Chapter Twenty-Six I
The Paulette manikins, famed throughout the world of fashion for their grace in attitude and correctness in position and movement, owed their prestige to a system of hygienic training conceived and carried out by Harry Kelly himself. Yet these young ladies took their distinction so seriously that they held it beneath them to assist their chief in straightening out the classroom disorder when the period of instruction was over.
“Here’s a mess!” called out Mazie Ross, walking into the Paulette gymnasium, immediately after the dismissal of a small class of manikins. “You might think they’d been on a grand jamboree.”
“Anything up?” said Harry, shortly.
“Janet asked me to help you this morning.”
“What for?”
“She went out for a horseback ride with the St. Hilaires.”
“This morning. Why, as it is, she goes almost every afternoon. She went yesterday afternoon. A fine way to do business, I’ll say.”
Mazie sulkily began to pick up stray articles.
“You needn’t pitch into me, Harry,” she said. “You’re not half so sorry as I am that your gentle Janet isn’t here to do this rotten job. Is it my fault?”
“Does Cornelia know she’s away?” said Kelly, fuming.
“Can a cat miaow within a mile of these precincts without Corny being on to it?”
“Why don’t they keep me posted then? I never hear of a blessed thing that goes on in my own home until it’s all over.”
“Say, do you want to start a row? Then take a tip from me and land into a certain party in the main office. If you’d knock her down and then jump on her with both feet, you’d be doing something. What’s the use of picking on a dead bird like me?”
“Don’t talk that way about Cornelia,” said Harry, fumbling amongst the papers on the desk, and trying vainly to be stern. “I’ve told you before I won’t have it. Where’s your gratitude?”
She made a face at him behind his back.
“Gratitude!” she said. “What’s the good of me wasting gratitude on Cornelia when she reminds herself and everybody in Paulette’s daily that she picked me up out of the gutter that Hutch left me in?”
“Lock up the wardrobe and clear out, will you?” said Kelly, frigidly. “I can do the rest myself.”
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry,” she muttered to herself. But she stayed and continued to put things to rights.
Mazie had changed greatly since the palmy days of the Lorillard tenements. She looked ill and haggard, a mere shadow of the jaunty “Follies” girl of old. Her willowy posture had degenerated into an undisguised slouch, her hair was frowsy, and her dress was slung together.
But her tongue had not lost its stab.
She closed the wardrobe door with an unintentional slam that caused Harry Kelly to jump up in his seat.
“Damn!” he said, in that mild voice of his.
It was as if Vesuvius had emitted a puff of tobacco smoke.
The metamorphosis of the “Harlem Gorilla” into the husband of Madame Paulette was astoundingly complete. Harry Kelly’s Van Dyke beard and fashionably tailored clothes alone would have effected a radical change in his appearance. Kelly was transformed not only physically but psychically. His muscles were still the muscles of a Titan, but his nerves had become the nerves of a fanciful man or a delicate woman.
Mazie, who was no student of spiritual transformations, went up to the desk at which Kelly sat and began to tidy it. She whisked away stray papers and envelopes that lay near his hands with much the same air that a waiter lashes the crumbs off a table to speed the lingering guest.
He grew more and more fidgety, but she showed him no mercy.
“Janet didn’t know those St. Hilaires were coming this morning,” she finally volunteered. “But you can gamble on it that Cornelia knew. When my fine gentleman got off his prancing horse and marched into the reception room clanking spurs and all, Corny was right there on the job in her softest, sweetest tone. My! butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And all the time Janet hangs in the background, saying she’s too busy to go out, and looking as stubborn as a mule. When gentle Janet gets that stubborn expression, it means: You can move the Woolworth Building, but you can’t move me!”
“Then why in thunder did she go?”
“Because that St. Hilaire kid got busy with her. A pretty little kid, a regular father’s darling, the kind that coos away like a turtledove till she gets everything she wants and a tidy slice of the moon extra. Well, she draped herself pathetically around Janet—all that heartstring stuff—and Janet, like any fool of a man, fell for the pathos.”
“You can’t persuade me that Janet didn’t want to go,” said Kelly, gloomily.
“I won’t try to, then. Just the same, she didn’t. That’s the weird part of it.”
“What’s weird about it?”
“Why, she doesn’t want to marry that millionaire and he’s crazy to get her. Gee, some people have all the luck.”
“If she doesn’t want him, where’s the luck?” said Kelly, with the logic of simplicity.
“Harry, don’t be a nut. Here’s the ABC of it. All my love affairs were on the q.t., though I say it that shouldn’t. Everything respectable and under cover. Nobody rattled my adventures in the ears of the public, did they? Yet, from the way everybody points the finger of scorn at me, you’d think I produced the whole Venusburg show and ran it single-handed. Now look at Janet. She hops off with young Claude Fontaine right under the eyes of the moving-picture brigade. The front pages of all the leading papers give her a full week’s publicity. She boards with Claude for a month or two, carefully omitting even the formality of a fake wedding ring. She lives in sin! But everybody shies at using ‘them crooel woids.’ And what are the wages of sin? A couple of millionaires pining away on her doorstep and Sousa’s band a-playing at her feet. And she’s no great beauty at that.”
“Quit it, Mazie. What’s the good of fooling yourself with the idea that Janet hasn’t had her troubles. My guess is that Claude threw her overboard.”
“Well, you can guess again, my simple Samson.”
“Anyhow, they wouldn’t have separated in a few weeks unless there had been a fierce blow-out, would they? That’s the kind of thing that can hurt a whole lot, a whole lot more than shows on the surface. A sensitive girl like Janet! By thunder, we don’t know what she went through, do we? She’s not the sort that wears her feelings on her sleeve.”
“In other words: ‘Gentle Janet meek and mild,’” said Mazie witheringly. “What that girl can’t get away with! I’d like to go through a few of her sufferings, I would. I’d like to see yours truly riding horseback every day in the Bois de Boulogne with a plutocrat by my side and a couple of grooms toddling along in back. There’s a terrible penance for you! And to think I can’t even get a second-hand man to take me to a third-rate cabaret in Montmartre. Me, Mazie Ross, the wickedest girl in the wickedest city in the world. Gee, life is tough!”
“You’ve seen enough cabarets to be sick of them—and you are sick of them,” said Kelly, with unwonted harshness.
“Yes, I suppose my cabaret days are over. But listen to me. There’ll be no more skylarking for gentle Janet as soon as Cornelia engineers her marriage with the Alsatian.”
“Janet’s marriage is none of your business, and none of Cornelia’s either.”
“You don’t say so? Well, you just tell the Empress that yourself.”
Mazie, with her hand over her mouth, flung these words at him just as Cornelia entered the gymnasium.
II
With the expression of a tragedy queen Cornelia came in and handed Kelly a telegram.
“From Robert!” she said, in a voice choked with emotion. He took it and read:
Am leaving Geneva International Labor Conference tonight. Hope to see you and Janet in Paris tomorrow.
Robert Lloyd.
“That’s one on us!” remarked Kelly, awkwardly, and a little afraid of the storm signals in Cornelia’s eyes.
His fatuous slang irritated her enormously.
“Isn’t it like Robert to turn up at the most inconvenient time imaginable? Just as Janet is on the point of being engaged! It spoils everything.”
“How did he locate us, I wonder?” said Kelly lamely. “I thought you had lost all track of him.”
When they had taken over Paulette’s, Cornelia had insisted on ruthlessly dropping former friends in impoverished circumstances on the plea that every connection that was not an asset was a liability. It had been a sore point between the two at first.
“Pryor—the meddling fool—probably put him onto us,” replied Cornelia. “Now everything’s sure to go to pot unless we can keep Robert from interfering. As long as he’s around, Janet will never marry Monsieur St. Hilaire.”
“She’s just crazy enough to throw away the chance of a lifetime,” said Mazie, judging it expedient to chime in with Cornelia.
“I don’t believe she’ll marry St. Hilaire, anyway,” said Kelly, with the obstinacy of a mild nature. “She doesn’t love him, to begin with. And she isn’t the sort that’ll do a thing simply because other people say that it’s good for her. She’s the sort of girl that shapes her own future.”
“You’re as big a fool as Pryor,” said Cornelia, flinging tempestuously out of the gymnasium.
Poor Kelly was crestfallen. He walked sadly to a window, opened it, and took several deep breaths, his infallible remedy for depression of spirits. Mazie, relieved at Cornelia’s exit, lighted a cigarette and waited for him to finish.
“Why is she so blamed anxious to have Janet marry this St. Hilaire?” he asked, turning slowly from the window.
“Why? Ha, ha, the poor fish asks me why?”
She punctuated the question with a hollow laugh.
“Only because Janet doesn’t want to marry him,” she went on, perching herself jauntily on the desk. “Why, Simple Simon, the old girl would have nothing left to live for, if she couldn’t make people do what they don’t want to do. Or, at least, if she couldn’t prevent them from doing what they do want to do—”
The door flew open.
“So that’s the way you talk about me behind my back?” cried Cornelia, the picture of outraged majesty.
Mazie rapidly came down from her perch and slunk out of the room.
The intruder turned her guns upon her husband.
“And you encouraging the little snake. I wonder you don’t summon the whole staff in here to plot against me.”
Kelly, dismayed and crushed, received the broadside with head bowed.
Cornelia expressed her passionate resentment at the universal treachery and ingratitude. This was her reward for helping girls in the plight that Mazie and Janet were in! She had put all the social and material resources of Paulette’s at the disposal of Janet in order that, by a most fortunate marriage, a well-nigh irretrievable blunder might be retrieved. She had herself strained every nerve to help the girl to obliterate her past. And what were her thanks? The unfeeling ingrate acted as if she hardly realized that there was a past to obliterate. She now washed her hands of the whole business. Never again—.
And so on.
Had Harry Kelly been of an inquiring turn of mind he might have ascertained whether or no Cornelia’s fury was in part due to being frustrated in the desire to get Janet off her conscience, and in part to being thwarted herself in that game of thwarting others at which Mazie had pronounced her an expert.
As it was, he listened like a Mohammedan prostrated before the muezzin. His silent prayer was that when Cornelia’s rage had spent itself, she would not refuse to bestow upon him a little of that affection for which he passionately and hopelessly craved.
III
A few hours later, Janet and Mazie were alone in the gymnasium, the former greatly excited about the news from Robert.
“It’s a pity he didn’t think of looking you up a little sooner,” said Mazie who was in a mood for throwing cold water on enthusiasms that strayed her way.
Janet was a little dashed by this reminder of Robert’s indifference to her fate.
“All the same,” she said, “I shall enjoy introducing him to Paris, as he once introduced me to Manhattan.”
“What, the Eiffel Tower, The Champs Elysees, the Boul. Mich., the American Quarter, and all the other rubberneck sights?”
“No, I’ll show him the places he’ll like: the office in L’Humanite where Jaures worked, the central hall of the Confederation Generate de Travail, and the Seine by moonlight.”
“The Seine by moonlight! Now we’re coming to it. Janet, you’re getting sentimental. Do you think Robert is coming particularly for you?”
“Oh, no, I hope I know him better than that.”
“Then what is he coming for? To see me? I don’t think. And if ever he was stuck on Cornelia, he took the cure complete, as soon as you breezed along.”
“Nonsense, Mazie. Perhaps he has made a fortune and, in passing, means to drop in on his poor relations.”
“Robert rich?” Mazie laughed the idea to scorn. “A man who likes work for its own sake will never have a stiver to his name.”
She ventured to surmise that all his expenses were being paid by some labor organization. That was the way with these professional radicals. They traveled around the world on their own wits and on somebody else’s money. They never succeeded in making even a bowing acquaintance with a check account. Never. She trusted Janet would not be such a fool as to forget this fact. Now, M. St. Hilaire was a very different story.
“Marry a rich man, Janet, and the memory of that Claude affair will die a natural death. Marry a poor one, and it will keep on bobbing up.”
“I shouldn’t care if it did.”
“No, you wouldn’t, but your husband would.”
“So my friends are at some pains to remind me,” said Janet, rather bitterly. “You and Cornelia keep on telling me so, and Robert once expressed the same opinion.”
“Well, he was right. I don’t say it from spite, like Cornelia does. I say it because I’m—because I’m damned fond of you—”
She repressed the tears in her eyes.
“You’re the only one here,” she went on, choking down a sob, “that doesn’t treat me as though I was an escaped inmate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and ought to be sent back there.”
Janet went to her side and comforted her. But Mazie would not be comforted. She burst out with:
“The trouble with us girls is that we’re too soft about love, as soft as putty. What good does all this talk and fuss about the equality of women do us? Where does it get us? Just exactly nowhere. And women won’t be worth as much as men, until they’re as hard about love as men are; and that means as hard as nails.”
Divining Janet’s silent comment, Mazie added defiantly that it was because she herself hadn’t been hard enough that she had come to grief at the hands of “that swine Hutchins.”
After a marked pause, Mazie reverted to the subject of M. St. Hilaire. Had he proposed as usual during the morning’s ride?
“Yes,” said Janet.
“No other news?”
“He assured me that I could have everything I wanted. Even my soul should be my own.”
“I don’t like that sob stuff about souls,” said Mazie whimsically. “What did you answer?”
“I told him that women would never be able to call their souls their own until they could call their bodies their own.”
“My God, Janet! You have to give the poor man something for his money.”
“Exactly. And as I can’t give him a fair return for it, it’s clear that I oughtn’t to marry him, isn’t it?”
“Fair return! Did you ever see anybody give a fair return in this sex business? I can gamble on it you didn’t. Fair return! Look here, Janet, who started putting a price on love? Did women start it or did men? Was it men or women that threw love on the curb to be bought and sold with other junk? Say, did you ever see a man who’d take love for a free gift? Let me give you a tip, dearie. If a woman don’t sell her love for all she can squeeze out of a man, and give him underweight into the bargain, the man don’t think he’s getting his money’s worth.”
She went on to say that every relation between the sexes was a case of the shearer and the sheep. Somebody was certain to be shorn. The man would fleece the woman unless the woman fleeced the man.
“And here’s another tip, my gentle Janet. When Cornelia sees you prancing off to the Bois de Boulogne with Monsieur St. Hilaire, she don’t believe you’re putting up with him because you dote on Henriette. Not for a moment. Well then, there’ll be a rude awakening for somebody. If you don’t fleece St. Hilaire, she’ll skin you. She’ll have you in her power at last.”
“No, she won’t. Mazie, I’d like to tell you something. But I don’t want Cornelia to know. Will you promise not to tell her?”
“Will I promise not to feed cakes to a crocodile?”
“Mrs. Jerome has offered me a job.”
“Well, I’ll hand it to gentle Janet. You’ll be going to heaven on a feather bed next. What’s the job?”
“I don’t know yet. She doesn’t either. She has some scheme in mind for helping professional women to make their way in the world. My work is to come out of that. Just the sort of work I have most at heart. Do you remember the plan I had when we lived in Kips Bay, the plan of creating a new profession for women? What a magnificent castle in the air it was! Robert helped me carry the first brick or two down to earth where we could build on solid ground. By the way, I told Mrs. Jerome all about Barr and Lloyd.”
“Did you tell all about Barr and Fontaine, too?”
“No,” said Janet, swallowing this bitter pill with some resentment. “But I will, before I accept her offer.”
“And you think it won’t make any difference to her?”
“No. She’s a woman with a great deal of good sense. She sizes you up by your future, not by your past.”
“Janet, you are a clip,” said Mazie, with immense admiration. “Aren’t you afraid of the future? Adventures can break a girl as well as make her. Look how they’ve broken me.”
“Mazie, don’t be a fool,” said Janet, putting her arm around the sick girl. “You’re not half broken yet. You’re only a bit cracked. And for your comfort I’ll tell you what Robert once said. He said nowadays everybody was a bit cracked—especially in the head.”
“Where’s the comfort in that?”
“Why, it’s the cracked pitcher that goes longest to the well, goose. That’s what I tell myself when I get the blues.”
“Do you, too, get in a blue funk, sometimes? I don’t believe it. I always think of you as being the twin sister of the man in the fairy tale, the man who couldn’t be taught to shiver or shake. You’re a wonderful girl, Janet. Still, I’d like to see a man come along some day and make you shiver and shake just a teeny-weeny bit. Perhaps Robert will.”
“Ah, Mazie, do you think he’ll try?”