Who Cares? A Story of Adolescence

  IV

  Pagliacci was to be followed as usual by "Cavalleria." It was the swansong of the opera season.

  In a part that he acted as well as he sang, Caruso had been permittedfinally to retire, wringing wet, to his dressing room. With all thedignity of a man of genuine feeling and sensitiveness he had taken callafter call on the fall of the curtain and stood bent almost doublebefore the increasing breakers of applause. Once more he had done hisbest in a role which demanded everything that he had of voice andpassion, comedy and tragedy. Once more, although his soul was with hiscomrades in battle, he had played the fool and broken his heart for thebenefit of his good friends in front.

  In her box on the first tier Mrs. Cooper Jekyll, in a dressimaginatively designed to display a considerable quantity of herfigure, was surrounded by a party which attracted many glasses. AlicePalgrave was there, pretty and scrupulously neat, even perhaps a littleprim, her pearls as big as marbles. Mrs. Alan Hosack made a mosteffective picture with her black hair and white skin in ageranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life. Mrs. Noel d'Oylylent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely but alltoo ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel intimacy.Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with diamondsglistening in her hair like dew. Of the four men, Gilbert Palgrave,standing where he could be seen, might have been an illustration by DuMaurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen. He made the otherthree, all of the extraordinary ordinary type, appear fifty per cent,more manly than they really were--the young old Hosack with hisgroomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, whoretained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noeld'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravestnaturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of the male andfemale spider.

  Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm. "Will you dosomething for me?" she asked.

  Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness. "It alldepends whether it will upset any of my plans," she said.

  "I wouldn't have asked you if I had thought that."

  Joan laughed. "You've been studying my character, Alice."

  "I did that at school, my dear." Mrs. Palgrave spoke lightly, but itwas plain to see that there was something on her mind. "Don't go out tosupper with Howard Cannon. Come back with me. I want to talk to you.Will you?"

  Joan had recently danced in Cannon's huge studio-apartment and beenoppressed by its Gulliveresque atmosphere, and she had just come fromthe Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a characteristicallydignified dinner had got on her nerves. Gilbert, she knew, was engagedto play roulette at the club, and none of her other new men friends wasavailable for dancing. She hadn't seen anything of Martin for severaldays. She could easily oblige Alice under the circumstances.

  So she said: "Yes, of course I will--just to prove how very little youreally know about me."

  "Thank you," said Alice. "I'll say that I have a headache and thatyou're coming home with me. Don't be talked out of it."

  A puzzled expression came into Joan's eyes, and she turned her shoulderto Palgrave, who was giving her his most amorous glances. "It doesn'tmatter," she said, "but I notice that you are all beginning to treat melike a sort of moral weathercock. I wonder why?" She gave no morethought to the matter which just for the most fleeting moment hadrather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music of Mascagni's immortalopera entirely ignoring the fact that Palgrave's face was within aninch of her shoulder and that Alan Hosack, on her other side, waswhispering heavy compliments.

  Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who hadbeen her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she hadgiven all her heart. In spite of the fact that she had been married ayear and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which madeup New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist. As a fiction-fedgirl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriageshe would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagantpeople who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks anddrakes with the Commandments. She had accepted as a fact thenovelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous withflippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of moneyand leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in humannature. Perhaps a little to her disappointment, she had soon discoveredhow grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was. She hadreturned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the warand had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known womenwhose names, in the public imagination, were associated with decadenceand irresponsibility, were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Crosswork and allied war charities; that the majority of the men who werepopularly supposed to be killing time with ingenious wickedness workedas hard as the average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantesnewly burst upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselvestogether as a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly animmense number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France andEngland. Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old namesof New York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heardof later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulanceworkers on the Western front. Beautiful girls had slipped quietly awayfrom their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to work inAllied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not asfull-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.

  There were, of course, the Oldershaws and the Marie Littlejohns and theChristine Hurleys and the rest. Alice had met and watched them throwingthemselves against any bright light like all silly moths. And therewere the girls like Joan, newly released from the exotic atmosphere ofthose fashionable finishing schools which no sane country shouldpermit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and fillies, shebelieved, had excuses. They were the natural results of a complete lackof parental discipline and school training. They ran amuck, advertisedby the press and applauded by the hawks who pounced upon their wallets.They were more to be pitied than condemned, far more foolish andridiculous than decadent. They were not unique, either, or peculiar totheir own country. Every nation possessed its "smart set," its littlegroup of men and women who were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and eventhe war and its iron tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. In herparticularly sane way of looking at things, Alice saw all this, wasproud to know that the majority of the people who formed Americansociety were fine and sound and generous, and kept as much as possibleout of the way of those others whose one object in life was to outragethe conventions. It was only when people began to tell her of seeingher husband and her friend about together night after night that shefound herself wondering, with jealousy in her heart, how long heroptimism would endure, because Gilbert had already shown her a foot ofclay, and Joan was deliberately flying wild.

  It was, at any rate, all to the good that Joan kept her promise andutterly refused to be turned by the pleadings and blandishments ofCannon and Hosack. They drove together to Palgrave's elaborate house, afaithful replica of one of the famous Paris mansions in the AvenueWagram and sat down to a little supper in Alice's boudoir.

  They made a curious picture, these two children, one just over twenty,the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room hung withFrench tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged gilt chairs andtables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing, with all the gravityand imitative genius of little girls in a nursery, at being grown up.

  While the servants moved discreetly about, Joan kept up a rattle ofimpersonalities, laughing at Cannon's amazing mustache and Gargantuanfurniture, enthusing wildly over Caruso's once-in-a-century voice,throwing satire at Mrs. Cooper Jekyll's confirmed belief in her divineright to queen it, and saying things that made Alice chuckle about thed'Oylys--that apparently ill-matched pair. She drank a glass ofchampagne with the air of a connoisseur and finally, having displayedan excellent appetite, mounted a cigarette into a long thinmother-of-pearl holder, lighted it
and sank with a sigh into the room'sone comfortable chair.

  "Gilbert gave me a cigarette holder like that," said Alice.

  "Yes? I think this comes from him," said Joan. "A thoughtful person!"

  That Joan was not quite sure from whom she received it annoyed Alicefar more than if she had boasted of it as one of Gilbert's numerousgifts. She needed no screwing up now to say what she had rather timidlybrought this cool young slip of a thing there to discuss.

  "Will you tell me about yourself and Gilbert?" she asked quietly. Therewas no need for Joan to act complete composure. She felt it. "What isthere to tell, my dear?"

  "I hope there isn't anything--I mean anything that matters. But perhapsyou don't know that people have begun to talk about you, and I thinkyou owe it to me to be perfectly frank."

  Even then it didn't occur to Joan that there was anything serious inthe business. "I'll be as frank as the front page of The Times--'Allthe news that's fit to print,'" she said. "What do you want to know?"

  Alice proved her courage. She drew up a chair, bent forward and camestraight to the point. "Be honest with me, Joan, even if you have tohurt me. Gilbert is very handsome, and women throw themselves at him. Idid, I suppose; but having won him and being still in my first year ofmarriage, I'm naturally jealous when he lets himself be drawn off bythem. The women who have tried to take Gilbert away from me I didn'tknow, and they owed me no friendship. But you're different, and I can'tbelieve that you--"

  Joan broke in with a peal of laughter. "Can't you? Why not? I haven'tgot wings on my shoulders. Isn't everything fair in love and war?"

  Alice drew back. She had many times been called prim and old-fashioned,especially at school, by Joan and others when men were talked about,and the glittering life that lay beyond the walls. Sophistication, toput it mildly, had been the order of the day in that temporary home ofthe young idea. But this calm declaration of disloyalty took her coloraway, and her breath. Here was honesty with a vengeance!

  "Joan!" she cried. "Joan!" And she put up her hand as though to wardoff an unbelievable thought.

  In an instant Joan was on her feet with her arms around the shouldersof the best friend she had, whose face had gone as white as stone. "Oh,my dear," she said, "I'm sorry. Forgive me. I didn't mean that in theleast, not in the very least. It was only one of my cheap flippancies,said just to amuse myself and shock you. Don't you believe me?"

  Tears came to Alice. She had had at least one utterly sleepless nightand several days of mental anguish. She was one of the women who lovetoo well. She confessed to these things, brokenly, and it came as akind of shock to Joan to find some one taking things seriously andallowing herself to suffer.

  "Why, Alice," she said, "Gilbert means nothing to me. He's a dear oldthing; he's awfully nice to look at; he sums things up in a way thatmakes me laugh; and he dances like a streak. But as to flirting withhim or anything of that sort--why, my dear, he looks on me as a littleboob from the country, and in my eyes he's simply a man who carries alatchkey to amusement and can give me a good time. That's true. I swearit."

  It was true, and Alice realized it, with immense relief. She dried hereyes and held Joan away from her at arm's length and looked at heryoung, frank, intrepid face with puzzled admiration. It didn't go withher determined trifling. "I shall always believe what you tell me,Joan," she said. "You've taken a bigger load than you imagine off myheart--which is Gilbert's. And now sit down again and be comfortableand let's do what we used to do at school at night and talk aboutourselves. We've both changed since those days, haven't we?"

  "Have we? I don't think I have." Joan took another cigarette and wentback to her chair. Her small round shoulders looked very white againstthe black of a velvet cushion. If there was nothing boyish orunfeminine about her, there was certainly an indefinable appearance ofbeing untouched, unawakened. She was the same girl who had been foundby Martin that afternoon clean-cut against the sky--the determinedindividualist.

  Alice sat in front of her on a low stool with her hands clasped round aknee. "What a queer mixture you are of--of town and country, Joany.You're like a piece of honeysuckle playing at being an orchid."

  "That's because I'm a kid," said Joan. "The horrible hour will comewhen I shall be an orchid and try and palm myself off as honeysuckle,never fear."

  "Don't you think marriage has changed you a little?" asked Alice. "Itusually does. It changed me from an empty-headed little fool to a womanwith oh, such a tremendous desire to be worthy of it."

  "Yes, but then you married for love."

  "Didn't you, Joany?"

  "I? Marry for love?" Joan waved her arm for joy at the idea.

  Alice knew the story of the escape from old age. She also knew from theway in which Martin looked at Joan why he had given her his name andhouse. Here was her chance to get to the bottom of a constant puzzle."You may not have married for love," she said, "but of course you'refond of Martin."

  Joan considered the matter. It might be a good thing to go into it nowthat there was an unexpected lull in the wild rush that she had made toget into life. There had been something rather erratic about Martin'scomings and goings during the last week. She hadn't spoken to him sincethe night at the Ritz.

  "Yes, I am fond of him," she said. "That's the word. As fond as I mightbe of a very nice, sound boy whom I'd known all my life."

  "Is that all?"

  Joan made a series of smoke rings and watched them curl into the air."Yes, that's all," she said.

  Alice became even more interested and curious and puzzled. She heldvery serious views about marriage. "And are you happy with him?"

  "I don't know that I can be said to be happy with him," said Joan. "I'mperfectly happy as things are."

  "Tell me how they are." There was obviously something here that was farfrom right.

  Joan was amused at her friend's gravity. She had always been aresponsible little person with very definite and old-fashioned views."Well," she said, "it's a charming little story, really. I was themaiden who had to be rescued from the ugly castle, and Martin was theknight who performed the deed. And being a knight with a tremendoussense of convention and a castle of his own full of well-trainedservants, it didn't seem to him that he could give me the run of hishouse in the Paul and Virginia manner, which isn't being done now; andso, like a little gentleman, he married me, or as I suppose you wouldput it, went through the form of marriage. It's all part of theadventure that we started one afternoon on the edge of the woods. Icall it the cool and common-sense romance of two very modern andcivilized people."

  "I don't think there's any place in romance for such things as coolnessand common sense," said Alice warmly. "And as to there being two verymodern and civilized people in your adventure, as you call it, that Idoubt."

  Joan's large brown eyes grew a little larger, and she looked at theenthusiastic girl in front of her with more interest. "Do you?" sheasked. "Why?"

  Alice got up. She was disturbed and worried. She had a great affectionfor Joan, and that boy was indeed a knight. "I saw Martin walking awayfrom your house the night you dined with Gilbert at the Brevoort--I wastold about that!--and there was something in his eyes that wasn't theleast bit cool. Also I rode in the Park with him one morning a weekago, and I thought he looked ill and haggard and--if you mustknow--starved. No one would say that you aren't modern andcivilized,--and those are tame words,--but if Martin were to come innow and make a clean breast of it, you'd be surprised to find howlittle he is of either of those things, if I know anything about him."

  "Then, my dear," replied Joan, making a very special ring of smoke,"you know more about him than I do."

  Alice began to walk about. A form of marriage--that was the phrase thatstuck in her mind. And here was a girl who was without a genuine friendin all that heartless town except herself, and a fine boy who neededone, she began to see, very badly. She, at any rate, and she thankedGod for it, was properly married, and she owed it to friendship to makea try to put things right with these two.
/>
  "Joan, I believe I do," she said. "I really believe I do, although I'veonly had one real talk with him. You're terribly and awfully young, Iknow. You had a bad year with your grandfather and grandmother, and thereaction has made you wild and careless. But you're not a girl who hasbeen brought up behind a screen in a room lighted with one candle. Youknow what marriage means. There isn't a book you haven't read or athing you haven't talked over. And if you imagine that Martin iscontent to play Paul to your imitation Virginia, you're wrong. Oh,Joan, you're dangerously wrong."

  Settling into her chair and working her shoulders more comfortably intothe cushion, Joan crossed one leg over the other and lighted anothercigarette. "Go on," she said with a tantalizing smile. "I love to hearyou talk. It's far more interesting than listening to Howard Cannon'sdark prophecies about the day after to-morrow and his gloomy rumblingsabout the writing on the wall. You stand for the unemancipated marriedwoman. Don't you?"

  "Yes, I do," said Alice quickly, her eyes gleaming. "I consider that agirl who lets a man marry her under false pretenses is a cheat."

  "A strong word, my dear!"

  "But not too strong."

  "Wait a minute. Suppose she doesn't love him. What then?"

  "Then she oughtn't to have married him."

  "Yes, but it may have suited her to marry him."

  "Then she should fulfill the bargain honestly and play the gameaccording to the rules. However modern and civilized people are, theydo that."

  Joan shrugged her round white shoulders and flicked her cigarette ashexpertly into the china tray on the spindle-legged table at her elbow.She was quite unmoved. Alice had always taken it upon herself tolecture her about individualism--the enthusiastic little thing. "Dearold girl," she said, "don't you remember that I always make my ownrules?"

  "I know you do, but you can't tell me that Martin wants to go bythem--or that he'll be able to remain a knight long, while you're goingby one set and he's keen to go by another? Where will it end?"

  "End? But why drag in the end when Martin and I are only at thebeginning?"

  Alice sat down again and bent forward and caught up Joan's unoccupiedhand. "Listen, dear," she said with more than characteristicearnestness. "Last night I went with the Merrills to the ZiegfeldFollies, and I saw Martin there with a little white-faced girl with redlips and the golden hair that comes out of a bottle."

  "Good old Martin!" said Joan. "The devil you did!"

  "Doesn't that give you a jar?"

  "Good heavens, no! If you'd peeked into the One-o'clock Club thismorning at half past two, you would have seen me with a white-faced manwith a red mustache and a kink in his hair that comes from a hot iron.Martin and I are young and giddy, and we're on the round-about, andwe're hitting it up. Who cares?"

  There was a little silence--and then Alice drew back, shaking herpretty neat head. "It won't do, Joany," she said, "it won't do. I'veheard you say 'Who cares?' loads of times and never seen anybody takeyou by the shoulders and shake you into caring. That's why you go onsaying it. But somebody always cares, Joany dear, and there's not onething that any of us can say or do that doesn't react on some one else,either to hurt or bless. Martin Gray's your knight. You said so. Don'tyou be the one to turn his gleaming armor into commonbroadcloth--please, please don't."

  Joan gave a little laugh and a little yawn and stretched herself like aboy and got up. "Who'd have thought it? It's half-past twelve, andwe're both losing our much needed beauty sleep. I must really tearmyself away." She put her arm around Alice and kissed her. "The samedear little wise, responsible Alice who would like to put the earthinto woolens with a mustard plaster on its chest. But it takes allsorts to make up a world, you know, and it would be rather drab withouta few butterflies. Don't throw bricks at me until I've fluttered a bitmore, Ally. My colors won't last long, and I know what old age means,better than most. If I were in love as you are, my man's rules would bethe ones I'd go by all the time; but I'm not in love, and I don't wantto be--yet; and I'm only a kid, and I think I have the right to myfling. This marriage of mine is just a part of the adventure thatMartin and I plunged into as a great joke, and he knows it and he's oneof the best, and I'm grateful to him, believe me. Good night. God blessyou!"

  She stood for a moment on the top step to taste the air that was filledwith the essence of youth. Across a sky as clear as crystal a series ofyoung clouds were chasing each other, putting out the stars for amoment as they scurried playfully along. It was a joy to be alive andfit and careless. Summer was lying in wait for spring, and autumn wouldlay a withering hand upon summer, and winter with its crooked limbs andlack-luster eyes was waiting its inevitable turn.

  "A short life and a merry one!" whispered Joan to the moon, throwing ita kiss.

  A footman, sullen for want of sleep, opened the door of the limousine.Some one was sitting in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest.

  "Marty! Is that you?"

  "It's all right," said Gilbert Palgrave. "I've been playing patiencefor half an hour. I'm going to see you home."