CHAPTER III

It was an afternoon of late March, grim and forbidding, as if winter had thrown a last shadow across oncoming spring. The steam heat, turned off in the chorus dressing-rooms during a week of balmy weather, suddenly sputtered on and sang through the whole matinée performance.

Naomi came out of the stage entrance, fur coat hugged about her, and shivering a bit, made for the curb to hail a taxi. As she glanced up and down the street at the ant-like army of cars, one of them slid toward her and a man stepped down.

“Why, hello, Marshy,”—she reached out a hand—“haven’t seen you in weeks.”

He took it.

“Jump in.”

“Good! Buy me some tea, won’t you? I’m frozen.”

“We’ll have tea at your place. I want to talk to you.”

She turned and stared at him as he slammed the door.

His voice didn’t sound like Marshy Kent’s at all.

“I’ve called on you half a dozen times,” he supplemented. “You’re never home.”

“I’m busy.”

“I know you are. That’s why I sidetracked you.”

He did not speak again until they had mounted the flight of stairs to her apartment in a reconstructed house near the theater. But as she collected the seldom used tea things, he walked impatiently up and down the room.

“Naomi, we’ve always been pretty good friends, haven’t we?” he began.

“Friends?”

“Pals then,” he corrected, not knowing why.

“Well, yes, I suppose so.”

“That’s why I’m going to put something up to you. I want you to listen quietly and then I want you to stand by me. Naomi—I’ve done a lot of things in my young life that I’m not exactly proud of. But the worst that could have been said of me was that I’ve been a waster. I’ve wasted one or two fortunes that the old Kents slaved to pile up—on cards—on the wheel—on the ponies—on women—I’ve never been anything but a waster. But that goes in more senses than one. I’ve never been a cad. Not until a month ago.”

He waited for some response but Naomi merely struck a match and touched it to the wick of the samovar. If a quick question did flash to her lips, she held it back and kept her eyes lowered.

“You know when that was. I was _non compos mentis_ and I egged you into making a bet—”

“In other words, dear Marshy,” she filled in his pause, “you want me to let you off on the plea of—well, the undue influence of liquor. Of course I will.”

He pushed aside her easy acquiescence with a sweep that almost knocked the cup from her hand. “But that’s not all. The bet’s not the thing that’s bothering me. It’s you. You and that boy, Dixon. Naomi, you’ve got to quit. You’ve got to, do you hear me?”

“Quit—what?”

“Don’t play the innocent! You know what I’m driving at. I’ve made myself your partner in the job of smashing that boy’s life. And I’m telling you—”

“Wait a minute!”

Very slowly she set down her cup. Very slowly she rose and went close to him. At the hard, driving note in his voice, at the sharp arraignment of his eyes, resentment brought her head up and her eyes defiant.

“Marshy, men fall easily into the habit of talking to—to some women pretty much as they please. But in the years I’ve known you, you’ve never said a word to me that—that hurt. Don’t do it now—please.”

“Then let him alone. I’ve been through hell this past week thinking of what I let those two young things in for. McConnell tells me the girl’s on the verge of collapse,—can’t eat, can’t sleep, just sits and waits for the boy to come and he stays away. Why, they grew up together, those kids. They were as good as engaged. And now he’s chucked her—for you.”

He reached out, caught her by both shoulders with hands that shook.

“I must have been crazy to take you up that night and promise not to interfere. If you don’t cry quits, here’s where I do! Young Dixon is a damn fine boy—McConnell says one of the finest—and I’m not going to stand to one side and see you smash his life and break that little girl’s heart. Understand?”

The eyes that traveled up to his were more weary than he had ever seen them.

“What about my life, Marshy? Doesn’t that count—at all? Doesn’t it matter that I’d like a chance? That perhaps if I marry Bill Dixon, he’ll never know—and I can forget? Doesn’t it matter that you’d be helping me away from being a has-been—and all that goes with it? Do you ever think of the hours I spend here in the dark—alone, trying not to see what’s going to happen to me when I count even less than I do now? But no, of course not! Only—if it were the other way round, Marshy, and I was a man and he a girl, you wouldn’t see any harm in it—would you? If it were you, Marshy, and a young girl—”

“That’s different!”

“Why is it different—why? It’s a man standing up for a man where he wouldn’t for a woman—that’s the only difference. It isn’t that you’re any better than I am. It’s only that you think all men are.”

“Look here, Naomi, I know it’s hard on you, my putting it the way I have to. But conditions are conditions. We’ve both faced them too long to try and buck them. You keep away from that boy and you won’t regret it. I’ll guarantee that—any way you like. What’s it worth—?”

“Marshy—you’re not trying to buy me off!”

“Don’t put it so baldly—”

He stopped. For her head had gone back and a laugh startlingly high and sharp cut the sudden stillness.

“So you’re afraid of me, that’s it! It’s gone that far. He’s declared himself for me—and against her. It’s come to a crux, then—and McConnell’s asked you to help. Why, I didn’t dream it! I couldn’t have hoped for so much in such a short time. I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Even with that high laugh of mockery, her shadowy eyes filled with the vision of the boy fighting—fighting them all doggedly, with hot, flaming defiance—for her—and it was sweeter than the thought of triumph.

Kent’s voice broke in, uncompromising as judgment itself.

“I know a way to stop it—without you. I hesitated to use it before. It didn’t seem cricket. But I’m going to him now with the plain, unvarnished truth—the story Broadway tells when it hears the name, Naomi Stokes,—the story I can add a few chapters to.”

“Marshy!”

“I’ll show him what a blithering fool he is. I’ll prove it the way I can. We’ll see then!”

The vision vanished from Naomi’s eyes. She caught his arm, clutched it with the clinging fingers of a child who in sleep plunges from dreams into nightmare.

“Marshy—you wouldn’t do that! You couldn’t! Why, you called yourself my pal. Could pals stab one another like that? Could I think of harming you that way? Not for anybody! And that boy’s nothing to you. Nothing! Won’t you give me this chance? Just this one. If you knew what it means to me! Marshy, don’t turn away. Listen—please—please!”

But he kept his face turned determinedly from the pleading one streaked with tears, from the eyes he had so often smiled into when their mystery piqued and captivated him in idle moments. And in the rigid line of his jaw there was no yielding. He merely tried to tug away from her clinging fingers and a short phrase answered her.

“Do you cry quits—or no?”

She steadied her lips. Her arms fell listlessly. But even as she met the question, it came less in the form he put it than in the thought of what Bill Dixon had come to mean to her. Not ease for herself, not insurance against bleak years ahead, not the road that led away from terror; but a boy’s hearty laugh and ardent eyes, the warm clasp of his hand, the strength of his arms, what it would mean to lose them. A light that lifted the weight of centuries shone through her lashes. A smile that trembled caught her lips.

“It isn’t quits, Marshy. No! Either way you win, so we might as well play to the finish.”

When he had gone, she sank on the couch and tears unlike the bitter ones of early dawn and hard noon streamed silently down her cheeks. They were tears of wonder and passionate regret, of gratitude that she, Naomi Stokes, could know this engulfing tenderness. The thing she had never dreamed might come was hers. She loved him. Nothing could take that away. After stumbling through the years, she had found in one brief month the dearest thing in the world. And now Marshy was going to snatch it from her. Was that his man’s right? No! She would fight him—the whole world—to keep that which had suddenly become her reason for being.

Yet she realized that she was not armed to fight, not Marshy, nor the world, nor truth. She, who had never lacked resources, to whom the game of life had been a game of wits, stood helpless now.

She could only wait.