"Oh, Jake!" she cried excitedly and in a surprised tone, as if she had not known before that he was there. "How nice of you to come! I didn't know you were back. I thought you were still in Europe."
"I've been and went," he declared humorously.
"You're looking awfully well, Jake," she said. "The trip did you lots of good. You've lost weight. You took the cure at Carlsbad, didn't you?"
"I didn't take the cure," the old man solemnly declared, "I took the die-ett." Deliberately he mispronounced the word.
Instantly Mrs. Jack's face was suffused with crimson and her shoulders began to shake hysterically. She turned to Roberta Heilprinn, seized her helplessly by the arm, and clung to her, shrieking faintly:
"God! Did you hear him? He's been on a diet! I bet it almost killed him! The way he loves to eat!"
Miss Heilprinn chuckled fruitily and her oil-smooth features widened in such a large grin that her eyes contracted to closed slits.
"I've been die-etting ever since I went away," said Jake. "I was sick when I went away--and I came back on an English boat," the old man said with a melancholy and significant leer that drew a scream of laughter from the two women.
"Oh, Jake!" cried Mrs. Jack hilariously. "How you must have suffered! I know what you used to think of English food!"
"I think the same as I always did," the old man said with resigned sadness--"only ten times more!"
She shrieked again, then gasped out, "Brussels sprouts?"
"They still got 'em," said old Jake solemnly. "They still got the same ones they had ten years ago. I saw Brussels sprouts this last trip that ought to be in the British Museum...And they still got that good fish," he went on with a suggestive leer.
Roberta Heilprinn, her bland features grinning like a Buddha, gurgled: "The Dead Sea fruit?"
"No," said old Jake sadly, "not the Dead Sea fruit--that ain't dead enough. They got boiled flannel now," he said, "and that good sauce!...You remember that good sauce they used to make?" He leered at Mrs. Jack with an air of such insinuation that she was again set off in a fit of shuddering hysteria:
"You mean that awful...tasteless...pasty...goo...about the colour of a dead lemon?"
"You got it," the old man nodded his wise and tired old head in weary agreement. "You got it...That's it...They still make it...So I've been die-etting all the way back!" For the first time his tired old voice showed a trace of animation. "Carlsbad wasn't in it compared to the die-etting I had to do on the English boat!" He paused, then with a glint of cynic humour in his weary eyes, he said: "It was fit for nothing but a bunch of goys!"
This reference to unchosen tribes, with its evocation of humorous contempt, now snapped a connection between these three people, and suddenly one saw them in a new way. The old man was smiling thinly, with a cynical intelligence, and the two women were shaken utterly by a paroxysm of understanding mirth. One saw now that they really were together, able, ancient, immensely knowing, and outside the world, regardant, tribal, communitied in derision and contempt for the unhallowed, unsuspecting tribes of lesser men who were not party to their knowing, who were not folded to their seal. It passed--the instant showing of their ancient sign. The women just smiled now, quietly: they were citizens of the world again.
"But Jake! You poor fellow!" Mrs. Jack said sympathetically. "You must have hated it!" Then she cried suddenly and enthusiastically as she remembered: "Isn't Carlsbad just too beautiful?...Did you know that Bert and I were there one time?" As she uttered these words she slipped her hand affectionately through the arm of her friend, Roberta, then went on vigorously, with a jolly laugh and a merry face: "Didn't I ever tell you about that time, Jake?...Really, it was the most wonderful experience!...But God!" she laughed almost explosively--"Will you ever forget the first three or four days, Bert?" She appealed to her smiling friend. "Do you remember how hungry we got? How we thought we couldn't possibly hold out? Wasn't it dreadful?" she said, and then went on with a serious and rather puzzled air as she tried to explain it: "But then--I don't know--it's funny--but somehow you get used to it, don't you, Bert? The first few days are pretty awful, but after that you don't seem to mind. I guess you get too weak, or something...I know Bert and I stayed in bed three weeks--and really it wasn't bad after the first few days." She laughed suddenly, richly. "We used to try to torture each other by making up enormous menus of the most delicious food we knew. We had it all planned out to go to a swell restaurant the moment our cure was over and order the biggest meal we could think of!...Well!" she laughed--"would you believe it?--the day the cure was finished and the doctor told us it would be all right for us to get up and eat--I know we both lay there for hours thinking of all the things we were going to have. It was simply wonderful!" she said, laughing and making a fine little movement with her finger and her thumb to indicate great delicacy, her voice squeaking like a child's and her eyes wrinkling up to dancing points. "In all your life you never heard of such delicious food as Bert and I were going to devour! We resolved to do everything in the greatest style!...Well, at last we got up and dressed. And God!" she cried. "We were so weak we could hardly stand up, but we wore the prettiest clothes we had, and we had chartered a Rolls Royce for the occasion and a chauffeur in livery! In all your days," she cried with her eyes twinkling, "you've never seen such swank! We got into the car and were driven away like a couple of queens. We told the man to drive us to the swellest, most expensive restaurant he knew. He took us to a beautiful place outside of town. It looked like a chateau!" She beamed rosily round her. "And when they saw us coming they must have thought we were royalty from the way they acted. The flunkies were lined up, bowing and scraping, for half a block. Oh, it was thrilling! Everything we'd gone through and endured in taking the cure seemed worth it...Well!" she looked round her and the breath left her body audibly in a sigh of complete frustration--"would you believe it?--when we got in there and tried to eat we could hardly swallow a bite! We had looked forward to it so long--we had planned it all so carefully--and all we could eat was a soft-boiled egg--and we couldn't even finish that! It filled us up right to here--" she put a small hand level with her chin. "It was so tragic that we almost wept!...Isn't it a strange thing? I guess it must be that your stomach shrinks up while you're on the diet. You lie there day after day and think of the enormous meal you are going to devour just as soon as you get up--and then when you try it you're not even able to finish a soft-boiled egg!"
As she finished, Mrs. Jack shrugged her shoulders and lifted her hands questioningly, with such a comical look on her face that everybody round her laughed. Even weary and jaded old Jake Abramson, who had really paid no attention to what she was saying but had just been regarding her with his fixed smile during the whole course of her animated dialogue, now smiled a little more warmly as he turned away to speak to other friends.
Miss Heilprinn and Mrs. Jack, left standing together in the centre of the big room, offered an instructive comparison in the capacities of their sex. Each woman was perfectly cast in her own role. Each had found the perfect adaptive means by which she could utilise her full talents with the least waste and friction.
Miss Heilprinn looked the very distinguished woman that she was. Hers was the talent of the administrator, the ability to get things done, and one knew at a glance that in the rough and tumble of practical affairs this bland lady was more than a match for any man. She suggested oil--smooth oil, oil of tremendous driving power and generating force.
Along Broadway she had reigned for years as the governing brain of a celebrated art theatre, and her business acuity had wrung homage even from her enemies. It had been her function to promote, to direct, to control, and in the tenuous and uncertain speculations of the theatre to take care not to be fleeced by the wolves of Broadway. The brilliance of her success, the power of her will, and the superior quality of her metal were written plain upon her. It took no very experienced observer to see that in the unequal contest between Miss Heilprinn and the wolves of Broadway it ha
d been the wolves who had been worsted.
In that savage and unremitting warfare, which arouses such bitter passions and undying hatreds that eyes become jaundiced and lips so twisted that they are never afterwards able to do anything but writhe like yellowed scars on haggard faces, had Miss Heilprinn's face grown hard? Had her mouth contracted to a grim line? Had her jaw out-jutted like a granite crag? Were the marks of the wars visible anywhere upon her? Not at all. The more murderous the fight, the blander her face. The more treacherous the intrigues in which Broadway's life involved her, the more mellow became the fruity lilt of her good-humoured chuckle. She had actually thriven on it. Indeed, as one of her colleagues said: "Roberta never seems so happy and so unconsciously herself as when she is playing about in a nest of rattlesnakes."
So, now, as she stood there talking to Mrs. Jack, she presented a very handsome and striking appearance. Her grey hair was combed in a pompadour, and her suave and splendid gown gave the finishing touch to her general air of imperturbable assurance. Her face was almost impossibly bland, but it was a blandness without hypocrisy. Nevertheless, one saw that her twinkling eyes, which narrowed into such jolly slits when she smiled, were sharp as flint and missed nothing.
In a curious way, Mrs. Jack was a more complex person than her smooth companion. She was essentially not less shrewd, not less accomplished, not less subtle, and not less determined to secure her own ends in this hard world, but her strategy had been different.
Most people thought her "such a romantic person". As her friends said, she was "so beautiful", she was "such a child", she was "so good". Yes, she was all these things. For she had early learned the advantages of possessing a rosy, jolly little face and a manner of slightly bewildered surprise and naive innocence. When she smiled doubtfully yet good-naturedly at her friends, it was as if to say: "Now I know you're laughing at me, aren't you? I don't know what it is. I don't know what I've done or said now. Of course I'm not clever the way you are--all of you are so frightfully smart--but anyway I have a good time, and I like you all."
To many people that was the essential Mrs. Jack. Only a few knew that there was a great deal more to her than met the eye. The bland lady who now stood talking to her was one of these. Miss Roberta Heilprinn missed no artifice of that almost unconsciously deceptive innocence. And perhaps that is why, when Mrs. Jack finished her anecdote and looked at old Jake Abramson so comically and questioningly, Miss Heilprinn's eye twinkled a little brighter, her Buddhistic smile became a little smoother, and her yolky chuckle grew a trifle more infectious. Perhaps that is also why, with a sudden impulse of understanding and genuine affection, Miss Heilprinn bent and kissed the glowing little cheek.
And the object of this caress, although she never changed her expression of surprised and delighted innocence, knew full well all that was going on in the other woman's mind. For just a moment, almost imperceptibly, the eyes of the two women, stripped bare of all concealing artifice, met each other. And in that moment there was matter for Olympian laughter.
While Mrs. Jack welcomed her friends and beamed with happiness, one part of her mind remained aloof and preoccupied. For someone was still absent, and she kept thinking of him.
"I wonder where he is," she thought. "Why doesn't he come? I hope he hasn't been drinking." She looked quickly over the brilliant gathering with a troubled eye and thought impatiently: "If only he liked parties more! If only he enjoyed meeting people--going out in the evening! Oh, well--he's the way he is. It's no use trying to change him. I wouldn't have him any different."
And then he arrived.
"Here he is!" she thought excitedly, looking at him with instant relief. "And he's all right!"
George Webber had, in fact, taken two or three stiff drinks before he left his rooms, in preparation for the ordeal. The raw odour of cheap gin hung on his breath, his eyes were slightly bright and wild, and his manner was quick and a trifle more feverish than was his wont. Just the same he was, as Esther had phrased it to herself, "all right".
"If only people--my friends--everyone I know--didn't affect him so," she thought. "Why is it, I wonder. Last night when he telephoned me he talked so strange! Nothing he said made any sense! What could have been wrong with him? Oh, well--it doesn't matter now. He's here. I love him!"
Her face warmed and softened, her pulse beat quicker, and she went to meet him.
"Oh, hello, darling," she said fondly. "I'm so glad you're here at last. I was beginning to be afraid you were going to fail me after all."
He greeted her half fondly and half truculently, with a mixture of diffidence and pugnacity, of arrogance and humility, of pride, of hope, of love, of suspicion, of eagerness, of doubt.
He had not wanted to come to the party at all. From the moment she had first invited him he had brought forward a barrage of objections. They had argued it back and forth for days, but at last she had won and had exacted his promise. But as the time approached he felt himself hesitating again, and last night he had paced the floor for hours in an agony of self-recrimination and indecision. At last, around one o'clock, he had seized the telephone with desperate resolve and, after waking the whole household before he got her, he had told her that he was not coming. Once more he repeated all his reasons. He only half-understood them himself, but they had to do with the incompatibility of her world and his world, and his belief, which was as much a matter of instinctive feeling as of conscious thought, that he must keep his independence of the world she belonged to if he was to do his work. He grew almost desperate as he tried to explain it to her, because he couldn't seem to make her understand what he was driving at. In the end she became a little desperate, too. First she was annoyed, and told him for God's sake to stop being such a fool. Then she became hurt and angry and reminded him of his promise.
"We've been over all of this a dozen times!" she said shrilly, and there was also a tearful note in her voice. "You promised, George--you know you did! And now everything's arranged. It's too late to change it now. You can't let me down like this!"
This appeal was too much for him. He knew, of course, that the party had not been planned for him and that no arrangements would be upset if he failed to appear. No one but Esther would even be aware of his absence. But he had given his promise to come, however reluctantly, and he saw that the only issue he had succeeded in raising in her mind was the simple one of whether he would keep his word. So once more, and finally, he had yielded. And now he was here, full of confusion, and wishing with all his heart that he was anywhere else.
"I'm sure you're going to have a good time," Esther was saying to him eagerly. "You'll see--" and she squeezed his hand. "There are lots of people I want you to meet. But you must be hungry. Better get yourself something to eat first. You'll find plenty of things you like. I planned them especially for you. Go in the dining-room and help yourself. I'll have to stay here a little while to welcome all these people."
After she left him to greet some new arrivals, George stood there awkwardly for a moment with a scowl on his face and glanced about the room at the dazzling assemblage. In that attitude he cut a rather grotesque figure. The low brow with its frame of short black hair, the burning eyes, the small, packed features, the long arms dangling to the knees, and the curved paws gave him an appearance more simian than usual, and the image was accentuated by his not-too-well-fitting dinner jacket. People looked at him and stared, then turned away indifferently and resumed their conversations.
"So!" he thought with somewhat truculent self-consciousness--"These are her fine friends! I might have known it!" he muttered to himself, without knowing at all what it was he might have known. The poise, assurance, and sophistication of all these sleek faces made him fancy a slight where none was offered or intended. "I'll show them!" he growled absurdly beneath his breath, not having the faintest idea what he meant by that.
With this, he turned upon his heel and threaded his way through the brilliant throng towards the dining-room.
"I mean!...
You know!..."
At the sound of the words, eager, rapid, uttered in a rather hoarse yet strangely seductive tone of voice, Mrs. Jack smiled at the group to whom she had been talking. "There's Amy!" she said.
Then, as she turned and saw the elflike head with its unbelievable harvest of ebony curls, the snub nose and the little freckles, and the lovely face so radiant with an almost boyish quality of animation and enthusiasm, she thought:
"Isn't she beautiful! And--and--there is something so sweet, so--so good about her!"
Even as her mind framed its spontaneous tribute to the girlish apparition with the elflike head, Mrs. Jack knew that it was not true. No; Amy Carleton was many things, but no one could call her good. In fact, if she was not "a notorious woman", the reason was that she had surpassed the ultimate limits of notoriety, even for New York. Everybody knew her, and knew all about her, yet what the truth was, or what the true image of that lovely counterfeit of youth and joy, no one could say.
Chronology? Well, for birth she had had the golden spoon. She had been born to enfabled wealth. Hers had been the childhood of a dollar princess, kept, costly, cabined, pruned, confined. A daughter of "Society", her girlhood had been spent in rich schools and in travel, in Europe, Southampton, New York, and Palm Beach. By eighteen she was "out"--a famous beauty. By nineteen she was married. And by twenty she was divorced, her name tainted. It had been a sensational case which fairly reeked. Even at that time her conduct had been so scandalous that her husband had had no difficulty in winning a decree.
Since that time, seven years before, her career had defied the measurements of chronology. Although she was now only in her middle twenties, her life seemed to go back through aeons of iniquity. Thus one might remember one of the innumerable scandals that had been connected with her name, and then check oneself suddenly with a feeling of stunned disbelief. "Oh, no! It can't be! That happened only three short years ago, and since then she's--why she's--" And one would stare in stupefaction at that elflike head, that snub nose, that boyishly eager face, like one who realised that he was looking at the dread Medusa, or at some enchantress of Circean cunning whose life was older than the ages and whose heart was old as hell.