Chapter Eighteen I
On her own floor, she halted and, with Robert’s kiss still burning on her lips, waited until he had turned into Kelly’s flat. Then she opened the door of Number Fifteen.
Sure enough, Claude was there, full of resentment at her absence on a jaunt with Robert. She thanked her stars that Robert’s visible presence could not fan the flame. Even so, Claude acted badly enough. He was in a vertigo of jealousy, and at small pains to hide the fact.
At first, Janet tried to carry the matter off lightly, and strove to mollify him by saying that Robert had asked her to consider a very serious problem. She was a little conscience-stricken over this fib, but believed it the best thing to say. She pointed out that while it was with Robert that she worked, it was with Claude, after all, that she played.
At this Cornelia executed an unnecessarily tuneful laugh.
“There’s nothing like a man’s problem for disarranging a girl’s hair,” she observed, dropping the inevitable dress she was busy with. “Araminta, your hat’s a sight! Do look at yourself in the glass.”
Naturally, Claude was more furious than ever. He sulked in silence whilst rebuffing the advances that Janet made. Finally, maddened by Cornelia’s pin-prick innuendoes, he strode out, flashing a terrible look at Janet as he did so.
II
When will the play of Othello be absolutely unintelligible? Perhaps five hundred years from now or, let us hope, sooner. Surely, at some distant date, the private ownership of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman will seem as barbarous as the rings our ancestors stuck through their noses or as unfashionable as the three hundred concubines of Solomon. And the jealous passions arising from this ownership will be classed with rage, hysteria and other forms of emotional disease or pathological bad manners.
Indeed, do not the best people already look upon a pronounced fit of jealousy as an exhibition of arrested development or mental inferiority? If the jealous man is not destroyed, root and branch, by the refuse-reduction plant of ridicule, he will be rendered obsolete and perhaps extinct by the spread of the conviction that, after a human being has discharged his obligations to himself and his obligations to the community, he owes no other personal allegiance whatever.
Herself singularly free from jealousy, Janet was in direct touch with three persons whom the malady afflicted sorely. Besides the case of Claude, she had on her hands the case of Mrs. Howard Madison Grey in business, and the case of Cornelia at home.
Cornelia, who was no believer in keeping her emotions hermetically sealed, made her frame of mind patent to Janet on an unforgetable occasion. It was not the first, nor was it to be the last, of a series of blows, which were fast converting Janet to the belief that her own opinion of Cornelia was founded on an illusion, whilst Robert’s opinion was the correct one.
For some time past it had been Harry Kelly’s practice to come into Number Fifteen before breakfast and put the two girls “through their paces,” as he called the light drill he prescribed for them. Always on the lookout for some new outlet for his tremendous supply of energy, the physical culture expert had hit on the scheme of improving Cornelia’s bad health by reforming her bodily habits. Cornelia, who considered early rising bad form and breathing exercises a superstition, was for a prompt veto of the scheme, but Janet’s cordial support of it saved the day.
So, early in the morning of the day after Claude’s wrathful departure, Kelly, in gymnasium garb, made his entrance as usual. The athlete was not a man of many words. Words, after all, were not needed in his case, since, as he strode along with the nervous muscularity of a Rodin statue, his lithe, powerful body proclaimed his mission to all the world.
“Wake up, girls,” he called out, “and fill your bellies with the good south wind.”
The unvarnished word always moved Cornelia to a protesting shriek and a well-trilled “How do you do!” Kelly enjoyed both immensely.
After throwing the windows in the sitting room wide open, he paced the floor like a panther in his den. Janet was the first to appear. She was still drowsy, and her short dark hair, in tight somnolent curls, hung down her back. She wore a short-skirted bathing suit, a custom Kelly held in high regard for the business in hand.
As she toddled sleepily towards the athlete, the energy pent up in his frame unbottled itself on the impulse of the moment. Catching her at the waist, he lifted her high up in the air and spun her around three times as if she were a featherweight. Then, clasping her lightly by shoulder and leg, he set her tenderly down again.
“Do it again, Hercules, do!” articulated Cornelia, coming in just at the close of this maneuver, whilst Janet, still laughing and protesting, was in the act of resuming control of her well-shaped limbs.
But as there was that in Cornelia’s eye which belied her command, Kelly was careful to make no move to execute it.
Cornelia’s golden hair was done up on her head in a makeshift coil, she herself being enveloped in a long kimono that trailed to the ground. Kelly looked at this garment without ecstasy, a fact that did not escape the wearer’s observation.
“Hercules,” she commanded peevishly, “you might close this window near me. I’ve got a very bad headache from too little sleep. Do you want me to catch my death of cold, too?”
He complied with all haste, and then pitched into his calisthenics, Janet joining him with gusto. Cornelia followed suit, though in a very languid spirit; and soon she stopped altogether, on the pretext of unusual weakness.
Her chilly aloofness cut the period short. It was now time to prepare breakfast, a task theoretically shared by all four, including Robert, who was unaccountably late this morning. Habitually, three of them did the actual work while Cornelia “directed,” a process which, she firmly believed, enabled the others to save time. But, as Robert sardonically put it, “Cornelia’s method of showing us a short cut is to send us round Robin Hood’s barn.”
It was Kelly’s special business to convert a part of the kitchen into a dining room, and thereafter to make the toast. He had just reached this stage, when Cornelia took another hand in the proceedings.
“Go down and get the letters for me, Hercules,” she said suddenly, relieving him of the toaster.
“Why, what’s the hurry? Rob always gets them after breakfast.”
“Oh, do let Harry make the toast,” said Janet, chiming in with him. She, too, had thought of the letters, and was in no hurry to bid the devil good morning. “Nobody can eat toast the way you make it, Cornelia. And Robert is sure to—”
“No doubt Robert will do exactly as you tell him,” said Cornelia, interrupting her sweetly. “Please let Harry do as I tell him. Hercules, go now, please. I have a notion there’ll be some famous news for me this morning.”
Kelly, having been her devoted (and despised) slave since the day he ejected Hutchins Burley, obeyed submissively by mere force of habit. He ran down the three flights of stairs and in a very short time came back again with a single letter.
It was for Janet from Claude, and sarcasm was its prevailing tone.
The writer began by deploring his fatuous inability to remain away from her side. He pointed out that, as his chance visits might take her by surprise or catch her off guard, not to say worry her into thinking of promises she had no mind to keep, he should take steps to rid her of his manifestly superfluous attentions. He had accordingly arranged to spend some time with his friends the Armstrongs, in Huntington. By doing so he should at least please his father, which was better than nothing, certainly better than not pleasing either himself or her.
In short, it was just such a petulant note as a spoiled woman’s darling like Claude might be expected to write. Having always received complete submission from women, he regarded the least opposition to his self-indulgence as outrageous and even wicked or perhaps blasphemous.
The depth and passion of Janet’s nature were not easily stirred, but this letter startled her out of her usual lightheartedness. She sat down in a chair by the window and looked out fixedly, in an effort to repress her feelings. Kelly, sympathetic and bewildered, gave vent to sundry heartening murmurs and exclamations; and, as these accomplished little, he moved dishes attractively and hopefully around Janet’s empty place.
From her point of vantage at the table, Cornelia surveyed her handiwork with a pious simulation of sadness, surveyed it, and found that it was not so bad.
Janet blue and still, Kelly heavily anxious, Cornelia sweetly sanctimonious, such was the curious tableau that Robert saw when he came in, his slender frame and vigorous movements forming a direct contrast to the static spectacle before him.
“Now, see what you’ve done, Cato!” declaimed Cornelia, in one of those complacent greetings which only she could make sublime.
She fluttered Claude’s note aloft and called out the sender’s name for Robert’s information.
Ignoring her, but grasping the import of the scene, Robert went over to Janet’s side and asked her in all simplicity whether he could be of any service whatever.
But she, to hide her tears, turned decisively away from him. Robert gave her movement a totally different interpretation, drew back, and walked quickly out of the room.
III
The alarums and excursions for which Claude and Cornelia were responsible might well have monopolized Janet’s mind. But her thoughts were kept in flux by a thunderstorm which threatened her peace from another quarter.
The new cloud on her horizon came from no less a person than Mrs. Howard Madison Grey, the wife of her employer.
Mrs. Grey served Janet as a symbol, a symbol opposed to the Outlaws. The Outlaws were a convenient symbol of the world within Kips Bay. Mrs. Grey was an equally pat symbol of the world without.
It amused Janet to study her own reactions to these two symbols and to analyze her experiences with the moral codes symbolized.
According to one of the primary conventions of the Outlaws, sex was anybody’s to have and nobody’s to hold; there was no recognized private property in sex. In Kips Bay, Janet had acted in the spirit (though not in the letter) of this convention. And the results had been disastrous.
On the other hand, in the world beyond the model tenements, the right of private property in sex was absolute. In Mrs. Grey’s world, Janet had acted in the spirit and even in the letter of this convention. And again the results had been disastrous.
The second disaster materialized slowly. Its point of departure was the visit paid by an ex-President of the United States to a performance of Mr. Grey’s third play, “The Great Reprieve.”
As originally written, this was a drama in which a Vermont Yankee resigns to a younger brother the girl he madly loves, after which lofty sacrifice he starts life anew in the Klondike, makes a fortune there, and later turns up for a brief visit to the old homestead. To his dismay he learns that the girl of his dreams has been left a widow and that, with poverty and distress staring her in the face, she has no choice but to take up the lot of an actress in the great Subway Circuit. Nothing but his hand in marriage can save her from the doom in store for her! And the curtain falls on the Great Reprieve.
The play was a triumph of mediocrity in conception, construction, and style; yet for some unaccountable reason it fell flat. The producer was reluctant to accept the verdict of the playgoers for a fact, but a second footing-up of the box-office revenues conquered his reluctance completely.
Half a dozen play-surgeons—writers of Broadway successes, high-priced, fifth-rate super-hacks, before whose names the public prostrated itself—were hastily called into consultation and an immediate and drastic operation was advised.
No time was wasted in thinking. All six consultants took a hand, so did the producer, so did the favorite chauffeur of the producer’s second best mistress. Three days and three nights of heroic writing, drinking, and rehearsing followed. At the end of this furious interlude, “The Great Reprieve” had been whipped, or as the favorite chauffeur said, “Goulasht” into shape.
The chief character in the revised version was a typical American boy of fifteen (erstwhile the heroine’s brother), and upon his pranks, antics, impudence, and callowness, the play now pivoted. The lad’s capacity for noisy pertness and imbecile clownage was represented as inexhaustible, yet even so, the producer expressed a fear that the audience might not be equal to the intellectual pressure of the dialogue. Relaxing incidents were introduced—a woman purring over a poodle dog, a chorus girl spouting the real American language invented by George Ade, a squawking parrot, and a Southern mammy (out of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) worshipping the ground the leading juvenile treads on.
These features were warranted to give the play its “universal appeal”!
Dramatic action there was none. Why cast pearls? After all, there was plenty of movement, plenty of “pep” and “kick” as the producer said. All the characters made their entrances and exits with frenzied vehemence and, whilst on the stage, jerked arms and body and legs ceaselessly to and fro, as if in the last throes of St. Vitus’ Dance. The audience would get its money’s worth of “speed”—so much was provided for, if nothing else was. The dialogue was spoken with a short, sharp, pop-gun explosiveness, except in the maudlin sentimental scenes in which it was drawled out into one world-without-end whine. Apart from these details, nothing in particular was to happen in the play; for nothing in particular mattered. However, a squealing child was kept in reserve, ready to be trotted out for “sure-fire” applause, if the “action” should chance to flag.
In its renovated form, Mr. Grey hardly recognized “The Great Reprieve.” It seemed to him that his comedy had become an exact replica of each of the other ten American comedies then playing in Times Square. This, though Mr. Grey was no intellectual giant, made a difference to his artist’s pride. It made no difference to the Broadway theatregoers. They fairly devoured the play. They swallowed all the old wheezes and all the old slush and all the George Ade lingo and all the Southern mammy stuff. They swallowed it all without winking. Despite the fears of the producer, they proved themselves to be almost fully up to the intellectual level of the fifteen-year-old leading juvenile. They greeted his every act of clownage and horseplay with salvos of applause. They laughed themselves sick over him. And when the poodle dog and the baby appeared, the applause brought down the rafters.
To put it mildly, Mr. Howard Madison Grey was stupefied. However, the success of “The Great Reprieve” became the talk of the town. An ex-President of the United States went to see it and drenched his box with the tears of hilarity and contentment. Next day, he described the play as “a clean, wholesome play of American life, manners and thought!—every one hundred per cent American will be satisfied with it.”
This description was henceforth underscored in every advertisement of “The Great Reprieve.” Seats were sold ten weeks in advance. The producer and his crew of play-salvagers added another feather to their caps. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey began to look for an apartment on upper Park Avenue.
IV
The ensuing increase in the volume of engagements and correspondence threw Janet together with Mr. Grey for uninterrupted stretches, oftener than Mrs. Grey thought wise.
Before long, the author’s wife noted significant alterations in her husband’s behavior.
Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was nothing if not scientific. She believed religiously in the scientific method and applied it to all her activities, even to her excursions in jealousy. As she hadn’t read “Science and Power” by Fitzfield Tyler, the efficiency engineer, for nothing, she understood thoroughly that the proper method for scientific research proceeds by three stages, namely:
One: Observing facts, without any preconceived notion.
Two: Imagining a general explanation or hypothesis that establishes the relation of cause and effect between two groups of facts.
Three: Verifying this hypothesis, a process of determining by means of personally conducted observations, whether the hypothesis fits the facts it proposes to explain.
Observing, imagining, verifying—these were the three stages the trained investigator had to grasp. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey grasped them with considerable kinetic energy.
In the first place, observation of the library during work time ceased to reveal Mr. Grey in the careless act of dictating in shirt sleeves and suspenders or of puffing cigarette smoke unconcernedly towards Janet’s innocent lungs. Instead, it disclosed him in a handsome velvet smoking jacket and betrayed the astonishing fact that from the very moment the smoking jacket was exhibited the smoking habit was suppressed. Clearly, Mr. Grey’s behavior in the past and his behavior in the present showed the existence of two utterly different groups of facts.
To imagine a general explanation which should connect these two groups of facts was the second and by long odds the easiest step. Mrs. Howard Madison Grey formulated the hypothesis that some perverse piece of femininity had lost her head over Mr. Grey’s resplendent fame and fortune, and had set out to tempt him into the primrose path of dalliance.
The third step was to verify this hypothesis with a series of experiments.
Mrs. Grey began by putting Janet through a systematic cross-examination. Didn’t she think men looked revolting in shirt sleeves and suspenders? Quite so. Frankly, hadn’t she simply longed to know a great literary genius intimately? Naturally! And what might be her views on the subject of nicotine? She thought smoking a disgusting habit? Ah, well!
These answers were supplemented by scraps of information obtained, it must be confessed, by experiments that might have daunted any but a most dispassionate investigator. Disregarding ethics, it is an open question whether a personally conducted observation is better served by studying truth face to face or by studying her through a keyhole. Mrs. Grey’s contribution to the answer was to adopt the latter plan on the principle that all is fair in love and science.
She ratified the somewhat precarious keyhole method by the surer method of sudden sallies into the library. She heard Mr. Grey addressing his secretary in musically resonant tones, and saw him showing undue solicitude for her comfort. Nay more, she surprised them in animated, unworkmanlike conversations. True, she did not get the precise drift of these talks, but she was morally certain that the talkers were discussing six of the deadly sins and wishing the seventh. Though further proof was scarcely needed, she found the straw that topped the climax. Mr. Grey offered to double Janet’s salary without request. The conclusion forced itself on Mrs. Grey that her hypothesis was incontestably established. It brought light out of darkness and order out of chaos, besides fitting all the facts it proposed to explain.
She lost no time in acting on the verified conclusion.
One Monday morning before Howard Madison Grey returned from a week-end on the New Jersey coast, she intercepted Janet.
“The new play,” she said accusingly, “isn’t progressing very fast.”
“No,” admitted Janet, “it isn’t. So many topical matters have had to be disposed of lately that the final copy of the play has been held back.”
Janet could scarcely dwell on her employer’s growing penchant for conversation with her when his wife was presumed to be securely occupied.
“Mr. Grey,” said his wife, half reflectively, “Mr. Grey has the creative temperament.”
She frequently aired this phrase; it had, she believed, the ring and tang of distinction. Privately, she thought that the artistic temperament incapacitated a man from the sane discharge of his most elementary duties.
“The creative temperament,” she went on, “is too fine to cope with the details of business.”
She gave Janet to understand that it was imperative that the success of “The Great Reprieve” should be followed up without delay.
“Mr. Sarsfield, the manager,” continued Mrs. Grey, “has just telephoned anxiously for the next manuscript.”
“Mr. Grey is still working on the revision of the third act,” said Janet. “As soon as he finishes it, I shall rush the whole play through. Of course, I can type the first two acts at once.”
“Yes, do. But can you work uninterruptedly here? Perhaps you could finish it faster at home—instead of coming here?”
Janet jumped at the chance. “Certainly,” she said, “I can finish it at home in half the time.”
Mrs. Grey was taken aback. On second thoughts, she put Janet’s eagerness down to the new feminist strategy.
“There’s the risk,” she said, uneasily picturing the precious pages at the mercy of the New York transit services.
Anxious to escape the assiduities of the wife, if not of the husband, Janet gave reckless assurances of her devotion to the manuscript.
Mrs. Grey finally assented to the arrangement. Janet was to take the manuscript in sections and, if the scheme worked well, she might do all future typewriting for the playwright in the same way. She need come to the Greys’ house only for the dictation.
“I hope Mr. Grey will be satisfied,” Janet could not help saying, once the bundle of papers was safely tucked under her arm.
“I hope so,” said Mrs. Grey meditatively. “But who can fathom the ways of the creative temperament—?”
She left an eloquent hiatus.
From which Janet inferred that the shortest way with that particular temperament was to let the explanation follow the act.
V
This bout with the green-eyed monster had taken place shortly before Claude’s petulant flight to the Armstrong estate in Huntington. To Janet the whole affair was very ludicrous, and none the less so in that she had given Mrs. Grey little cause for anxiety.
Not for a moment had the newspaper acclaim of Howard Madison Grey imposed upon her. Having measured her own wits with the playwright’s, she had formed an estimate of his talents which caused her to reject with contempt the fantastic eulogies of him in the press. She continued to see in Mr. Grey what she had always seen, namely, a decidedly middle-aged man with a bald head and a graceless figure, a man whose amorous pleasantries and elderly sentimentalism inspired her with the same distaste as the odor of stale tobacco smoke with which his person seemed to reek.
She knew quite well that she had captured his emotions and his illusions, but as she had found no difficulty in keeping his advances within bounds she had seen no reason for giving the matter serious thought.
On the day of Mrs. Grey’s interference, Janet returned to Kips Bay in high feather. This had mystified Cornelia, who could not see in her friend’s recital of events any great cause for congratulation. She gloomily predicted that Janet would soon lose her position altogether. Janet said she didn’t care. A change was the only stimulant she ever took or needed. And any change, even a change for the worse, would serve the purpose admirably.
Cornelia wondered what was back of all this optimism until Janet pointed out that, with her new program of work, she could repay Robert for his many services to her. The firm of Barr & Lloyd could now carry on business in the mornings as well as in the afternoons, Robert sharing with her the work that came in from the Greys and perhaps from other authors, just as she had shared with him the work that came in from the League of Guildsmen. This statement was received in silence by Cornelia, who drew her own conclusions and communicated them only to Harry Kelly.
Janet’s offer to pool her secretarial jobs from all sources with her typewriting for the League had been very welcome to Robert. His funds were running uncomfortably low just then. The reason was that the League was not a paying concern. The economic changes advocated by the Guildsmen were so drastic in character and called for so much discipline and far-sighted cooperation on the part of the working classes that the very people whom they were intended to benefit fought shy of them. Leaders of labor received the Guild proposals coldly, and the rank and file gave them little sympathy and less support.
For several mornings Robert and Janet pitched in with a will on the typewriting of Mr. Grey’s manuscripts. In the afternoons they had continued the League work. Their comradeship was a happy and an intimate one, how happy and how intimate Janet did not fully realize until long after it was over. Perhaps the most delightful periods were those in which they proofread the manuscripts they had finished. They took turns reading aloud, and endless was the fun they extracted from the lines of Mr. Grey’s new play. More delightful still were excursions into the fields of literature and economics, the play or some Guild pamphlet furnishing the starting point.
Thus the partnership of Barr & Lloyd had gone on swimmingly for two weeks, until the afternoon on the recreation pier, the memorable afternoon that had begun with the long talk about free love, and had ended in the model tenement with Robert’s kiss and Claude’s sulky fit of jealousy.
VI
On the morning after this fateful day, Janet had to go to the Howard Madison Greys’ to return some finished manuscripts.
She had gone there for this purpose some two or three times a week, since the last arrangement with Mr. Grey. On these occasions, the playwright himself met her. And usually he spun out the interview as long as possible, due regard being had to the prudent Mrs. Grey who, hovering watchfully in the background, reminded Janet of a quiet but overcautious museum attendant.
Mrs. Grey would frequently contrive to come into the room for the undisguised purpose of glancing at or even criticizing Janet’s typewriting. The expectation of such a visit made Janet, on this particular day, decidedly nervous. For, what with her distraction by Claude’s anger, and a sudden crotchiness that had overtaken the typewriter, her papers bore the glaring evidence of innumerable corrections and erasures.
However, Mrs. Grey seemed for once to be off duty. So at least Janet concluded from the fact that the author himself received her with much less than his customary constraint and far more than his ordinary enthusiasm. And not only was he in the best of spirits; he was groomed to perfection. He had put on a suit cut in a fashionable English mode, with quaint cuffs on the sleeves of the coat as well as on the bottoms of the trousers.
These and other details of sartorial artistry were probably lost on Janet, but she was sensible enough of the general effect to surmise that her employer had dressed himself to conquer. This surmise would have forced itself upon her in any event, for Mr. Grey soon launched into repeated hints looking to an assignation with her outside his home, hints that presently crystallized into a direct invitation to a dinner at Sherry’s.
According to the principles of Kips Bay—and Janet at this time subscribed to these principles—there was absolutely no reason why Mr. Grey should not invite her and absolutely no reason why she should not accept. But the heart has a reason to which reason must bow. Janet’s heart was in submission to but one law, and that was the law of her integrity. She could no more strike up a friendship with a man to whom she was not naturally, spontaneously drawn than she could fly. And she could hardly pretend to be drawn to Mr. Grey. No, not even for the pleasure of giving the suspicious Mrs. Grey something to be suspicious about.
Besides, the man was too cocksure. He appeared to share Mrs. Grey’s conviction that the slightest nod on his part would incline Janet (or any other woman) to follow him to the ends of the earth. This was amusing. But it was also irritating to one’s pride of sex.
The trouble with Mr. Grey was that, having realized the first of the two ambitions which governed his desires, he felt satisfied he was about to realize the second. As an author, he had conquered the public; as a man, he now meant to conquer women.
To Janet, Mr. Grey’s illusions about himself were as transparent as his illusions about her. It was plain that he took with the utmost seriousness the greatness that had recently been thrust upon him. His reasoning was quite simple. If success in pleasing the crowd and its leaders did not imply the possession of superior gifts and of a masterly technique in exploiting those gifts, what did it imply?
This reasoning struck Janet as puerile. Yet Mr. Grey could hardly be expected to share her view that talent and superb execution had never by themselves attracted the plaudits of the crowd, or that the only man who could please the million was the man born with the taste of the million. Mr. Grey had been lucky enough to inherit this taste. Why demand that he look a gift horse in the mouth?
But the judgment of youth is direct and pitiless! It seemed nothing less than ridiculous to Janet that Mr. Grey should seriously pose as a fount of the divine fire, and calmly invite her to become a ministering angel to the sacred fount. What was still more ridiculous was that he disguised his offer in weird, roundabout phrases calculated to enable her to “save her face.”
He was still confidently urging the project, when Mrs. Grey swept in and fell upon them like a moral landslide.
Mrs. Grey did not stop to account for her unexpected return, to disclose how long she had been eavesdropping, or to listen to Mr. Grey’s stumbling and embarrassed explanations. Her belligerent manner left no doubt that she put the very worst construction on what she had heard. Ignoring Janet altogether, she opened her batteries full on her husband and discharged a broadside of questions, short, sharp and desolating.
Her questions were entirely rhetorical.
Was this the loyalty he had sworn to her, when she picked him out of the gutter of obscurity and married him? Had she not, all along, suspected that he was plotting an affair with this girl? No doubt the girl had been setting her cap at him, but was that a legitimate excuse for inconstancy? At his age, he ought to be beyond a desire to sow wild oats. Didn’t he know that a mature man sowing his wild oats presented as idiotic a spectacle as if he were sucking his thumb? She didn’t know or care what his family would think, but was he proposing to besmirch the unstained record of her family with a divorce scandal? And so on—
Janet listened in icy humiliation whilst the storm broke over and around her. She expected every moment to be caught up in it, whirled into its vortex, and destroyed.
What actually happened was that Mr. Grey played a ghastly imitation of his masterful hero in “The Klondike Mail,” until his lady, infuriated by even this shadow of defiance, reached a degree of tension that would have burst a twelve-inch gun. Death and destruction were almost afoot when she spied the typewritten papers which Janet had just returned. She pounced upon these papers and violently projected them to a point within three inches of her spouse’s nose, after which she regaled him with a description of the flaws in the typewriting and the deficiencies in the typist.
This description was pithy, elaborate, exhaustive, but it was not exactly verified.
Followed an effective oratorical pause. And then Mrs. Grey begged to be informed whether the quality of the work was not ample evidence that the worker came for no good and sufficient business reasons. No one venturing to reply, she hurled the manuscripts at the head of Mr. Grey’s rapidly retreating form and, as her aim was marred by a trifling miscalculation, she picked up another document and took a shy at Janet. While Janet was warding off this missile, the playwright made good his escape.
“Really, Mrs. Grey,” said Janet, standing her ground boldly as her indignation got the better of her fright, “you are behaving worse than a fishwife.”
Mrs. Grey sobered down with incredible suddenness.
“My poor girl,” she said, solicitously, “did I hit you?”
“You came within an ace of knocking out one of my eyes!”
“Just so. Within an ace. That was my intention, precisely. I aimed for effect, not for damage. I assure you I’m a first-rate shot.”
Mrs. Grey had now composed her feelings and her dress, both of which had been considerably ruffled.
“A husband is hard to get nowadays,” she went on, smiling, “but he is even harder to keep. When a charming girl makes this comparative difficulty a superlative one, she does a wife grave wrong. Still, under the circumstances, I forgive you.”
“You mustn’t presume too much on my wickedness,” said Janet, smiling at this strange turn of affairs. “I’m disgracefully inexperienced.”
“Inexperienced! Ah, well, men have an amazing weakness for some kinds of inexperience—in a girl. In a wife they’re not so keen on it. My dear, if unmarried girls would only put themselves in a wife’s place, what a lot of trouble they’d save—for us now and for themselves later on. But of course, they can’t do it. They think marriage is a picnic on a motorcycle with the bride in the carriage attachment. What a dream! Marriage is more like a tennis game with the two players facing each other across the dividing line of sex. You’ll find that out the day after the wedding! You’ll know then that the only way to manage a husband is to discover his weakest point and keep driving at that until the game and the set are in your hands. Mr. Grey’s weakest point is his horror of facing facts. He dreads a fact the way a boy dreads soap. I discovered that at our honeymoon hotel when we debated how to stop the waiter from serving us with cold soup. Rather than compel the waiter to change it, Mr. Grey tried to prove that the soup was really quite hot. No, I’m not the tartar you think I am. I don’t object to a man having his fling now and then, provided it’s a short fling. But I can’t let him get into the grip of a girl of your sort, the permanent sort. That might introduce fatal complications, and I don’t mean to take any chances.”
“Then why did you let me come here in the first place?”
“Because you took me in completely,” replied this astonishing woman. “You had none of the obvious female ways. You were almost pathetically businesslike and you seemed to be—well—no beauty. Excuse me for being frank.”
“The excuses are all on my side, I’m sure,” said Janet, highly amused.
“Not at all, my dear. I’m convinced I was quite wrong. You grow on one, even on a woman. I soon found out that beneath your dovelike innocence there was a serpentine wisdom. It’s a magic combination. No man can resist it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Grey. This flattery is more than I deserve, but—”
“It’s no good protesting. There is a devilish fascination about you. If I’m beginning to feel it myself, what must poor Mr. Grey feel?”
And with a gesture which betokened that, in these matters, feelings transcended verbal arguments and oral contracts, she paid Janet what was owing to her and made it clear that she need not come again.
At the door, she wished Janet good luck.
“My dear,” she said, “as a typist you cut rather a poor figure. But that combination I spoke of—it’s worth a fortune—”
Janet went away not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. A good cry would not have come amiss; and yet, as she counted up the fortunes of the last two days, she could not help observing that her mishaps had trod on one another’s heels in a procession that was well-nigh comic. Claude’s letter and flight, Cornelia’s bad temper, her own involuntary rudeness to Robert, the crop of errors in the playwright’s manuscript, Mrs. Grey’s impertinences, and the crowning loss of her position—here was a downpour of calamities amounting to a regular deluge!
And not a single ray of sunshine in sight, either.
On second thoughts, she had to admit that this statement was not strictly true. For Robert would probably be home, and what an immense relief it would be to tell him all that had happened to her! At the same time she would be able to obliterate the effect of yesterday’s rudeness.
For she guessed that Robert’s feelings had been deeply hurt by her gesture of withdrawal from him. But she felt no doubt of her power to conciliate him or to conquer his just resentment. In fact, she had so little doubt of this power that, the nearer home she got, the more she looked forward to the prospect of exercising it.
Ah, yes, it would be simple and sweet to make up with Robert, and they should spend a very jolly afternoon together, working over sundry papers and planning new activities for the firm of Barr & Lloyd.
And (such is the peremptory, indomitable influence of the heart!), her spirits rose again. In the full flush of agreeable anticipation, she began to turn the day’s adventures over in her mind. As she did so, she gave them a humorous twist, for she meant to relate them to Robert entertainingly, in return for his expected concession to her.