Chapter Eleven I
For the next few weeks, Janet lived excitedly in the glamor of the Lorillard tenements. She could not well have imagined a bigger difference than that between the complete orthodoxy of the Barrs of Brooklyn and the complete heterodoxy of the model tenementers of Kips Bay.
Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia Dyson, the author of “Brothers and Sisters,” (then in its twenty-fifth big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl:
“We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs.”
Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.
In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature, she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but with very little done.
The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle. Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied—in killing time.
Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of Cornelia’s. If she ever came up to a job’s requirements, the job never came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when taken.
At noon, the day’s duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or movie. Free tickets from Cornelia’s theatrical friends were reasonably plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.
Thus, Charlotte Beecher’s studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on certain afternoons she served an “intellectual tea” in a studio sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.
Janet was always taken to the studio de luxe in the Mews. Cornelia, invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte’s show room. The serpent in this garden of Eden was the “little group of serious thinkers” (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue of Charlotte’s encouragement.
“These intellectuals!” Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way home. “Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?”
“I find them rather amusing,” Janet would perhaps reply.
“Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge. But that’s Charlotte all over. There’s a nigger in every woodpile, and there’s a jarring note in every one of Charlotte’s rooms. My dear, it bores me cruelly.”
Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom, and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred cause of luxury.
Every evening was like a new party to Janet, flat Number Fifteen being one of the chief rendezvous in the tenements. After supper, visitors of both sexes dropped in unannounced and uninvited, until by midnight, a dozen people, more or less, were sure to be occupying the whole flat.
Generally, the guests split up into small groups and spent the time in play. Some played at dancing or at music, others at clever repartee or giddy flirting. To this play, the counterpoint was enthusiasm. A magnificent enthusiasm for self. In a rapturous torrent of words, each Kipsite painted a roseate future that led by startling steps to a supreme moment in which the world lay prostrate at the enthusiast’s feet.
It was a cosmopolitan gathering. All the arts and sciences and occupations, all the moral and immoral standards, and all the races and nationalities of New York were represented. A dancer from the Hindoo Kush, several would-be Fokines or Stravinskys, two or three imitation Oscar Wildes, Theodore Dreisers or Frank Harrises—these were sure to be there. Even the solid banker (or aspiring Pierpont Morgan), who kept a quiet flat and a lady in it, was an occasional visitor. No one was excluded who was piquant or picturesque.
Cornelia’s specially privileged guests were a scanty handful. Among the men were Claude Fontaine, Robert Lloyd, Denman Page, and Harry Kelly, the “Harlem Gorilla.” Soon after Janet’s coming, Mark Pryor, immaculate and unobtrusive, joined the ultimate circle and began mysteriously to appear and to disappear.
Still fewer were the women admitted to the inner ring. Of these the chief were Lydia Dyson, the spectacular, and Charlotte Beecher, the industrious. The novelist came in silks, the heiress in calicos. Charlotte’s cheap but natty working costume was looked upon among the Outlaws as an affectation. Her blouses and skirts gave Cornelia the horrors.
So did her marked preference for Robert Lloyd.
Janet had an idea that these evening visitors came chiefly to admire Cornelia or to be admired by her. She assumed that Cornelia was “the whole show.” It was a pardonable assumption. Cornelia sat in a rocking chair in the central room and was feline, and languid, and observant, while the excitement eddied and swirled around her. To all appearances she held the reins of her party with the masterly skill of the Borax man who drives the celebrated twenty mule team.
Robert would have it that Cornelia was neither the star nor the manager of the nightly performance in Number Fifteen. According to him, the only management she displayed was in the skill with which she focused attention upon herself. The cadenced laugh, the sugary stab, the artful question—these were not the subtle devices of a clever hostess; they were merely the centripetal pulls of an egomaniac against the centrifugal interests of her guests.
Janet dismissed this explanation lightly and begged Robert not to analyze every joy until its very essence had been probed—and destroyed. She laughed at his attempt to convince her that these gay evenings of Cornelia’s were a kind of renaissance. His theory was that the light of Cornelia’s splendor had been getting dim of late, as it had got dim on several previous occasions. But the impact of a new partner against her, like the impact of an astral visitor against a dying sun, now as always gave her a new lease of brilliance.
In short, Robert asserted that it was the replacement of Mazie by Janet which had caused a tremendous revival of interest in Cornelia’s flat. Everybody in the inner ring of the Outlaws or in the outer ring of the tenements, everybody indeed, that had any shadow of a claim to an entree, had come trooping in to sun themselves in the restored glory of Number Fifteen.
To most of Robert’s remarks, Janet paid little attention. But she carefully treasured up one of them.
This was that never before had Claude Fontaine been such a constant visitor.
II
Yet for a few days after the Outlaws’ Ball, Claude had behaved as if his confession of love had never been made, or had merely been the expression of an impulse, for which he disclaimed responsibility. There had been no return to the intimacy that instantly abolishes all the formulas of mere politeness and all the prescriptions of mere etiquette; there had been no recurrence of that world-without-end moment at the ball or of that other moment in the limousine next day.
At the ball he had treated her as he would have treated any respectable middle-class girl who might take his fancy. That is, he had stretched the conventions as far as an impressionable young woman will usually allow a dashing young man to stretch them, but not further.
After she joined Cornelia, however, his attitude changed. He treated her with a certain wariness of manner by which he appeared to convey the following:
“I took you to be a girl who strictly observed the moral customs established and honored in Brooklyn, but long fallen into disuse in certain parts of Manhattan, and nowhere less respected than in Kips Bay. It amused me to tempt you to violate these customs, especially as I had little hope of meeting with success. But now that you have become a Lorillard girl, what spice is there in tempting you? Either you never were the girl I took you for; or, at any rate, you soon won’t be.
“At all events I shall be on my guard. You are the first girl to work upon me so mightily with a single glance. But you are not the first girl who has looked as innocent as a dove and acted as subtly as a serpent. Be warned! Neither your innocent subtlety nor subtle innocence can make me forget that a Claude Fontaine is in the habit of forming but one sort of friendship with a girl in the Lorillard tenements.”
Janet, always very sensitive to atmosphere, got the effect of this train of thought, and in consequence kept Claude at as great a distance as her naturally cordial nature would let her.
In one of the evening gatherings at Cornelia’s the talk turned on marriage, and it came out that Janet had adopted Cornelia’s views on the wickedness of marriage in its modern form. Claude, with the common failing of lovers, promptly referred her action to himself.
Was this Janet’s way of announcing that she meant to make no greater demands on a rich man than any other girl in the Lorillard environment? At first, it seemed so to Claude, and he felt relieved. But, on second thoughts, another question occurred to him. Might not Janet’s conversion to Cornelia’s beliefs in free love be a mere blind? A pretended dislike of wedlock was a recognized bait for landing a man at the altar. Was her conversion of this type or was it of the franker type of Mazie Ross, who asked all that was due to a Lorillard tenement girl but asked no more?
On the whole, it seemed fairly safe to treat Janet on the Mazie Ross plane, and this he proceeded to do.
Mazie, by the way, had returned as a visitor to Number Fifteen within a week of her spectacular exit. Her doll-like face had recovered its pretty smile and her baby blue eyes gave no clue to whether she was seeking vengeance or merely currying favor again. No one asked or cared, hatred, like love, being a very fluctuating stock in the model tenements.
Janet had not failed to notice that Claude made little difference between his manner to her and his manner to Mazie. She did not like it, but she had to wait some time for the chance of showing how much she scorned his judgment.
III
The opportunity came at one of Cornelia’s gayest parties given at the end of Janet’s second week in Kips Bay. It was really a sort of “coming out” party for Janet. All the Outlaws, both of the inner and the outer ring turned out to hail the new favorite. Even Mark Pryor put in an appearance and actually remained on deck until the end, perhaps because the trio of Cornelia’s friends who provided the music played Lehar, Straus, and more recent dance tunes without the customary sentimental whine.
Contemptuous of the fitness of things, Claude did his best to monopolize Janet. When the gayety was at its highest and the music at its most intoxicating, he danced her into a room which, for the moment, proved to be nearly but not quite empty.
Pushed out of the way against a corner stood a screen. Behind this he whirled her, and then swiftly took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. As swiftly, she pushed him away with an expression of extreme distaste.
“I don’t like my friends to imitate Hutchins Burley,” she said, her voice quiet and cool, her gray eyes full of life and scorn.
The others in the room laughed in mockery or applause. For an instant, Claude’s all-conquering look was replaced by a crestfallen one. But he quickly regained his poise and spirits.
“Just a kiss to try,” he said jauntily, as he attempted to recapture her arm.
“It’s much too trying for gentle Janet,” blithely chirped Mazie, who had danced into the room and taken in the situation, as Janet again turned away from Claude.
AS a matter of fact, it was Janet’s sense of propriety in public that was offended more than anything else. As for Claude, he was only less mortified by the affront to his vanity than by the haunting fear that Janet’s rebuff came from genuine dislike.
No girl had ever given the brilliant, impetuous Claude Fontaine a glance of undisguised repugnance.
Janet spent the rest of the evening chiefly in conversation with Robert Lloyd and Mark Pryor. Meanwhile, Claude affected a complete indifference to her actions. He threw himself into the party with a mad abandon, and whipped up the conviviality with a riotous, headstrong wildness until everybody voted it the merriest evening in years. Amongst the other sex, he exploited to the utmost his patrician graces and masculine daring, and was so much the center of the occasion that the party might have been his rather than Janet’s.
The women thought him magnificent, graceful, cruel—in a word, irresistible; the men laughed at his impudence, and envied or admired his readiness, effrontery and ease.
And yet, as he showed his fine points triumphantly now to this adoring girl and now to that, his voice vibrated towards Janet.
Janet took it all in, and continued talking to Robert with undisturbed satisfaction. She saw Claude pass recklessly from one favorite to another, and guessed easily that none of these was his real aim.
When the party broke up, Claude induced Janet to listen to him alone for a moment. He was suddenly all contrition. To his whispered plea for forgiveness, she said, in a not unkindly tone:
“Forgiveness for what? For advertising your emotions?”
“For the kiss,” he said, his voice full of sensuous charm. And he added, on a more audacious note: “I wish I could take it back.”
“Oh, do you? You’d better begin with the publicity.”
“Please forgive the kiss and the publicity, Janet.”
“I’ll forgive the second when I forget the first,” she replied, much more gaily than she intended, thus proving that Claude was not the only one in the grip of a resistless passion.
Claude went home, satisfied that his daring had once again enabled him to snatch victory out of the arms of defeat.