Part 9

The rest tells glibly. The Jewish salesman, who wore blue-and-white-striped soft collars with a bar pin across the front, does not even enter the story. He was only a stepping-stone. From him, the ascent, or descent, or whatever you choose to call it, was quick and sheer.

Five years later, Hester was the very private, the very exotic, manicured, coiffured, scented, svelted, and strictly _de-luxe_ chattel of one Charles G. Wheeler, of New York city and Rosencranz, Long Island, vice-president of the Standard Tractor Company, a member of no clubs but of the Rosencranz church, three lodges, and several corporations.

You see, there is no obvious detail lacking. Yes; there was an apartment. “Flat” it becomes under their kind of tenancy, situated on the windiest bend of Riverside Drive and minutely true to type from the pale-blue and brocade Verni Martin parlor of talking-machine, mechanical piano, and cellarette built to simulate a music cabinet, to the pink-brocaded bedroom with a _chaise longue_ piled high with a small mountain of lace pillowettes that were liberally interlarded with paper-bound novels, and a spacious, white-marble adjoining bathroom with a sunken tub, rubber-sheeted shower, white-enamel weighing scales and over-loaded medicine-chest of cosmetic array in frosted bottles, sleeping-, headache-, sedative powders, _et al._ There were also a negro maid, two Pomeranian dogs, and last, but by no means least, a private telephone enclosed in a hall closet and lighted by an electric bulb that turned on automatically to the opening of the door.

There was nothing sinister about Wheeler. He was a rather fair exponent of that amazing genus known as “typical New Yorker,” a roll of money in his pocket, and a roll of fat at the back of his neck. He went in for light checked suits, wore a platinum-and-Oriental-pearl chain across his waistcoat, and slept at a Turkish bath once a week; was once named in a large corporation scandal, escaping indictment only after violent and expensive skirmishes, could be either savage or familiar with waiters, wore highly manicured nails, which he regarded frequently in public, white-silk socks only, and maintained, on a twenty-thousand-a-year scale in the decorous suburb of Rosencranz, a decorous wife and three children, and, like all men of his code, his ethics were strictly double-decked. He would not permit his nineteen-year-old daughter Marion so much as a shopping-tour to the city without the chaperonage of her mother or a friend, forbade in his wife, a comely enough woman with a white unmarcelled coiffure and upper arms a bit baggy with withering flesh, even the slightest of shirt-waist V’s unless filled in with net, and kept up, at an expense of no less than fifteen thousand a year--thirty the war-year that tractors jumped into the war-industry class--the very high-priced, -tempered, -handled, and -stepping Hester of wild-gazelle charm.

Not that Hester stepped much. There were a long underslung roadster and a great tan limousine with yellow-silk curtains at the call of her private telephone.

The Wheeler family used, not without complaint, a large open car of very early vintage, which in winter was shut in with flapping curtains with isinglass peepers, and leaked cold air badly.

On more than one occasion they passed on the road--these cars. The long tan limousine with the shock-absorbers, foot-warmers, two brown Pomeranian dogs, little case of enamel-top bottles, fresh flowers, and outside this little jewel-case interior, smartly exposed, so that the blast hit him from all sides, a chauffeur in uniform that harmonized nicely with the tans and yellows. And then the grotesque caravan of the Azoic motor-age, with its flapping curtains and ununiformed youth in visored cap at the wheel.

There is undoubtedly an unsavory aspect to this story. For purpose of fiction, it is neither fragrant nor easily digested. But it is not so unsavory as the social scheme which made it possible for those two cars to pass thus on the road, and, at the same time, Charles G. Wheeler to remain the unchallenged member of the three lodges, the corporations, and the Rosencranz church, with a memorial window in his name on the left side as you enter, and again his name spelled out on a brass plate at the end of a front pew.

No one but God and Mrs. Wheeler knew what was in her heart. It is possible that she did not know what the world knew, but hardly. That she endured it is not admirable, but then there were the three children, and, besides, she lived in a world that let it go at that. And so she continued to hold up her head in her rather poor, mute way, rode beside her husband to funerals, weddings, and to the college commencement of their son at Yale. Scrimped a little, cried a little, prayed a little in private, but outwardly lived the life of the smug in body and soul.

But the Wheelers’ is another story, also a running social sore; but it was Hester, you remember, who came sobbing and clamoring to be told--and so back to her.

As Wheeler once said of her, she was a darn-fine clotheshorse. There was no pushed-up line of flesh across the middle of her back, as the corsets did it to Mrs. Wheeler. She was honed to the ounce. The white-enameled weighing scales, the sweet oils, the flexible fingers of her masseur, the dumb-bells, the cabinet, salt-water, needle-spray, and vapor-baths saw to that. Her skin, unlike Marion Wheeler’s, was unfreckled, and as heavily and tropically white as a magnolia leaf, and, of course, she reddened her lips, and the moonlike pallor came out more than ever.

As I said, she was frankly what she was. No man looked at her more than once without knowing it. To use an awkward metaphor, it was before her face like an overtone; it was an invisible caul. The wells of her eyes were muddy with it.

But withal, she commanded something of a manner, even from Wheeler. He had no key to the apartment. He never entered her room without knocking. There were certain of his friends she would not tolerate, from one or another aversion, to be party to their not infrequent carousals. Men did not always rise from their chairs when she entered a room, but she suffered few liberties from them. She was absolutely indomitable in her demands.

“Lord!” ventured Wheeler, upon occasion across a Sunday-noon, lace-spread breakfast-table, when she was slim and cool-fingered in orchid-colored draperies, and his newest gift of a six-carat, pear-shaped diamond blazing away on her right hand. “Say, aren’t these Yvette bills pretty steep?

“One midnight-blue-and-silver gown $485.00 One blue-and-silver head bandeau 50.00 One serge-and-satin trotteur gown 275.00 One ciel-blue tea-gown 280.00

“Is that the cheapest you can drink tea? Whew!”

She put down her coffee-cup which she usually held with one little finger poised elegantly outward as if for flight.

“You’ve got a nerve!” she said, rising and pushing back her chair. “Over whose ticker are you getting quotations that I come cheap?”

He was immediately conciliatory, rising also to enfold her in an embrace that easily held her slightness.

“Go on,” he said. “You could work me for the Woolworth Building in diamonds if you wanted it badly enough.”

“Funny way of showing it! I may be a lot of things, Wheeler, but I’m not cheap. You’re darn lucky that the war is on and I’m not asking for a French car.”

He crushed his lips to hers.

“You devil!” he said.

There were frequent parties. Dancing at Broadway cabarets. All-night joy rides, punctuated with road-house stop-overs and not infrequently, in groups of three or four couples, ten-day pilgrimages to showy American spas.

“Getting boiled out,” they called it. It was part of Hester’s scheme for keeping her sveltness.

Her friendships were necessarily rather confined to a definite circle--within her own apartment-house, in fact. On the floor above, also in large, bright rooms of high rental, and so that they were exchanging visits frequently during the day, often _en déshabille_, using the stairway that wound up round the elevator-shaft, lived a certain Mrs. Kitty Drew, I believe she called herself. She was plump and blond, and so very scented that her aroma lay on a hallway for an hour after she had scurried through it. She was well known and chiefly distinguished by a large court-plaster crescent which she wore on her left shoulder-blade. She enjoyed the bounty of a Wall Street broker who for one day had attained the conspicuousness of cornering the egg-market.

There were two or three others within this group. A Mrs. Denison, half French, and a younger girl called Babe. But Mrs. Drew and Hester were intimates. They twaddled daily in one or the other’s apartments, usually lazy and lacy with negligée, lounging about on the mounds of lingerie pillows over chocolates, cigarettes, novels, Pomeranians, and always the headache-powders, nerve-sedatives, or smelling-salts, a running line of “Lord, I’ve a head!” “I need a good cry for the blues!” “Talk about a dark-brown taste,” or, “There was some kick to those cocktails last night,” through their conversation.

KITTY: Br-r-r! I’m as nervous as a cat to-day.

HESTER: Naughty, naughty bad doggie to bite muvver’s diamond ring.

KITTY: Leave it to you to land a pear-shaped diamond on your hooks.

HESTER: He fell for it, just like that!

KITTY: You could milk a billiard-ball.

HESTER: I don’t see any “quality of mercy” to spare around your flat.

There were the two years of high school, you see.

“Ed’s going out to Geyser Springs next month for the cure. I told him he could not go without me unless over my dead body, he could not.”

“Geyser Springs. That’s thirty miles from my home town.”

“Your home town? Nighty-night! I thought you was born on the corner of Forty-second street and Broadway with a lobster claw in your mouth.”

“Demopolis, Ohio.”

“What is that--a skin-disease?”

“My last relation in the world died out there two years ago. An aunt. Wouldn’t mind some Geyser Springs myself if I could get some of this stiffness out of my joints.”

“Come on, I dare you! May Denison and Chris will come in on it, and Babe can always find somebody. Make it three or four cars full and let’s motor out. We all need a good boiling, anyways. Wheeler looks about ready for spontaneous combustion, and I got a twinge in my left little toe. You on?”

“I am, if he is.”

“‘If he is!’ He’d fall for life in an Igorrote village with a ring in his nose if you wanted it.”

And truly enough, it did come about that on a height-of-the-season evening, a highly cosmopolitan party of four couples trooped into the solid-marble foyer of the Geyser Springs Hotel, motor-coated, goggled, veiled; a whole litter of pigskin and patent-leather bags, hampers, and hat-boxes, two golf-bags, two Pomeranians, a bull in spiked collar, furs, leather coats, monogrammed rugs, thermos bottles, air-pillows, robes, and an ensemble of fourteen wardrobe-trunks sent by express.

They took the “cure.” Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the casino for big stakes, and eschewed the American plan of service for the smarter European idea, with a special à-la-carte menu for each meal. Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, and strictly against the mandates of the “cure,” appeared at their table. Strange midnight goings-on were reported by the more conservative hotel guests, and the privacy of their circle was allowed full integrity by the little veranda groups of gouty ladies or middle-aged husbands with liver-spots on their faces. The bath-attendants reveled in the largest tips of the season. When Hester walked down the large dining-room evenings, she was a signal for the craning of necks for the newest shock of her newest extreme toilette. The kinds of toilettes that shocked the women into envy and mental notes of how the under arm was cut, and the men into covert delight. Wheeler liked to sit back and put her through her paces like a high-strung filly.

“Make ’em sit up, girl! You got them all looking like dimes around here.”

One night, she descended to the dining-room in a black evening gown so daringly lacking in back and yet, withal, so slimly perfect an elegant thing that an actual breathlessness hung over the hall, the clatter of dishes pausing.

There was a gold bird of paradise dipped down her hair over one shoulder, trailing its smoothness like fingers of lace. She defied with it as she walked.

“Take it from me,” said Kitty, who felt fat in lavender that night, “she’s going it one too strong.”

Another evening, she descended, always last, in a cloth of silver, with a tiny, an absurd, an impeccably tight silver turban dipped down over one eye, and absolutely devoid of jewels except the pear-shaped diamond on her left forefinger.

They were a noisy, a spending, a cosmopolitan crowd of too well-fed men and too well-groomed women, ignored by the veranda groups of wives and mothers, openly dazzling and arousing a tremendous curiosity in the younger set, and quite obviously sought after by their own kind.

But Hester’s world, too, is all run through with sharply defined, social schisms.

“I wish that Irwin woman wouldn’t always hang round our crowd,” she said, one morning, as she and Kitty lay side by side in the cooling-room after their baths, massages, manicures, and shampoos. “I don’t want to be seen running with her.”

“Did you see the square emerald she wore last night?”

“Fake. I know the clerk at the Synthetic Jewelry Company had it made up for her. She’s cheap, I tell you. Promiscuous. Who ever heard of anybody standing back of her. She knocks around. She sells her old clothes to Tessie, my manicurist. I’ve got a line on her. She’s cheap.”

Kitty, who lay with her face under a white mud of cold-cream and her little mouth merely a hole, turned on her elbow.

“We can’t all be top-notchers, Hester,” she said. “You’re hard as nails.”

“I guess I am, but you’ve got to be to play this game. The ones who aren’t end up by stuffing the keyhole and turning on the gas. You’ve got to play it hard or not at all. If you’ve got the name, you might as well have the game.”

“If I had it to do over again--well, there would be one more wife-and-mother rôle being played in this little old world, even if I had to play it on a South Dakota farm.”

“‘Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well,’ I used to write in the copy-book. Well, that’s the way I feel about this: To me, anything is worth doing to escape the cotton stockings and lisle next to your skin. I admit I never sit down and _think_. You know, sit down and take stock of myself. What’s the use thinking? Live! Yes,” mused Hester, her arms in a wreath over her head, “I think I’d do it all over again. There’s not been so many at that. Three. The first was a Jew. He’d have married me, but I couldn’t see it on six thousand a year. Nice fellow, too--an easy spender in a small way, but I couldn’t see a future to ladies’ neckwear. They make good husbands, Jews do. I hear he made good later in munitions. Al was a pretty good sort, too, but tight. How I hate tightness! I’ve been pretty lucky in the long run, I guess.”

“Did I say ‘hard as nails’?” said Kitty, grotesquely fitting a cigarette in the aperture of her mouth. “I apologize. Why, alongside of you, a piece of flint is morning cereal. Haven’t you ever had a love-affair? I’ve been married twice--that’s how chicken-hearted I can be. Haven’t you ever pumped a little faster just because a certain some one walked into the room?”

“Once.”

“Once what?”

“I liked a fellow. Pretty much. A blond. Say, he was blond! I always think to myself, Kit--next to Gerald you’ve got the bluest eyes under heaven. Only, his didn’t have any dregs.”

“Thanks, dearie.”

“I sometimes wonder about Gerald. I ought to drive over while we’re out here. Poor old Gerald Fishback!”

“Sweet name--‘Fishback.’ No wonder you went wrong, dearie.”

“Oh, I’m not getting soft. I saw my bed and made it, nice and soft and comfy, and I’m lying on it without a whimper.”

“You just bet your life you made it up nice and comfy! You’ve the right idea; I have to hand that to you. You command respect from them. Lord! Ed would as soon fire a teacup at me as not. But, with me, it pays. The last one he broke he made up to me with my opal-and-diamond beetle.”

“Wouldn’t wear an opal if it was set next to the Hope diamond.”

“Superstitious, dearie?”

“Unlucky. Never knew it to fail.”

“Not a superstition in my bones. I don’t believe in walking under ladders or opening an umbrella in the house or sitting down with thirteen, but, Lordy, never saw the like with you! Thought you’d have the hysterics over that little old vanity mirror you broke that day out at the races.”

“Br-r-r; I hated it.”

“Lay easy, dearie. Nothing can touch you the way he’s raking in the war-contracts.”

“Great--isn’t it?”

“Play for a country home, dearie. I always say real estate and jewelry are something in the hand. Look ahead in this game, I always say.”

“You just bet I’ve looked ahead.”

“So have I, but not enough.”

“Somehow, I never feel afraid. I could get a job to-morrow if I had to.”

“Say, dearie, if it comes to that, with twenty pounds off me, there’s not a chorus I couldn’t land back in.”

“I worked once, you know, in Lichtig’s import shop.”

“Fifth Avenue.”

“Yes. It was in between the Jew and Al. I sold two thousand five hundred dollars’ worth of gowns the first week.”

“Sure enough?”

“‘Girl,’ old man Lichtig said to me the day I quit; ‘girl,’ he said, ‘if ever you need this job again, come back; it’s waiting.’”

“Fine chance!”

“I’ve got the last twenty-five dollars I earned pinned away this minute in the pocket of the little dark-blue suit I wore to work. I paid for that suit with my first month’s savings. A little dark-blue Norfolk, Lichtig let me have out of a stock for twenty-seven fifty.”

“Were they giving them away with a pound of tea?”

“Honest, Kitty, it was neat. Little white shirt-waist, tan shoes, and one of those slick little five-dollar sailors, and every cent paid out of my salary. I could step into that outfit to-morrow, look the part, and land back that job or any other. I had a way with the trade, even back at Finley’s.”

“Here, hold my jewel-bag, honey; I’m going to die of cold-cream suffocation if she don’t soon come back and unsmear me.”

“Opal beetle in it?”

“Yes, dearie; but it won’t bite. It’s muzzled with my diamond horseshoe.”

“Nothing doing. Kit. Put it under your pillow.”

“You better watch out. There’s a thirteenth letter in the alphabet; you might accidentally use it some day. You’re going to have a sweet time to-night, you are!”

“Why?”

“The boys have engaged De Butera to come up to the rooms.”

“You mean the fortune-teller over at the Stag Hotel?”

“She’s not a fortune-teller, you poor nervous wreck. She’s the highest-priced spiritualist in the world. Moving tables--spooks--woof!”

“Faugh!” said Hester, rising from her couch and feeling about with her little bare feet for the daintiest of pink-silk mules. “I could make tables move too, at forty dollars an hour. Where’s my attendant? I want an alcohol rub.”

They did hold séance that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled together in the _de-luxe_ sitting-room of one of their suites, and little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under cover of darkness.

Madame De Butera was of a distinctly fat and earthy blondness, with a coarse-lace waist over pink, and short hands covered with turquoise rings of many shapes and blues.

Tables moved. A dead sister of Wheeler’s spoke in thin, high voice. Why is it the dead are always so vocally thin and high?

A chair tilted itself on hind legs, eliciting squeals from the women. Babe spoke with a gentleman friend long since passed on, and Kitty with a deceased husband, and began to cry quite sobbily and took little sips of high-ball quite gulpily. May Denison, who was openly defiant, allowed herself to be hypnotized and lay rigid between two chairs, and Kitty went off into rampant hysteria until Wheeler finally placed a hundred-dollar bill over the closed eyes, and whether under it, or to the legerdemain of madam’s manipulating hands, the tight eyes opened, May, amid riots of laughter claiming for herself the hundred-dollar bill, and Kitty, quite resuscitated, jumping up for a table cancan, her yellow hair tumbling, and her China-blue eyes with the dregs in them inclined to water.

All but Hester. She sat off by herself in a peacock-colored gown that wrapped her body-suavity as if the fabric were soaking wet, a band of smoky blue about her forehead. Never intoxicated, a slight amount of alcohol had a tendency to make her morose.

“What’s the matter, Cleo?” asked Wheeler, sitting down beside her and lifting her cool fingers one by one, and, by reason of some remote analogy that must have stirred within him, seeing in her a Nile queen. “What’s the matter, Cleo; does the spook-stuff get your goat?”

She turned on him eyes that were all troubled up like waters suddenly wind-blown.

“God!” she said, her fingers, nails inward, closing about his arm. “Wheeler--can--can the--dead--speak?”

But fleeting as the hours themselves were the moods of them all, and the following morning there they were, the eight of them, light with laughter and caparisoned again as to hampers, veils, coats, dogs, off for a day’s motoring through the springtime countryside.

“Where to?” shouted Wheeler, twisting from where he and Hester sat in the first of the cars to call to the two motor-loads behind.

“I thought Crystal Cave was the spot”--from May Denison in the last of the cars, winding her head in a scarlet veil.

“Crystal Springs it is, then.”

“Is that through Demopolis?”

Followed a scanning of maps.

“Sure! Here it is! See! Granite City. Mitchell. Demopolis. Crystal Cave.”

“Good Lord, Hester, you’re not going to spend any time in that dump?”

“It’s my home town,” she replied coldly. “The only relation I had is buried there. It’s nothing out of your way to drop me on the court-house steps and pick me up as you drive back. I’ve been wanting to get there ever since we’re down here. Wanting to stop by your home town you haven’t seen in five years isn’t unreasonable, is it?”

He admitted it wasn’t, leaning to kiss her.

She turned to him a face, soft, with one of the pouts he usually found irresistible.

“Honey,” she said, “what do you think?”

“What?”

“Chris is buying May that chinchilla coat I showed you in Meyerbloom’s window the day before we left.”

“The deuce he is!” he said, letting go of her hand but hers immediately covering his.

“She’s wiring her sister in the ‘Girlie Revue’ to go in and buy it for her.”

“Outrage--fifteen thousand dollars to cover a woman’s back! Look at the beautiful scenery, honey! You’re always prating about views. Look at those hills over there! Great--isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t expect it, Wheeler, if it wasn’t war-year and you landing one big contract after another. I’d hate to see May show herself in that chinchilla coat when we could beat her to it by a wire. I could telegraph Meyerbloom himself. I bought the sable rug off him. I’d hate it, Wheeler, to see her and Chris beat us to it. So would you. What’s fifteen thousand when one of your contracts alone runs into the hundred thousands? Honey?”

“Wire,” he said sourly, but not withdrawing his hand from hers.

They left her at the shady court-house steps in Demopolis, but with pleasantry and gibe.

“Give my love to the town pump.”

“Rush the old oaken growler for me.”

“So long!” she called, eager to be rid of them. “Pick me up at six sharp.”