill. Finally, Jerry spoke.

“Of course, Joy, I don’t know the facts of the case—but he’ll come back. I’d stake ten to one on it. He’ll come back—I tell you he will!”

“I’m waiting——!” said Joy.

And she waited—through a week that turned hope to hopelessness. She dared not leave the apartment for fear the telephone would ring. She told herself that he was not coming; yet she sat in the living-room, a book on her lap, or sat at the piano touching keys into strange harmonies . . . waiting.

Gradually life began to resume its accustomed gait at the apartment. Jerry had curtailed all parties during Joy’s convalescence, but now was off again. It was nearing fall; people were coming back into town; the telephone jangled constantly. Joy lacked the energy to join any of these parties, and the evenings were very lonely; as she had not gone back to Pa Graham’s as yet, her days also were long and purposeless.

And so a week had passed on leaden wheels. And one evening about ten-thirty when she heard a babble of voices in the living-room, she made up her mind to dress and annex herself to the crowd.

The music of popping corks and carefree laughter assailed her ears as she came into the room. There were three men, not counting one that Sarah had taken to a comfortable, cosy corner and to whom she was archly whispering. Jerry was standing by the piano, looking over some popular songs with a short, chunky youth who could make the keys jingle in strange, barbaric dissonances that made up an irresistible syncopation which seemed to intoxicate more than the contents of the cellarette. The ever-present Wigs and Davy hailed Joy, pressed a “tall one” upon her, and sat her on the sofa.

“I knew you couldn’t stand Boston’s Best for a steady diet,” said Wigs. “You struck the right time, too, Joy; Jerry’s gotten herself quite tightly edged to-night, a thing that never happens as you know, and since we’ve got the wine and women, she’s going to favour us with song.”