_ CHAPTER VI
After the first round of excessively formal entertainments for Mr. and Mrs. O'Valley, Steve found a mental hunger suddenly asserting itself. It was as if a farm hand were asked to subsist upon a diet of weak tea and wafers.
In the first place, no masculine mind can quite admit the superiority of a feminine mind when it concerns handling said masculine mind's business affairs. Though Steve insisted that Mary had done quite as well as he would have done, he told himself secretly that he must get down to hard work and go over the letters and memoranda which had developed during his absence.
With quiet amusement Mary had agreed to the investigation, watching him prowl among the files with the same tolerant attitude she would have entertained toward Luke had he insisted that he could run the household more efficiently than a mere sister.
"Poor tired boy," she used to think when Steve would come into the office with a fagged look on his handsome face and new lines steadily growing across his forehead. "You don't realize yet--you haven't begun to realize."
And Steve, trying to catch up with work and plan for the future, to respond graciously to every civic call made upon him, would find himself enmeshed in a desperate combination of Beatrice's dismay over the cut of her new coat, her delight at the latest scandal, her headaches, the special order for glace chestnuts he must not forget, the demand that he come home for luncheon just because she wanted him to talk to, the New York trip looming ahead with Bea coaxing him to stay the entire time and let business slide along as it would. All the while the anaesthesia of unreality was lessening in its effect now that he had attained his goal.
The rapt adoration he felt for his wife was in a sense a rather subtle form of egotism he felt for himself. The Gorgeous Girl or rather any Gorgeous Girl personified his starved dreams and frantic ambitions. He had turned his face toward such a goal for so many tense years, goading himself on and breathing in the anaesthesia of indifference and unreality to all else about him that having obtained it he now paused exhausted and about to make many disconcerting discoveries. Had the Gorgeous Girl had hair as black as his own or a nose such as Mary Faithful's she would have still been his goal, symbol of his aims.
Having finished the long battle Steve now felt an urge to begin to battle for something else besides wealth and social position. He felt ill at ease in Beatrice's salon and among her friends, who all seemed particularly inane and ridiculous, who were all just as busy and tired and nervous as Beatrice was for some strange reason, and who considered it middle class not to smoke and common to show any natural sentiment or emotion. He soon found it was quite the thing to display the temperament of an oyster when any vital issue was discussed or any play, for example, had a scene of deep and inspiring words. A queer little smirk or titter was the proper applause, but one must wax enthusiastic and superlative over a clever burglary, a new-style dance, a chafing-dish concoction, or, a risque story retold in drawing-room language.
Before his marriage Beatrice had always been terribly rushed and he had had more time in which to work and glow with pride at the nearing of his goal. She kept him at arm's length very cleverly anchored with the two-carat engagement ring and Steve had to fight for time and plead for an audience. It fired his imagination, making him twice as keen for the final capture.
But when two persons live in the same apartment, notwithstanding the eleven rooms and so on, a monotony of existence pervades even the grandeur of velvet-panelled walls. There are the inevitable three meals a day to be gone through with--five meals if tea and a supper party are counted. There are the same ever-rising questions as to the cook's honesty and the chauffeur's graft in the matter of buying, new tires. There are just so many persons who have to be wined and dined and who revenge themselves by doing likewise to their former host; the everlasting exchanging of courtesies and pleasantries--all the dull, decent habits of ultra living.
Steve found his small store of possessions huddled into a corner, his pet slippers and gown graciously bestowed upon a passing panhandler, and he was obliged to don a very correct gray "shroud," as he named it in thankless terms, and to put his cigar and cigar ashes into something having the earmarks of an Etruscan coal scuttle, though Beatrice said it was a priceless antique Gay had bought for a song! There were many times when Steve would have liked to roam about his house in plebeian shirt sleeves, eat a plain steak and French-fried potatoes with a hunk of homemade pie as a finish, and spend the evening in that harmless, disorderly fashion known to men of doing nothing but stroll about smoking, playing semi-popular records, reading the papers, and very likely having another hunk of pie at bedtime.
Besides all this there were the topics of the day to discuss. During his courtship love was an all-absorbing topic. There were many questions that Beatrice asked that required intricate and tiring answers. During the first six weeks of living at the apartment Steve realized a telling difference between men and women is that a woman demands a specific case--you must rush special incidents to back up any theory you may advance--whereas men, for the most part, are content with abstract reasoning and supply their own incidents if they feel inclined. Also that a finely bred fragile type of woman such as Beatrice inspires both fear and a maudlin sort of sympathy, and that man is prevented from crossing such a one to any great extent since men are as easily conquered by maudlin sympathy as by fear.
When a yellow-haired child with dove-coloured eyes manages to squeeze out a tear and at the same moment depart in wrath to her room and lock the doors, refusing to answer--the trouble being why in heaven's name must a pound-and-a-half spaniel called Monster, nothing but a flea-bearing dust mop, do nothing but sit and yap for chocolates?--what man is going to dare do otherwise than suppress a little profanity and then go and whisper apologies at the keyhole?
After several uncomfortable weeks of this sort of mental chaos Steve determined to do what many business men do--particularly the sort starting life in an orphan asylum and ending by having residence pipe organs and Russian wolfhounds frolicking at their heels--to bury himself in his work and defend his seclusion by never refusing to write a check for his wife. When he finally reached this decision he was conscious of a strange joy.
Everything was a trifle too perfect to suit Steve. The entire effect was that of the well-set stage of a society drama. Beatrice was too correctly gowned and coiffured, always upstage if any one was about, her high-pitched, thin voice saying superlative nothings upon the slightest provocation; or else she was dissolving into tears and tantrums if no one was about.
Steve could not grasp the wherefore of having such stress laid upon the exact position of a floor cushion or the colour scheme for a bridge luncheon--he would have so rejoiced in really mediocre table service, in less precision as to the various angles of the shades or the unrumpled condition of the rugs. He had not the oasis Mark Constantine had provided for himself when he kept his room of old-fashioned trappings apart from the rest of the mansion.
Steve needed such a room. He planned almost guiltily upon building a shack in the woods whither he could run when things became too impossible for his peace of mind. If he could convince his wife that a thing was smart or different from everything else its success and welcome in their house were assured. But an apple pie, a smelly pipe, a maidless dinner table, or a disorderly den had never been considered smart in Beatrice's estimation, and Steve never attempted trying to change her point of view.
Beatrice wondered, during moments of seriousness, how it was that this handsome cave man of hers rebelled so constantly against the beauty and correctness of the apartment and yet never really disgraced her as her own father would have done. It gave her added admiration for Steve though she felt it would be a mistake to tell him so. She did not believe in letting her husband see that she was too much in love with him.
Despite his growls and protests about this and that, and his ignorance as to the things in life Beatrice counted paramount, Steve adapted himself to the new environment with a certain poise that astonished everyone. The old saying "Every Basque a noble" rang true in this descendant of a dark-haired, romantic young woman whom his grandfather had married. There was blood in Steve which Beatrice might have envied had she been aware of it. But Steve was in ignorance, and very willingly so, regarding his ancestors. There had merely been "my folks"--which began and ended the matter.
Still it was the thoroughbred strain which the Basque woman had given her grandson that enabled Steve to be master of his house even if he knew very little of what it was all about. It was fortunate for his peace of mind--and pocketbook--that Beatrice had accepted the general rumour of a goat-tending ancestry and pried no further. Had she ever glimpsed the genealogy tables of the Benefacio family, from which Steve descended, she would have had the best time of all; coats of arms and family crests and mottoes would have been the vogue; a trip to the Pyrenees would have followed; mantillas and rebozos would have crowded her wardrobe, and Steve would have been forced to learn Spanish and cultivate a troubadourish air.
Moreover, the Gorgeous Girl was not willing that her husband be buried in business. She could not have so good a time without him--besides, it was meet that he acquired polish. Her father was a different matter; everyone knew his ways and would be as likely to try to change the gruff, harsh-featured man as to try surveying Gibraltar with a penny ruler. Now Beatrice had married Steve because cave men were rather the mode, cave men who were wonderfully successful and had no hampering relatives. Besides, her father favoured Steve and he would not have been amiable had he been forced to accept a son-in-law of whom he did not approve. Mark Constantine had never learned graciousness of the heart, nor had his child.
So Beatrice proceeded to badger Steve whenever he pleaded business, with the result that she kept dropping in at his office, sometimes bringing friends, coaxing him to close his desk and come and play for the rest of the day. Sometimes she would peek in at Mary Faithful's office and baby talk--for Steve's edification--something like this:
"Ise a naughty dirl--I is--want somebody to play wif me--want to be amoosed. Do oo care? Nice, busy lady--big brain."
Often she would bring a gift for Mary in her surface generous fashion--a box of candy or a little silk handkerchief. She pitied Mary as all butterflies pity all ants, and she little knew that as soon as she had departed Mary would open the window to let fresh air drive out distracting perfume, and would look at the useless trifle on her desk with scornful amusement.
Before the New York trip Steve took refuge in his first deliberate lie to his wife. He had lied to himself throughout his courtship but was most innocent of the offence.
"If Mrs. O'Valley telephones or calls please say I have gone out to the stockyards," he told Mary. "And will you lend me your office for the afternoon? I'm so rushed I must be alone where I can work without interruption."
Mary gathered up her papers. "I'll keep you under cover." She was smiling.
"What's the joke?"
"I was thinking of how very busy idle people always are and of how much time busy people always manage to make for the idle people's demands."
He did not answer until he had collected his work materials. Then he said: "I should like to know just what these idle people do with themselves but I shall never have the time to find out." He vanished into Mary's office, banging the door.
Beatrice telephoned that afternoon, only to be given her husband's message.
"I'll drive out to the stockyards and get him," she proposed.
"He went with some men and I don't believe I'd try it if I were you," Mary floundered.
"I see. Well, have him call me up as soon as he comes in. It is very important."
When Steve reached home that night he found Beatrice in a well-developed pout.
"Didn't you get my message?" she demanded, sharply.
"Just as I was leaving the office. I looked in there on--on my way back. I saw no use in telephoning then. What is it, dear?"
"It's too late now. You have ruined my day."
"Sorry. What is too late?"
"I wanted you to go to Amityville with me; there is a wonderful astrologer there who casts life horoscopes. He predicted this whole war and the Bolsheviki and bombs and everything, and I wanted him to do ours. Alice Twill says he is positively uncanny."
Steve shook his head. "No long-haired cocoanut throwers for mine," he said, briefly, unfolding his paper.
"But I wanted you to go."
"Well, I do not approve of such things; they are a waste of time and money."
"I have my own money," she informed him, curtly.
Steve laid aside the paper. "I have known that for some time."
"Besides, it is rude to refuse to call me when I have asked you to do so. It makes me ridiculous in the eyes of your employees."
Recalling the shift of offices Steve suppressed a smile. "It was nothing important, Bea, and I am mighty busy. Your father never had time to play; he worked a great deal harder than I have worked."
"I can't help that. You must not expect me to be a little stay-at-home. You knew that before we were even engaged. Besides, I'm no child----"
"No, but you act like one." He spoke almost before he thought. "You are a woman nearly twenty-six years old, yet you haven't the poise of girls eighteen that I have known. Still, they were farm or working girls. I've sometimes wondered what it is that makes you and your friends always seem so childish and naive--at times. Aren't you ever going to grow up--any of you?"
"Do you want a pack of old women?" she demanded. "How can you find fault with my friends? You seem to forget how splendidly they have treated you."
A cave man must be muzzled, handcuffed, and Under the anaesthetic of unreality and indifference to be a satisfactory husband for a modern Gorgeous Girl.
"Why shouldn't they treat me splendidly? I have never robbed or maltreated any of them. Tell me something. It is time we talked seriously. We can't exist on the cream-puff kind of conversation. What in the world has your way of going through these finishing schools done for you?"
The dove-coloured eyes flickered angrily. "I had a terribly good time," she began. "Besides, it's the proper thing--girls don't come out at twenty and marry off and let that be the end of it. You really have a much better time now if you wait until you are twenty-five, and then you somehow have learned how to be a girl for an indefinite period. As for the finishing school in America--well, we had a wonderful sorority."
"I've met college women who were clear-headed persons deserving the best and usually attaining it--but I've never taken a microscope to the sort of women playing the game from the froth end. I'm wondering what your ideas were."
"You visited me--you met my friends--my chaperons--you wrote me each day."
"I was in love and busy making my fortune. I was as shy as a backwoods product--you know that--and afraid you would be carried off by someone else before I could come up to the sum your father demanded of me. I have nothing but a hazy idea as to a great many girls of all sorts and sizes--and mostly you."
"Well, we had wonderful lectures and things; and I had a wonderful crush on some of the younger teachers--that is a great deal of fun."
"Crushes?"
"You must have crushes unless you're a nobody--and there's nothing so much a lark. You select your crush and then you rush her. I had a darling teacher, she is doing war work in Paris now. She was a doll. I adored her the moment I saw her and I sent her presents and left flowers in her room, orchids on Sundays, until she made me stop. One day a whole lot of us who had been rushing her clipped off locks of our hair and fastened them in little gauze bags and we strung a doll clothes line across her room and pinned the little bags on it and left a note for her saying: 'Your scalp line!'"
"What did that amount to?"
"Oh, it was fun. And I had another crush right after that one. Then some of the classes were interesting. I liked psychology best of all because you could fake the answers and cram for exams more easily. Math. and history require facts. There was one perfectly thrilling experience with fish. You know fish distinguish colours, one from the other, and are guided by colour sense rather than a sense of smell. We had red sticks and green sticks and blue sticks in a tank of fish, and for days we put the fish food on the green sticks and the fish would swim right over to get it, and then we put it on the red sticks and they still swam over to the green sticks and waited round--so it was recognizing colour and not the food. And a lot of things like that."
Steve laughed. "I hope the fish wised up in time."
Beatrice looked at him disapprovingly. "If you had gone to college it might have made a great difference," she said.
"Possibly," he admitted; "but I'll let the rest of the boys wait on the fishes. Did you go to domestic science this morning?"
"Yes, it was omelet. Mine was like leather. The gas stove makes my head ache. But we are going to have a Roman pageant to close the season--all about a Roman matron, and that will be lots of fun."
"You eat too much candy; that is what makes your head ache," he corrected.
She pretended not to hear him. "It is time to dress."
"Don't say there's a party to-night," he begged.
"Of course there is, and you know it. The Homers are giving a dinner for their daughter. Everyone is to wear their costumes wrong side out. Isn't that clever? I laid out a white linen suit for you; it will look so well turned inside out; and I am going to wear an organdie that has a wonderful satin lining. There is no reason why we must be frumps."
"I'd rather stay home and play cribbage," Steve said, almost wistfully. "There's a rain creeping up. Let's not go!"
"I hate staying home when it is raining." Beatrice went into her room to try the effect of a sash wrong side out. "It is so dull in a big drawing room when there are just two people," she added, as Steve appeared in the doorway.
"Two people make a home," he found himself answering.
The Gorgeous Girl glanced at him briefly, during which instant she seemed quite twenty-six years old and the spoiled daughter of a rich man, the childish, senseless part of her had vanished. "Would you please take Monster into the kitchen for her supper?" she asked, almost insolently.
So the owner of the O'Valley Leather Works found his solace in tucking the pound-and-a-half spaniel under his arm and trying to convince himself that he was all wrong and a self-made man must keep a watch on himself lest he become a boor!
* * * * *
The day the O'Valleys left for New York in company with three other couples Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord Vondeplosshe arrived in Hanover, having visited until their welcome was not alone worn out but impossible ever to be replaced. A social item in the evening paper stated that they had taken an apartment at the Graystone and would be at home to their friends--whoever they might be.
If Gay's club and his friends had determined merely to be polite and not welcome his wife, Trudy had determined that they would not only welcome her but insist upon being helpful to them; as for her former associates--they would be treated to a curt bow. This, however, did not include the Faithfuls. Mary was not to be ignored, nor did Trudy wish to ignore her. All the good that was in Trudy responded to Mary's goodness. She never tried to be to Mary--no one did more than once. Nor did she try to flatter her. She was truly sorry for Mary's colourless life, truly grieved that Mary would not consent to shape her eyebrows. But she respected her, and it was to Mary's house that Mrs. Vondeplosshe repaired shortly after her arrival.
It was quite true that Beatrice Constantine would have developed much as Trudy had were the pampered person compelled to earn her living, and, like Trudy, too, would have married a half portion, bankrupt snob. As Trudy dashed into the Faithful living room, kissing Mary and her mother and shaking a finger at Luke, Mary thought what a splendid imitation she was of Beatrice returning from her honeymoon.
"As pretty as a picture," Mrs. Faithful declared, quite chirked up by the bridal atmosphere. "How do you do it, Trudy? And why didn't you write us something besides postals? They always seem like printed handbills to me."
"Especially mine," Luke protested. "One of Sing Sing with the line: 'I am thinking of you.'"
Trudy giggled. "I didn't have a minute and I bought postals in flocks. Oh, I adore New York! I'm wild to live there. I nearly passed away in New England, but of course we had to stay as long as they would have us."
She looked at herself in a mirror, conscious of Mary's amused expression. She wore a painfully bright blue tailored suit--she had made the skirt herself and hunted up a Harlem tailor to do the jacket--round-toed, white leather shoes stitched with bright blue, white silk stockings, an aviatrix cap of blue suede, and a white fox fur purchased at half price at a fire sale.
"I haven't any new jewellery except my wedding ring," she mourned. "I expected Gay's sister to give me one of her mother's diamond earrings--I think she might have. They are lovely stones--but she never made a move that way--she's horrid. As soon as I can afford to be independent I shall cut her, for she did her best to politely ask us to leave."
"You were there several weeks, weren't you?" Mary ventured.
"Yes--I grew tame. I learned a lot from her--I was pretty crude in some ways." Which was true. Trudy was quite as well-bred looking, at first glance, as the Gorgeous Girl. "It is always better to get your experience where the neighbours aren't watching. I didn't lose a minute. If I never did an honest day's work for Steve O'Valley I worked like a steam engine learning how to be a real lady, the sort Gay tried to marry but couldn't!"
"As if you weren't a little lady at all times," Mrs. Faithful added.
"Of course we are stony broke but Gay's brother-in-law just had to loan us some money in order to have us go. They gave us fifty dollars for a wedding present. Well, it was better than nothing. Gay has talked to a lot of concert managers and he's going to have some wonderful attractions next season. People have never taken Gaylord seriously; he really has had to discover himself, and he is----"
"Are you practising small talk on me?" Mary asked.
"You've said it," Trudy admitted. "That last is the way I'm going to talk about Gaylord to his friends. I'll make him a success if he will only mind me. Just think--I'll be calling on Beatrice O'Valley before long! She will have to know me because Gay helped furnish her apartment and was one of her ushers. It will mean everything for us to know her--and I'm never going to appear at all down and out, either. People never take you seriously if you seem to need money. Debt can't frighten me. I was raised on it. All I need is Gay's family reputation and my own hair and teeth and I'll breeze in before any of the other entries. I came to ask if you won't come to see where I live?" She smiled her prettiest. "Gay is at his club and we can talk. It was quite a bomb in the enemies' camp when he married--people just can't dun a married man like they do a bachelor."
"I'll come next week." Mary tried putting off the evil day.
"No--now. I want your advice--and to show you my clothes."
"You will have clothes, Trudy, when you don't have food."
"You have to these days--no good time unless you do."
She kissed Mrs. Faithful and promised to have them all up for dinner. Then she tucked her arm in Mary's and pranced down the street with her, talking at top speed of how horrid it was that they had to walk and not drive in a cab like Beatrice, and concluding with a dissertation on Gaylord's mean disposition.
"I'm not mean, Mary, unless I want to accomplish something--but Gaylord is mean on general principle. He sulks and tells silly lies when you come to really know him. Oh, I'm not madly in love--but we can get along without throwing things. It's better than marrying a clod-hopper who couldn't show me anything better than his mother's green-plush parlour."
"Doesn't it seem hard to have to pretend to love him?"
"No, he's so stupid," said the debonair Mrs. Vondeplosshe as she brought Mary up before the entrance of the Graystone, a cheap apartment house with a marble entrance that extended only a quarter of the way up; from there on ordinary wood and marbleized paper finished the deed. The Vondeplosshes had a rear apartment. Their windows looked upon ash cans and delivery entrances, the front apartments with their bulging bay windows being twenty-five dollars a month more rent. As it was, they were paying forty-five, and very lucky to have the chance to pay it.
Trudy unlocked the door with a flourish. All that Trudy had considered as really essential to the making of a home was a phonograph and a pier glass; the rest was simple--rent a furnished place and wear out someone else's things. The bandbox of a place with four cell-like rooms was by turns pitiful and amusing to Mary Faithful.
"We are just starting from here," Trudy reminded her as she watched the gray eyes flicker with humour or narrow with displeasure. "Wait and see--we'll soon be living neighbour to the O'Valleys. Besides, there is such an advantage in being married. You don't have to worry for fear you'll be an----"
"Old maid," finished Mary. "Out with it! You can't frighten me. I hope you and Gay never try changing your minds at the same time, for it would be a squeeze."
She selected a fragile gilt chair in the tiny living room with its imitation fireplace and row of painted imitation books in the little bookcase. This was in case the tenants had no books of their own--which the Vondeplosshes had not. If they possessed a library they could easily remove the painted board and give it to the janitor for safekeeping. There were imitation Oriental rugs and imitation-leather chairs and imitation-mahogany furniture, plated silver, and imitations of china and of linen were to be found in the small three-cornered dining room, which resembled a penurious wedge of cake, Mary thought as she tried saying something polite. The imitation extended to the bedroom with its wall bed and built-in chiffonier and dresser of gaudy walnut. Trudy had promptly cluttered up the last-mentioned article with smart-looking cretonne and near-ivory toilet articles. There was even a pathetic little wardrobe trunk they had bought for $28.75 in New York, and Trudy had painstakingly soaked off old European hotel labels she had found on one of Gay's father's satchels and repasted them on the trunk to give the impression of travel and money.
The kitchen was nothing but a dark hole with a rusty range and nondescript pots and pans. "Being in the kitchen gets me nothing, so why bother about it?" Trudy explained, hardly opening the door. "We have no halls or furnace to care for, and an apartment house sounds so well when you give an address. I wish we could have afforded a front one; it will be hard to have people climbing through the back halls. I have put in a good supply of canned soups and vegetables and powdered puddings, and we can save a lot on our food. We'll be invited out, too, and when we eat at home I can get a meal in a few minutes and I'll make Gay wash the dishes. Besides, I have a wonderful recipe for vanishing cream that his sister bought in Paris, and I'm going to have a little business myself, making it to supply to a few select customers as a favour. I'll sell small jars for a dollar and large ones for three, and I can make liquid face powder, too. Oh, we won't starve. And if you could wait for the money I know I owe you----"
"Call it a wedding present," Mary said, briefly.
"You lamb!"
Trudy fell on her neck and was in the throes of explaining how grateful she was and how she had an evening dress modelled after one of Gay's sister's, which cost seven hundred dollars before the war, when Gay appeared--very debonair and optimistic in his checked suit, velours hat, and toothpick-toed tan shoes, and his pale little eyes were quite animated as he kissed Trudy and dutifully shook hands with Mary, explaining that the Hunters of Arcadia had just offered him a clerical position at the club, ordering supplies and making out bills and so on--because he was married, very likely. It would pay forty a month and his lunches.
"And only take up your mornings! You can slip extra sandwiches in your pockets for me, deary. I'll give you a rubber-pocketed vest for a Christmas present," Trudy exclaimed. "Oh, say everything in front of Mary--she knows what we really are!"
At which Mary fled, with the general after impression of pale, wicked eyes and a checked suit and a dashing, red-haired young matron with a can opener always on hand, and the fact that the Vondeplosshes were going to lay siege to the O'Valleys as soon as possible.
Mary decided that it was a great privilege to be a profane lady concealing a heartache compared to other alternatives. At least heartaches were quite real. _