Chapter Five I
During the Outlaws’ Ball, Cornelia sat alone in the Lorillard apartment. Had she dressed for the masquerade she had declined to attend? One might have been pardoned for thinking so. To a piece of black satin, draped around her in sensuous lines, a girdle of tangerine velvet added the sole touch of color. It also served to draw her dress in high above the waist and to bring out the burnished gold of her hair. The fabric was ingeniously held together by pins, Cornelia being an advocate of a mode of dressing or draping that dispensed with sewing as much as possible.
One handsome shoulder was bare; and this arrangement detracted nothing from the garment’s look of insecurity. Cornelia’s men friends were apt to be on tenterhooks lest her pinned dresses should suddenly come to pieces. It was an emotion she was not altogether unconscious of, or wholly displeased with.
To the very last she had persisted in her refusal to take part in the festivity, and had held out firmly against the friendly blandishments with which Janet, Robert, Mazie, and Hutchins Burley had successively tried to shake her determination. She defended her position by declaring that dancing bored her to distraction, not to mention that the current dance forms, the fox trot, the jazz steps and the glide, seemed to her to be unspeakable profanations of a fine art.
With this explanation her friends had to be content, while they guessed at the true reason for her refusal. Claude hazarded the view that her real motive was a dread of emerging in public while her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist, was still fresh in everybody’s memory. Mazie repeated her laconic opinion that Cornelia could spite more people and attract more attention by being missed than by being present.
About eleven o’clock some one rang. When Cornelia opened the door, she was confronted by an athletic young man whom she recognized as the occupant of apartment number thirteen, the one next to her own. Mistaking her dress for negligee, he apologized profusely and then explained that the gas in his room having suddenly given out he needed a twenty-five-cent piece to set the meter in action again. Cornelia observed that whereas his form was the form of the roaring lion, his voice was the voice of the cooing dove.
“I always keep an extra quarter on the mantelpiece,” he said, coloring with embarrassment, “but the light went down all of a sudden, and in the dark I couldn’t locate the pesky coin.”
Cornelia hastened to get the necessary money. Returning, she sympathized with him upon the fickleness of quarter meters.
“Horrid, mercenary things! I’d give them ‘no quarter,’ if I dared, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes—the light always goes out in the dark,” he said, quaintly.
He was obviously anxious to make a good impression, and ill at ease because of this anxiety.
“Just wait a second, will you, Miss,” he said, as she handed him the money. “I’ll give it back right away.”
As his door was only a few feet away from hers, she waited in the hall and looked curiously into his room after he had lighted up. She noticed that the place was filled with gymnastic paraphernalia—clubs, dumb-bells, weights, and a boxing bag apparatus. Meanwhile, he rummaged through the articles on the mantelpiece until he discovered the missing money tucked snugly away in an empty match-box.
“I don’t know how it got there,” he said, ruefully. “I guess I meant to put it underneath, but slipped it into the box absent-mindedly.”
She smiled. “You have a complete pocket gymnasium,” she commented.
“Yes, I’m pretty well rigged out,” he replied, delighted at her show of interest.
He was very much impressed with her appearance, which mirrored a world socially more elevated and more beautiful than his own. He racked his wits for an excuse to detain her.
“Is this how you keep in trim?” asked Cornelia, indicating the apparatus.
“I—I’m a professional wrestler and a physical culture expert,” he went on, fumbling in his pocket for a visiting card.
“Ah, I see. It’s business, not pleasure.” She did not look at the card, but flashed eloquent glances at his figure.
“That’s it,” he replied, emboldened by her mute flattery. “Will you come in and let me show you around? Young ladies aren’t always interested in these things.”
“Another time. It’s too late now.”
Her phrases emerged so curtly and her relapse into frigid conventionality was so abrupt that the young man stammered a hurt good night, and rather hastily closed his door.
Cornelia gained her sexual gratification in diluted but frequent doses. Without being a deliberate flirt like Mazie, she instinctively tried out the subtler weapons of sex on every man she liked and, since her appearance was both striking and agreeable and her likings fairly far flung, men often responded to her charm with a crudeness that gave her great offence. She seemed unconscious of the incitement in her manner; when, on one occasion, Robert pointed it out, she denied the charge with mingled passion and surprise.
And it was quite true that she took no pleasure in arousing a man’s desire. All her pleasure was derived from baffling it. Curiously enough, an enamored man was an object which aroused in her only a feeling of distaste. And the presence of this feeling satisfied her that she was the innocent victim of his condition rather than the responsible author.
Perhaps it was this attitude of Cornelia’s that Robert had in mind when he said that there was an indefinable suggestion of latent wickedness about her, of wickedness she had neither the vitality nor the courage to live up to. How much her luckless amour had to do with her inverted sex emotions, it would be hard to say. Robert’s private view was that it had thrown her into the society of people like the Kips Bay tenementers who, by all current moral standards, were not “respectable.” He also held that it had inspired her with a passion for respectability, as secret and as strong as the drunkard’s longing to be considered a sober man.
After her neighbor’s retirement, Cornelia looked at his card. In the middle was inscribed the name “Harry Kelly” and underneath appeared: “The Harlem Gorilla, Champion of the Mat.”
II
It was an hour or more before the doorbell of suite number fifteen rang again. This time the visitor was Robert Lloyd. His entrance drove Cornelia’s languor away. But she concealed her immense delight and received him neutrally enough.
“I couldn’t endure the monotony of the ball another minute,” he declared. “You’ve no idea what a relief it is to be able to come here.”
“What was so monotonous, Cato?”
“What wasn’t!” said Robert, taking off his overcoat and revealing the black friar’s hood and gown that had served him during the evening. “The music, the dancing, the ogling, the drinking, the sickening coquetry, the silly speeches to and from brainless companions—in short, everything!”
“My dear!” exclaimed Cornelia. “At a ball, what can you expect?”
“Oh, I know I’m a fool for my pains,” said Robert, laughing off the vexation he felt at having frittered away a whole evening.
He began to undo the girdle of his gown.
“Stop!” she cried. “I haven’t had a really good look at your costume.”
“Nor I at yours,” he said, noticing how her dress lapped and caressed her form. He praised the effect freely.
Pleased, she went to his side, pulled his hood over his head, set his girdle and gown aright, and then stepped back to inspect the result, clapping her hands in approval as she did so.
“When the devil is sick of the world, the devil a monk would be!”
“The devil a monk am I!” said Robert, “unless an unholy rage at the world is a first-class qualification for monastic honors.”
“Robert, the part fits you to perfection. It’s astonishing how neatly you manage to blend the temper of a devil with the austerity of a monk.”
“Not astonishing at all,” said Robert, divesting himself of the costume. “Like most young men I have a craving for pleasure, excitement and female society. That’s what you call the devil in me. But my observation is keen enough to show me that, under present social conditions, I can’t give this craving either a temperate or an honorable satisfaction. So I repress it as much as common sense allows, and you call that repression austerity.”
“Cato, you ought to be writing tracts for the Ethical Culture Society instead of newspaper articles for Hutchins’ wicked Evening Chronicle. What are you doing among the Outlaws instead of in a goody-goody Sunday School?”
He took her raillery in good part.
“Every journalist is a patcher-up of unconsidered trifles,” he said. “He makes a crazy quilt of them as orderly and coherent as he can. Well, where can I get the raw material I need in greater supply than in this little community of criminality and sentimentality, of Radicalism and bad debts? Kips Bay is an inexhaustible mine of police news and town talk.”
“Well, I can’t say that your kind stay among us has broadened you out much, Rob!”
“No?” he replied, amused at the shot. “I suppose I do grow more squeamish every day. Nothing like a steady diet of police episodes for purifying purposes. It acts the way some nauseous drugs do.”
“You’re perfectly detestable,” she cried. She didn’t like anybody but herself to disparage Kips Bay. “You’ve put your mind in a prison, Rob. Your symptoms require a drastic remedy. If I were a physician of the soul, I should prescribe marriage.”
“Don’t be a Job’s comforter, Cornelia. I said I wanted female society, not female satiety. And, by the way, since when did you begin to advocate marriage as the door to freedom? You have always denounced it as the trapdoor to slavery.”
“I don’t advocate it for women, and even for men I recommend it only in the most desperate cases.”
“Well, mine isn’t desperate. But Hutchins Burley’s is, judging from his conduct at the ball tonight. You might prescribe for him.”
“Oh, he’s past all treatment. What do you think he told me in strict confidence yesterday? That he’s weighed down by a great sorrow; too many women find him irresistible, and persecute him to death with their lovesick attentions.”
“I call that a new form of persecutional mania.”
“He was in dead earnest, Rob. He called himself a martyr to love, fancy that!”
“Well, he seemed to be a remarkably willing martyr tonight. He buzzed like a huge wasp from one pair of lips to another. When he got to Mazie, who unfolds her petals so alluringly, he became quite intoxicated.”
“Which means that Mazie acted in a perfectly shameless way, as usual.”
“Whose mind is a prison now?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Cornelia acridly. “Please don’t assume that, because I no longer believe in marriage, I’ve turned my back on decency and good manners.”
“This is breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Cornelia. The fact is, Mazie doesn’t have to act to produce the peculiar behavior in men which I described. You know that quite well. She is what Joseph Conrad calls ‘one of the women of all time.’ I’d call her a throw-back with the emotions and appetites of a cave woman and the thoughts and looks of a Ziegfield chorus girl. It’s not by acting shamelessly, or by acting at all, but by just passively being herself that she sets a man’s blood boiling.”
“A man’s blood boils so easily—like a kettle on a mountain!”
“Be fair, Cornelia. Some men’s blood does, yes. Men on Mazie’s own level. Burley’s one of them.”
“Well,” said Cornelia, waiving the point, “what did Hutchins do, or rather undo?”
“I’d better not go into details. He played several questionable pranks. Once, it looked as though he were on the point of seizing Mazie by her locks and dragging her, stone-man fashion, to his lair. Even Mazie had to act then, really to act, for she was after bigger game.”
“You mean, Claude?”
“Yes. But Claude had no eyes for the woman of all time. His gaze was absolutely absorbed by a new star of the first magnitude, a star not charted in the heavens before.”
“And this starry wonder?”
“Was Janet Barr.”
He tried to say the name casually, but Cornelia’s jealous ear detected a caressing tone.
“Hard on Mazie, wasn’t it?” he pursued.
“On Mazie least of all,” she said pointedly.
The shaft missed.
“Yes, Burley got the worst end of it,” he went on innocently. “I dare say Mazie consoled herself easily enough. But Burley’s aspirations have met more than one jolt to-night. When he made a dead set at Janet—that was another rebuff.”
Robert described the riotous scene outside the gypsy tent.
“Then, as I’ve already told you, Mazie gave him the slip; with the result that I’ve never seen Burley more completely divested of his first-prize bumptiousness. However, he soon pulled himself together.”
“Goodness knows there must have been plenty of Outlaw girls ready to lay balm on the big scamp’s wounds.”
“Yes. And I needn’t remind you that many of these young ladies believe in free speech, free men and free love. Well, Hutchins made the rounds of those he knew and publicly challenged them to live up to their pretensions. His proposals were brutally frank.”
“The girls received them with amusement, I suppose?”
“They received them with scornful resentment—just like ordinary conventional creatures. That was what was so surprising. For Hutchins was simply a man who took their professed opinions at face value. ‘Darling,’ he would say bluntly, to one of his pets, ‘Darling, I like you and your ruby lips. If you like me and are not otherwise engaged, suppose we go off to Paradise.’ It was raw, of course. But you can’t say it wasn’t what is called ‘free love’.”
“Really, Rob!”
“Exactly. They were every bit as scandalized as you are. After gasping for breath, they called for their escorts. Whereupon I concluded that instinct is mightier than opinion and that the beliefs we inherit are vastly stronger than the beliefs we acquire.”
Cornelia ignored this piece of satire. And Robert then told how Burley had resumed his pursuit of Janet.
“Luckily, Claude held him off,” he said.
“Another champion! Little Janet must be quite the belle of the ball.”
“She’s been much in demand. There was the gypsy tent, remember. When it comes to innocent credulity, a radical’s capacity is just as great as any honest man’s. So what with examining scores of palms and eluding Hutchins Burley, Janet might have died from exhaustion but for Claude’s gallant interference.”
“Just like Claude’s knight-errantry,” she said. “He has always had a passion for novelties.”
“And the novelties have usually returned the passion!”
Cornelia felt a twinge of jealousy. But as Janet had evidently not been very attentive to Robert, and had even hurt his feelings, she was hardly conscious of the emotion.
“Janet is young, impressionable and fresh from a Puritan home,” she said, with a languid air of detachment. “Small wonder if Lothario’s dash and distinction have captivated her.”
They fell to talking of Janet’s history, and Robert spoke of the surprising change in her sphere of interests.
“A month ago she was demure enough to have stood model for the heroine of Miles Standish. She could hardly be induced to drink at a soda-water fountain on a Sunday. Now she is full of ‘equal pay for equal work.’ And she appears to have a voice as well as a vote. I’m told that she reads the Liberator and that she broke the last Sabbath by attending a meeting of the new Labor Party in Madison Square Garden.”
“She’s been under my wing for several weeks,” said Cornelia, proudly.
III
Cornelia’s assumption that she was entirely responsible for the change in Janet’s outlook on life was without warrant. Yet she was so self-satisfied as scarcely to suspect that Robert had anything to do with the matter; and it was interest in the man rather than curiosity about the girl that caused her to question him about his previous acquaintance with Janet.
She learnt that Robert’s mother was not a very distant cousin of Mrs. Barr, and that both ladies had spent their girlhood in the same Connecticut town, where they had been friends until Mrs. Lloyd married and went out West. When Robert left Los Angeles, he bore this relationship in mind and, on the strength of it, paid his respects to the Barrs soon after settling in New York.
Cornelia inferred that the young man’s acquaintance with the Barrs had continued on a very superficial footing. Robert knew better than to undeceive her. As a matter of fact, he had repeated his visits to the Barr household for the simple reason that there had sprung up between himself and Janet a mental fellowship which the hostility of her mother, the timid aloofness of her father and the envy of her sister had been able to obstruct but not to destroy.
Janet had more than repaid him for the inhospitality of her relatives. She in turn amused, puzzled, inspired and electrified him. So much unsophistication in the midst of a guileful city, so much candor surrounded by pious make-believe, above all, so much eagerness for experience held in leash by a vegetating family routine, had filled Robert with the hope that he might play Pygmalion to her Galatea.
Galatea, however, did not exactly go into raptures over Pygmalion. Though her insurgent nature was full of silent sympathy with Robert, her instincts were so much under the bondage of the Barr atmosphere as to prevent her from fully estimating his worth. Still, she conscientiously followed up the leads he gave her. She made her first bewildered acquaintance with the new paintings, the new music and the new social sciences. She began to look forward to copies of the Republic, the Nation, the London Statesman; and she joined him in reading the great contemporary writers: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Romain Rolland. In short, she ranged with silent delight through the new world of modernity that he opened up to her, though it had to be explored in an obstinate little way of her own.
As her unofficial pilot Robert was very happy and might long have held the post but for a fatal blunder. Mrs. Barr learned one day that he had tempted Janet to attend a performance of Shaw’s “Blanco Posnet,” given on a Sunday by the Stage Reform Players. According to Emily, her informant, this play was immoral, not to say blasphemous, as was proved by the refusal of the British censor to license its performance.
Such a flagrant breach of holy writ, family propriety and the Sabbath, raised a domestic tempest to which Janet deemed it wise to bend. Robert was forced to discontinue his visits. What he did not tell Cornelia was that, during the last two months, he had regularly met Janet at Brentano’s, where she had formed the habit of browsing through the new books and magazines every Friday afternoon.