CHAPTER II
RODNEY LOSES A BATTLE
Rodney Bangs, author of "The Black Pearl" and co-author of "The ManAbove," was annoyed. When Mr. Bangs was annoyed he usually betrayed thefact, for his was an open nature.
He was betraying it now. His clear, red-brown eyes were clouded. Thehealthy pink of his youthful cheeks had deepened to an unbecoming flush.His wide, engaging grin, the grin of a friendly bulldog, was lacking,and his lips were set tight. Even his burnished red pomadour added tothe general pugnaciousness of his appearance. Standing up at its mostaggressive angle, it seemed to challenge the world.
Sitting on a low chair in the dressing-room of the bachelor apartment heand Laurence Devon occupied together, Rodney drew on a shoe and stampedhis foot down into it with an emphasis that shook the floor. Devon,fastening his tie before the full-length mirror set in the door leadingto their common bath-room, started at the sound, like a high-strungprima donna. This was one of Laurie's temperamental mornings.
"What the devil's the matter with you, Bangs?" he demanded, but withoutill humor. "Can't you get on a shoe without imitating the recoil of aseventy-five centimeter gun?"
Bangs grunted, drew on the other shoe, and drove his foot into it withincreased energy. Laurie looked at him, and this time there was a sparkin his black eyes. Very quietly he turned, crossed the small room, and,planting himself in front of his chum, resentfully stared down at thedynamic youth.
"What's the idea?" he demanded. "Are you deliberately trying to beannoying?"
Rodney did not raise his head. His fingers were busy with a complicatedknot.
"Oh, shut up!" he muttered.
Laurie, his hands in his pockets, remained where he was. Under hiscontinued inspection, the fingers of Bangs grew clumsy. He fumbled withthe knot, and, having unfastened it, prolonged to the utmost the processof lacing his shoes. He knew what must come as soon as he settled backin his chair. It had been coming for days. He was in for an unpleasantten minutes. But the situation was one he had deliberately created asthe only possible way of bringing about a serious talk with his friend.Now that it was here, he was anxious to make the most of it. With headbent and thoughts busy he played for time.
At last, the shoes laced and his campaign mapped out, he sat up and metLaurie's eyes. Their expression of antagonism, temporary though he knewit to be, hurt him. Devon, when he had his own way, and he usually hadit, was a singularly sweet-tempered chap. Never before, throughout theiryear of close association, had he looked at Bangs like that. Rodney knewthat he deserved the look. For days past he had deliberately subjectedhis companion to a series of annoyances, small but intensely irritating.
"Well?" demanded Laurie. "What's the answer?"
"What answer?" Rodney was in the position of a small boy challenged tocombat in cold blood. He was experiencing some difficulty in workinghimself up to the necessary heat for an engagement. But Laurie's nextwords helped him out.
"You've been making a damned nuisance of yourself for the last week," hesaid deliberately. "I want to know why."
Bangs squared his stocky shoulders and rose to his feet. His brown eyeswere below the level of his chum's black ones, but the two glances metsharply and a flash passed between them. Under the force of his risingexcitement the voice of Rodney shook.
"The reason I've been a damned nuisance," he said curtly, "is becauseyou've been acting like an infernal fool, and I'm sick of it."
Laurie's lips tightened, but the other rushed on without giving him achance to reply. The moment was his. He must crowd into it all he hadnot dared to say before and might not be given a chance to say again.
"Oh, I know what you'll say!" he cried. "It's none of my business, andyou're your own master, and all that sort of rot. And I know you're notdrinking, and God knows I'm not ass enough to take on any high moraltone and try to preach to you, whatever you do. What gets my goat,Devon, and the only thing I'm worrying about, is this damnable waste ofyour time and mine."
Laurie grinned, and the grin infuriated Bangs. He whirled away from it.A footstool impeded his progress, and he kicked it out of his way withlarge abandon. It was his habit to rush about a room when he was talkingexcitedly. He rushed about now; and Laurie lit a cigarette and watchedhim, at first angrily, then with a growing tolerance born of memories ofscenes in their plays which Bangs had threshed out in much this samemanner. The world could never be wholly uninteresting while Rodneypranced about in it, cutting the air with gestures like that.
"Here I am," snapped Rodney, "ready with my play, the best plot I've hadyet. You won't let me even mention it to you. Here's the new season.Here's Epstein, sitting on our door-mat with a check-book in each hand,waiting to put on anything we give him. You know he's lost a smallfortune this fall. You know it's up to us to give him a play that willpull him out of the hole he's in. Here's Haxon, the best director intown, marking time and holding off other managers in the hope that youand I will get down to business. And here you are, the fellow we're allcounting on--" He stopped for breath and adjectives.
"Yes," Laurie politely prompted him. "Here I am. What about it? What amI doing?"
"You know damned well what you're doing. You're loafing!" Bangs firedthe word at him as if it were a shell from a Big Bertha. "You're loafingtill it makes us all sick to look at you. We thought a week or two of itwould be enough, when you realized the conditions; but it's gone on fora month; and, instead of getting tired, you're getting more and moreinto the loafing habit. You abuse time till it shrieks in agony."
"Good sentence," applauded Laurie. "But don't waste it on me. Put itinto a play."
Bangs seemed not to hear him. He was standing by the room's one window,now, staring unseeingly out of it, his hands deep in his pockets, takingin the knowledge of the failure of his appeal. Under the realization ofthis he tossed a final taunt at his partner over his shoulder.
"I can forgive the big blunders a man makes in his life," he muttered;"but, by God, I haven't much patience with a chap that lies around andshirks at a time like this!"
Laurie removed the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth, and not findingan ash tray within reach, carefully crushed out its burning end againstthe polished top of the dressing-case. He had grown rather pale.
"That will be about all, Bangs," he said quietly. "What you and Epsteinand Haxon don't seem to remember is just one thing. If you don't likematters as they are, it's mighty easy to change them. It doesn't takehalf a minute to agree to dissolve a partnership."
"I know." Bangs returned to his chair, and, dropping limply into it, hishands still in his pockets, stared despondently at his outstretchedlegs. "That's all it means to you," he went on, morosely. "Ourpartnership is one in a thousand. It's based on friendship as well as onfinancial interest. If I do say it, it represents a combination ofbrains, ability, backing, and prospects that comes only once in alifetime, if it comes at all. Yet in one year you're sick of it, andtired of work. You're ready to throw it all over, and to throw over atthe same time the men whose interests are bound up with yours. You'redawdling in cabarets and roadhouses and restaurants, when you might bedoing Work--" Bangs's voice capitalized the word--"real work," he addedfiercely, "work other fellows would give their souls to be able to do."
He ended on a flat note, oddly unlike his usual buoyant tones, and satstill as if everything had been said.
Laurie lit a fresh cigarette, drew in a mouthful of smoke, and exhaledit in a series of pretty rings. In his brief college experience he haddevoted some time to acquiring this art. Admiringly watching the littlerings pass through the big rings, he spoke with studied carelessness.
"It was a pretty good scene, Bangs," he said, "and it showed carefulrehearsing. But it would be a lot more effective if you had a realsituation to base it on. As it is, you're making a devil of a row aboutnothing. I worked like a horse all last year, and you know it. Now I'mresting, or loafing, if you prefer to call it that, and"--he bit off thewords and fairly threw them at his friend--"it will save you and Epst
einand Haxon a lot of mental wear and tear if you will mind your ownbusiness and let me alone."
Bangs raised his eyes and dropped them again.
"You _are_ our business," he somberly reminded his partner. "I've got soI can't work without you," he added, with a humility new to him. "Youknow that. And you know I've got the plot. It's ready--great Scott, it'sboiling in me! I'm crazy to get it out. And here I've got to sit aroundwatching you kill time, while you know and I know that you'd be a damnsight happier if you were on the job. Good Lord, Laurie, work's thebiggest thing there is in life! Doesn't it mean anything at all to you?"
"Not just now." Laurie spoke with maddening nonchalance.
"Then there's something rotten in you."
Laurie winced, but made no answer. He hoped Bangs would go on talkingand thus destroy the echo of his last words, with which the silent roomseemed filled. But nothing came. Rodney's opportunity had passed, and hewas lost in depressed realization of its failure. Laurie strolled backto the mirror, his forgotten tie dangling in his hand.
"We'll let it go at that," he said then. "Think things over, and make upyour mind what you want to do about the contract."
"All right."
Bangs replied in the same flat notes he had used a moment before, andwithout changing his position; but the two words gave Laurie a shock. Hedid not believe that either Rodney or Epstein would contemplate adissolution of their existing partnership; but an hour ago he would nothave believed that Rodney Bangs could say to him the things he had saidjust now.
He was beginning to realize that he had tried his partners sorely in themonth that had passed since his return to town; and all for what? Hehimself had brought out of the foolish experience nothing save a tirednervous system, a sense of boredom such as he had not known for a year,and, especially when he looked at Bangs, an acute mental discomfortwhich introspective persons would probably have diagnosed as the pangsof conscience. Laurie did not take the trouble to diagnose it. He merelyresented it as a grievance added to the supreme grievance based on thefact that he had not yet even started on the high adventure he hadpromised himself.
He was gloomily considering both grievances, and tying his tie with hisusual care, when something in the mirror caught and held his attention.He looked at it, at first casually, then with growing interest. In theglass, directly facing him, was a wide studio window. It was open,notwithstanding the cold January weather, and a comfortable,middle-aged, plump woman, evidently a superior type of caretaker, wassitting on the sill, polishing an inner pane. The scene was as vivid asa mirage, and it was like the mirage in that it was projected from somepoint which itself remained unseen.
Laurie turned to the one window the dressing-room afforded--a doubleFrench window, at his right, but a little behind him, and reaching tothe floor. Through this he could see across a court the opposite side ofhis own building, but no such window or commonplace vision as had justcome to him. In his absorption in the phenomenon he called to Bangs, whorose slowly, and, coming to his side, regarded the scene without muchinterest.
"It's a cross projection from a house diagonally opposite us," he said,after studying the picture a moment. "It must be that old red studiobuilding on the southwest corner of the square. If we had a room back ofthis and looking toward the west, we could see the real window."
"As it is," said Laurie, "we've got a reserved seat for an intimatestudy of any one who lives there. I wonder who has that studio?"
Bangs had no idea. He was grateful to the little episode, however, forspreading over the yielding ground beneath his feet the solid strip onwhich he had crossed back to his chum. He threw an arm across Laurie'sshoulders and looked into his face, with something in his expressionthat reminded young Devon of a favorite collie he had loved and lost inboyhood.
"All right now?" the look asked, just as the dog's look had asked it ofthe little chap of ten, when something had gone wrong. Rodney's creed oflife was held together by a few primitive laws, the first of which wasloyalty. Already he was reproaching himself for what he had said anddone. Laurie carefully completed the tying of his tie, and turned to himwith his gayest smile.
"Hurry up and finish dressing," he cheerfully suggested, "and we'll goout to breakfast. Since you insist on waiting 'round for me like Mary'slittle lamb, I suppose I've got to feed you."
Rodney's wide grin responded, for the first time in many days. Hebustled about, completing his toilet, and ten minutes later the twoyoung men started out together with a lightness of spirit which eachenjoyed and neither wholly understood. Both had a healthy horror of"sentimental stuff" and a gay, normal disregard of each other's feelingsin ordinary intercourse. But in the past half-hour, for the first timein their association, they had come close to a serious break, and thesoul of each had been chilled by a premonitory loneliness as definite asthe touch of an icy finger. In the quick reaction they experienced nowtheir spirits soared exultantly. They breakfasted in a fellowship suchas they had not known since Barbara's marriage, the month before.
If Bangs had indulged in any dream of a change of life in Laurie,however, following this reconciliation, the next few days destroyed thetender shoots of that hope. Laurie's manner retained its pleasantcamaraderie, but work and he met as strangers and passed each other by.The routine of his days remained what they had been during the past fiveweeks. He gadded about, apparently harmlessly, came home at shockinghours, and spent most of the bracing January days wrapped in a healthfulslumber that infuriated Bangs, who wandered in and out of theirapartment like an unhappy ghost. On the rare occasions when he andRodney lunched or dined together, Laurie was entirely good-humored andwhen Epstein was with them seemed wholly impervious to any hints thrownout, none too subtly, by his producing partner.
"Listen, Laurie," said that disgusted individual, almost a month afterthe new year had been ushered in, "the new year's here. That's a goodtime for a young fella to get busy again on somethin' vorth while. Ain'tI right?"
Laurie suppressed a yawn and carefully struck off with his little fingerthe firm ash of an excellent cigarette. He was consuming thirty orforty cigarettes a day, and his nerves were beginning to show the effectof this indulgence.
"I believe it is," he courteously agreed. "It has been earnestlyrecommended to the young as a good time to start something."
"Vell," Epstein's voice took on the guttural notes of his temperamentalmoments, "don't that mean nothin' to you?"
Laurie grinned. He had caught the quick look of warning Bangs shot atthe producer and it amused him.
"Not yet," he said. "Not till I've had my adventure."
Epstein sniffed.
"The greatest adventure in life," he stated dogmatically, "is to make alot of money. I tell you vy. Because then you got all the otheradventures you can handle, trying to hold on to it!"
Bangs, who was developing a new and hitherto unsuspected vein of tact,encouraged Epstein to enlarge on this congenial theme. He now fullyrealized that Devon would go his own gait until he wearied of it, andthat no argument or persuasion could enter his armor-clad mind. Theposition of Bangs was a difficult one, for while he was accepting andassimilating this unpleasant fact, Epstein and Haxon--impatient men bytemperament and without much training in self-control--were gettingwholly out of patience and therefore out of hand. Haxon, indeed, was forthe time entirely out of hand, for he had finally started the rehearsalsof a new play which, he grimly informed Bangs, would make "The ManAbove" look like a canceled postage-stamp.
Bangs repeated the comment to his chum the next morning, during the latedressing-hour which now gave them almost their only opportunity for afew words together. He had hoped it would make an impression, and helistened with pleasure to a sharp exclamation from Laurie, who chancedto be standing before the door mirror in the dressing-room, brushing hishair. The next instant Bangs realized that it was not his news which hadevoked the tribute of that exclamation.
"Come here!" called Laurie, urgently. "Here's something new; and, byJove, isn't she a beauty!" br />
Bangs interrupted his toilet to lounge across the room. Looking overLaurie's shoulder, his eyes found the cynosure that held the gaze of hisfriend. The wide-open studio window was again reflected in the mirror,but with another occupant.
This was a girl, young and lovely. She appeared in the window like ahalf-length photograph in a frame. Her body showed only from above thewaist. Her elbows were on the sill. Her chin rested in the hollows ofher cupped hands. Her wavy hair, parted on one side and drawn softlyover the ears in the fashion of the season, was reddish-gold. Her eyeswere brown, and very thoughtful. Down-dropped, they seemed to stare atsomething on the street below, but the girl's expression was not that ofone who was looking at an object with interest. Instead, she seemed lostin a deep and melancholy abstraction.
Laurie, a hair-brush in each hand, stared hard at the picture.
"Isn't she charming!" he cried again.
Bangs's reply revealed a severely practical side of his nature.
"She'll have a beastly cold in the head if she doesn't shut thatwindow," he grumpily suggested. But his interest, too, was aroused. Hestared at the girl in the mirror with an attention almost equal toLaurie's.
As they looked, she suddenly stirred and moved backward, as if occultlywarned of their survey. They saw her close the window, and, drawing achair close to it, sit down and stare out through the pane, still withthat intent, impersonal expression. Bangs strolled back to thedressing-case and resumed his interrupted toilet. Laurie, fumblingvaguely with his brushes, kept his eyes on the girl in the mirror.
"Do you suppose we could see her if we went out on the street?" heasked, suddenly.
"Her? Oh, you mean that girl?" With difficulty Bangs recalled histhoughts from Haxon's new play. "No, I don't think so," he decided. "Yousee, we're up on the tenth floor, so she must be fairly high up, too."
"She's a wonder." Laurie was still gazing into the mirror. "Prettiestgirl I've ever seen, I think," he reflected aloud.
Bangs snorted.
"She's probably a peroxide," he said. "Even if she isn't, she can't holda candle to your sister."
"Oh, Barbara--" Laurie considered the question of Barbara's beauty as ifit were new to him. "Babs is good-looking," he handsomely conceded. "Butthere's something about this girl that's unusual. Perhaps it's herexpression. She doesn't look happy."
Bangs sighed with ostentation.
"If you want to study some one that isn't happy, look at me," he invitedwarmly. "If that play of mine isn't out of me pretty soon, I'll have tohave an operation!"
Laurie made no reply to this pathetic prediction, and Bangs sadly shookhis head and concluded his toilet, meditating gloomily the while on theunpleasant idiosyncrasies of every one he knew. To see Devon turnsuddenly into a loafer upset all his theories as well as all his plans.
Laurie, for some reason, dawdled more than usual that morning. It wasafter eleven before he went to breakfast. An hour earlier Bangs departedalone for their pet restaurant.
The girl in the mirror remained at her window for a long time, andLaurie watched her in growing fascination. It was not until she rose anddisappeared that he felt moved to consider so sordid a question as thatof food.
He joined Bangs just as that youth was finishing his after-breakfastcigar. Even under its soothing influence, he was in the mood of combinedexasperation and depression with which his friends were becomingfamiliar.
"If we had begun work as soon as we got back to town after your sister'swedding," he told Laurie, "we'd have had two acts ready by now, in therough."
"No reason why you shouldn't have four acts ready, so far as I can see,"murmured Laurie, cheerfully attacking his grape-fruit. "All you've gotto do is to write 'em."
Bangs's lips set.
"Not till I've talked 'em over with you and got your ideas," hedeclared, positively. "If you'd just let me give you an outline--"
Laurie set down his cup.
"Do I get my breakfast in peace, or don't I?" he demanded, coldly.
"You do, confound you!"
Bangs bit off the end of a fresh cigar and smoked it in stolid silence.He was a person of one idea. If he couldn't talk about the play, hecouldn't talk at all. He meditated, considering his characters, hissituations, his partner's and his own position, in a mental jumble thathad lately become habitual and which was seriously affecting his nerves.Laurie, as he ate, chatted cheerfully and at random, apparently avoidingwith care any subject that might interest his partner. Bangs roseabruptly.
"Well, I'm off," he said. "See you at dinner time, I suppose."
But Laurie, it appeared, had engagements. He was taking a party offriends out to Gedney Farms that evening, in his new car, and they mightdecide to stay there for a day or two. Also, though he did not confidethis fact to Bangs, he had an engagement for the afternoon, at a placewhere the card rooms were quiet and elegant and the stakes high.
He had been there half a dozen times, and had played each time. He hadbeen able to keep himself in hand. In fact, a great part of thefascination of the game now lay in the study of its effect on himselfand its test of his new-born will power. Thus far, he had played exactlyas much as he had planned to play, and had secretly exulted in the fact.What he intended, he told himself, was to learn to do things inmoderation; neither to fear them nor to let them master him.
The attraction of these diversions filled his mind. He quite forgot thegirl in the mirror, and it was no thought of her that drew him back toNew York that night. The plans of his guests had changed, that was all.The change brought him home at eleven o'clock. Bangs was in his ownroom, finding in sleep a wall of unconsciouness that separated him fromhis troubles. Laurie decided upon the novel pleasure of a long night ofslumber for himself.
He fell asleep with surprising ease, and immediately, as it seemed, hesaw the girl in the mirror. She was walking toward him, through whatappeared to be a heavy fog. Her hands were outstretched to him, and hehurried to meet her; but even as he did so the fog closed down and helost her, though he seemed to hear her voice, calling him from somewherefar away.
He awoke late in the morning with every detail of the dream vivid in hismind, so vivid, indeed, that when he approached the mirror after hismorning plunge, it seemed almost a continuation of the dream to find thegirl there.
He stopped short with a chuckle. The curtains of his French window weredrawn apart, and in the mirror he saw the reflection of the girl as shestood in profile near her own uncurtained window and slowly dressed herhair.
It was wonderful hair, much more wonderful down than up. Laurie, who hada sophisticated notion that most of the hair on the heads of girls heknew had been purchased as removable curls and "transformations," staredwith pleasure at the red-gold mass that fell down over the girl's whitegarment. Then, with a little shock, he realized that the white garmentwas a nightdress. It was evident that, high in her lonely room, the girlthought herself safe from observation and was quietly making her toiletfor the morning.
Well, she should be safe. With a quick jerk, Laurie drew together theheavy curtains that hung at the sides of the long window. Then, smilinga little, he slowly dressed. His thoughts dwelt on the girl. It was oddthat she should be literally projected into his life in that unusualfashion. He had never had any such experience before, nor had he heardof one just like it. It was unique and pleasant. It was especiallypleasant to have her so young and so charming to look at. She might havebeen a disheveled art student, given to weird color effects, or anaustere schoolma'am, or some plump and matter-of-fact person who setmilk bottles on the sill and spread wet handkerchiefs to dry on thewindow-panes. As it was, all that disturbed him was her expression. Hewished he knew her name and something more about her. His thoughts werefull of her.
Before he left the room he parted the curtains again to open the windowwide, following his usual program. As he did so he glanced into hismirror. He saw her open window, but it was lifeless. Only his owndisappointed face confronted him.