Chapter IX (2)

The car drew up in front of a large red sandstone house just off Fifth Avenue in the fifties, which brought a whistle from Jerry. “Say, Joy—what are you getting us into? The nearest I’ve been to this sort of stuff is the movies!”

It did not add to their composure to have a butler admit them, to be elevatored to one floor to take off their wraps and elevatored to another floor to meet Mabel. They were ushered into a drawing-room, which seemed to Joy’s eyes full of people whose faces were obscured in the candlelight which was the only illumination affected. Mabel came forward to greet them, a little overplump without the coat and glossing-over sables, but very attractive in warm rose, her only jewelry a single pink pearl hanging at the end of a platinum and diamond chain. Joy noticed these details automatically, her attention focussed on Jerry, who, since she had entered the room, had taken on a manner entirely foreign to her make-up as Joy knew it. She was the easy, gracious grande dame from the lilt of her walk and assured poise to the cultured cadences of the voice that Joy had often likened to rough plush. She had slipped into it as readily as one slips into another garment.

Joy could not know, as the East-Side gamin answered Mabel’s friendly greeting with a few well-chosen words of appreciation at her inclusion in the dinner, that poor little Jerry had assumed the atmosphere of the successful designer at Charlette’s, when she was conferring with a desirable patron. She only marvelled, then looked beyond. A man nearing forty, and plumpness; a girl with a complexion of peachdown, pleasantly irregular features, brown hair folded back straight without a crinkle or wave from a high white forehead; and behind these two—a taller man, whose face was above the range of the candlelight.

“Miss Dalrymple, Miss Nelson—and my husband, Mr. Drew—” The two who barred the way fell apart, and Joy was facing the man who had given Jerry the power to dream. “Phil, this is your new cousin.”

Weary blue eyes that settled on her without interest; a dark, beautiful face with hard lines carving manliness into it and softer marks etching bitternesses around the eyes and mouth; a man who, even Joy could sense, had been too inquisitive of life and found nothing worthy of his young curiosity. She fell aside and looked back at Jerry, still the grande dame, exchanging greetings with the first two. Jerry was never pretty; she could not sink to that level; and to-night she was at the height of her fascination. No one could wear bobbed hair quite like Jerry; it fluffed around her face, adding to the shimmering lights of expression; those lights that always seemed dancing to the surface, yet which by not being transmuted into speech and action, lent her subtlety, which is the essence of charm.

She came through to them, stately, gracious, with always that moonshine of charm flickering in her face. “My brother, Mr. Lancaster,” said Mabel at her elbow. Jerry looked up—and vivid colour, moonbeams, grande dame and all, were struck from her face as if an artist had wiped everything from his painting but the formless features. A long moment she hung thus, one thin hand which she had put out before lifting her head, fluttering without volition. Then with a gasp almost heard in the suspended quiet, she took shape again. Star-shine lurked itself into her face, and she threw back her head, bringing on the grand dame again in double-barreled force. Valiant! Joy thought; valiant! And stole a look at him. There she had the great surprise of the evening. He was taking Jerry’s hand, a bit lingeringly; smiling at her with interest—but without recognition!

“You look very much like someone I met a long time ago,” he said.

“A very long time ago?” murmured Jerry in the richest of her plush tones.

“Oh, very. At least two years—which means it was war times, and those times seem hundreds of years behind us now.”

“There you go, Old Crow’s-feet!” Mabel was hanging on his arm and smiling up at him. She brought the others into it with an explanatory quirk: “These returned war heroes think everyone forgets pretty quickly, but we don’t, do we?”

“Returned war hero!” Joy cried, her mind a suspended blank to be written over with wonder. Jerry said nothing with fierce intensity of question.

“Why, yes,” said Mabel. “Stop nudging me, Phil, I will if I want to!—He was over for a long time, and brought back millions of those little citation ribbons which he gave me with instructions to bury—stop, Phil!”

Another man-servant—did they have _two_ butlers?—announced dinner at this moment, and Mabel gave Joy to her brother, leading the way with Jerry and leaving her husband to the girl with the white forehead, who so far had said nothing of any irrelevance, and so had made little impression on the party.

As they settled themselves behind the fruit cocktails, Joy watched Phil Lancaster, who kept his eyes fixed on Jerry across the table.

“Is—is the resemblance so very striking?” she probed gently.

“Not so very, after the first look.” He took his eyes away from Jerry with a jolt and landed them on Joy for one perfunctory second. “Your friend is quite a different type.” His eyes found Jerry again; and Jerry’s short, thick lashes quivered as she raised her chin higher and looked determinedly at Mabel, who was stretching out a large fund of small talk.

“That girl with the brown hair and white forehead—is she another cousin?” asked Joy, still quietly insistent that he should talk to her.

He drew his eyes back to Joy. “No; she’s a Bryn Mawr girl, one of Mabel’s protégés. Mabel’s awfully keen on younger girls.”

“You don’t like ‘younger girls,’ do you?” His tone had been descriptive.

“Why—has Mabel been getting biographic?”

“No; she didn’t say anything about you to me; I just guessed. And as long as I have guessed, I think you ought to tell me why.”

There was a pause as a third man in livery came between them with the soup, an opportunity he enriched by looking at Jerry; then he said: “To tell you why—would not make dinner conversation. But a young girl flaunting her conscious beauty and youth does not interest me, any more than I would give other than a passing look to a large coloured advertisement on a billboard.”

“And how about older women?” she asked, letting his statement pass without battle.

“Oh—they have either lost interest in life and are only pretending, or their minds are one-track affairs.”

“My——” said Joy thoughtfully. “It must be awful to be a bachelor.”

They both laughed then, and Jerry looked across the table with an answering gleam. His eyes caught hers for an intimate moment; then she turned back to Mabel and he to Joy.

“I admit it sounded humourous,” he said. “But I told you, the rest would not be dinner conversation.”

“When did you go across?” she asked abruptly. Her words carried across the table, and Jerry’s polite attention to Mabel took on another tin.

“In the fall of ’17.”

So she had been right in her random suggestion! Mabel, hearing a fragment of their conversation through Jerry’s silence, proudly contributed the fact that Phil had just been promoted to the rank of major when the armistice was signed. The girl with the white forehead and Mabel’s husband were deep in a steady stream of discussion which flowed on during the pauses of the rest of the dinner party.

So he did not remember Jerry. And yet he must, or why did he look at her so? Many times she reviled fashion of ceremony, as courses were brought on and taken off and dinner slowly rolled by with always the balancing of his and Jerry’s gaze across the table, while he talked vaguely and diffusely to Joy. It was when they were having coffee—Mabel had declared the men were too few to be left alone—that he seemed to give his attention to Joy for the first time. She had not been lessening her contemplative gaze, and he suddenly broke into it. “I’m sorry—I’ve rattled on so. I don’t know what’s in the air to-night—I’m not generally talkative. Are you of those awful ones who ‘draw people out,’ young cousin?”

He was almost boyish now. She had been noting one or two grey hairs sparkling in his ruddy crop.

“I don’t think—I’ve drawn you out at all,” she said, and her glance travelled to Jerry. He did not look this time, but his eyes were well distanced by now.

“I am glad you brought her with you,” he said simply.

The remark was so direct, after his circuitous discourse throughout the meal, that she was left in surprise without a response. Mabel, sensitive to Jerry’s aloofness, Phil’s apparent boredom and Joy’s non-registering silence, rose and wafted them into the drawing room. “Eustace, you can play the Victrola or do something entertaining while I show Joy the babies,” she demanded. “She doesn’t know she has some more cousins to meet!”

They left the four, for another elevator trip. “You have—_children_?” said Joy in awe.

Mabel nodded. “Three,” she said, with the first pride she had shown.

Three children—in as many years of marriage. Small wonder Mabel looked a little faded, in spite of every aura wealth could cast. The nursery was a long, wide room, into which they tiptoed, Mabel turning on the light of a small rose-shaded lamp. Three little white beds, with tiny, slumbering faces pressed hard against the pillows—faces beautiful with the unearthly beauty of babyhood on which all of life’s beauty is yet to be written. A moment while Joy gazed, and Mabel, going from one room to another, murmured ecstatic nothings. Then Mabel turned off the light, and they went to the door shivering in the cold from the open windows that they had not felt while looking at the children.

On the other side of the door Joy stammered her enchantment of eternity’s marvel. Mabel smiled, her hand on the knob, lingering as if she could not bear to leave that hold upon the nursery.

“You will never know—until you have them,” she said. “The greatest happiness in all the world, Joy. If only people realized! I myself didn’t know. I thought I had come to the crown of my life when I married. To have the love of the one you love—that is surely the greatest honour and happiness that life can bring. But this—this brings so infinitely much more—that you think you could only have barely existed, before!” She relinquished the knob, turning it gently so that the catch would hold. “All the happiness in the world, Joy, transmutes itself into this great one. After all, everything speaks in terms of love.” She laughed, half apologetically. “It’s true—we married people pity everyone who doesn’t go and do likewise!”

Joy was thinking of the phrases she had heard bandied with such assurance—yes, that she herself had bandied in her own mind; “the risks and sacrifices of marriage,” “marriage clipping the wings.” In the nursery—and now, with Mabel’s suddenly iridescent love spreading beauty in her face—a career with all its gilt glory seemed very far away and unreal. But they came back to a room which was echoing to great music filtered through a sounding-box; and nursery and Mabel’s face sank away. Different hearts, different loves—and what could one love one-half so satisfying as music?

Eustace Drew and the college girl were selecting other records from the cabinet—Jerry and Phil Lancaster were on the other side of the room, beyond the candles, talking. Jerry was sitting on the window-seat; he was standing looking down upon her, his back to the room. Joy frantically wished that she were a pane in that window, then sat down beside the college girl, who turned a smiling face to her with some comment on the music. Joy answered it without impetus, and in the ensuing conversation was surprised to find that Miss Dalrymple was actually interesting on the subject. Besides being well-read, as Joy innocently supposed all college girls to be, she was evidently well-heard. She decided that Miss Dalrymple added up to a very attractive girl. She wasn’t the type that a man would ask to a Prom to cut a wide swath and impress the other fellows with looks and jazz, but she was very attractive just the same. She had beauty of an unobtrusive sort; her clothes were quietly right; and she had a responsive glow that was most winning. Joy continued the conversation in an investigating frame of mind. This girl must be several years older than she was. She seemed older, in some few ways, but on the whole, so much younger. . . .

After a long conversation Joy again looked at the two at the end of the room. It was so maddening to sit through an evening in ignorance of all that was passing. Mabel followed her look.

“Your friend seems to have bewitched my brother, Joy,” she said lightly. “She must be a sorceress, and cast a spell—he hasn’t even been polite to a girl for so long.”

Joy stole a glance at her watch. Quarter of ten—it was surely already too late to stay after a dinner in a butlered house such as this,—even if Jerry did show no signs of desiring to leave the window seat. She was stopped in her preliminary motions of departure by the insistence of the Drews. Why, they were scarcely acquainted with their new cousin yet! They did not even know what she was doing—what school she was attending, or if she was just being a butterfly this year. Somehow, she drew back from telling them about her studying and its aspirations. It sounded so out of place in that atmosphere—so hectic after what she had seen upstairs. So she evaded the subject with a careless, “Oh, I’m not doing much of anything just now,” and this time succeeded in saying her farewells uninterrupted. Somehow Jerry saw her rise, and strolled over to them. Phil following with objecting footsteps. Jerry was palpably nervous. What she had done in allowing herself to be monopolized in a corner at such a small dinner-party where she had been a stranger, had been in bad taste; but it was the sort of thing that was being done continually by yearlings belonging to what is known as “the best families,” and she had not sinned against precedent.

Mabel bade Joy an affectionate good-bye, adjuring her not to forget that the next time she visited New York she must stay with her cousins, and the Bryn Mawr girl shook hands warmly, hoping-to-see-her-again in a really genuine tone. Joy found her voice returning a like remark in as genuine a tone.

Eustace Drew joined Phil as they went to the door, and the two men rode to the Belmont with Joy and Jerry in an easy volleying of general conversation carried on mainly by Mr. Drew. Jerry, back in the gloom of the car, was inscrutable; Phil more so. They left them at the elevator, where the two girls turned to each other as the door closed and they shot upwards.

“Anchor me down, Joy,” Jerry whispered; “anchor me down, or I’ll float away!”

“Jerry! What was he saying?”

An interim while they got off at their floor, passed a maid in the corridor, and gained their room. Jerry threw off her coat and went to the mirror. “Can you believe it, Joy?” she asked, in luxurious wonder, falling into all angles of pose; “he doesn’t know me! I’ve changed so much he doesn’t know me!”

“What did he _say_?” Joy demanded. “I saw he didn’t know you!”

“Well, I’ve changed since then. Funny I hadn’t thought of it that way. My hair’s bobbed now, of course—and I used to dress a lot more so, and this black velvet changes me more yet—and my make-up was different——”

“Will you tell me what he said—or won’t you?”

She whirled around from the mirror, and with a jump, seated herself on the bureau top. “After you went out, I slumped down on the window seat. My legs had caved in—I couldn’t stand any longer. And he came over to me and looked down at me—which he kept on doing, by the way. Joy, he _likes_ to look at me. Did you notice it? Didn’t you? And then he said—he said—‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ I was knocked loggy for a minute. Did I? Hadn’t I! Then I passed back to him: ‘Not necessarily.’ ‘It is the only love which is formed without analysis,’ he said, ‘and analysis is death to love.’ ‘Maybe, with some people,’ I said. ‘You can’t generalize about those things—though I suppose love is one of the things that is most generalized about.’

“‘Do you want me to come down to particulars?’ he said. ‘Or is it safer to go on—generalizing?’” Jerry clenched her hands, smiling softly the while. “I laughed at that. I had to laugh or yell—it was all so like I’d been dreaming for so long—I can’t believe yet it’s all really happened—and I said: ‘Please don’t put it up to me.’ ‘Let us both waive the responsibility, then,’ he said. ‘If what I say sounds like sheer madness, forget it. You look as if you could forget, and had forgotten, much. But—I have fallen in love twice in my life. The second time was this evening, when I saw you come walking down the room to meet me, a spirit embodied from a dream.’ Joy, he said that! Was there ever anything like it under Heaven?”

“No!” cried Joy, hysterical with conflicting emotions. “Go on!”

Jerry jumped down from the bureau to look into the mirror again. “Jerry, your luck,” she cried to her triumphant reflection. “Your luck!” She turned to Joy. “I was so scared I got to shaking. ‘A dream,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s what it was, a dream all right.’ I thought it was, too. ‘You do not understand,’ he said. ‘How could I expect it—there will never be another Brushwood Boy.’ That was one of the things he had given me to read, Joy. I guess I registered a recognition on that, for he went on:

“‘Oh, you’ve read it? You remember the Brushwood boy saw a little girl in the theatre, and afterwards he built an image of her in his dreams. His image grew in his dreams to womanhood, and bye and bye he met her in the flesh—a spirit embodied from the dream. Two years ago, in those fleeting, hectic days of war, at a time when no dreams were being left to me, I met a little girl who somehow brought me back to interest in life and—dreams. Our relationship was of the most casual; I only saw her a few times before I was suddenly put in command of a company that was sailing. She was not the sort to mean anything in my life, and I almost forgot her as herself. But her image stayed with me, always growing in little ways. She herself was so unfinished an image—she was of a type that could not change its atmosphere and environment—yet there was that in her which made me build, until the image grew to womanhood in my dreams. Am I boring you with details of a girl you never knew? But you see—the image grew to womanhood—and then I met you in the flesh, the embodiment of that dream.’ I hadn’t stopped shaking. ‘I don’t understand, except that I remind you of someone you once knew,’ I said. ‘Nor do I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s of the realm of—dreams. It’s not to be believed. What is this that makes me sure you are the complement to my existence, the one woman with everything I want, the sum total of a man’s fatuous dream that is generally too impossible to find realization?’ ‘You’d better not spread words around so,’ I said. ‘It isn’t wise to talk freely about anything you only know by sight. If I were anyone else, I’d think you were crazy.’ He snapped me up on that. ‘If you were anyone else! I must descend to the supreme idiocy and say—But you are you—and I knew you were when you came walking down the room to-night.’ ‘You must be a Southern man,’ I said. ‘I’ve always heard that they swung this line.’ He never blinked at that. ‘Do you feel nothing?’ he said. ‘If you tell me you felt nothing when your eyes met mine—if you did not feel that we had been a long time finding each other—if you tell me that—why then,—I will start in and make you realize what I know to be true.’”

She stopped, and ran to the window with a trembling laugh. “Look at old New York—that I couldn’t look at this afternoon! Joy—to think of his saying that! Asking me if I didn’t feel that we had been a long time finding each other! Joy—I was so scared I’d slip a cog and come through with some pithy talk! I spoke slow and thought twice between each word. ‘I—I really—these flashes that seem to go between two people—I never analyze them—which you seem to be doing, after all.’

“By this time you’d come back, but he didn’t even turn though I kept my off-eye alive on you. ‘That is—admission,’ he said, talking very low now. ‘We have started at the end, and defeated all the weary preliminaries.’ ‘Doesn’t it all amount to the same, though?’ I said; ‘for we’ll have to work back.’ ‘No, it’s not the same,’ he said, ‘for at the end I do not greatly care to turn back for my sake. I shall for yours, if you will; but I somehow feel, that to work back is something for which you, too, do not greatly care.’”

“What did he mean?” Joy interrupted. “How could you follow all this, Jerry?”

“Follow what he says? I’d get his drift if he made love to me in Latin! He was taking me at my face value, Joy—which wasn’t right, God knows—and dropping the remark in passing that he wouldn’t expect me to do the same thing with him, although he sort of thought that I would anyhow!”

“It’s so—so strange.”

“Strange! It’s—as he says—a dream! How did he happen to be your cousin, anyway? Didn’t you ever know he was?”

Joy explained, and the two fell into a silent labyrinth of wonder. Jerry walked restlessly about the room. “And he’s still unmarried, though every woman that passed his way must have made a grab for him!”

“He looks to me like a man who has always had his way—with women,” said Joy, trembling to break in upon Jerry’s exultation, but fearful memory driving the words out of her. “What if he was—just bandying words, Jerry? And thought you were too? Or didn’t care—what you thought? The last kind I know——You admitted too much, right off like that, it seems to me.”

Jerry laughed, running her fingers through her hair with a satisfied sigh. “Don’t you think I’ve been through enough sieges of men and their lines, in my life, not to be able to tell a real thing from a line? The real thing just thumps out. You never can mistake it. A line can be finely spun, but it can’t thump. The real thing and a line can have the same words—that’s where we women get fooled—it’s manner and looks you’ve got to watch.”

“He’s awfully cynical about women,” said Joy. “And his face, Jerry—it’s so full of—so—experienced.”

“Can you imagine me getting along well with anyone who was—not?” Jerry questioned; and then smiled again. Joy started. Her smile held in it an echo of Mabel’s peculiar radiance. “Cynical! His face looks like a kid’s who has asked for a stick of candy and been stuffed with the whole candy store.”

She began to slide out of her clothes. “And he doesn’t know—that I’m Galatea! Can you tie that?”

“You—don’t have to tell him,” and Joy watched her from the corner of one eye as she brushed her hair. “He doesn’t care about working back—he’s said so—you never have to tell him a—thing.”

Jerry shrugged her shoulders into the purple kimono. “He’s going to lunch with me to-morrow. He’ll see me in broad daylight without candles and the black velvet dress. It’ll be my turn to talk—in which case I can’t keep up my stride, and will have to slide into the American language. And I’m going to tell him—of course I’m going to tell him. Don’t you see my really being both things—starting the dream, and finishing it—makes it—better than ever? If he doesn’t see it that way—— But he will! I can’t wait to tell him.”

Joy crawled into bed with misgivings which grew faint in the face of Jerry’s firm faith. “It was just as we doped it, wasn’t it, Joy? You said he went across—and I said that I was too small and casual a matter for him to waste pains on—when it got inconvenient for him to do so. They sent him over sooner than he expected—so he simply knocked out of my life. But now! Those years were worth it—I’d go through ’em over again if I were sure this was coming at the end.”

“And he thinks he’s started at the end,” said Joy, “and ‘defeated all the weary preliminaries.’”

Jerry had snapped out the light, opened the windows and jumped into bed, but her head reared up again at this. “You think he’s had an easy time of it—compared to me—that I made it too easy for him, right off—don’t you? I—I didn’t want to make it any harder for _myself_! And look at his face, Joy—does he look as if _he_ had had an especially satisfying time along the way—before he found me?”

“Forgive me, Jerry,” said Joy after a silence. “He was right, these things should not be analyzed.”

But Jerry did not even hear her. “We have been a long time finding each other. But the finding trims everything on heaven and earth tied together, to a finish!”

And Joy was conscious of an overpowering loneliness. It was a barren feeling; she had never really loved. She had not known Mabel’s radiance or Jerry’s ecstatic fireworks, in the disturbing thrills that had been hers in the past which now seemed so far removed it was as if it belonged to another life. And now, with Jerry silent but not asleep by her side, she felt suddenly, horribly alone. Jerry was her best friend, and save for Jim, her only friend. Yet how that friendship sank into insignificance now. Jerry’s world was full; all her world and life were but one man; and Joy was outside. She lost herself in sleep, where she dreamed that the only person remaining in her world who spelled anything in life to her, had left her. She woke up sobbing bitterly, with “Jim!” on her lips. All was toneless dark, that breathless hour of earliest morning when vitality is at its lowest ebb yet sometimes the heart may beat at its highest. Things are seen at that hour with uninfluenced clarity of vision. And Joy gasped in the shock of the knowledge that was rising within her. Jim Dalton was the only person left—who spelled anything in life to her. Jerry was sleeping quietly; her tears fell unconsoled. “Jim!” she sobbed again; and with his name trembling through the black fringe of dawn, she fell asleep.