Chapter XX: Barbara Breaks Loose

A glaze settled over the surface of events for the next few weeks in the Flandon household. Both Gage and Helen were torn away from too much indulgence in their own thoughts by the implacability of the things which they must do. Having broken up his legal connections with his own hands, Gage was confronted with the necessity of in some way making his next steps justify his past action and an unholy pride made him determined to show a doubting business world that he had been actuated by deep and skillful motives. There was the alternative of leaving St. Pierre and that he was disinclined to do. He wanted to start an office of his own and demonstrate with the greatest possible rapidity that nothing but benefit had accrued to him from his break with Sable. He guessed what he did not hear of the doubts about his move, and he wanted to put the world in the wrong if possible.

It was true, while he had found Sable’s intervention in the matter of Freda the unbearable breaking point, that he had a kind of long deferred zest in contemplating his new business freedom. Sable’s offer had been, in the beginning, far too lucrative and too flattering to lose but there was a cautiousness, a lack of independence in many of their mutual actions which had galled Gage. He was tired of the connection. He was at odds with the political clique to which his close connection with the Congressman held him. He was disgusted with the result of the convention--not that he had hoped for much but the flatness of the political outlook, the beating of the old drums irritated him. There were times when the exhilaration of the chance he was taking lifted him up and if he had been drinking less steadily he might have turned the exhilaration to much advantage. But his mind was too nervous to plan steadily or well. It shot restlessly past immediacies into dreams of a future when he would have justified every action to himself and the world and particularly to Helen.

He ignored and avoided Helen’s several attempts to come to an understanding on the question of money. She knew enough about their affairs to feel that this change of Gage must make a great difference in their income temporarily, even if he should ultimately succeed. It worried her greatly. She had made up her mind to a separation from Gage but mere independence did not solve the money question for them all. She wanted very much to know exactly where they stood and she was convinced that the spendthrift, financial optimism of Gage, characteristic always, but most marked now, was getting them into deeper waters constantly. Temporarily she and Gage had dropped their personal problem. In one brief, cold conversation Gage had suggested that, pending a settlement of his affairs and his new ventures, they waive the personal matters and Helen had very gladly agreed.

So the days adjusted themselves to a routine so smooth and orderly that sometimes even to Helen it seemed unbelievable that it was not the expression of ease and happiness. Only at times, however, for as she looked at Gage it was impossible not to be conscious of the strain under which he was laboring. He was often out nights, working or not--she did not know. She knew that the supply of whisky in the sideboard was replenished far too often to serve moderate drinking and she knew that Gage slept badly, for she could often see the light reflected from his windows in the early hours of the morning.

He never molested her now but left her to her own activities with hardly a jeer at them. Now and then some scathing remark escaped him and fell blunted from the armor of her indifference. But for the most part his early chafing under her prominence was gone. The flood of letters which came for her in every mail aroused no comment from him. He saw her at work on the organization of her section of the country and hardly seemed to notice what she did. Intent as she was on learning what she could do, how she could do it, always with the thought in the back of her mind that she needed to find a kind of work that would earn her independence as well as notoriety she put an entirely new seriousness into the work she was doing. The old dilettantism was gone and with the death of that half-mocking dilettante spirit came an entirely new zest for the work she did.

Mrs. Brownley was full of a glorious naïveté. She wanted to organize everybody. Politics fairly dripped from her impressive, deliberately moulded lips. She wanted to pin a small white elephant badge on every one she met. She had a practical eye that liked to translate enthusiasm into badges, buttons and costumes. Jerrold Haynes, rather indispensable now and then to Helen, said that he was sure that the end of the campaign would see Mrs. Brownley in full elephant’s costume. Jerrold laughed at Helen too. He told her frankly that she was ruining herself for an observer.

“A year ago you were in a fair way to become the most beautiful philosopher of the twentieth century. Now you’re like all the rest of the women--a good looking hustler. You’ve become ordinary in appealing to your big audience. You should have been content to charm Gage and me.”

“I was. But I wasn’t allowed to remain in my sloth.”

“No--that serpent of a Duffield girl. I seem to remember Gage didn’t like her either. I didn’t, but undoubtedly Gage and I wouldn’t agree on reasons, would we? Well, where is she now?”

“Down on Long Island somewhere with Harriet Thompson, resting. She was pretty well fagged out with the months here.”

“Didn’t marry Carpenter, did she?”

“No. Apparently she didn’t or we might have heard of it.”

“Carpenter saved himself from the yoke of feminism just in time, perhaps.”

“I haven’t seen him lately.”

“He sits around the club all day and cools himself in case he should decide to keep an evening engagement and need to look fresh. I see him off and on. Doesn’t look happy, for a fact.”

“Anyway it’s none of our business, is it?”

Jerrold laughed.

“Not a whit and therefore interesting. I hate talking about what is my business.”

“That’s a common failing,” said Helen a little bitterly. “I never realized how epidemic until lately, since Gage has decided to go in for himself. People ask me about everything except my bank balance.”

“The penalty of being in the limelight, Helen.”

She shrugged lightly, a tinge of weariness in her manner.

“Don’t you like the limelight then?” he urged teasingly.

Impatiently she turned on him.

“Oh, more or less, I suppose. But I shan’t like it six months from now. I’ll be tired to death of it if it still keeps coming. You get fed up on it pretty quickly.”

“So skeptical--”

“You needn’t mock at me, Jerrold. You ought to admire me because I’m honest enough not to say that I weep every time my picture is in the paper. I go further. I am quite miserable when I realize that my limelight is directed mostly not at the inner workings of my mind but at my dress and my name and the fact that I take a marcel well.”

“So you know that too, do you?”

“I know everything about it,” Helen boasted mockingly. “I even admit the necessity for keeping my clothes pretty well pressed and clean. I may scoff with the rest of you at Mrs. Brownley’s methods of organizing a Junior Republican Club but I know that she’s the finest realist of us all. She is willing to admit that women love white elephant badges, and appeals to them as the virtuous sex, and fashionable Junior Republican Clubs, which are Junior Leagues in action. I can see myself developing a philosophy just like Mrs. Brownley and learning to speak of democracy and the home with her impressiveness and Mrs. Thorstad’s italics and bending my energies to making the Republican party sought after by women because after all it includes all the best people.”

“You’re a great woman. I think I’ll write a book about you.”

She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “You’ll never write a book about anything, Jerrold. You’re too dilettante to ever get started. I know. I was the same way until Margaret hurled me into all this action. Now I am, as you say, spoiled for a good dilettante. I’m spoiled for a lot of things, in fact. For being an easy going comfortable wife. I’m a poor wreck of a woman politician.” She laughed at him and looked so mockingly pretty under the big gray chiffon hat she wore that Jerrold’s eyes were lit with enthusiasm. Jerrold had motored Helen down to the Brownleys’ summer home for a conference with Mrs. Brownley, who had the Junior Republican Club on her hands at the moment and wanted to talk it over with Helen. Mrs. Brownley had done a great deal of organizing and much of it was extremely effective along the lines suggested by Margaret and Mrs. Thorstad. But Mrs. Brownley knew that the lure of the social column was great and she had pressed Bob and Allie into action. The Junior Republican Club, composed of girls just preparing for the vote, was to be one of the educational features of the campaign. They would be useful, she pointed out, in helping when the Republican women had headquarters, later--and useful or not they ought to be interested.

So the Junior Republican Club was formed amid much enthusiasm on the piazza of the Redding Hotel at Lake Nokomis where St. Pierre sent its fashionable colony during the summer months. They had a president, and several news agencies had already taken pictures of them “reading from left to right and from right to left--standing in the back row, etc.” One of the agencies had been acting for a New York paper and the girls were somewhat stirred over the novelty. As Allie said, “It was time some one did something. Look what happened to Russia where the Bolsheviks drove you out of your homes and took everything you’d got. If they’d been organized it might have been different.” Besides her father said he thought women, especially educated women, (Allie spoke with personal feeling, having spent four thousand a year at the Elm Grove School) were to be the salvation of the country.

She had plenty of support and enthusiasm. Even in these spoiled and under nourished little minds a tiny flame of enthusiasm for the new possibilities of women’s lives were burning. They interpreted the new freedom to suit themselves as did most other women. To them it meant a good deal of license, a cool impudence and camaraderie towards men, a definite claiming of all the rights of men in so far as they contributed to the fun of existence. “Women aren’t as they used to be” was a handy peg for them to hang escapades upon, a blanket reason for refusing to accept any discipline. That was the substance of their feminism.

As for their politics they were hewed from the politics of their fathers and their class. They were defensive for the most part. They had heard of the exigent demands of labor, they had seen their fathers irritant under “Bolshevik legislation”--in their own shrewd minds (and many of them had the shrewdness common to smallness) they knew that all their luxury and their personal license, their expensive clothes and schools and motors and unlimited charge accounts were based on an order whose right to exist was being challenged. They roused to its defense, boisterously, giggling, and yet class conscious.

Helen did what she could to palliate any trouble the club might cause.

She pressed on Mrs. Brownley the need of not antagonizing possible and prospective members of the party by anything that appeared as snobbishness. Mrs. Brownley agreed astutely, starting post haste on a scheme for organizing the stenographers of the city and mapping out a scheme whereby the employees of the large department stores might be drawn into Republican groups. She urged Helen to talk to the Junior Republicans and Helen did it.

She noted Barbara among the rest, handsome in yellow linen and yet looking tired and worn. The artificial penciling under her eyes was circled by deeper yellow brown hollows, and her restlessness and lack of interest in the whole proceeding were conspicuous.

“What a world weary face that child has!” thought Helen.

She remembered one of Mrs. Brownley’s confidences about Barbara’s engagement and idly asked Allie about it.

“Is Bob engaged to Ted?”

“Oh, Lord, who knows!” said Allie. “She’s had an awful row with him, but she’s got his ring. I don’t know what they fought about. And she’s such a fool, for she really is crazy about him and he knows it so he doesn’t pay much attention when she rows.”

She stopped as Barbara came towards them.

“I’m going up to town over night. I wonder if you and Mr. Haynes would take me up? Have you an extra seat? I’ll be a fine chaperon.”

Helen frowned a little. She disliked the insinuation, just as she disliked Barbara, but the girl’s request could not be refused gracefully.

“I’m sure Jerrold will be glad,” she said rather coldly.

“When’d you decide to go to town, Bob?” asked Allie.

Another girl joined the group, overhearing the last remark.

“I think she’s going up to keep a watch on Ted. One of the girls saw him with that pretty Thorstad girl one day at a hotel--the girl there’s been such a lot of talk about.”

Helen felt herself change color and as she tried to get quick control caught sight of Barbara’s face. It was almost white, but not as if white from shock or pain--rather an ugly white, lips compressed, eyes lifted angrily.

“I don’t consider myself in the least responsible for Ted’s company, Mildred,” she said sharply.

“Aren’t you afraid to stay alone in the house with just Mathilda?” went on Allie.

Barbara looked her contempt.

“If you are there,” Allie went on, “call up Mrs. Wilkins and tell her I’ve got to have those new white skirts by noon Wednesday. If she doesn’t get them here I won’t pay for them.”

“Write her your grouch,” said Bob, graciously, “I’ve got my own errands.”

They left Barbara at the portico of the big stone house where the shades were drawn down and the windows closed.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right here?” asked Helen.

“Oh, yes,” said Bob, “the housekeeper’s here and father’s going to take me back to-morrow night after I get my shopping done. Thanks so much for taking me up. And I do feel so guilty--”

But Jerrold speeded the motor and the sound of her voice was lost.

“What a lascivious little mind she has,” he remarked as they drove on to Helen’s house.

“And malicious, I think. It’s odd. Her parents are really kindly on the whole. And Allie’s just a nice clumsy child.”

“Whatever hereditary influences might have made this girl, they’ve been completely choked,” said Jerrold. “She’s pure and simple environment--rotted by it just as she might have rotted in a slum somewhere. The only thing that has survived her complete subordination to money and luxury is old Brownley’s acquisitive instinct--and God help the person who thwarts that!”

* * * * *

It was a considerate invocation if it had done any good, for at that moment Barbara was preparing to destroy any obstacles which lay in the path of her acquiring Ted.

She went to the telephone in her mother’s room and called Ted Smillie’s house. He was not in. She tried two clubs and finally located him.

“Yes, it is Bob. I came up--oh, to see a dressmaker. No--just to-night. No--I’m tired and hot. I don’t want to dance. You come over here. Why, of course it’s all right. Do come. Well, I’ll make you some lemonade and we’ll have a talk. Of course. Eight--that’s fine.”

But it was nearly nine before he came. Barbara had found a black dinner dress which became her, and she had thrown open the windows of the second floor library to the cooling evening air. She had found some supper for herself, a casual, icebox supper but for her guest she had made sandwiches. Also she had hunted long and wearily for some key which would open the wine cellar and failed to find any. But there were lemons fortunately and she had, as she promised, made the lemonade. By eight she was all ready for him--waiting, in repose. By nine she was tense. In that empty hour she had much time for thinking and her thoughts did not rest her. They roused her to a nervous tension which was manifest in the quick gestures so unlike her usual pose of lazy indifference.

He rang at last and she slipped down the stairs to let him in. A single light burned in the hall cluster.

He looked down at her from his admired height, smiling without eagerness.

“Where did you drop from? Nowhere? I was going to go down to see you next week.”

“I had to come up to town to see about some clothes.”

He laid down his hat and turned to her.

“All alone?”

“All alone,” answered Bob coolly. “Even the housekeeper’s gone to see a sick sister and won’t be back until morning. I guess the caretaker’s in the basement--at least I told him to stay there.”

“You going to stay here alone all night?”

“Why not? It’s safe as a clock. Bars on mother’s windows and all the front of the house. Safety locks on the doors. Nothing stealable in the house and a telephone and house phone in my room.”

“All the same it’s--”

“Unconventional? By this time you ought to know I’m the most unconventional person on earth. Women don’t bother about conventions as they used to. We don’t need chaperons at our elbows, thank goodness!”

He smiled appreciatively.

“Let’s go upstairs to the library,” said Bob, “and tell me what you’ve been doing.”

He followed her obediently and they settled themselves in two great soft leather chairs drawn up to a little table, the tray of sandwiches and lemonade between them.

“What’s new?” said Bob.

“It’s dull as can be. Nothing stirring.”

“Who’ve you been seeing?”

“Pretty much of nobody. A few stalemates around the club. That’s all.”

“Then why stay in town? Why don’t you come down to join your mother? It’s really not bad at Nokomis this year. Dot Lodge has two girls from New York visiting her that are pretty snappy. And we’ve gone in for politics. Formed a Republican club.”

“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Ted. “Torchlight processions and all that? Going to purify politics?”

“Maybe--can’t tell.”

“Maybe not, probably.”

They scuffed around in tawdry repartee, going swiftly through a few motions of convention that seemed to cling to them. But shortly he was sitting on the arm of her chair and then he had her held more closely. For a while she let him fondle her, her cheeks growing hot. Then she returned to her line of attack.

“If it’s as dull as you say here you ought to be in the country where we can make it less dull.”

“Can’t. Lose my job if I do. The old man said that he’d make no distinction in the office this summer. Me and the hallroom boys--we’ve got to do our eight hours.”

“Sure it’s that? Sure it’s not some girl holding you up here?”

That pleased him.

“So you came up to see me because you’re jealous, did you? Little cat!”

He caressed her as he spoke and she did not seem to mind what he said.

“No--I’m not jealous. But perhaps I’m lonesome.”

“Not this minute you aren’t.”

She seemed to purr.

“Well, this is nice,” he repeated.

“I wish we could stay this way forever. Isn’t it fun to be away from every one?”

For answer he kissed her.

“I suppose you’re dreadfully shocked by my unconventionality,” said Bob, “but I don’t care. I despise conventions. I think women have a right to do as they please. Anything they please. Women aren’t slaves as they used to be.”

She lay back, invoking her vulgar license in the name of the hard won liberties of women, corrupting the words she spoke.

“Look out what you say,” said Ted. “Look out, young woman and don’t get me to take you at your word.”

She shivered ecstatically.

“Ted,”--the time seemed ripe, no doubt--“do you care for that Thorstad girl?”

“Who--Freda Thorstad?”

“All the girls are talking because you were seen at some hotel with her.”

“Let them talk, the silly fools.”

She released herself a little.

“Where is she, Ted?”

“Why?” He began to tease her, and her lack of control showed instantly.

“You know she’s disappeared. Why did she go and where did she go?”

“Why should I know?”

“You do know,” she countered.

“I said nothing of the sort.”

Pulling herself loose, she confronted him. Every thwarted undisciplined desire in her raged at the frail control maintained by habit. Her eyes, no longer sleepy, blazed at him.

“You know where she is. The creature has gone off somewhere to hide herself and her shame, I suppose. The abandoned hussy. I know all about it, Ted. I found out all about it.”

He became a little surly and yet curiosity seemed to pique him.

“You know all about what, Bob?”

She was losing control completely now. The confession, abasement, she had worked up to was not forthcoming.

“Where is she?” she stormed. “Where are you keeping that girl?”

Her face had changed from that of a pretty girl to that of a furious, uncontrolled shrew. Her shrill voice tore through the empty room, struck against the silence.

“Hush,” he said sharply, “don’t yell like that, Bob. Don’t be a fool.”

“I won’t have it. I won’t have you making a laughing stock out of me. Before everybody--everybody’s talking, laughing at you--at me. You’ve got to give that girl up. You’ve got to! Pay her off and let her go away and hide till it’s over.”

The vein of caddishness was rich in Ted. He looked at her coolly--calculated her hysteria, made her maddeningly conscious of his imperturbability. Turning away, he lit a cigarette.

“So you won’t answer me!”

“I really don’t know what you mean, Bob. You hurl a lot of accusations at me and in the same breath you want a lot of promises. I don’t know what you’re driving at, my dear.”

“Then I’m through with you,” she said, viciously.

An impolite smile glimmered at the corners of his mouth.

“Oh, in that case--” He turned to the door.

But she did not have strength enough to let him go. She followed him, distressing now in her abandonment which was not even held together by anger.

“Ted--you know I care--how can you--how can you?”

He turned and appraised her. It was obvious now how much of her charm was in that thrown aside pose of indifference, lazy mockery.

“You told me you were through with me.”

His voice was quite cold, stiff. It brought her to him with a rush, her arms thrown about his neck, cheek against his, hot, panting.

“I didn’t mean it, Ted. Really, I was just about crazy. I won’t talk about that girl--about anything. Let’s just be as we were when you first came in.”

“I didn’t start all this,” he answered sullenly.

She urged him back to his chair, pulled things into some semblance of order.

“There, let’s be comfortable after all the melodrama. Here you must eat some of these sandwiches. I made them myself.”

She poised herself on the arm of his chair and played with him.

“You can’t understand how a girl feels,” she told him, “under a lot of foolish teasing. They all know I’m fond of you--a little anyway” (that fell cold)--“and they take it out of me because I’m honest and not a flirt.”

Ted chuckled. “Not a flirt.”

“You know what I mean. A girl who has been brought up as I have--can’t let herself go the way other girls of a different class can. I can see that those girls have an advantage. We’re just as--we’re just like they are only they’ve been brought up differently.”

She paused for a moment in her fumbling, in the pleading to be admitted to the class of women of easy virtue whom she fancied held her lover in their toils, trying to convince him that she was ripe for abandonment. But he would not help her. He looked at her rather curiously--that was all.

Sighing she rested her head on his shoulder.

“It’s so nice to have you here.”

“But it’s getting late, Bob. I’ll really have to go.”

She threw a restraining arm across his chest.

“Go where?”

“I have to get back--” he said vaguely.

It was time for her last card. Actuated by that vivid fear of his possible destination, perhaps, she relaxed completely in his rather unwilling arms.

“Don’t go--don’t go at all to-night. Let’s just stay here--together.”

She could feel him stiffen and looked up slowly, languorously, slyly at him. But she should have known what she would see--should have known that so easily played a game would not be worth the candle of compromise which would bind him so much more to her. He was too sophisticated to be attracted by unsought abandonment.

“Look here, Bob,” he almost shook himself to be free of her, “you’re not quite yourself to-night. You’re a bit tired and you’ll be better for a night’s sleep. I’ll have to run along now. Don’t come down. Good night.”

She made a swift movement--then seemed checked by a vision of its futility. The other door closed quietly and heavily. Stripped of the pose that served her for strength, the vanity which served her for modesty, Barbara sat in the leather chair which Ted had abandoned and let her ugly imaginings consume her.