Part 5

She considered one pump and fretted the silver buckle with the other heel. “I’d see people, papa.”

“What people, sis?”

“Oh,” she said, “every one!”

It set him thinking that she lived pent in his house with her stiff, alien governess. She was infinitely safe, so, but she might be bored; he recalled hot and stagnant evenings on the farm when his mind had floated free of the porch steps and his father’s drawl into a paradise of black haired nymphs and illustrious warriors dressed from the engravings of the Centennial Shakespeare. Perhaps she should go to school? He consulted the governess, was surprised by her agreement, began to ask questions about schools for small girls.

“Miss Thorne’s,” said his broker, Villay, “She’ll really be taught something there.... Miss Thorne was my wife’s governess. I’ll see if I can manage....”

“Manage what?”

The broker clicked his cigarette case open, shut it and laughed, “You know what I mean, Walling.”

“No, I don’t.”

“It was one thing getting Gurdy into Saint Andrew’s. The Headmaster’s a broad minded man.... My dear boy, you’re Walling--Walling, of Carlson and Walling and you used to be a matinée idol.... I don’t like hurting your feelings.”

“You mean you’ll have to go down on your knees to this Miss Thorne to get her to take Margot?”

The broker said, “Not exactly down on my knees, Walling. I’ll have it managed. The school’s a corporation and my wife owns some stock.” Mark groaned and was driven uptown thinking sourly of New York. Things like this made Socialists, he fancied, and looked with sympathy at an orator on a box in Union Square. But Gurdy was arriving by the five o’clock train at the Grand Central Station and the lush swirl of the crowd on Fifth Avenue cured Mark’s spleen. Snow fluttered in planes of brief opal from the depth of assorted cornices above the exciting lights. A scarlet car crossed his at Thirty Fourth Street and bore a rigid, revealed woman in emerald velvet, like a figure of pride in a luminous shell. Her machine moved with his up the slope. Mark examined her happily. She chewed gum with the least movement of her white and vermilion cheeks. He despised her and felt strong against the pyramidal society in which Walling, of Carlson and Walling, was disdained. A cocktail in the Manhattan bar helped. The yellow place was full of undergraduates bustling away from Harvard and Yale. The consciousness of dull trim boots and the black, perpetual decency of his dress raised Mark high out of this herd. At least he knew better than to smoke cigarettes with gold tips and the oblique, racy colours of neckties had no meaning for him beyond gaudiness. He strolled to the clapboards and icy labyrinthine bewilderment of the station, found the right gate and beheld uncountable ladies gathered together with children in leather gaiters, chauffeurs at attention smoking furtively. Here, he knew, was good breeding collected to take charge of its sons. The cocktail struggled for a moment with cold air. Mark retired to the rough wooden wall and watched this crowd. The mingling voices never reached plangency. The small girls and boys stirred like low flowers in a field of dark, human stalks. Colours, this winter, were sombre. The women walked with restraint, with tiny gestures that revealed nothing, with smiles to each other that meant nothing. He had a feeling of deft performance and a young fellow at the wall beside Mark chuckled, lighting a cigarette.

“A lot of rich dames waitin’ for their kids from some goddam school up in Boston, see?”

Mark nodded. The young fellow gave the grouped women another stare and crossed the tight knees of his sailor’s breeches. The nostrils of his shapely, short nose shook a trifle. He tilted his flat cap further over an ear and winked comradely at Mark, “Wonder who the kids’ fathers are, huh? A lot of rich dames....” He spat and added, “Well, you can’t blame ’em so much. Their husban’s are all keepin’ these chorus girls. But it’s too much money, that’s what. If they’d got to work some and cook an’ all they wouldn’t have time for this society stuff. It’s too much money. If they’d got to cook their meals they wouldn’t have time for carryin’ on with all these artists an’ actors an’ things--” He broke off to snap at a girl who came hurrying from a telephone booth, “Say, what in hell? Makin’ another date?”

“Honest, I was just phonin’ mamma,” the girl said.

“You took a time!--Phonin’ her what?” He scowled, dominating the girl, “Huh?”

The girl argued, “I’d got to tell her sump’n, ain’t I, Jimmy? I told her I was goin’ to a show with a gerl fren’--”

“Some friend,” said the sailor, laughed at himself and tramped off with his girl under an arm. The girl’s cheap suit of beryl cloth shook out a scent of cinnamon. Mark sighed; she was young and pretty and shouldn’t lie to her mother about men. But perhaps her mother was bad tempered, illiberal. Perhaps the flat was crowded with a preposterous family and exuded this slim thing often, hoping a fragment of pleasure. A man couldn’t be critical. Mark went to meet Gurdy and immediately forgot all discomforts in seeing that the boy had grown an inch, that the lashes about his dark blue eyes were blackening, in hearing him admit that he was glad to be at home again.

Gurdy’s schoolmates had sisters at Miss Thorne’s, it seemed, and Mark waited, fretting, through the Christmas holidays until his broker wrote that Miss Thorne would be pleased to have Margot as a pupil. Miss Converse, the governess, asked Mark bluntly how he had managed this matter.

“You Americans are extraordinary,” she said, “You’re so--so essentially undemocratic. It’s shocking. But we must get Margot some decent frocks directly.”

The bill for Margot’s massed Christmas clothes lay on his desk. Mark started, protesting, “But--”

“I’ve been meaning to talk of this for some time,” said the governess.

“Her clothes?”

“Her clothes.--My people were quite rich, you know, and I had things from Paris but really--O, really, Mr. Walling, you mustn’t let her have every pretty frock she sees! I must say you’ve more taste than most women--quite remarkable. But what will there be left for the child when she comes out?”

He wanted to answer that no frock devised of man could make Miss Converse other than a bulky, angular female but gave his meek consent to authority. He resented the dull serges and linens of Margot’s school dress and Sunday became precious because he saw her in all glory, flounced in rose and sapphire. She was a miracle; she deserved brilliancies of toned silk to set off the pale brown of her skin, the crisp thickness of her hair. But in June on the _Cedric_ he heard one woman say to another, “Positively indecent. Like a doll,” when he walked the decks with Margot and the other woman’s, “But she’s quite lovely,” didn’t assuage that tart summary of Margot’s costume. An elderly actress told him, “My dear boy, you mustn’t overdo the child’s clothes,” and a fat lady from Detroit came gurgling to ask where he bought things for Margot. He knew this creature to be the wife of a motor king and looked down at her thoughtfully.

“I suppose you have daughters, yourself?”

“Yes, three. All of them married. But they still come to me for advice.--Mastin’s? I thought so. Thank you so much.”

He watched her purple linen frock ruck up in lumps as her fat knees bent over the brass sill of a door and pitied her daughters. He was playing poker in the smoke room when Gurdy slid into the couch beside him and sat silently observing the game. The boy was lately thirteen and gaunt. His silence coated an emotion that Mark felt, disturbing as the chill of an audience on an opening night. Gurdy was angry. The milky skin below his lips twitched and wrinkled. The luncheon bugle blew. The game stopped and, when the other players rose, Mark could turn to him. “Was that fat woman in tortoise shell glasses talkin’ to you?” The boy demanded.

“Yes.”

“Well, it was a bet. I was reading in the parlour place. It was a bet. One of the women bet you got Margot’s things in New York and the rest of ’em said Paris. And that fat hog--” Gurdy’s voice broke--“said she didn’t mind slumming. So she went off and talked to you. They all s-said that Margot looked like a poster.”

This was horrible. Mark saw some likeness between Margot’s pink splendour and the new posters clever people made for him. He must be wrong. He uncertainly fingered the pile of poker chips and asked Gurdy, “D’you think sister’s--too dressed up?”

Gurdy loosed a sob that slapped Mark’s face with its misery and dashed his hand into the piled chips. He said, “D-don’t give a dam’ what they say about her. I hate hearin’ them talk about you that way!”

Mark waited until the nervous sobs slacked. Then he asked, “Do they ever talk about me at your school, sonny?”

“No. Oh, one of the masters asked me why you didn’t put on some play. Is there a play called the Cherry Orchard?”

“Russian. It wouldn’t run a week.” Mark piled up the chips and said, “I may be all wrong--Anyhow, don’t you bother, son ... God bless you.”

Olive Ilden gave him her view while Margot and Gurdy explored the garden that opened from her Chelsea drawing room. She sat painting her lips with a perfumed stick of deep red and mimicked his drawl, “No, her things ar-r-ren’t too bright, old man. She isn’t too much dressed up. It’s merely that this thin faced time of ours isn’t dressed up to her. She’s Della Robbia and we’re--Whistler. It’s burgherdom. Prudence. It’s the nineteenth century. It’s the tupenny ha’penny belief that dullness is respectable. Hasn’t she some Italian blood? Now Joan--my wretched daughter--simply revels in dowdiness. She’s only happy in a jersey or Girl Guides rubbish. She’s at Cheltenham, mixing with the British flapper. When she’s at home she drives me into painting my face and putting dyed attire on my head. If I had to live with Margot I shouldn’t wear anything gayer than taupe.”

He stared out at Margot whose pink frock revolved above her gleaming silver buckles on the crushed shell of the walk. Olive saw his face light, attaining for the second a holy glow. It was a window in the wall of dark night. He looked and doted. The woman wondered at him. He had all the breathless beauty of a child facing its dearest toy. His grey eyes dilated. In her own eyes she felt the dry threat of tears and said, “Old man, I’m sorry for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re such a dear and because you’re a pariah. I don’t know that all this garden party petting is good for our player folk but--over in your wilderness--no one seems to investigate the stage except professors and the police. It must be sickening.... What’ll become of Margot when she’s grown up?”

It had begun to worry him on the _Cedric_. He loosely thought that her friends from Miss Thorne’s school would be kind to her. Wouldn’t they? He said, “She’s only ten, Olive,” and sat brooding. It wasn’t fair. Smart society, the decorous women of small gestures, hadn’t any use for him. He looked at Olive who wrote letters to him and called him old man. She wrote books. She knew all the world. She had been to the king’s court and laughed about it. He went to shelter in her strange kindness and sighed, “It isn’t fair. She ought to have--she ought to go anywhere she wants to.”

“She probably will if there’s anything in eyelashes,” said Olive, “and Gurdy will go anywhere he wants to, by the shape of his jaw. I’ve been dissecting American society with horrific interest. It seems to have reached a lower level than British! You haven’t even an intelligent Bohemia.”

“There ain’t many literary people,” Mark reflected, “and they mostly seem to live in Philadelphia and Indiana, anyhow. Or over here. What’s a man to do? I can’t--”

“You can’t do anything. Whistle the children in. There’s a one man show. Stage settings. Italian. I haven’t seen them and you should.” She threw the stick of paint away and set about cheering him. She liked him, muddled in his trade, labouring after beauty, unaware of his own odd sweetness. She gave up the last weeks of the season, guiding him about London, watching him glow when Margot wanted a scarf of orange silk in Liberty’s, when Gurdy demonstrated his Latin, not badly, before a tomb in Saint Paul’s. Margot was the obvious idol, something to be petted and dressed. But the child had a rich attraction of her own, graces of placid curves, a quiet loveliness that missed stupidity.

“You don’t like Margot,” Olive told Gurdy in a waste of the British Museum.

The boy lied, “Of course I do,” in his cracked voice but Olive took that as the product of good schooling, like his easy performance of airs on the piano. He was jealous of Margot and showed it so often that the woman wondered why Mark didn’t see. But this wasn’t the usual boy.

“You let him read anything he likes,” she scolded Mark.

“Sure. Where’s the harm? I haven’t got the Contes Drolatiques at the house or any of those things. Aunt Edith used to make me read the Book of Kings when I was a kid. Oh, Gurd knows that babies don’t come by express,” said Mark, “He’s lived in the country, too much.”

“I thought the American peasantry entirely compounded of the Puritan virtues, old man.”

“You missed your guess, then. You read a lot of American novels, Olive. Some day or other some writer’s goin’ to come along and write up an American country town like it is. The police will probably suppress the book.... My father and Gurdy’s mamma are sort of scared because I’ve got the kid at a rich school. You mustn’t believe all the stuff you see in the American magazines and papers about the wicked rich, Olive. I’ve met some of the rich roués at suppers and so on. Put any of ’em alongside some of the hired men and clerks and things that were in my regiment in Cuba--or alongside Tommy Grover that’s blacksmith at Fayettesville and they’d look like Sunday School teachers. I sort of wish the poor folks in the United States’d leave off yawping about the wicked rich and look after their own backyards a while! No, I don’t take any stock in this country virtue thing. The only girl in Fayettesville that ever run off with a wicked drummer had morals that’d scare a chorus girl stiff. Who’s the fellow that hangs ’round the stage door of a musical show? Nine times out of ten he’s a kid from the country that’s won twenty dollars at poker. Who’s the fellow that--well--seduces the poor working girl? Once in a hundred it’s a rich whelp in a dinner jacket. Rest of the time it’s the boy in the next flat. When I was acting and used to get mash notes from fool women, were they from women on Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue? Not much! Stenographers and ladies in Harlem that had husbands travelling a good deal. You believe in talking about these kind of things out loud and I expect you’re right.”

“Gurdy’s not handsome,” said Olive, “but he’s attractive--charming eyes--and women are going to like him a goodish bit, bye and bye. And man is fire. What moral precepts are you going to--”

“Just what my father told me. I’m going to tell him that he mustn’t make love to a married woman and that he mustn’t fool after an innocent girl unless he means matrimony--but God knows it’s getting pretty hard to tell what an innocent girl is, these days! Nine tenths of ’em dress like cocottes.”

“Old man, where did you pick up that very decent French accent?” Olive saw his blush slide fleetly from his collar to the red hair and added, “I hope it was honestly come by. You’re a good deal of a Puritan for a sensualist.”

“Oh ... I am a sensualist, I guess. But, I ain’t a hog.”

Olive said, “No, that’s quite true, my son. There’s nothing porcine about you. My brother has a house this season and he’s giving a dance tonight. There might be some pretty frocks.”

“Didn’t know you had a brother!”

“Sir Gerald Shelmardine of Shelmardine Cross, Hampshire. He’s rather dreary. Will you come?”

She took him to several evening parties and his wooden coldness before a crowd was enchanting. It occurred to her that individuals wearied the man. He eyed pretty women, striking gowns, studied the decoration of ball-rooms. He confessed, “I’ll never see any of them again and shouldn’t remember them if I did. My memory for people’s no good--unless they’re interestin’ to look at. My god, look at that girl in purple. Her dressmaker ought to be hung! Skirt’s crooked all across the front.” He gave the girl in purple his rare frown then asked, “Well, where’s some place in France, on the seashore, where I can take the kids until August?”

She recommended Royan and had from him a letter describing Margot’s success among the ladies of a quiet hotel. His letters of 1912 and 1913 were full of Margot. Snapshots of the child dropped often from the thick blue envelopes. When he sent his thin book, “Modern Scenery” in the autumn of 1913 it was dedicated, “To my Daughter.” The bald prose was correct, the photographs and plates were well selected. Mark wrote: “Gurdy went over it with a fine tooth comb to see if the grammar was O. K. Mr. Carlson is not well and we have four plays to bring in by December. Spoke at a lunch of a ladies’ dramatic society yesterday. Forgot where I was and said Hell in the middle of it. They did not mind. Things seem to be changing a lot. I am pretty worried about one of our plays.”

Olive saw in the New York _Herald_ some discussion of this play and a furious reference to it on the editorial page, signed by a clergyman. This was at Christmas time when she was entertaining her tiresome brother at Ilden’s house in Suffolk. She folded the newspaper away, meaning to explore the business. She forgot the accident in the hurry of her attempt to reach a Scotch country house where her daughter Joan died of pneumonia on New Year’s Day. The shock sent Olive into grey seclusion. Her husband was on the China station with his cruiser. She suddenly found herself worrying over the health of her son, then in the Fifth Form at Harrow, so took a cottage in Harrow village and there reflected on the nastiness of death while she wrote her next novel. The cottage was singularly dismal and the daughters of the next dwelling were pretty girls of thirteen and fourteen, with fair hair. “Sentimental analogy is the bane of life,” she wrote to her husband, “I went to town yesterday for some gloves and saw the posters of Peter Pan on a hoarding in Baker Street. Joan liked it so. So I went to the theatre and squandered five sovereigns in stalls and gave the tickets to these wretched girls who would infinitely prefer a cinema, naturally. However I managed to laugh on Saturday. The news had just reached Mark Walling by way of Ian Gail who is in the States trying to sell his worst and newest play. Mark cabled me a hundred words quite incoherent and mostly inappropriate.”

Three days later Olive came in from a walk and Mark opened the door of the stupid cottage. When she drew her hands away from his stooped face they were hot and wet.

“But, my dear boy,” she said, presently, “what blessing brought you over? In the middle of your season, too.”

“I’m in trouble. See anything in the papers about the Mayor stoppin’ a play we put on?--I don’t blame the Mayor, for a minute. Mr. Carlson wanted it.... Well, it was stopped and some of the newspapers took it up. And then Mr. Carlson had a sort of stroke. His mind’s all right but his legs are paralyzed. Won’t ever walk again.” His voice drummed suddenly as if it might break into a sob. He passed his fingers over the red hair and went on, “I’ve got him up at my house.”

“Of course,” said Olive.

“Sure. The doctors say he’ll last four or five years, maybe.--Say you’ve always said we’re a nation of prudes. Look at this,” and he dragged from a black pocket a note on formal paper. Olive read: “The Thorne School, Madison Avenue and Sixty Sixth Street. December 28th, 1913. My dear Mr. Walling, Will you be so good as to call upon me when it is possible in order to discuss Margaret’s future attendance. It seems kindest to warn you that several parents have suggested that--”

“What is this nonsense?” Olive asked, “What’s the child been doing?”

“Doing? Nothin’! It’s this damned play!”

“You mean that there were women who seriously asked this Miss Thorne to have Margot withdrawn because you’d produced a risqué farce? But that’s--”

His wrath reached a piteous climax in, “Oh, damn women, anyhow!... Well I took her out. My broker could have fixed the thing up. What’s the use? Well, I brought her over with me. She’s at the Ritz. What’s the best girls’ school in England?”

Olive said, “Oh, I’ll take her,” saw him smile and began to weep.

V

Margot

Gurdy Bernamer kept his twentieth birthday in a trench. The next week his regiment was withdrawn from the line to a dull village where Gurdy was taking a warm bath in a zinc tub behind the Mairie when a German aeroplane crossed above and lifted his attention from a Red Cross copy of “The Brook Kerith” which he read while he soaked. He dropped the dialectics of George Moore and watched, then saw the whitewashed wall of the yard bend in slowly, its cracks blackening. He spent a month in hospital getting the best of the wandering, deep wound that began at his right hip and ended in his armpit. He wrote to Mark, “I kept trying to remember a quotation from Twain’s Tramp Abroad. ‘Not by war’s shock or war’s shaft. Shot with a rock on a raft.’ They dug a piece of zinc out of me. I feel fairly well. Mrs. Tilford Arbuthnot has the Y. M. C. A. cafeteria in Bordeaux. Her brother was with me at Saint Andrew’s. She brings me novels and things. I think she has a secret passion for you. She says you were a great actor. My nurse also thinks you were. Her name is Zippah Coe and she looks it. She says the immorality of French women is too awful for words. She is coming to take my temperature.” The temperature displeased the nurse and Gurdy passed into a daze. The wet hemlocks beyond the window sometimes turned cerise, inexcusably. Pneumonia succeeded his influenza.

Through all this lapse he meditated and drew toward a belief that life was a series of meaningless illusions, many painful. He expanded “All the world’s a stage.” Suicide wasn’t universal as some of the players acquired a thrilling interest in their parts, rose to be directors--Wilsons, Northcliffes, Millerands. It was satisfactory to know this at twenty. His education was complete in its departments passional, athletic and philosophical. Saint Andrew’s school. Two and a half years of Yale in smart company. The miscellany of his regiment. He must certainly begin maturity as a critic. He lay composing an essay on the illusory value of passion in a loop of paradoxes which vanished as his pulse improved. Then he was conscious that a surgeon took interest in him. Orderlies came from the hospital adjutant inquiring. Gurdy sat up, read the papers and accepted five thousand francs in mauve and blue bills from a bank agent. It seemed that Mark had run him to earth by cabling. Soon he was uniformed again and given orders that assigned him to duty in a Paris military bureau. There Gurdy found Mark’s broker, decorated as a Major.

“Of course, I got you up here,” said Major Villay. “Why not?”

“But--” With recovery Gurdy had shed some sense of illusions. He stood thinking of his regiment rather sourly, rather sadly.

The broker-major grunted, “Rot, Gurdy. You’re all Mark’s got--Son, and all that. Dare say Margot’ll marry some Englishman. Anyhow, it’s all over. Bulgaria’s on the skids. Mark thinks too much of you.”

Gurdy was subtly pleased. He stood thinking of Mark fondly, with annotations in contempt. Mark was nothing but a big blunderer among the arts, a man who couldn’t see the strength of Russian drama or disillusioned comedy, who didn’t admire Granville Barker’s plays. But if Margot stayed in England Gurdy could steer his uncle toward proper productions. Mark meant well, very well. He had done some fine things, had a feeling for vesture, anyhow.