CHAPTER XXV

_Pearl Veal and I_

Pearl's new car is a wonder. It picked us up last Tuesday at the Westbury house, gathered us in with a shower of rice and old shoes. With a fiendish roar it started, but all the devils went out of it with a siss and a bang, and by the time we had swung through the gate it was going sweetly and swiftly, so softly that we seemed to be borne on the wind that swept over the plain, so quickly that, did the road hold straight and hard and smooth, we could circle the world in a day. How we flew! Constables shouted from the fences, but we outsped the sound of their voices. Horses shied into ditches, and drivers called down maledictions; but when Pearl Veal is abroad in her car you hear just the rustle of the angels' wings and see nothing. At Jamaica a mounted policeman thought that he saw something, put spurs to his steed, came clattering down the road in chase, yelling fiercely, and the answer was a wild scream of the horn as we shot around a corner and knew him no more. She cut across three funerals just to show that she was not superstitious, then almost cost us all our lives to save a dog from being flattened under the wheels.

"Madam," said Gascan, the chauffeur, with a tremble even in his voice, "they will catch us at the ferry."

"We will go by the bridge, then," was the quiet answer. "It will take but a few minutes longer."

So by the bridge we came, losing ourselves in the mazes of the East Side and ending forever all chances of pursuit; turning at last sedately into the avenue and picking our way uptown through the crush of carriages that block the way on a bright spring afternoon.

"Why, we have been over an hour from Westbury," she said, glancing at the clock on the Brick Church tower.

That is the way we have been travelling for a week--flying. Sometimes Gascan, the silent, takes the wheel, and we roll easily along at legal speed, not at all to keep within the absurd law, but to quiet our nerves with a smoke, to rest our eyes on the blue sky and the stately clouds, and our ears with the music of the wood and meadow. Then Pearl will take command, Pearl, all goggled and armored, all enwrapped in dust cloth and ashes till she would seem an animated mummy instead of the fairest girl in town. With her eyes intent on the road, intent on the spot a mile ahead where we are to be an instant later, and mine intent on her as she sits beside me, strong, alert, resourceful, we go at top speed, a mad pace, for miles and miles and miles, running away from the law and the world. We forget them all, all the Mints and Bumpschuses, the Wherrys and Lites, the Nocastles and Nothinghams, all the smart folk and noble folk with whom God and Mrs. Radigan have seen fit to cast our lot in the past few years. Sometimes we forget even John and Sally, but that is only in the excitement of the road when we are hurling ourselves over hill and valley. When evening comes and Gascan has unloaded the car, and dinner comes, and Pearl and I sit over coffee and a cigarette, she will blow a smoke ring and say, as she watches it rise into the darkness: "I wonder what Sally is doing now."

"Reading her novel to Lord Algernon Fitznit," I will venture.

"Or to Green," Pearl will say with a quiet smile.

"Or preparing for Newport," I will suggest.

"And planning the donkey-dinner," Pearl will laugh.

"She was to give a fair for the hospital, you may remember," I say, "and she told me distinctly that she proposed to spend almost all her time in church-work."

"After the racing season," Pearl explains. "You know she has started a stable with Constance Wherry, and promises to give to the church all she makes in the ring."

"Their colors?" I inquire.

"Gold," Pearl answers; "all gold with narrow silver hoops--and the horses entered by 'Mr. Nagidar,' the new firm's name and 'Radigan' backward."

Then I will raise my glass and clink it gently over the table with Pearl's. "To Mr. Nagidar, success," I say.

A sip. Up go the glasses again, and I suggest: "To Mrs. Radigan--yesterday in Kansas City, to-day the smartest woman in town, to-morrow the patron saint of Society."

"But Sally was never so enthusiastic over you," Pearl says, resting her chin on her clinched fists as she leans on the table and smiles at me. "Remember Plumstone Smith and the Duke of Nocastle--even Captain Lord Algernon Fitznit."

"I prefer to forget them," I exclaim, "and will remember only that but for Mrs. Radigan I should never have met Pearl Veal!"

"Ve-al," Pearl corrects me laughingly. "Thank Heaven, I have at last got rid of that dreadful name. People simply would not help me out with the French pronunciation."

"Names are made in heaven--like marriages," I aver, lighting a cigar.

"The same insight into human needs is shown in both cases," Pearl declares. "But, anyway, I could change mine."

"And, thank Heaven, not to Smith nor to Fitznit," I murmur devoutly.

"Thank Heaven," says she. And she raises her glass and murmurs softly, "To Us!"

Then we forget the Radigans again, the Mints and the Bumpschuses, the Nocastles and the Fitznits, and all those tiresome folk. Sometimes letters follow us, and when they start in time and follow fast they catch us and for a while drag us back again to home and friends. To-day we had quite a batch of them, mostly from Mrs. Radigan, with one from Mignonette Klapper announcing her engagement to Captain Lord Algernon Fitznit, and a marked paper containing a picture of the Guardsman and his fiancée, and telling all about the romance that began at the Long Island house. I must confess I can see nothing romantic in the match, for the giant soldier seemed to have too plain sailing; did nothing, just eyed Mignonette through his monocle while Mrs. Radigan read to him, as he smoked and sipped Scotch, and the girl played solitaire so innocently. Then he proposed and she took him, and that is the end of it. I suppose they arranged it the day of our wedding, for he was to leave Westbury next morning and she to start that night for her Milwaukee home. But she stayed over, announced the engagement at breakfast, and took him West to show to the family.

"Her conduct was horrid," wrote Mrs. Radigan to Pearl. "It makes my blood boil to think that all those hours when I was reading my novel to him, he was flirting with that little minx. I told you from the first that this is what you might expect if you persisted in your friendships with people you ought not to know. Now she will go to London and, with her money and his family, will be in the thick of the Court set and in prime shape to snub me back if I do not cringe. Her conduct the day of the wedding was dreadful, though I suppose you were too busy to notice it. She kept him trailing after her all day long, when he should have been attentive to Marian Speechless and Clarissa Mudison and Gladys Tumbleton, and all those nice girls who have been so kind to him since he came over. He simply ignored them and followed her around wherever she went, like a little dog, and after you had gone away in the car the two of them slipped out for a long walk and never got back till nearly dinner-time. The first I heard of the engagement was late in the evening, when, thinking no one was there, I happened to look into the library."

"Poor Sally!" said Pearl as she laid down the letter. "She will never forgive me for having a quiet wedding."

"A quiet wedding!" I cried. "What is a quiet wedding?"

My mind, of course, went back to the dreadful day--or three days, for the trouble began on Saturday--when the house filled with people and there was no rest till that afternoon, when we jumped into the car amid a shower of rubbish and flew away. There was all the worry about Green, enough to break down any man, particularly as there was no need of it, after all. He is my oldest friend, so I did want him to stand by me at that trying time, but, of course, he knows only queer people and I was sure he would behave like a fish out of water. But Green proved wonderful. He has picked up a lot of things in the past year, has quite changed his style of dressing, and as he is a handsome fellow, he got along splendidly with everybody, told some new stories, cleaned up considerable at bridge, beat Radigan at billiards, and killed a long Sunday evening for us with an improvised musicale, in which he and Miss Klapper did everything, except that Lord Algernon sang a drinking-song. The Count and Countess Poglioso Spinnigini invited him to visit them in Italy when they return there ten years hence; Marian Speechless got him promised for a week-end in June; Stuyve Mint asked him to go out to the races on their coach next week, and as for Mrs. Radigan, I heard her distinctly introduce him to Mrs. Hegerton Humming as the "most brilliant man I know."

Pearl looked up from another letter: "Sally writes that she has asked 'that lovely Mr. Green' to Newport in August," she said, handing the note across the table for my inspection.

So I pinched myself to make sure that it was I, as I have pinched myself a dozen times in the past week when my mind has gone back to the old days in the boarding-house and to that dreadful real-estate time. And here is Green, my friend Green, yesterday in a hall bedroom, to-day spending week-ends, to-morrow being toted around Newport as the most "brilliant man Mrs. Radigan knows," which can only mean the most brilliant in all the town. Green was splendid. Even she approved of him, and there were few things about that wedding which did meet her approbation.

I cannot see why Mrs. Radigan was disappointed, except that the Bumpschus-Nocastle affair overshadowed it, as it did all other of the season's functions. It was small. They say it was quiet. It certainly was smart, for, except for Miss Klapper and Green, only those worth knowing were asked, some four hundred all told, of whom perhaps a half came down on a special train, and it took every trap in the neighborhood to get them over to the house. Well could Mrs. Radigan view with pride that assemblage beneath her roof, when the orchestra struck up the wedding-march and Radigan led Pearl Veal through that splendid company, down the aisle they had formed to the rosy bower where stood two bishops and a half-dozen other of the clergy, where I stood with Green. Mint and Bumpschus, Williegilt and Wherry, Hegerton and Humming--every great name in the city was there. Every railroad had sent its representative; every street-car line and bank; every race-track and towing company--even some medicines and breakfast-foods. These were the proudest of the city. These were the great folk of the land. Yesterday none knew her. Yesterday some snubbed her. To-day they journey miles to see her sister married, not because they are very interested, but because she is a power and it is well to be there; they call her Sally and her husband Jack; they throw rice at her sister and old shoes at me in an outburst of affection. Is it a wonder that I pinch myself to make sure that it is I?

And of the future, what? Shall we climb higher or shall we fall? Higher we cannot climb, but of a fall I have little fear, while the money lasts. To-morrow the Radigans will be old and conservative, and Sally will be content with four houses and one small dance a year, will honor her friends with a card handed in by the footman, will head the list of patronesses of all charities, and spend Lent in a retreat. New Radigans will rise, Radigans with more money and more brains and more push. For the Radigans of to-day are the Bumpschuses of to-morrow and the Van Rundouns of the day after. Then they disappear in the great human sea of those who are not worth knowing.