Comedy_American Style

  Now here was Chris with his background of long association swept suddenly out of her orbit . . . removed not only by his mother’s ungraciousness but by the unexpected tepidness of his proposal. . . . Somehow the whole adventure left her feeling flat and bewildered and in some strange manner a failure. . . . Mrs. Cary had come to apprise her of her unworthiness. Christopher, seeking in his dilemma essential womanhood, had found her unable, unwilling to meet his demands.

  She smiled wryly. Compared with the realities of life the figments of imagination which every night she presented on the stage, faded into nothingness. She had always sought love. What about giving it? If she had loved Christopher sufficiently, as well as Phebe, she knew, loved Nicholas Campbell, she might have acceded to his request. She might have brought some beauty and orderliness into his troubled life. . . . Confused and inexplicably disappointed she sat for a long time shivering in the chilling room. . . .

  CHAPTER VII

  SATURDAY afternoon which a mere six months ago was to Phebe another name for Rapture, now represented to her the lowest depth, the ultimate nadir of boredom. She had been known to spend the holiday in the dress-shop, tabulating the old models, inserting new ones, reviewing and recopying their simple accounts. Today, however, she had decided to leave the shop at one o’clock. She would walk out Chestnut Street, treat herself to the green hat and the white gloves which she had noticed at Shaftesbury’s, go to a movie, perhaps, then home.

  “And if I feel like it,” she said, putting the last dash of powder on her nose before the long mirror, “I’ll go with Johnny Albans to the Fortnightly tonight.”

  This was the first time since that night, six months ago when she had bade Nicholas Campbell good-bye, that she had felt any interest in living. She welcomed these desires which had sprung so spontaneously within her as a sick man might welcome manifestations of returning strength. If she could just hope to recover one tithe of her old joyousness, her old satisfaction in being alive which Llewellyn Nash had so envied her! . . .

  He was in Italy now or she might consider spending the afternoon with him. . . . He might at least be a cure for ghosts. . . . Smiling a little at the conceit she stepped out of the store into the Saturday afternoon quiet of Walnut Street to confront the very person of whom she had been thinking.

  He came toward her, panting a little. “I actually ran, Phebe. I was so afraid I’d miss you. I met Madame Rémy on the street; she seemed to think you might be spending the afternoon here. But I couldn’t believe you’d spend a day like this indoors. . . . Glad to see me, Child?”

  “I don’t know when I’ve been so glad to see anybody! How long have you been back, Llewellyn?”

  “Two days . . . I’d have telephoned you before, but I’m just getting on my feet.” And indeed he was still a little pale. “You know, I’m one of those people who suffer from a voyage after I’ve set my feet on terra firma. . . . Have you had your lunch yet, Lovely Girl?”

  “No,” she said smiling. “Would you like me to have it with you?”

  “Would I?” He hesitated. “I suppose you’re all dated up for this afternoon?”

  “Not unless it’s with you, my lord.”

  “You don’t mean to say you’d spend it with me? Phebe, would you for once, let me give you the kind of day I’d like?”

  She acquiesced. “Just let me telephone my mother.”

  “And while you telephone . . . Here, come up with me to the Bellevue Stratford. You can do your telephoning there while I do some of my own. . . . Wait in the lobby till I come back.”

  In half an hour he had returned to escort her outside to a long, low car. . . . “The kind they call ‘rakish’ in the novels,” Phebe said smiling. “Goodness me, you didn’t step out and buy it, did you?”

  “Not exactly . . . no, it belongs to a friend of mine, . . . fellow I went to school with. . . . Isn’t she sweet? Step in, Phebe.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the home of a twentieth cousin, Steve Folsom. . . . He’s a writer and he has this little . . . shack, he calls it, out on the Main Line . . .just this side of Roselands. I saw him in Florence week before last and he told me to use it whenever I wanted to . . . gave me the keys and all . . . but anyway, there’s a caretaker and his wife there all the time. I just phoned to her. . . . She’s preparing lunch for us. So you see you’ll have time to work up some appetite.”

  In an incredibly short time they were at the house, a long, low, rambling building covered with ivy. A wide loggia completed one end and here amid climbing vines, with apple blossoms drifting by in the bright May weather, the housekeeper had set a table. In the mellow gloom the snowy drapery, the gleaming silver were startlingly visible.

  It had been a hot drive, for the day was unseasonably warm. Nash led Phebe into a long, rather narrow room, lined completely with books; its atmosphere cool and inviting.

  “Steve does himself pretty well, doesn’t he? You can sit here and rest until she calls us; or if you prefer you can go upstairs to powder. . . . Not that I see anything the matter with your face.”

  “I did powder, just before you came. I can’t help what my face looks like. I’m not going to budge till I see, smell and taste food. I’d be afraid to leave you with it. I never noticed before how wolfish your eye is.”

  “The better to see you with, my dear.”

  At the perfectly spread table, the talk turned to his recent visit to Italy. Nash was a superb conversationalist, painting unforgettable pictures of Florence and Sorrento, telling her laughingly of an adventure of his, high up in the bleak Italian Alps, where he had encountered bandits.

  “There were only two of them, and I managed to draw my revolver first . . . or I might not be here lunching with you.”

  “What a wonderful life you lead! You make it sound all very marvelous. . . . I suppose it’s all because you’re so rich. I’ve never thought very much about money, except in so far as it kept me from disgusting poverty.”

  “You’ve been really poor, Phebe?”

  “Horribly . . . you’ve no idea. . . .” She remembered a time far back in her little girlhood when they first came to Philadelphia, before her mother had found work with Mrs. Rogers. It had been bitter cold and they had lacked the money to buy any but a few buckets of coal. . . . She and her mother had worn their coats in the house during the whole hellish winter. . . . The memory could still make her shiver.

  “I don’t like to think about some aspects of poverty that I’ve known.”

  “Don’t think of it then. . . . Let’s talk on other things. How did you happen to be free this lovely afternoon? I never dreamed of our spending all this time together.”

  “Nice, isn’t it? It’s my surprise for you.”

  “Nice, very. And I’m grateful for your surprise. But inexplicable. . . . Where’s your young man, Phebe.”

  Well, she knew it was coming . . . “I haven’t any young man.”

  “I’m sorry for him,” he said with no ulterior intention. “But you’ll be taking him back again.”

  She was silent.

  “And you haven’t been going about with anyone else?”

  “No one.”

  “Why, Phebe, think of what I’ve missed pottering about Florence. Perhaps you might have been spending some time with me.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, of course, it isn’t too late for that yet,” he said, with some attempt to restrain his rising excitement. “How about me for young-man-in-waiting?”

  But she knew it wouldn’t be the same thing and told him so. “And I think I’d better be going home, Mr. Nash.”

  “H’m, Mr. Nash! I don’t like that. . . . You’ll let me bring you out here again, Phebe?”

  “I think I will.”

  They rode back to the city almost in silence.

  Just before entering her door she thought: “I’ve had a pleasant afternoon and all because I made up my mind in the first place to enjoy myself today and stop moping. . . . I belie
ve I’ll go out with Johnny tonight . . . maybe I’ll feel that much better tomorrow. Staying in is simply no good.”

  The Fortnightly was quite a function on all occasions. Tonight it was rather more so because it was the closing dance of the season. She was glad of this because it gave her an occasion to dress. In accordance with a silent resolve of hers, to wear as rarely as possible anything which she had worn in the company of Campbell, she donned a simple, almost severely cut, black dress.

  The back was very low, but otherwise the frock clung most lovingly to her figure, as though it could not cling close enough to her slender, supple figure. Rhinestones flashed from her ears and arms, and relieved the somberness of her slender black slippers. Young Albans gasped as she came running down the steps to meet him.

  “Gee, Phebe! If you could just see yourself!”

  “I’ve been seeing myself, as you call it, for several minutes. Am I all right?”

  “Right as rain. Come on, girl, get into the buggy! If you don’t knock all the Fortnighters dead, I’ll eat my hat.”

  His prophecy came reversely true for instead of knocking the members—that is to say the male members of the Fortnightly—dead, the girl galvanized them into action. There was no cutting in at this dance; its formality was one of its chief charms; one of the reasons really for its continued long existence, since membership in a body so correct and distinguished constituted a social cachet. . . . But the black coats and dark heads surrounded Phebe so unremittingly that she might just as well have been dancing her way straight down a line of eager suitors.

  At intermission, as she stood laughing and excited, talking rather breathlessly to young Albans, Jerry Talliver came up, a tall, broad shouldered young man with a thick thatch of burnished hair, close beside him.

  “No use, no use!” Albans cried. “She’s engaged to the last note of Home Sweet Home. Next time I take this girl to a dance I’m going to engage the Fire Department to keep the mob back.”

  “I’m not asking for myself,” grinned Talliver. “I was in the first onslaught and was forced to retreat with heavy losses. . . . But here’s a young man who craves an audience. He says he knows you, Phebe.”

  “But I think you’ve forgotten me,” the young man interposed. “I’m Christopher Cary. I think you and my sister, Teresa, used to be schoolmates. Weren’t you?”

  “I should say we were! It’s been ages since we’ve seen each other.”

  “Yes . . . I don’t believe I’ve seen you to speak to since we all went to a party . . . it must have been nine years ago . . .just before Teresa went off to New Hampshire.”

  The orchestra was re-assembling; it was striking up. Johnny advanced, arms outstretched. They started off.

  “I’ll be waiting here till you come back,” Christopher said.

  Miraculously, she was free for the fourth dance. Christopher took her gently in his arms, starting off with that easy, unpremeditated motion which marks the natural dancer. The lights were lowered ever so slightly, the beautiful little room teemed with the magnetism of youth and beauty and the spontaneous gayety of these people, black and white and yellow and brown, who still retained some of their primitive zest for living. Like a stringed instrument the air thrummed with the sound of young men’s voices singing:

  “Somebody loves me; I wonder who?

  Maybe it’s you!”

  “It’s a curious thing,” Phebe said, “that’s an old song. They’ve been playing it ever since I was a child. And I don’t believe I’ve ever been at a dance where all the men haven’t joined in singing it, if the orchestra played it. I wonder why?”

  “I suppose because everybody is wondering who really loves him,” Christopher answered simply.

  She was going home now, drugged with fatigue, almost nodding as she bade Johnny good-night in the darkened hall. He had meant to try a kiss tonight, but, pshaw, there was no fun in taking advantage of someone who was practically walking in her sleep.

  It seemed to her that one moment she was mounting the steps to her room and the next she was lying awake, but drowsy, deliciously conscious that this was Sunday and she need not rise till she felt like it. Her mother, on her way to church, put her head in the door and gave her a gentle admonition.

  “You came in so late last night, daughter. You must be rest-broken. Better not get up for quite a while yet.”

  So she lay there and watched the sun climb lazily up the walls, finally flooding the room with its glory. She thought of Albans and his slangy, boyish kindliness, of Jerry Talliver, ugly but a divine dancer, of Christopher and the last time they had all seen each other . . . nine years ago, he had said. What changes had come to that little group which had once been so compact!

  Teresa married and in France—gone from them forever; Marise a dancer in New York; she and Nicholas . . . but she would not, she would not think of Nicholas. Little Oliver Cary dead. Something very strange there! And finally she fell to dreaming of Llewellyn Nash, of his charm, his utter worldliness and above all of the glimpses which he could give her of a milieu so arrestingly different from any she had known. . . .

  Certainly there could be no harm in playing around with him for a while. He could not possibly be deceived, for his intentions toward her she knew were nil. Marriage with a girl so far below him in station would never enter that aristocratic head. On the other hand he respected her too much to offer her anything different. Here certainly she was on safe, middle ground.

  The bell rang, pealed violently, but she let it go unanswered. Presently she heard Mrs. Nixon, her lodger, shuffling downstairs. . . . Doubtless she was expecting a visitor. She closed her eyes only to open them again as a loud thump resounded on the door of her room. . . . Mrs. Nixon handed her an envelope. She tore it open, to note with amazement that it was from Christopher Cary.

  He had written to say that unable to find her listed in the telephone directory he had sent her this by messenger. If agreeable to her he would call that afternoon. The boy had instructions to wait for an answer.

  Characteristically enough she read nothing into the request except that her resolution, formed the preceding Saturday, was bringing results. She had rallied her powers and sallied forth. And behold her days were filling up once more; her evenings pleasantly occupied. She did not dare go far below the surface lest she discover there shoals, depths on which she might still lose peace of mind. . . . There were moments when the mere thought of Nick, a still remembered gesture, a too completely etched pose of his, could turn her sick and faint. . . .

  Christopher arrived in his father’s car, a car not as fresh and up-to-date as former Cary cars. The older man had lost his grip. After Oliver’s death his interest in his work died away; he spent long days in his office, refusing to see patients; the seriousness of his financial plight seemed to impress him not a whit. At one time he roused himself long enough to clap a mortgage on the house which his father had willed to Oliver, and to which he had succeeded after all. But the interest in this was mounting and he had given it, to all appearances, little or no thought.

  To the young man’s proposal that they go driving through the Park Phebe returned a decided negative. So they went exploring down in South Philadelphia, noting how the huge city had grown up from the water-front. Here in the Sunday afternoon quiet, it lay sprawling and ugly, like some huge giant caught off guard and relaxed in its sleep. They drove through circular Dock Street and out Front, past warehouses, past great stacks of boxes and bales of food stuffs still not delivered.

  “You’re a strange girl,” Christopher said admiringly, “to find interest in all this. Somehow I had thought you so different.”

  “It’s always terribly exciting to me,” she told him, “to see how a city is conducted. It’s all as uninviting down here as it can be, and I know I’d die if I had to live in this neighborhood. But it does seem to suggest life, in a big way. Life that goes on and on without regard to the individual.”

  Somewhere he twisted back and turned on to the ne
w bridge across the Delaware, flying along the well-kept Jersey roads, flitting through the home-like Jersey towns.

  “I’m surprised,” she resumed after a long silence, “to hear you say you thought I was different. I never supposed you thought of me at all. I know I never . . .”

  “Thought of me . . .” he amended, laughing. “Funny, isn’t it? But surely you used to come to our house a lot. Guess I was always out playing baseball, or hockey. I sure was some terrible athlete in those days.”

  “And as a matter of fact I didn’t come to your house much. We all used to rush to Marise’s if we could. I know Teresa liked it there . . . and as for me! Mrs. Davies was always so kind . . . and she gave us such good things to eat. I guess she was really a blessing in disguise to my mother. When I wasn’t there I was home, studying or sewing. I never would have got to know anybody if it hadn’t been for Marise and the Campbell boy,” she said very casually, “who lived in the house across the alley.”

  “Strange how we all got away from each other. I saw Campbell in New York, not so long ago. Great Scott, isn’t he someone to look at! I don’t know when I’d run across him.”

  She was glad she had mentioned him.

  Christopher wanted her to have dinner with him but she preferred to go home. “For such a long time I was unable to offer my friends hospitality,” she said frankly. “It gives me a real thrill to do it now.

  After supper she played for him; sang a few old ballads in her nice, unpretentious voice. It all combined to make him think of Teresa and the kind of evenings they used to spend long ago.

  Refreshed and curiously restored he rose to tell her goodnight. “You’re a great girl, little Phebe. I hope you’re going to let me see you often.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  UNQUESTIONABLY Llewellyn Nash was interested and unquestionably Phebe enjoyed that interest. All through these hot summer months he was staying in town, that is to say, in Chestnut Hill. “Just to be near you, Phebe,” he would remind her reproachfully.