Part 26

Joan and Fowey followed more at their leisure, constraint and silence between them like a wall. The girl was deeply disappointed with the expedition, as far as it had gone, doubting whether anything better would follow, and still labouring under that unaccountable depression which had settled down upon her spirits at sight of Quard on the New Bedford boat. Fowey, no less disgusted, was puzzled by his companion's attitude, at once tolerant and aloof, keenly watchful for an opening through which to pursue his conquest, and wondering how it would end. If she were simply bent on tantalizing him again, for her own amusement....

He swore angrily but inaudibly.

Near the shore end of the pier they delayed to watch the antics of the hundreds of bathers churning the shallows in front of huge and hideous bathing establishments. In countless numbers, they dotted the sea like flies and darkened the sun-baked, unclean sands, into which their feet had trodden the wreckage of ten thousand lunches.

Fowey said something inexpressively cynical about the resemblance of the scene below to a congregation of bacilli crawling upon a slide beneath a microscope.

Joan heard without response, either vocal or mental. She resented bitterly the superior attitude adopted by her companion. For her part, she would have asked nothing better than to mingle with the throng and taste those crude pleasures so dear to its simple heart and, had she but dared admit it, to her own. But she had Fowey to live up to.

Very heartily she regretted the impulse which had dictated her invitation. She had been far happier alone--though it would have been strange had she been suffered to remain long alone.

By the time they left the pier, the evening was so far advanced that the myriad lights of the tawdry town were flashing into being. They debouched into a roaring mob which filled the wide avenue from curb to curb, packed so densely, though in constant motion, that trolley cars and automobiles forced a way through it only at a snail's pace and with great difficulty. Encouraged by the excessive heat which rendered Town intolerable to all who had the means to escape it, the week-end swarming had begun in all sincerity. In spite of the terrific congestion which already obtained in all the streets and avenues and beaches, piers, amusement parks, catch-penny shows, saloons, and restaurants, scarcely a minute passed without the arrival at some one of the trolley terminals of a car packed to the guards with more visitors.

A good-natured if rowdy mob, for the most part, with only a minimum element of the downright vicious in its composition, it was none the less bent on amusement in its cheapest form, that is to say, at somebody else's expense. It gathered thickest round the places of free entertainment, where acrobats performed on open-air stages or crawled upon high, invisible wires, or where slides were supplied gratis for public diversion: grinning always, but howling with delight when treated to real misadventure, as when some girl, negotiating a bamboo slide upon a grass mat, her skirts wrapped tight about her, would lose balance and shoot headlong, sprawling, to the level; the greater the exposure, the greater the diversion....

Nor was Fowey permitted to escape unteased: his conspicuous clothing, and the broad black ribbons dangling from his horn-rimmed glasses were too tempting to be resisted. Once his Panama was smashed down over his eyes; and his glasses were so frequently jerked by their moorings from his nose that he was fain at length to pocket them and poke owlishly along at Joan's guidance.

Dazzled to blindness by those ten million glaring bulbs which lifted up tier upon tier against the blank purple skies; deafened by an indescribable cacophony of bands, organs, bells, horns, human tongues incessantly clattering; suffering acutely from the collective heat of the multitude added to that of the still and muggy night; buffeted and borne hither and yon at the will of the mass: they contrived in the end to engage an open, horse-drawn vehicle, of the type colloquially known in those days as "low-neck hack," and ordered themselves driven to the Manhattan Beach Hotel.

When presently they had gained the darkling peace of a long road between marsh-lands, Fowey resumed with his glasses his hateful cynicism.

"That was considerable treat, all right," he said pensively.

"Glad you liked it," Joan replied with the curtness of chagrin.

"We'll go back and have some more after dinner," he suggested.

"Thanks--I've had plenty."

"No, but really!" he insisted. "We haven't seen half of it--"

"Oh, shut up!"

Her anger was real; and when he would have mollified the girl with soft words and an arm that sought to steal round her waist, she repeated her injunction with added coarseness and struck his hand away with a force that he felt.

In spite of this, he schooled himself to patience.

Dinner, served perfunctorily by a weary waiter and consumed upon the verandah of the hotel at a table, the best they could command, far removed from the comparative coolness and ease of those beside the railing, did little if anything to modify Joan's temper.

She, who had set out, believing herself the happiest of mortals, to spend an evening of real enjoyment, felt utterly wretched and forlorn.

Moment by moment her distaste for Fowey was gaining strength. She was put to it to listen to his bragging and to make response civilly. She did not relish her food, her company, or her surroundings; and in utter ennui tried to stimulate herself with her favourite brand of sweet champagne, insisting on another bottle when they had emptied one between them. It served only to stimulate a fictitious gaiety in her, one swift to wane.

For all this, she was reluctant to contemplate going home. Anything were preferable to that--at least until she could feel reasonably sure of finding Hattie abed and asleep.

They finished their meal at an hour too late to make it worth while to patronize one of the open-air entertainments with which she had promised herself diversion; and since she would neither go home nor, at Fowey's mischievous suggestion, return to Coney Island, they moved to another table, nearer the railing, and whiled away one more hour listening to the band music over their cigarettes and liqueurs.

Toward eleven o'clock, Joan suddenly announced that she was sick of it all and ready to go. Fowey revived his preference for a motor-car, and got his way against scanty opposition. In a saner humour, Joan would have stuck to her original plan. As it was, she accepted the motor ride with neither gratitude nor graciousness.

Curiously enough, once established in the car, her hat off, the swift rush of night air cooling her moist brows, her head resting back against the cushions, she permitted Fowey to repeat his ardent love-making which had made their previous ride together memorable. Her dislike of him was no less thorough-paced, but had passed from an active to a passive stage; she was at once too indifferent to resist him and so bored that she welcomed anything that promised excitement. She suffered his kisses, confident in her power to control him, and drew a certain satisfaction from reminding him, now and again forcibly, that there were limits to her toleration. But for the most part she lay in his arms in passive languor, her eyes half closed, and tried to forget him, or rather to believe him someone else, one whose embraces she could have welcomed....

When they came to lighted streets, she bade Fowey "behave," and would not permit him even so slight a lapse from decorum as that of "holding hands."

She sat up, rearranging the disorder of her hair, adjusted her hat, surreptitiously restored the brilliance of her lips with a stick of rouge.

The man drew back sullenly into his corner, fuming....

At her door, dismissing the car, he followed her up to the stoop.

"Joan--" he began angrily.

She turned back from using her latch-key, with a wondering, child-like stare.

"Yes, Hubert?" she enquired with hidden malice.

"You're not--you're not going to send me off like this?"

"Why not?" she demanded with fine assumption of simplicity. "It's awful' late."

Fowey seized her wrist.

"Now, listen to me!"

Joan broke his grasp with little or no effort.

"Silly boy!" she said. "Do you really want to come in and visit a while before you say good night?"

Her look was false with a winning softness. Fowey stammered.

"You--you know--"

"Then come along!" she said, with a laugh; and turning fled lightly before him up the darkened stairway.

She had opened the door to the tiny private hallway of the flat when he overtook her, panting. She paused, with a warning finger to her lips.

"S-sh!" she warned. "Don't wake Hattie!"

He swore viciously, discountenanced; and she laughed and, leaving the door wide, went on into the small sitting-dining-room, meanly exulting in the discomfiture she had planned, knowing quite well that he had either forgotten Hattie or believed her to be spending this week-end out of Town, as before.

In the act of lighting the gas, she heard the door close and saw Fowey come, white and shaken, into the room.

"Hush!" she said gaily. "I'll make sure she isn't awake--"

Removing her hat, she passed on into the adjoining bedroom, and stopped short with a sensation of sinking dismay. The room was empty, the bed she shared with Hattie untouched. So much was visible in the faint light entering through windows that opened on a well.

Wondering, Joan struck a light. Its first glimmer revealed to her the fact that Hattie's trunk was gone. The flare of the gas-jet disclosed greater changes in the aspect of the room, due to the disappearance of Hattie's toilet articles and knick-knacks.

Hattie had left, bag and baggage--had gone for good!

But why?

Had she discovered Joan's treachery? Or what had happened?

And in her surprise and perplexity, the girl was conscious anew of that sense of loneliness. She had been afraid to return to the one whom she had betrayed so lightly; but now she was afraid to be without her.

Going back to the adjoining room, she found Fowey standing beside the table and with a slight smile examining a sheet of paper.

"I found this lying here," he announced, handing it over--"didn't realize it was anything until I'd read half of it."

His smile was again confident, bright with premature pride of conquest. But Joan didn't heed it. She was reading rapidly what had been written, swiftly and in a sprawling hand, upon the half sheet of note-paper.

"By rights I ought to stay until you come back, whenever you have the cheek to, and tell you what I think of you--I saw B. E. this evening and he told me all about it--but I want never to see you again--the rent's paid up till next Wednesday--then you can stick or get out--I don't care which--and I wish you joy of your bargain!--H. M."

"You've been scrapping with Hattie, eh?" Joan heard Fowey say in an amused voice.

Without answering, she let the sheet of paper fall to the table, and stood with head bowed in thought, suffering acutely the humiliation inspired by Hattie's contemptuous dismissal.

"What was the trouble?" Fowey pursued. "Not that I'm sorry--"

"Oh, nothing much," Joan interrupted. "We just had a difference of opinion, and she had to fly off the handle like this. It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," Fowey announced significantly.

Now Joan looked up, for the first time appreciating her position.

"Oh ..." she said blankly.

Fowey was advancing, with extended arms. She raised a hand to fend him off.

"Don't!" she begged. "Please don't. I can't.... You must go, now--of course. I'm sorry. Good night."

He paused, and she saw his face pale and working with passion; his small eyes blazing behind their thick lenses; his hands clenched by his sides, but not tightly, the fingers twitching nervously; his whole body trembling and shaken beyond control.

She was conscious of an incongruous, unnatural, inexplicable feeling of pity for him.

"Please be a good boy," she pleaded, "and go away."

"No, I'm damned if I do. You asked me up here--I know now--just to tease me. But that's no good. I won't go!" He advanced another pace, his tone and manner changing. "O Joan, Joan!" he begged--"don't treat me so cruelly! You know I'm mad about you. Doesn't that mean anything to you, more than a chance to torment me? My God! what kind of a woman are you? I can't stand this. Flesh and blood couldn't. I'm only human. All this week I've kept away from you simply because I realized what you were--"

"What am I?" Joan cut in quickly.

Fowey choked again, with a gesture of impotent exasperation.

"You," he almost shouted--"you're the woman I love and who's driving me mad--mad I tell you!"

"Hubert! You mean that? You really love me?"

"You know I do. You know I'm crazy about you. Haven't you seen it from the first?"

Hesitating, Joan experienced a sense of one in deep waters. There was a sound as that of distant surf in her ears. All through her body pulses were throbbing madly.

She struggled still a little, instinctively; but Fowey advantaged himself of that instant of indecision. He held her in his arms, now; her face was stinging beneath his kisses.

Almost unconsciously, she lifted her arms and clasped them round his neck, drawing his face to hers.

"You poor kid!" she murmured fondly, her eyes closed.... "You poor kid...."

XXXVI

Without knowing how she had come there, Joan found herself standing beside the outer doorway, in the narrow hall; one hand hugging about her the kimono she must have snatched up by instinct, while yet not fully wakened, the other hand fumbling with the lock; sleep clouding her brain like a fog, fatigue weighting her eyelids and chaining her limbs, panic hammering in her bosom.

Overhead the doorbell was ringing imperatively, without interruption, even as it must have been ringing for many minutes before she was consciously awake.

Dimly she felt that this alarm by night must portend something strange and terrible.

And still she held her hand, wondering. Who could it be? Not Quard: for she had seen him leave New York. Never Marbridge: that were unthinkable! Hattie Morrison, perhaps.... And that meant....

The bell ground on implacably.

At length she found courage to adjust the chain-bolt and open the door to the limit permitted by that guard.

In the outer hallway a gas-jet burned, turned low, diffusing just enough illumination to show her the figure, somehow indefinitely familiar in spite of its style, of a man in a chauffeur's uniform: a young and wiry man clothed in khaki coat and breeches and leather leggins, and wearing a cap with visor shadowing heavily his narrow, sharp-featured countenance.

As the door opened he removed his finger from the bell-push, and drove home recognition with his voice.

"Miss Thursby live here? I got a message for her."

Joan gasped: "Butch!"

"It's me, all right," her brother admitted crisply in his well-remembered tone of irony. "You certainly are one sincere little sleeper. I been ringing here--"

"How did you get in?"

"Rang up the janitor--if _that_ matters. Lis'n: you betta hustle into your clothes quick 's you can if you wanta get home in time to say good-bye to the old woman."

"Mother!" Joan shrilled. "What--what's the matter--?"

"Dyin'," Butch told her briefly and without emotion. "She said she wanted to see you. So get a move on. My car's waitin', and I dassent leave it alone. Hustle--y' understand?"

"Yes, yes!" Joan promised with a sob. "I'll hurry, Butch--"

"See you do, then!"

The boy swung about smartly and disappeared down the well of the stairway.

Joan closed the door, and leaned against it, panting. Suppose he had wanted to come in!...

For the moment, this was her sole coherent thought.

Then, rousing, she crept stealthily back to the darkened bedroom, gathered up her clothing with infinite precautions against noise, and returned to the sitting-room to dress in feverish haste....

There was an open taxicab waiting in front of the door. As she came out, Butch bent over and cranked the motor. Straightening up, he waved her curtly into the body of the car.

"Jump in and shut the door," he ordered briefly, climbing into the driver's seat.

"But--Butch--"

"Doncha hear me? Get in and shut that door. We got no time to waste chinnin' here."

Abashed and frightened, the girl obeyed.

Immediately Butch had the cab in motion, tearing eastward at lawless speed through streets whose long ranks of yawning windows, seen fugitively in the formless dusk of early morning, seemed to look down leering, as if informed with terrible intelligence.

She shut out the sight of them with hands that covered her face until the swift rush of cool air steadied and sobered her, so that she grew calmer in the knowledge that, in veritable fact (and this was all that really mattered) "nobody knew"....

Then, sitting up, she composed herself, and with deft fingers completed the adjustment of her garments. By the time she had finished her toilet, aided by a small mirror inset between the forward windows, Butch was stopping the cab before the East Seventy-sixth Street tenement.

Bending back, he unlatched the door and swung it open.

"You go on up," he ordered. "I'll be around before long--gotta run this machine back to the garage."

Joan stepped quickly to the sidewalk, and shut the door.

"All right," she responded, and added, almost timidly, avoiding her brother's eyes: "Thank you, Butch."

He grunted unintelligibly and, as Joan moved up the stoop, threw in the power again and drew swiftly away down the street.

For an instant Joan held back in the vestibule, sickened to recognize anew the home of dirt and squalor she had fled, a long lifetime since, it seemed, and struggling with almost invincible repugnance for the ordeal awaiting her at the head of those five weary flights.

Then, more through instinct than of her will, her finger pressed the call-button beneath the Thursby letter box.

The latch clicked. She pushed the door open, moved reluctantly into the shadows and addressed herself wearily to the stairs, inhaling with a keen physical disgust the heavy and malodorous atmosphere in which her youth had been shaped toward womanhood.

As the dining-room door admitted her, she checked again, almost tempted to question the soundness of those faculties which insisted that more than a year had passed, rather than an hour or two, since she had left that mean and sordid place.

Above the dining-table blazed and wheezed a single gas-jet, whose ragged bluish flame was yet sufficiently strong to turn to the colour of night the dull dawnlight outside the air-shaft windows. It revealed to her not a single article of furniture other than as memory placed it, and showed her, seated on the far side of the table, her father lifting a heavy and sullen face from the note-book between his soiled fat fingers, that inevitable sheaf of dope lying at his elbow.

There was no sort of greeting, in proper sense, between these two. For a little neither spoke. Joan hesitated, with shoulders against the panels of the door, in an attitude instinctively defiant and defensive. Thursby looked her up and down, a louring sneer marking his recognition of his daughter's finery.

Suddenly, explosively, she found her tongue: "How's ma?"

Thursby jerked a thumb in the direction of the bedrooms.

"She died an hour ago," he said slowly, "just after Ed went to find you. Edna's in there."

Joan made a gesture of horror.

"My God!" she said throatily, and turned away.

A moment later, loud cries of lamentation ringing through the flat testified that she had found her sister.

XXXVII

With peculiar irony, the passing of that pallid, vague, and ineffectual character, Mrs. Thursby, proved the signal for the dissolution of the family which, denying her both respect and affection during her life, had none the less lost, in losing her, its sole motive or excuse for unity.

The return from the cemetery was accomplished toward noon of a July day whose heavily overcast sky seemed only to act as a blanket over the city, compressing its heated and humid atmosphere until the least exertion was to be indulged in only at the cost of saturated clothing.

The four were crowded in common misery within a shabby, stuffy, undertaker's growler.

Thursby occupied the back seat with his eldest daughter, notwithstanding the fact that, since apprising her of her mother's death, the morning of her return, he had addressed no word to her directly. He sat now with fat and mottled hands resting on his knees, his waistcoat unbuttoned, exposing soiled linen, his dull and heavy gaze steadfastly directed through the window.

Opposite him, on the forward seat, Edna wept silently and incessantly into a black-bordered handkerchief.

Butch, beside her, looked serious and depressed in a suit of black clothing borrowed for the occasion.

Nobody spoke from the time they re-entered the carriage, after the burial, until they left it. Joan huddled herself into her corner, putting all possible space between herself and her father. A sense of lassitude was heavy upon her. She meditated vaguely on the strangeness of life, its inscrutable riddle, the enigma of its brief and feverish transit from black oblivion through light to black oblivion. But the problem only wearied her. She dropped it from time to time and tried to think of other things; as a rule this resulted in her speculations centering about Butch.

The boy mystified her, awed her a little with a suggestion of spirit and strength, character and intelligence, conveyed by a forceful yet unassuming manner. It was a new manner, strangely developed in the year that spaced her knowledge of him, only to be explained by his sudden determination to go seriously to work and make something of himself; and the motive for that remained inexplicable, and would ever as far as concerned Joan. For the personal reticence that had always sealed his cynical mouth was more than ever characteristic of the boy today; and the sympathy which once had existed between himself and Joan was become a thing of yesterday and as if it had never been. His attitude toward her was touched with just a colour of contempt, almost too faint to be resented; she shrank from it, feeling that he saw through her shallowness, that he knew her, not as Marbridge knew her, perhaps, or as Billy Salute, but thoroughly and intimately, and far better than she would ever know herself.

She knew now--through Edna--that within the last twelve-month Butch had learned his trade of chauffeur and pursued it with such diligence that, aside from being the main support of the family which she had deserted, he was half-owner of his taxicab and in a way to acquire an interest in a small garage....

When the carriage stopped, the father was the first to alight. With no word or look for either of his daughters, and only a semi-articulate growl for Butch, to the effect that they'd see one another again at dinner, he pulled his rusty derby well forward over his haggard, haunted eyes, thrust his hands deep into trouser-pockets, and slouched ponderously away in the direction of his news-stand. Before he turned the avenue corner, Joan, looking after him while she waited for Butch to settle with the driver, saw Thursby produce his packet of dope and, moistening a thumb, begin to con it as he plodded on.

So, pursuing his passion to the end, he passed forever from her life, yet never altogether from her memory; in which, as time matured the girl, his inscrutable personality assumed the character of a symbol of aborted destiny. What he had been, whence he had sprung, what he might have become, she never learned....

Then, preceded by Edna, followed by Butch, she climbed for the last time those weary stairs.