Chapter Thirty I
“You don’t love me, Robert!”
“It’s false,” he said, retreating. “I do love you. I’ve loved you madly ever since you fled to Paris.”
“Then why do you run away? I don’t want you to marry me. You’re too poor! But you might at least kiss me. Come back, Robert, please come back!”
Following him, she put her arms around his neck and clasped him tight.
“Let me go, Janet. I won’t marry you. I won’t! I’ll never, never, NEVER marry a woman who has had a free lover!”
Still he receded, and ever so gently tried to unclasp her hands.
“You needn’t marry me, Robert. Only treat me just as you’d treat a man. Don’t you remember that you promised you would? You promised on the pier in Kips Bay, when your heart was a free and a fetterless thing.”
She concentrated all her magic upon him, upon his pale thoughtful face and discerning hazel-brown eyes. But look! The eyes were not hazel-brown—they were a flashing blue! And these were not the mobile sensitive features of Robert, but the bold virile features (somewhat distorted by angry passion) of Claude.
“What!” he cried. “Marry you here—here in Brussels—after all I’ve suffered on your account? Serpent! Shall I never escape your sting?”
Hovering somewhere in the background, a thin-edged female with horn-rimmed spectacles took a malignant joy in fanning the flames of his rage.
Claude wrenched both her hands loose and flung them off, the violence of the action sending her prone to the floor.
II
Janet sat up in bed and shook back the tangles of her nut-brown hair.
What a horrible nightmare!
All on account of the rumpus started last night by the thin-edged female with the horn-rimmed spectacles.
Not in Brussels, but in New York. Not in the Grand Hotel, Boulevard Anspach, but in the Susan B. Anthony House, Park Avenue, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome’s new apartment house for self-supporting professional women with children.
Well, this particular rumpus had been settled, and the attack of officious Pharisaism upon Janet’s reputation had received a black eye. Janet wondered whether the blow was to be recorded as a knockout or merely as the end of the first round.
Time would show. Meanwhile, she dressed and breakfasted; then, with all the gravity of her twenty-seven years, she began to discharge the responsible duties of manager of the House.
But the memory of the nightmare would not down. Not even the excitement she still felt in making the rounds of her three departments sufficed to dispel it. In the children’s section, she applauded the new floor games which the kindergartner had invented for her wards; she became a ready listener to the woes of the matron in charge of the household division; on her way through the cuisine, she devoted her faculties to the task of adjudicating the claims of the cook against the dietitian in command. And she sought distraction in the stupendous thought that these three great departments of the Susan B. Anthony House were coordinated in the person of Miss J. Barr, the business manager and personal representative of Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.
Yet, although these occupations drove away the haunting nightmare for minutes at a time, they were impotent to banish it permanently.
The chief trouble was, of course, that her nerves were still shaken by the emotional explosion in which the whole House had been involved the day before. The explosion was the cause of the nightmare. And the nightmare itself, its several metamorphoses and all, had marched in such a logical, well arranged order, that she was greatly tempted to tell it to Lydia Dyson, the novelist, who was a crank on the subject of Freud and dreams.
Lydia, to be sure, would pronounce it a contemptible dream, lamentably short of knives, pitchforks, corks, bottles and other shining symbolic materials. Contemptible or not, she would none the less insist that it must be submitted to a psychoanalyst.
Yes, Lydia Dyson would torment her to be psychoanalyzed. With a smile she recalled the novelist’s visit to the Susan B. Anthony House a week ago. Lydia, in search of material for her new novel, The Soul Pirates (expression derived from Cornelia Covert), had set the members of the house to narrating their worst dreams. Then she had beguiled more than half of them into having themselves psychoanalyzed by Aristide Cambeau, an amazingly brilliant speaker whose lectures (at the Ritz—five dollars a ticket!) were the latest social rage, and whose clinic was daily besieged by a long queue of fashionable ladies impatient to have their souls laid bare.
Janet believed she could interpret her dream fully as well as the fascinating Mr. Cambeau.
Her attempt to do so led her to a review of her own recent history.
Seven weeks ago she had returned with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome to the United States. Mrs. Jerome had resumed training her as soon as the Statue of Liberty was sighted. Thus, the good lady reminded her that they had come from England (where plenty of explosive insurrectionary material was lying around) to their own land with its “tendency to normalcy” as a noted politician expressed it. That is, they had come back to the America of the women’s vote, the high cost of living, the housing shortage, the unemployment menace, the deportation of radicals and Japanese, the reception of hoards of unhealthy South-European immigrants, the ouija board, the stock market slump and jazz. The same old America! It was reading “Main Street” just then; and Mrs. Jerome opined that all America was reading the book, not because it gave a memorable picture of the soul of a nation in all its drab, desolating mediocrity, but because it gratified the furious national craving to be paid attention to and talked about, it mattered nothing whether in terms of praise, disparagement or abuse.
Mrs. Jerome’s gloomy view rolled off Janet like water off a duck’s back. She had youth, enthusiasm, vigor; there was a great civilizing work to be done. And though, as Mark Pryor took pains to assure her, it might take a thousand years to do it, she threw herself into it heart and soul, just as if the goal were attainable next year.
Two weeks after their arrival in New York, the Susan B. Anthony House had been opened, undemonstratively but successfully. Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, an omnipresent deity at first, relinquished the reins of government gradually; all the reins save one, for it was well understood that she was to be the power behind the scenes. Within a week, every suite in the house was occupied and hundreds of applicants were turned away. The rents, though far from low, were not unreasonable; and, as special provision had been made for the care of children, and competent experts placed in control of each department (“quality not quantity” was the specific motto throughout), the house was a godsend for precisely the ones it was designed to serve, that is, for self-supporting professional women with one or two children.
For a time, things had gone swimmingly. Almost too swimmingly. As the news spread, social workers and social science students began to pay the place a visit. Before long the unofficial busybodies followed and, with the kindliest intentions in the world, did their level best to disorganize the machinery of the house and subvert the discipline.
And the reporters took up the scent! All the magazine sections of the Sunday newspapers had articles describing Mrs. Jerome’s “latest hobby.” Interviews with Mrs. Jerome—some real, some alleged—appeared in increasing numbers and with increasingly pungent specimens of this lady’s sprightly wit. Writers of special features in the evening sheets praised or deplored the “communal upbringing” of the children. The photogravure supplements took up the sport and favored their readers with pictures of every conceivable corner of the house, and also with tableaux in which the children, looking remarkably happy and well dressed, were grouped about three adults (from left to right): the Duchess of Keswick, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome and Miss J. Barr.
Finally, the Infamous Players-Smartcraft Company offered a fabulous sum for the use of the Susan B. Anthony House as the scene of an “action” (with adagio “close-ups”), which it insisted on calling (doubtless in irony) a “moving” picture.
But the marvel of marvels was that, throughout this period of unbought, unsought advertising, nobody breathed the suspicion that Miss J. Barr, the calm, collected young manageress in the neat blouse and trim skirt, might be the notorious Janet Barr who had eloped two years before with Claude Fontaine!
Then, one fine day, as she was leaving the Broadway side of Wanamaker’s, a man had leapt out of a magnificent limousine drawn up at the curb, and had seized her hands.
It was Claude himself! Handsome and imposing as ever, with perhaps a dash less of self-confidence.
He had implored her for a meeting later in the day. No, no, he wouldn’t make love to her, he solemnly swore he wouldn’t! He wanted to get a load off his conscience. His wife? Oh, he got along well enough with Marjorie, only— Well, surely Janet knew why he had married her? There had simply been no alternative! If Colonel Armstrong hadn’t stood back of Fontaine and Company at the time of the smuggling exposure, the firm would have gone to smash. And so on—
Janet peremptorily refused to meet him. There was no sense in a meeting, she urged. He was importunate. “What about my House?” said she. “What about my state of mind?” said he. She had tried hard to be firm.
“Come not between the lion and his wrath or the tigress and her work,” she said, torn this way and that between the comedy and the tragedy of the situation.
To get rid of him, she had at length made an appointment for the afternoon.
The appointment was never kept!
The sequel proved that her encounter with Claude had been observed. That night the bloodhounds of scandal were unleashed in the Susan Anthony House. The ring-leader was the thin-edged woman with the horn-rimmed spectacles.
This precious female was the mother of a whining little boy whose father was authenticated by due process of law. The law had not sufficed, however, to keep the gentleman faithful for long to the nuptial vows. After his disappearance from New York, his wife was left to support herself and to wreak vengeance where vengeance was not due.
The first that Janet knew about the coming storm was when the dietitian took her aside and told her that the house had been divided into two camps: for and against Janet; or, as the anti-Janet crowd put it: for and against Morality.
Two days before the nightmare, things had come to a head. In the absence of the manager, the anti-Janet faction had assembled under the chairmanship of the thin-edged agitator.
This lady had opened the meeting with the bitter announcement that those present were liberal and fairminded, but that they had their children to think of. Their darling children! Mothers, married mothers, mind you (and she, for her part, had consented to join the Susan B. Anthony House only on the confident assumption that all the mothers were as regularly married as herself)—mothers, as such, could afford to take no chances! Unhappily, she was persuaded that in the other camp there were ladies who had more than one good reason for standing by the manager. She surmised that some of these ladies were unmarried mothers! Scarcely mothers at all (if morals counted for anything), and certainly no better than they should be.
After much nursing of self-righteousness, suitable resolutions were moved, and a deputation was appointed to present the facts to Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome; also to demand the discharge of Janet and the vindication of American morality.
The great impeachment had occurred last night. Mrs. Jerome had motored into town, and both factions had turned out for the occasion in the large reception room on the ground floor. Mrs. Jerome had refused to start the proceedings until Janet was seated at her right hand. This settled, the thin-edged spokesman had made the formal charges.
Then the fun had begun—
At this point, a telephone bell jangled across Janet’s reflections.
“Who is it?” she asked the switchboard girl.
“Mr. Pryor.”
“Let him come up,” said Janet eagerly.
III
As usual, Mark Pryor’s spare form was dressed from head to foot in materials of one color. But even Janet noticed that, for once, the inevitable stand-up collar, with its two prongs tilting its wearer’s chin upwards, had been replaced by a low-lying collar of creamiest silk.
“Circles under the eyes!” he began severely. “What’s wrong?”
“Nightmares, witches, broomsticks,” she replied laughing.
“Out with it!” he commanded.
In her calm, clear tones she gave him a graphic account of the unpleasantness of the last few days, from its inception in her chance encounter with Claude Fontaine down to the demand made upon Mrs. Jerome for her dismissal.
“And how did little Apple Dumpling meet this demand?” inquired Pryor.
“Like a trump! Said she’d stand by me to the limit—also that the Susan B. Anthony House, being designed for busy people and not for busy*bodies*, Mrs. Farrar (the one with the horn-rimmed spectacles) would have to vacate at the end of the week. Further that, in the future, it is to be a fixed rule of the house that any mother, married or unmarried, may become a tenant, and no questions asked other than those needed to satisfy Mrs. Jerome or her representative that the applicant is both self-supporting and self-respecting—”
“Bravo!”
“And, furthermore, she then and there dictated a letter to be sent to the liberal weeklies in New York, informing their readers of the adoption of this new rule.”
“Hurrah!” cried Pryor. “The next time anybody queries, in the words of the immortal William:
“‘What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?’
I’ll answer: No king; but let me tip you the name of a queen—Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the magnificent. She can turn the trick.”
“Yes, she’s a perfect darling. Do you know, I didn’t mind the backbiting of those silly women a bit. But Mrs. Jerome’s unhesitating support made me want to cry.”
She added that in a private conversation with the dear lady she had urged her own resignation as a matter of practical wisdom. Wasn’t the cause greater than the individual?—“Rubbish!” Mrs. Jerome had replied with a considerable show of heat. No cause was worth the cowardly abandonment of a comrade! For two thousand years men had prated of the holy duties of friend to friend, and had committed one crime against friendship after another. And when these crimes were committed, what did they do? They folded their hands, raised pious eyes to heaven, and sang (through their noses), “Alas for the rarity of Christian charity!” etc. Well, women would show them that the time to be loyal was not when the pack curried favor with your friend but when it turned to rend him.
“What do you mean to do now?” asked Pryor.
“I shall stick it out. After all, I’m not looking for social or official favors. All I ask is to be allowed to do the best work of which I’m capable. Surely, I have that right.”
“So you think,” said Pryor drily. “But bear in mind that for every bona fide worker in New York, there are nine idlers or time wasters, nine breeders of noise, disorder and disease. And don’t forget that the chief objection to the idler is not that he neglects his own work, but that he insists on interrupting or damaging yours. The doer is the waster’s sworn enemy to all eternity. And the waster knows it! Therefore, he spies out your vulnerable spot: social, economic, psychic, whatever it be; and the first moment he catches you off guard, he sends his poisoned arrow straight to your Achilles’ heel.”
“I suppose I must take my chance of that. What else can I do?”
“You might imitate me.”
“Imitate you! What do you mean?”
“Why, get married! I’m going to marry Charlotte Beecher.”
“But I thought that Charlotte—”
“Yes, she’s very fond of Robert Lloyd. And I’m only her second string. But bless your wayward curls, we’re all second strings on somebody’s violin! What’s the odds—especially after the first string has snapped? I’ve been madly in love myself, twice before. Once, down south in Colon, with a dusky Isthmian beauty. The second time, with you.”
“Don’t be silly, Mark, or I shall stop envying Charlotte her extraordinary good luck.”
“Hers and mine! Charlotte was looking for a husband with enough brains to manage a fortune, and yet with heart enough not to love her for her fortune alone. I was looking for a wife with heart enough to lay her fortune at my feet, and yet with enough brains to permit me to enjoy her society. Are we well matched or not?”
“‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,’” quoted Janet, laughing.
“Now you’re talking sense as well as poetry, dear girl.”
“I didn’t say I’d follow your example, though.”
“All in good time! It’s human nature for young blood to rebel against wedlock—and to come around to it in the long run. Marriage, as Lydia Dyson says, is the easiest way!”
“Yes, for Lydia, who changes her lover once a season, while her husband stays at home and keeps the household in smooth running order. But my needs don’t run in Lydia’s line.”
Pryor admitted this. But he pointed out that marriage was a human institution. There it was, for every one of us to reckon with. Either you made use of it, or it made use of you. Sensible people adopted the former alternative.
“Why, look at me!” he said, waxing strangely eloquent. “I’ve knocked about the world a good bit in the last twenty years. A born adventurer if ever there was one. Do you see me settling down to matrimony like any spirit-broken married man in the pinchbeck salaried class? No, by Jupiter! I’ve waited for the right conditions to come to pass so that I could take up marriage as one more great adventure.”
“Your last one, Mark!” said Janet, bantering him.
More seriously, she asked him whether all his other adventures had been in the Secret Service.
“Lord no! I’ve taken a shot at all sorts of jobs and been all sorts of things from a West Point cadet to a buccaneer in the South Seas.”
This quiet, self-contained man, spare of frame but tough as a hickory stick, had he really been a gorgeous sea-rover? Looking into his humorously inquisitive gray eyes, Janet could not doubt his words. And, like Desdemona entranced by Othello, she listened whilst he dipped into a store of reminiscences and, in his own inimitably laconic style, gave her an outline of his picturesque career.
Pryor as a West Point cadet, as a lieutenant in the Engineer Corps, in service against the Moros in the Philippines, on the sanitary staff in the thick of the Panama Canal construction, again as a civilian on a dare-devil voyage to Tahiti—these pictures took the romantic side of Janet by storm. She made him tell the Tahitian story most minutely, and hung on his lips with bated breath as he recounted the capture of his tiny steamer by real pirates who gave him a Hobson’s choice of joining them in their marauding trips near the Society Islands, or of walking the plank.
“But I never gave full satisfaction anywhere,” he concluded ruefully. “Secrets that I had better not have known were incessantly coming my way and causing me no end of trouble. Once, when we unexpectedly sighted a Dutch merchantman laden with coffee and spices, I ran up the red flag instead of the black! My shipmates swore that I did it on purpose and assured me that, as a pirate, I was a failure. It was true. I was a failure! Almost a dead failure, in fact, for they left me on what they thought was a desert island.”
When he got back to the United States, the Great War had begun, but the officials in Washington were extremely slow to utilize his services. His record was against him. He was one of those men with whom two and two didn’t inevitably make four, but sometimes footed up to a sum that included human as well as mathematical factors. For an army man, this was a fatal defect.
Impatient to be of use, he eventually joined the Secret Service.
“Why?” asked Janet.
“Nothing else was open to me,” he replied, with a twinkle in his roving eyes. “When a man is a pronounced failure, there are only three professions that will take him into their ranks: those of detective, writer and teacher. I chose the first as the least degrading of the three. Also because it gave me a chance to use my gift as a telepath, an elemental telepath.”
“You can’t pretend that you haven’t made good at that!”
“Oh, I’ve done so-so.”
“So-so!” cried Janet indignantly. “Look how you caught Hutchins Burley red-handed!”
“True enough. I’m bound to confess, however, that I went to the pier to arrest him for treason. When his boxes of Oriental books were opened, it was the smuggled diamonds that we found and not (as I had predicted) the evidence of his sale of United States military secrets to the Japanese. Later on, we got that evidence too; but that was Smilo’s doing more than mine. Ah, wait till you hear Robert’s opinion of my sleuthing skill.”
“Oh, Robert!” she said, with the faintest quiver of her lip. “He hasn’t been near me. I’m not even sure that he’s in America.”
“Well, he is! And I happen to know that urgent business is keeping him out of New York.”
“What can it be?”
“It’s a peculiar business. In a sense, it’s the reverse of what I was engaged upon. I was in pursuit of rogues; but rogues are in pursuit of him.”
“I must say, you’re as enigmatic as ever.”
“Only till tomorrow, Janet. I pledge my word to have everything explained to your satisfaction if you’ll come tomorrow to Charlotte’s studio in Washington Mews. The party begins at four.”
“The party!”
“Precisely. An engagement party for Charlotte; a surprise party for you.”
Saying which, and protesting that he had talked her deaf, dumb and blind, and affirming that he had never felt so horribly out of character in his life, Mark Pryor gravely took his leave.
IV
In fulfillment of her promise, Janet went the following afternoon to the converted stable in Washington Mews where Charlotte Beecher cultivated sculpture in an atmosphere of aristocratic Bohemianism. It was the same studio in which, of old, Cornelia Covert had luxuriated whenever the routine of Outlawry in Kips Bay got on her nerves.
Spring and hope in a young woman’s breast usually add love to their number. In Janet’s case they added thoughts of Robert. All morning she had been plagued with a feeling, amounting to a conviction, that he would be at Charlotte’s party. But when she reached the Mews, she found that Pryor and Lydia Dyson were the only other guests at a gathering which bade fair to be intimate and exclusive.
For a minute or two her spirits were considerably dashed. She waited for Pryor’s advertised surprise to eventuate; but she waited in the dark, nobody offering so much as a ray of enlightenment.
While Lydia Dyson stretched herself supine upon the magnificent tiger rug before the blazing fire, Pryor fetched wineglasses and poured out champagne.
“Here’s to those about to wed!” cried Lydia, raising her glass, and then quoting:
“‘Farewell, happy fields where Joy forever dwells,
Hail Horrors!’”
“You might give us a more cheerful toast, old girl,” protested Charlotte.
“An occasion like this conduces to high philosophy rather than to vulgar good cheer,” retorted Lydia, whose Egyptian beauty—ebony hair against a pale olive skin—had never been more stunning. “However, since you wish it, I’ll take another shot: ‘Here’s to continued failure for all of us!’”
“Lydia, you are a merry soul today,” exclaimed Janet, amidst the general laughter.
“And why not?” inquired Lydia, with a provoking drawl. “Why not? When I see my last blood curdler running well into the two hundred thousands!”
“Lydia is right,” said Pryor. “In the present state of civilization, all the best people are failures, glorious failures.”
He contrasted the fortunes of Lydia’s pornographic romances with the fate of her one serious experiment in fiction. The romances sold like hot cakes. But the serious work, a short novel in which, with pitiless Hogarthian realism, she had developed an episode between a brother and a sister, had been refused by her publisher on the ground that “it was too terrible!” Then there was his own case! Had he not failed as a detective because too much secret information was always breezing his way?
“Don’t forget our young feminist over there,” cried Lydia, indicating Janet. “Don’t forget her, or her heroic gesture against wedlock!”
“A bark is not as good as a bite,” retorted Janet. “But isn’t it better than a tame crawl into the yoke?”
By way of reply, Lydia half raised herself from the tiger skin and, in measured tones, recited:
“O Dewdrop, thou hast fought the better fight—in vain! Some women are born to be wedlocked, some achieve wedlock, and some have wedlock thrust upon them. Janet belongs to the first group, Charlotte belongs to the second, I belong to the third.”
“You to the third!” cried Charlotte. “How do you make that out? From all I see, though Charley Morrow is a perfect dragon of jealousy, you cling to him pretty tightly.”
“I have to, Charlotte! I have to keep him in countenance (and in pocket money, too!), because I’m afflicted with what the doctors call ‘a floating stomach.’ Now, Charley is not only the best housekeeper in New York, he’s the best cook, too. There’s simply nobody else whom I can depend on not to sneak lard instead of butter into my bread—”
“Or to mix cottonseed oil instead of olive oil with your salads?” thrust in Pryor.
“Precisely. Sometimes, when I eat at home I say: How can I stand Charley another twenty-four hours? Next day I eat at a restaurant, and say: I can stand Charley forever!”
They all laughed, and Lydia buried herself in the rug again.
“All the same,” she went on meditatively, “I’ve never really got used to marriage. It’s a well of never-ending surprises.”
“What about my surprise?” asked Janet, for the fourth time.
The bell rang and Charlotte went to the door a few feet away.
“Here it comes!” announced Pryor, as a man entered.
“Janet!”
“Robert!”
Greetings all round cut their glances short.
V
Janet was struck with the fact that he had never looked better. Robert, as dynamic as a battery giving out blue sparks, was familiar enough to her. But Robert, with a deepening pink spreading over his pale cheeks, and with a suit that showed the craftsmanship of a fashionable Fifth Avenue tailor, was a sight to make one gasp and stare. Nor was this all. In times past, she had often conjured up a picture of him poised as on a springboard, preparing to leap upward to join the spirits of the air. But there was nothing aerial about the way in which his feet now gripped the solid ground.
She couldn’t get over the change!
When he alluded briefly to a trip to California from which he had just returned and on which he appeared to have done some work for the Confederated Press, she had the sensation of not being in a secret that all the rest shared. This was the sort of discourtesy that had hitherto been taboo in Charlotte’s crowd, and she resented being made a victim of it.
“Then the Confederated Press knew better than to give you your walking papers?” drawled Lydia.
“They knew nothing,” replied Robert. “I simply paid them to keep me on and to let me say exactly what I pleased.”
This was more mystifying to Janet than ever.
Presently, Mark Pryor proposed a walk to the Lorillard model tenements to inspect Number Fifteen, Cornelia’s old flat. It turned out that Robert had rented it and that Donald Kyrion, perhaps the youngest and certainly the most talented interior designer in New York, had decorated it for him as a labor of love. Pryor pronounced the result: “Art that congealed art!”
“Donald Kyrion?” said Lydia. “If Robert got him to do anything for nothing he ought to get the Nobel prize for wonder-working.”
“Ahem!” said Pryor, and again he and Robert exchanged knowing glances.
Charlotte protested with all her soul against being dragged to Kips Bay. Now that Robert could earn an honest living, why didn’t he rent a lodging in a decent locality instead of consorting with the Outlaws who—what with their talk of wrongs, their love of dirt, and their smell of tobacco—were tiresome enough to bore Mephistopheles himself.
“The Outlaws parted company with me long ago,” replied Robert, putting up a vigorous defence. “It is not they who lure me back.”
He said that the Outlaws were, after all, not the whole of Kips Bay. They were the most picturesque element in the population, but they were only a tiny fraction of the total. True, they behaved in every respect as though no other element besides their own existed. Wasn’t this, however, merely a proof that they were New Yorkers to the manner born? It was, in fact, undeniable that there were plenty of simple, self-respecting toilers in Kips Bay, plenty of them right in the very citadel of Outlawry, the Lorillard model tenements themselves. Nay, candor compelled the admission that there were even “rich but honest” toilers in the Kipsian district—to be specific, in the new “art colonies” planted around Sutton Terrace and Turtle Bay Gardens.
He had found this out after the dispersal of Cornelia’s set. Force of circumstances having obliged him to look out into the Kips Bay that extended beyond the model flats, he had learned how parochial, in their assumptions about the district, the Outlaws had been.
“The fact is,” he added, “I often think it’s a hankering after the paths of rectitude and respectability that makes me enjoy a Lorillard flat—for short stretches only, needless to say. Anyhow, the older I get and the more I study the flibbertigibbet Bohemian in his lair and the heavy-footed Bourgeois in his, the more I’m struck with the bond between them.”
“The bond, Robert!” exclaimed Charlotte. “Call it a touching point, common ground, but don’t call it a bond.”
“Well, it’s a hidden bond. For the irregular doings of the strait-laced people and the comparatively regular doings of the gypsies show me how Bohemian the Bourgeois is, and how Bourgeois the Bohemian.”
“What Robert says reminds me forcibly of a passage in Gulliver’s Travels,” interposed Mark Pryor. “I mean the passage in which the horses, the noble highborn creatures that govern, move about stark naked, whilst the Yahoos, the loathsome human creatures that live like beasts, yearn to cover their shame with rags and strings of beads.”
“For the matter of that,” continued Robert, “look at our little group here. We’ve all lived and worked quite contentedly in the thick of Kips Bay. Yet there’s nothing in our daily behavior at which a Philistine of the deepest dye would turn a hair. Where, in fact, could one find a more incurably respectable lot of people—always counting out Lydia who, I believe, is still a member in good standing among the Outlaws?”
“Look here, old boy!” Lydia called out. “Are you attacking or defending me?”
“As the supreme ornament of Charlotte’s studio, you can always count on my homage, Lydia. But as an Outlaw, you must expect no quarter. I’ve lived among the Outlaws and weighed them in the balance.”
“Meaning what?” said Lydia, groaning for effect. “That their honor rooted in dishonor stands?”
“Not a bad way of putting it, Lydia,” replied Robert, smiling. “Shall I give you the gist of Outlawry? Well, it is an excrescence of Radicalism, often a decorative, sometimes a merely indecorous excrescence. The purpose of Radicalism is to remove the obstacles that lie athwart the course of life, of life aspiring to an estate infinitely higher than that of man. What part in this mighty purpose is played by the mummers of Greenwich Village, the camp-stool triflers of Washington Square, the picarescos of Kips Bay, and the other Outlaw aggregations?”
“They stand for insurgency, don’t they?” drawled Lydia.
“For insurgency, yes. But what sort of insurgency? Your typical Outlaw ‘insurges’ against perfectly harmless laws and conventions: obstacles of no importance. And at the very same time, he conforms to ruthlessly strangling laws and conventions: obstacles that really matter.”
“Kips Bay or bust!” announced Lydia, reluctantly abandoning her tiger skin as the only alternative to a pursuit of Robert’s theme.
VI
On the walk uptown, Lydia attached herself to Pryor and Charlotte, while Robert with Janet soon fell far behind.
What a first aid to free speech an independent income is! Dozens of questions which, in Paris, had stuck on the tip of Robert’s tongue now rolled off as freely as down a buttered slide. He was the first to break boldly into the vicious circle of topics of the day.
“You’d better return my pearls and diamonds!” he began with a grave smile. “As for me, I’ll send back all your letters and also the lock of your hair that I’ve worn next my heart.”
He said that there was only one conclusion to be drawn from the unbroken silence she had maintained ever since the end of the partnership of Barr and Lloyd; an end, he reminded her, not of his making.
Well, she liked that! She had written long letters, addressed to Cornelia, but expressly intended for the whole Lorillard circle; and, seeing that several people had replied, it would seem that her intention had been respected. In these letters she had more than once fished for a crumb of sympathy from him. She might say that, on reaching the very bottom of the ladder of luck, she had signalled to him almost as abjectly as Dives had to Lazarus. But no Lazarus had responded.
This reproach led, on both sides, to a rapid fire of questions and answers in the course of which one of their chief misunderstandings was cleared up. Janet learned that Cornelia had never shown her letters to Robert. What she had done was to give him subtly to understand that Janet, in the hope of inducing Claude to legitimate their love affair, was prudently burning her Kips Bay connections behind her.
“It was only one of a score of things that Cornelia did to queer the pitch between us,” was Robert’s comment.
They were silent for a space, whilst they adjusted their thoughts to a much clearer interpretation of the curious way that Cornelia had acted out her part in the triangle of their relations.
Robert’s mind reverted to a bit of news which Pryor had passed on to him the night before, after the arrival of the San Francisco Limited at the Pennsylvania Station. Pryor had picked up the information in the course of an interview with Hutchins Burley in the Tombs, where the fallen editor, garbed as a Federal convict (he had begun to serve his sentence for smuggling), was being detained to testify against a former confederate in the Japanese espionage case. Burley, raging like the bull of Bashan, had lashed out against all the people who had ever given him offence, and against some who hadn’t. As a by-product of sheer, overflowing hatred, he had let slip the item that it was to Cornelia that he was really indebted for having been able to get on Janet’s track in Brussels. Cornelia had not known Janet’s precise whereabouts, yet she had shown Burley the letters, the very letters she had withheld from Robert! This was a piquant bit of gossip, but Robert decided to suppress it for the time being. Until he had finished with the delicate job he had in hand!
Crossing Astor Place, they proceeded along Bookworm Lane to Union Square. Janet stopped halfway and pointed out a quaint old shop where she had bought at secondhand many of the text-books used in her Evening Law School. “You are on the primrose path of dalliance!” exclaimed Robert, who heard of these studies for the first time. “Do you keep your mother posted regarding your wicked ways or has she closed the front door to you forever, as she threatened?”
“No, the front door has been left on a crack,” said Janet. And she recounted a visit she had lately paid her home. The family atmosphere was exactly as she had left it, the only change being that her father, having retired from business as the result of a serious accident, had ceased to be even the titular head of the house.
“The poor old man, a mere ghost of his former handsome self, was in a state of coma, Robert. And I fear that, as his salary days are over, his approaching dissolution is being firmly and not too gently accelerated. He sat huddled up in an invalid’s chair, from time to time mumbling that he hoped I’d be a sensible girl, and stay with them in Brooklyn now, and learn to appreciate my mother for the brave and unselfish woman she has always been! He’ll lick the whip to the very last breath. The sight of him was heartrending!”
Otherwise, the atmosphere of the Barr household had not changed one whit. The same musty, fusty ideas prevailed, and the same hollow, stagnant, make-believe existence went on. Here, at least, was one spot in America where pre-war conditions prevailed unchallenged!
“How could I ever have stood it as long as I did! Mother pecked at my cheek and, without turning a hair, asked me was I coming home at last (to be a young lady of the house I suppose!) or did I mean to go on wasting the Lord’s time? Wasting the Lord’s time! I replied that if she was alluding to my work and to my legal studies—which together occupied me from ten to sixteen hours a day—wasting the Lord’s time wasn’t the picnic it sounded like. She muttered something about the wages of sin being death! ‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘I get a very fat salary from Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.’ I mentioned the exact figure—the amount quite made Emily sit up!—and I added that Mrs. Jerome, my friend as well as my employer, had undertaken to advance my career.
“Well, it seemed to me that this piece of news stumped mother a bit, although she closed her eyes in that trance-like, oblivious way of hers and affected never to have heard of a Mrs. Jerome. Perhaps she really hadn’t. Nobody has ever fathomed the bottomless ignorance of the Barr mind.”
“Nobody could—not even God!” said Robert.
Janet nodded and went on:
“Don’t forget that the Barrs are inordinately vain and aggressively jealous of the things they don’t know. This is the fact that makes their ignorance sublime! Take Emily. I got her to talk about herself for a while. She is now one of the head teachers in a public high school. Her devotion to her business is pathetic. She teaches, eats, sleeps—and teaches! Once in a while she shops or sews. These acts complete the cycle of her life from day to day, from year to year. No books, no concerts, no theatres, no travel, no meditation, no self-training, no real companionship with equals or superiors—never one piercing or shattering experience of novelty—nothing that might make the pulse go fast or the heart beat high. ‘But how can you teach them anything real, anything about life?’ I maliciously asked her.”
“‘Anything real!’ she sneered. ‘I suppose you mean romantic adventures! Well, teaching is real enough for me. I study the science of pedagogy every night of the week. And when I want to learn anything more about life, I read the Saturday Evening Post!’
“Yes, Robert; it sounds like a line from The Old Homestead. But that’s exactly what she said.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Robert. “I know the Barrs of Brooklyn. I’ve met them in every part of the United States, and one runs across them even in Europe. Age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite monotony. As on creation’s day, so they’ll remain till the trump of doom.”
“Of course, Mother isn’t as stupid as Emily, not by half,” said Janet. “Her behavior at parting convinces me that she really does have an inkling of who Mrs. Jerome is and of how my position near this influential lady sends my stock up in the world of cash realities. When I left, she didn’t peck at my cheek as at first. No, she kissed me almost affectionately and said, in a tone so relenting that I’m sure Emily was greatly shocked: ‘Now that you’ve found the way back, my child, come and see us again soon.’ And I had always believed that Mother’s moral and religious prejudices were incorruptible—absolutely money-proof, if nothing else in this age was! It was quite a blow to me.”
“Never mind,” rejoined Robert. “We’re all easily taken in by other people’s moral counterfeit. Haven’t you observed that it’s usually a Barr who circulates the Biblical saying that a man cannot serve both God and Mammon? Yet, though too modest to acknowledge it, the Barrs themselves accomplish this miracle daily. It’s precisely the Barrs who, in their heart of hearts, worship these two deities as one.”
They had now reached the Lorillard tenements. In the dimly lit foyer of the middle house they rested on the settee, quite as in the chummiest days of Barr and Lloyd.
“Speaking of Mammon,” he resumed, in the most offhand way imaginable, “don’t you think you ought to marry a rich man? Of course I mean your own sort of rich man, not the St. Hilaire sort.”
Janet gave him a puzzled look.
“I should hate a welter of trivial responsibilities,” she said decisively. “A great big house and a lot of servants to manage—to say nothing of a husband!—the mere prospect terrifies me.”
“Now I’m doubly sure that we’re birds of a feather, Janet! Still, aren’t you rather difficult to please? In Paris you said you wouldn’t marry a man if he was poor? Here you say you won’t marry a man if he’s rich.”
“Does it matter, Robert? What rich man is likely to ask me?”
“You’re quite wrong. One is asking you now.”
“You!” Had he suddenly lost his senses?
“I’ve inherited a couple of millions, Janet!”
He briefly put her in possession of the facts. Then he made her a formal offer of marriage, in tones so restrained that she could hardly guess the immortal longing beneath them.
“I need a partner to share the rich man’s burden!” he said, with a quizzical smile. “And I know from experience that you are the one partner in the world for me.”
“No!” she said, her eyes half closed, her cheeks rather pale. “I—I’m not sure that I’m ready for marriage.”
“Oh, don’t let that stop you! Nobody is ever ready for birth, marriage, or death. We’re just plunged in—doubts, hesitations, and all. You don’t suppose any sane man or woman wants to take the plunge, do you? I know I don’t. But since I’ve got to marry somebody, I’ve made up my mind to marry no one but you.”
“At least you’re quite frank,” she said, with a rather trembling lip.
“Are you angry? Heaven knows it would be easier for me to use the stock phrases on which we were brought up and fed up. But you’re a woman of the new age! And I’m proposing partnership to an equal, to a fellow worker—not to a goddess-drudge!”
They both rose from the settee.
“Surely,” he said, wondering at her silence, “it isn’t the Free Love philosophy that’s in the way?”
“No, no!” she said, emphatically. “I thought I’d told you that in Paris.”
She repeated that she was done with all that! She admitted that, for a time, Cornelia had won her over to what Bernard Shaw called the Love-Is-All school of fanatics. And, so she feared, she had actually believed in her own readiness to give up All for Love! But the hard knocks of the last two years had opened her eyes to the inadequacy as well as to the inexpediency of this philosophy. When the Hutchins Burleys, the Cornelia Coverts, the women with horn-rimmed spectacles, and their like—when these successively popped up to interfere with her purposes, she had realized that love, far from being all to her, was simply one of her heart’s desires. She still held to the view that the love relation between two people should be subject to no other law than that of their own consciences. And she still hoped that society would be converted to this view, although she no longer had a mind to risk her soul’s welfare in its behalf.
“You see, Robert, how fully I’ve come round to your opinion! If I’m to risk my salvation for anything, it must be for something bigger than the love chase.”
After a pause, she added, with a faintly ironical smile:
“For something bigger, too, than a mere husband, don’t you think?”
“But you won’t risk your salvation with me, Janet,” said Robert, coming close to her side. “You’re in a position to make your own terms, absolutely—for have you I must! Stick to your practical terms but not to your abstract ideas. And be generous! Remember, a man who’s obliged to take care of a fortune, needs a wife to take care of him.”
“Indeed! But why expect one able-bodied human being to ‘take care of’ another human being, equally able-bodied? Or why ask a woman to become what men gallantly call a ministering angel, but what ought bluntly to be called a domestic drudge?”
“I admit it’s a very stupid arrangement. Yet at present it’s the only tolerable arrangement I know of. Unquestionably, it’s haphazard, wasteful, anarchic! And no doubt a later generation of men and women, fired with a collective purpose, will regulate domestic affairs much better. But what am I to do? Wasn’t I born and bred on the understanding that some ministering angel would drudge my home to rights? Well, I’m extremely uncomfortable without one!”
“Selfish wretch. Do you know what Mrs. Jerome says?”
“No.”
“She says that women have been men’s cat’s-paws long enough. It’s time for them to abdicate the job. If we are to make any headway, the unmarried girls will have to be strong enough and self-respecting enough to refuse the empty honors offered as bribes for their servitude. They must put a high price on their freedom!”
“Good! I offer you a million dollars, cash down, for yours. It’s half my fortune.”
Janet turned away, chilled to the soul.
“You’re mocking me,” she said.
“Not a bit of it,” he retorted, following her. “I don’t propose to live with an economic inferior. Such a course would wreck us at the start. That there can be no genuine comradeship between people of unequal means is a truth which every philosopher from Plato to William James has pointed out.”
“Did they point it out, in the midst of a proposal?”
He held both her hands in a firm grip.
“Darling, don’t pretend to misunderstand me. Do you want me to sink to my knees in this public place and overwhelm you with ardors and protestations? It’s easy enough, and I’m quite mad enough now. Mad with the enchantment of your touch, that turns my heart to fire; with the music of your voice, in which I hear all Elfland calling; with your haunting mystery and lilac fragrance, at which my senses reel and swim! I’m ninety-nine parts drenched with ecstasy! If you reproach me because one thin gleam of sanity still remains at the helm I shall be—”
“Arithmetical!”
At the word, he seized her and kissed her and—Time being Love’s fool—they were imparadised in each other’s arms.
VII
After a while, between endearments, she managed to say:
“So you do want me to make a marriage of convenience?”
“No, I want you to make a convenience of marriage. That’s what all sensible people do.”
“Splendid! Then you won’t expect me to give up the Susan B. Anthony House? I couldn’t leave Mrs. Jerome in the lurch now, you know.”
“Of course not!” he said.
She was to go on with her work, he with his. They should have living places to be alone in, and living places to be together in, like the Havelock Ellises. They’d have a house together in the mountains or the seashore, remote from other people—a biggish house, this would perhaps have to be. But she need manage it no better (or no worse, he trusted) than she now managed the Susan B. Anthony House.
Janet laughed at his incorrigible, man-made outlook on the future. Indulgent and happy, she rested her head on his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you take your own advice,” she asked, “and marry some independently rich woman—Charlotte, for instance?”
“Because there are a good many women that I could work with, yet never love. And some few that I could love, yet never work with. But there’s only one that I could work with and love as well. At least, I’ve never met another.”
“That’s a very pretty speech, Robert, for you. We were good comrades, weren’t we? In the days of Barr and Lloyd!”
“From now on, Barr and Lloyd, Inc.”
“But it isn’t the same Barr nor the same Lloyd that are to be incorporated again. Suppose we prove not to be good comrades, this time?”
“In that case, we shall hie us to some genuinely civilized country—Sweden or Cape Comorin—where breach of comradeship is the sole ground for divorce—”
Indignant voices from the staircase penetrated their mutual absorption.
“Where in the world can they be!”
“So this is your radical hospitality!”
“Robert—latest method?—proposing by telepathy—imperfect communications—vast silences—heavenly harmony—”
“Pooh! Janet’s no fool—nothing like a bee line—marriage license bureau—bird in the bush, you know—”
Blushing and looking like culprits, they climbed the stairs and braved the mock indignation meeting which their three friends were holding in the hall between flats 13 and 15. (Robert had rented both flats, as a surprise for Janet.)
Lydia went straight to Janet and enfolded her in a copious embrace, whilst Charlotte stood by, ready for a cordial handshake. Mark Pryor, stupefied at this exhibition of feminine perspicacity, could only stare at Robert and mutter:
“What! Already?”
“Was ever woman in this humor won!” drawled Lydia, as she led the way into Number Thirteen, Kelly’s old flat. “I must say, Janet, I’m not much impressed with Robert’s 1921 revision of the Lord of Burleigh stunt. Like all modern versions of fine old idylls, it’s gingerbread without the ginger. Give me the village painter who leads his sweetheart to a palace! There’s the thrill that comes but once in a lifetime. But fancy a millionaire taking his bride to a Kips Bay model tenement—and Number Thirteen at that!”
“You forget,” said Robert, who, with Pryor, had followed the ladies in. “You forget that ‘leiser Nachhall längst verklungner Lieder, zieht mit Erinnenings-Schauer durch die Brust.”
“Which means, I take it,” Pryor said:
“‘I saw her then, as I see her yet,
With the rose she wore, when first we met.’”
“Pooh! Male parsimony disguised as Teuton sentiment,” said Lydia. “Don’t be put upon, Janet, by this love-in-a-tenement stuff. Let me give you a tip. Laurence Twickenham, my publisher, has just put his Long Island home on the market. He says that the ruinous royalties he’s compelled to pay me do not permit him to keep up an expensive establishment. It’s a perfectly gorgeous estate, right next to mine, and not too far from New York. Do make Robert buy it and settle down to a useful life as a country gentleman.”
“What! Foster his mania for hearth and home?” cried Janet, laughing. “Catch me! Nowadays men are almost incurably domestic, as it is.”
“Well, what are you children going to do?”
“Children!” said Robert, coming forward, and lecturing Lydia with gusto. “None of your wiseacre airs, Lydia. Our program will show you that we know our own minds. Hear ye! We shall be married as soon as Janet can get a day off. After the ceremony Janet will return to her job of running the Susan B. Anthony House; I shall return to my job of trying to make America safe for those who don’t happen to be grafters, parasites, or profiteers. During the better part of the year, our offices will be in the Kips Bay tenements here, Numbers Thirteen and Fifteen, respectively—we shall toss up to see who gets which. No attempt on the part of either to impose his or her friends, diet, hygiene, or recreations upon the other without consent, will be tolerated for a moment. Each is to be absolute master in what may jointly be agreed upon to be his own domain, provided only that Janet is to darn all my socks or buy new pairs as fast as the big toe protrudes. At the end of nine months, we shall both be ready for a trip to—”
“To Sweden,” Janet put in softly, going to his side and caressing his arm.
“To Sweden!” exclaimed Lydia, while Charlotte and Pryor laughed at her bewilderment. “To the psychopathic ward, if you ask me!”
BY FELIX GRENDON
WILL HE COME BACK? A Play
NIXOLA OF WALL STREET A Novel
FREEDOM IN THE WORKSHOP A Study