Part 9

The chunky boy at the piano was shaking out some bars of eerie ragtime. Jerry turned, swaying, hands on hips. Her eyes were shining with almost polished rays; they wandered over the room in an impersonal, professional smile. It was doubtful if she saw Joy at all. Her lips parted in an avid, gamin grin, and hardly opening her teeth, she jutted forth the words of the song:

“I wanted some men and I sought them I made myself up like a doll The other girls, oh, how I fought them! They handed it to me for gall— I wanted some men and I’ve got them Turned down five bids for dinner last night But somehow they’re not what I thought them And somehow I know it’s not right.”

The fiery, vivid personality that was Jerry’s leaped out through scarcely a motion as she sang, insolently, through her teeth, her red lips always curved into that goblin grin. She was swinging into the chorus now, a chorus of dizzying syncopation the notes of which she followed not at all, speaking the words with a little drag at inconsequential moments—

“Ten men down—and more to go— Other girls get them—if you are slow— This life is short So don’t get caught You’ve got to have strings to your bow!”

“No sense to words of any popular songs nowadays,” complained Davy. “But Jerry puts ’em over—she’s the Queen of the Cabaret Artists.”

Joy had never heard Jerry sing before, except from a distance at the Prom. It was a rich voice, thick and uneven and even harsh in places; but she had “put it over.” She did not need any voice at all, with that audacity and insolence. There was loud applause, mingled with the popping of more corks. The chunky youth deserted the piano, complaining that it was “devilish dry work.” Jerry came over to the lounge.

“Hello, Joy,” she said lightly. “Come to join the happy family? Everyone was bored as blazes to-night until we started opening them up, and now everyone thinks they’re bright as the morning sun, which is still a long ways off from to-night, I’ll tell anyone.” She teetered slightly standing before them. Jerry “tightly edged,” was fascinating as ever, but not a pleasant sight.

“I can make up words as good as that old song,” said Sarah from her corner. Her head had slid to her companion’s shoulder, but she bobbed it up as she sang:

“Mazie had a man an’ he left her flat If she’d had more than one he’d not had nerve to do that.”

“Fine! Let’s all make up pop’lar songs,” cried Davy, thumping out a staccato time with his feet and humming some blue lines of uncertain origin.

“Pop-u-lar songs,” corrected Wigs, with academic zeal. “’Shamed of you, Davy, ignoring your shyllables that way.”

“None of your business whether I cut silbles when I see ’em or not,” Davy retorted. “Always was ’ristocratic. Can’t help way was made——”

“Should help cruelty to inan-imate objexsh. Poor little shyllables can’t hit back.” Wigs became tearful over his chivalry in defending helpless objects. Davy remained gay, taking a glass Jerry had just filled, from her hands while chanting—

“O my name’s July an’ I gotta thirst O babe, share de whiskey or you shore will burst.”

“Some poet!” said Jerry, and tipped the contents of the glass on to his collar, as he started to lift it to his lips. She poured herself another glass, while he rose and tore off the dripping mass that had been his collar, shrieking another stanza:

“De whiskey am frisky in its lawful place Babe, leave some for me or I’ll slap your face.”

“Shay—whaddyouthinkthisish—blooming musical comedy?” And Wigs wept again.

Sarah’s little comrade in the corner was announcing that Sarah had “passed out”; the chunky pianist stopped drinking long enough to say that Sal was a rumhound and never knew when to stop; there seemed to be no end to Wigs’ flow of tears; Davy was chanting a new verse in which he could only get as far as “O Babe——” and then he would have to begin over. Jerry was laughing stridently at Davy between gulps of port wine. It was the worst to see Jerry so——But Sarah was the farthest along—she lay back on her cushions now without motion, her hair that was usually so exquisitely arranged, loose in loops about her face, her mouth sagging open ever so slightly.

Watching the sight before her, Joy felt a nauseation that she had ever touched liquor herself. Wigs’ tears reminded her sickeningly of her own. She had been living in a daze; but the daze had worn off. To-night was the finishing touch. Packy may have been despicable, but his words about Jerry and Sarah at this moment seemed to be justified.

She rose and left, ignoring Davy’s pleas for her to stay, and the fact that her departure threw Wigs into a fresh fit of tears. Jerry was still remarking that the evening was young and tender—and Joy had no doubt but that they would all drink until they were unable to move.

In the morning she got up early and packed her things—a decision born of the night hours, which did not change its colour in the rays of the sun. She was going home. Her visit had stretched itself far beyond its first designated limits. Her father could not understand why she had not come long since. She would go back to the Mid-Victorian house and face the family portraits—feel the protection of the four walls of the ancestral mansion around her—enjoy the peace and security of the little town.

A thought held her up, as she was folding a sweater. What of her singing? To leave Boston would be to leave Pa Graham. She had been subconsciously assuming that her music would always go on, but—how?

In a very few minutes she had dressed for the street and was hurrying out of the apartment. No one was stirring, but it was nine o clock, and she knew Pa would be in his studio. If she could only get there before his first lesson——

There is something about the personal quality of singing, and the reverence the teacher inspires as the embodiment of that great art, that draws the confidence. If singing teachers could tell half the stories of the lives of their pupils!

Pa was alone playing in the great studio, and came forward with delighted welcome: “Back again, my prima donna! Are you ready and eager for work once more?” Before her white wistfulness he paused. She stood looking around the room, at the busts of Mendelssohn and Beethoven; at the shrine to “Patti—the thing that happened once” in the far corner; at the photograph of Sembrich of the golden voice supreme, with loving greetings to Pa written across the face; the piles of music on the pianos——A sob arose to her lips. “Oh, Pa!” she said. “If you could only understand! Everything—has left me!” Days of waiting, of patient tears, brought a swift little rush of words: “I haven’t even a heart—any more.”

Pa took her hand gently and led her to a chair. Then he stood before her, stroking his short little beard, his old eyes very soft under his bent brows.

“Child—your heart may break—it’s the way of young hearts every once in a while—but there is one great soul that will remain true as long as you are true, and that is the soul of music. An older and wiser spirit than mine has said: ‘All passes; Art alone endures.’ With you, all else may pass, but the soul of music will unite itself with your own, always weaving its tendrils more closely into your being. Just now it may seem a cold comfort in your desolation—but it is a thing that ripens as the years go on—always faithful—_always providing you are faithful_.”

A quick little silence in the room. Joy lifted her head. “I want to, Pa—I want to turn to my music, so much—but how can I—do anything more with it—when I feel as if everything in my heart was burned and dead!”

He smiled. “Youth is tragic—every once in a while. Look you, Joy—you came this morning half determined to tell me you weren’t coming to me again—but you are. What would you do, else? Your impulse to love, let us say, has been awakened, then—diverted. Note, I do not say snuffed out, for that is an impossible thing. The impulse is still there—and if you turn it to music, spending it royally in terms of energy and power in work at your art, instead of in terms of love, you will be content, and you will become one of the greatest artists the world has known. You will interpret life to hundreds of thousands, through the transmutation of your life into work. ‘All passes; Art alone endures.’” He took a few quick turns about the room, then brought himself up with a jerk. “I do not want you to sing to-day; you have been with tears too recently; besides, I have a lesson. Go away, and think over what I have said. You will have some decisions to make. For if you come back to me, there will be no more half-toned effort such as the desultory summer work we have done.”

“Desultory summer work,” Joy gasped. “Why, I practised regularly——”

“Practice! An hour and a half a day. That is the most you can do with your voice. But there must be hours of silent study. No matter what one may say of Geraldine Farrar now, she was, is and will remain a very great artist. It does not drop on one like the gentle rain from Heaven, after a few years of hour-and-a-half practice. That girl worked ten hours a day in her years of study. Lilli Lehmann said she never had such a worker. You have the voice—yes. Now you require solfège, through harmony and counterpoint, French, Italian and German complete, other languages to pronounce—you are but at the threshold of your toil. Oh, when I see you before me, with practically everything to learn, the days don’t seem long enough—the years don’t seem long enough!” He quieted down and looked at her. A great deal had descended upon her at once, but she felt no sense of oppression at the program outlined; rather, she felt as if energy were pouring in upon her, energy to accomplish anything he said. She rose, inhaling a long breath as she did to sing on, feeling her ribs swell out, with the sense of power that it never failed to give her.

“It’s true, Pa—I did come in here half with the idea of leaving you. I didn’t know what I would do. But you have decided me. There’s no need of my thinking over what you said. I’ve decided now. You never told me all this before, about how I would have to work, because I wasn’t ready for it—isn’t that so? I am now—and thank you.”

His eyes glinted beneath his brows. “I’ll not let you decide here. Go away as I told you, and then come back. At Jerry’s, your atmosphere will not be so—musical, and you can make an unbiased decision.”

“No—I want to decide now—before I go back to Jerry’s——”

“You speak as if Jerry might influence you the other way. Jerry loves to mind her business with strict impartiality, but if she ever overstepped her limits she would only urge you to strive as she might have. That girl has the makings of a diseuse of the first water.”

She left the studio in the gilded bubble of youth’s ambition. All the voices and urges within her seemed this morning to have crystallized themselves into one refrain: “_No work is too hard if it reaches towards perfection!_” How could she have thought she could leave Pa?

She had forgotten—Jerry, Jerry, the mystery—about whom Pa seemed to know more than she, Joy, who lived with her.

What could she do? What was she to think? Where could she turn, in this perplexity?

Jerry was sitting in her room—a pale, seedy-looking Jerry in the familiar purple kimono, staring dully at the half-packed trunk. She did not turn as Joy came in.

“So you’ve—decided to go,” she said in a funny, hard little voice that wavered at the end.

All the resentment and doubt that had been torturing Joy, was dispelled by the sight of that desolate figure and those few wry little words. “Jerry!” she cried. “I—I thought about it this morning—but I—I couldn’t!”

Jerry’s lashes flickered, but she remained sitting in the same position, knees drawn against her chin, pink mules flapping in front of her. “It never wandered into my bean until just now, when I came in and saw——But I’ve been boiling the idea down—and I think you’d better.”

“Jerry!”

“You aren’t happy here; I—I guess you never have been. I’ve never done anything but harm to you from the first moment I knew you. God knows I didn’t mean to, but it seems my good intentions always make the smoothest kind of boulevards for the joy-riders in hell.”

Jerry broke the silence that followed her last speech. “Joy—I’ve never told you about myself. Get comfortable now, because I’m going to ladle out the whole story.”

Joy was at the threshold of the Blue Room, of what she had always wanted to know. And now that she was so near, she drew back. “Oh, no, Jerry—please don’t tell me anything you’d rather not talk about—and you’ve often said you’d rather not talk about that——”

“I also said I’d tell you sometime when I felt like it. Now gets the vote. I should have told you right at the start—but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to go into it. Now I’ve got to.”

“Well, if you must tell me—I’m comfortable,” said Joy in a small voice, sitting down on one of the black walnut chairs which had been remodeled with black-and-white-striped cushions.

VI

” To begin at the pop of the pistol—I was born in New York—over on the East Side, where people live like flies. You’ve never been there, have you?” Joy shook her head. “Then you probably won’t believe some of the things I’m going to tell you. I was one of ten—and we all lived in two rooms.” Jerry’s voice seemed to have grown dull, and she stared away from Joy as she talked. “When you toss it over in your mind—it’s pretty brutalizing, living that way—it tends to turn humans into worse than animals—for humans can make themselves as much lower than animals as they can higher—that’s one of the things I’ve learned so far in life.”

“You don’t mean _ten people_—in two rooms?” Joy gasped.

Jerry shrugged her shoulders. “That’s exactly what I do mean. Not only that, but we took two boarders in our rooms because my father was always out of work.”

Joy’s eyes were huge disks of horror; already she had shrunk into her chair looking at Jerry as if she had suddenly dropped in from Mars. Jerry was continuing rapidly:

“I sold newspapers as soon as I was able to take in the pennies. I wore a grey sweater and a pair of bloomers, and talked to everybody who bought a paper of me, whether they slung a line back or not.” She gave a long, quivering sigh. “I don’t intend to go into details about my life from the ground floor up——But get this clear, Joy: _I never knew what it was to be innocent_, not since I can remember. And I’m not throwing out any cross lines when I say that it wasn’t my fault or my own choosing. I—never had any other slant on it offered to me. My life, as I have said, was like that of an alley cat, and it couldn’t be translated to you any other way.”

“I don’t understand,” said Joy faintly.

“You wouldn’t. You were having milk fed to you when I was picking up beer-leavings. That’s the best way I can put it to you.”

There was a pause while Jerry studied her pink mules and searched for words in which to clothe what she wanted to say. Finally, with a swift frown, she plunged into narrative again, obviously leaving a hiatus.

“When I was thirteen, I got a job as messenger girl for Charlette et Cie. Happened to have drifted up the Avenue to see if I could get some man to buy my whole load of papers—saw the sign, Girl Wanted, and tacked inside. There were a bunch of others waiting that dressed the part a little better—I had on the grey sweater and bloomers—but I told the dame that was doing the interviewing that I’d carry their old bundles for less than any other applicant. This underbidding tickled the old girl somehow, and before I knew it, I was one of Charlette’s regular messenger-girls at five dollars per.

“My getting rich quick was the cause of a split between me and the family. I shut my mitt on my income—and the result was the throwing of a few flat-irons and other little parties, which ended in the fact that one night I didn’t come back and I’ve never been back since. I hadn’t ever bet much on the family—and there was a new boarder I didn’t like.”

“What do you mean, Jerry,” Joy interposed; “you couldn’t live—not _live_ on five dollars a week?”

“I could and did. I took a room at a dollar a week. It was a hall bedroom, the kind you don’t even read about. No light, and squirming all over. I used to——Never mind—I got along all right—and the family never came after me; I guess one more or less didn’t make such a hell of a difference.

“Excuse me, Joy! You look paralyzed or something. I was inhaling the dollar-a-week air again——Cheer up—I’m whirling off the slum stuff as swift as it can go—but you’ve really got to hear some of this, so you can understand every little thing.”

“Go—on,” Joy articulated with difficulty.

“My next two years I spent carrying bundles for Charlette’s and incidentally hanging around the place before and after hours, talking to the models every chance I could get, absorbing the main truths about what clothes can do to you and what you can do to clothes. My errands took me into the workrooms and fitting-rooms, and I began to make my own clothes and what I admitted was improving on Charlette designs in doing so. Watching the models and hearing them talk had given me an idea of what colour and line could do.

“I think I was at my worst at fifteen. I tossed a mean make-up and looked probably older than I do now. I had no morals and a bunch of bad ideas. Some of the models were all right, but those weren’t the ones who shot their mouths off. About the only rule I went by was to look out for myself.

“Along about then, I struck for recognition—I was working twelve hours a day and only pulling down seven a week—and they graduated me into the work-rooms.

“That’s the way my rise in the world began—that and changing to a sub-let room in an apartment uptown. I was five years more at Charlette’s; and at the end of that time I was one of their designers—what I had been working for, all that time.” She closed her eyes as if they hurt. “I’d been working on the same old twelve-hour average, but it was a change and higher pay, and I lapped up the work, I was so crazy about it. There seemed a sort of poetry to it—even when I started as a cutter, baster, fitter and spent days over the sewing machine—a poetry that grew as I pushed myself into the designing end and put the right thing on the right person.”

“Like Mrs. Messy,” Joy said, with a little hysterical giggle. She had lost her look of breathless horror, and was listening with minute interest.

“Well—there were a lot of people like her around, of course—there always are, in a big designing shop—and I learned how to put things on them, too—as you’ve seen.” The two girls smiled at each other. The air had become less tense. It was almost in relief that Jerry continued:

“I always worked overtime, at first because I knew that was the way to get ahead, then later from habit as well as my burning to get to the top. I saved my money, too, and was the original glued-to-a-nickel fiend. Men dropped out of my life pretty much in those five years. I was too busy getting ahead.

“Before I go on and get to the heart-throb—I’ll give you a general snapshot of me at the age of twenty. I made myself up every A.M. as peppily as if I were going to tread the boards. I wore my hair in the last gasp from Paris. I cut my clothes as snappy as I could get away with, which was some, you can gather. And I looked like a misprint. As for the rest—I was hard as a city pavement, tough as gum, and looked on men as a necessary evil.”

“That wasn’t your fault!” Joy interpolated swiftly. Jerry shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, but gave a faint nod, before going on.

“Then one day a man walked into Charlette’s who—I’ve never lined this out to a soul, Joy; but I’ll try to hold my words in when I talk about him. You know, or of course you don’t, the type of man likely to float around Charlette’s. Husbands, or sapheads. Mostly both. But this day—a man came in with his sister, who was having us do her wedding dress.

“She was Mabel Lancaster. Of course you know who she is.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Joy admitted. “The name sounds vaguely familiar, but most nice names sound that way to me——”

“Well, New Yorkers would know; it’s an old family, not much ready cash; and she tied up to Eustace Drew, also old family, and a lot of ready cash. The papers were full of blurbs about it at the time. I had thrown a lot of thought over her dress, and it was good, by the way—but Fanchon spread a noise about having done it herself. Fanchon was the old girl who had first interviewed me when I came in for messenger girl. Her real name was Mrs. O’Brien, but never mind.

“I was out front shadowing Fanchon O’Brien with a telephone message when he came, not trailing after his sister with a dragged-in-look or tripping along with all the zest in the world—just the in-between effect that I had often remarked no man ever got in Charlette’s Louis Somebody salon. Joy, he—well, he’s tall, and big, and he’s got brown hair, sort of choppy, with a pinch of red in it. And his eyes are blue as yours, only they’re breezy and full of zip—and then they can look at you with a little half-smile——”

She caught herself up. “Tell me when, I blow, Joy! I knew I would.”

Joy laughed. “I love it when you ‘blow,’ Jerry! I’ve often wondered if you ever—could! Go on—quick!”

“Well—he didn’t look at me at all. Fanchon took them into the theatre salon, and I sneaked after them, pretending I was busy at something or other. Mabel Lancaster was saying that she wanted to look at some evening gowns for her trousseau, and Fanchon nailed me to rustle the dear models along. I did so, and then stood at the end of the salon and kept my eyes pasted on the back of his head. I was hard in love with him then—with the back of his head and the way he turned and smiled and said things to his sister. The back of a man’s head is an awful test—it can register, or not register, so many things. Try it and see some time!

“Finally I came down the theatre to a seat almost behind them. Fanchon had gone back in the workroom to see about the wedding dress, and thanks to Charlette having the theatre salon in semitones, they didn’t notice me, although they never wasted an eye on surrounding human scenery anyhow.

“‘Those models fascinate me, Phil,’ she was saying. ‘What an empty show their life must be! Or is it? What do you think?’ ‘I’ve known some of their kind,’ he answered, ‘and I can assure you that their chief concern is what they put on or leave off their backs. Poor little rats! Not much “honour and truth and a sure intent” among them!’

She laughed. ‘You’re always talking about “honour and truth and a sure intent,”’ she said. ‘You’re so romantic, Phil—anyone would think you were getting married instead of me!’