The Golden Vanity (8 page)

"You said Gertrude," Bill objected.

"I know I did," Polly admitted. "Gertrude for short. Let's not go into that; I'd have to teach you the alphabet. It's partly my fault anyhow."

"What have you got to do with it?" Bill enquired placidly.

"Patting him on the head, when he was trying to escape from the nursery," Polly explained darkly. "The least I could have done was to break his heart. If it wasn't for you I'd elope with him this minute; it's my plain duty. But I suppose you wouldn't like it."

"I would
not,
" Bill grunted. "What's wrong with the girl, anyhow? I remember her now; she seemed a sweet little thing. No money, eh?"

"Sweet," Polly grimaced. "Oh, so sweet!"

"You women are always down on one another," Bill said, with unbearable masculine fatuity.

Polly moaned. "I don't see how it is possible to love such an absolute dimwit as you are, Bill. But I do. It's sheer atavism. If I were a Victorian, and you died, I'd feel an irresistible impulse to have you mounted with glass eyes and keep you in a case in the parlor."

"Quaint notion," Bill agreed. "I wouldn't put it past you. But cut out the elopements. When do they mean to walk up the aisle?"

"Oh, go away," said Polly. "In June, I suppose. People do."

* * *

She supposed correctly. Miss Kirkland sent the announcement to the newspapers, and fended off reporters. She knew she was typing her own sentence. The honeymoon would be spent abroad, and Mrs. Siddall planned to join the young couple later and winter in Egypt or on the Riviera. Mrs. Siddall had not been abroad for twenty years, dreading the sea; but this was a new start. She would engage a courier-secretary for traveling, she explained to Janet; but her old friend, Mrs. Trask, required a companion; Mrs. Siddall recommended Janet to her. Mrs. Trask lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and was stone deaf, but very active and cheerful, Mrs. Siddall said encouragingly. The position would be restful for Janet, who looked tired.

Janet said nothing. ... It was enough to make her abandon virtue altogether, if she had seen any feasible way. Much virtue in an if . . .

7

M
YSIE
was an hour late, and she was in a hurry, and angry, and laughing. Teddy McKee stopped her as she was running down the steps of the theater entrance. She said: "Oh, hello," and waved to a taxi. He said: "I haven't seen you for a long time, Mysie: what are you doing this evening?" She said: "This
evening
—good heavens!" and sprang into the taxi.

Jake Van Buren would be waiting at her apartment to take her to dinner. When she arrived she was an hour and fifteen minutes late. She flew up the stairs and burst in; Jake was there. She exclaimed: "Don't bother to say it." She had a job as press-agent for Neale Corrigan, a grouchy little Irish producer with a face like a hickory knot. She rather liked him, in spite of his habit of counting the postage stamps and keeping her overtime. "Wouldn't you think," she said, "that at his age and him a good Catholic with the fear of death on him that he'd mend his manners—but it's unfortunate the Church doesn't tell you that you go to hell for that sort of thing. For you do. And then," she remembered what she had been laughing about, "Sid Walters came in while I was putting on my hat; there was a smudge of carbon across my nose; he clasped me to his manly bosom and said:

'My little wild rose.' Wild is no word for it, I just exploded laughing, and it hurt his feelings—that's his method, taking 'em by surprise, and he did all right— I had to bolt and leave him looking as if he had stepped on his foot. Blast, it's nearly eight o'clock, go out and get yourself something to eat while I dress."

"I had some," Jake replied. "I knew you'd be late. What about you?"

"I don't want any—" She vanished into her bedroom, and there were faint sounds of splashing.

Jake sat down again patiently, with his habitual air of a well-bred guest, at ease without presuming. Dress clothes became him; he only sighed at the discovery that he was wearing a hair shirt under the armor plate of white starch. He had been to the barber during the afternoon, and a few clippings had clung through a bath and a change, with devilish persistence. Putting on hornrimmed glasses, he took up a book.

Half an hour later Mysie called to him in muffled tones. He laid down the book exactly where it had been.

"Yes?" he replied. "Can I what?"

Mysie came out in a short black evening frock, with an erratic trail of silver lace at one side, and contorted her neck alarmingly, endeavoring to gaze down her spinal column. "Something is caught in the back, can you see what, and put it straight?"

"How can you tell when a dress like this is straight?" he enquired, making a careful, respectful survey. "Ah," he disentangled a fastener, without touching Mysie's bare shoulder.

Thea Ludlow appeared from the kitchen, and watched them. What an extraordinary relationship, she thought. She was the only person who knew or even suspected the nature of the relationship.

Mysie said: "Thanks—one minute," disappearing again. "I ought to have gloves," her voice floated out tragically.

"I will get you gloves to-morrow," Jake said.

"To-morrow!
What good will that do to-night?"

"This book I was just reading," Jake said pacifically, "by Eddington Jeans Whitehead, explains that time and space are identical and interchangeable, and that if you work fast enough, you will overtake yesterday and get a million light years ahead of to-morrow, thus meeting yourself coming back for something you forgot, though it is possible that the whole universe is shooting sideways, which would make it harder."

"Well, then, I'll bet it
is
shooting sideways," said Mysie bitterly, "just to make it harder. The trouble with me is that I'm two million light years ahead already, so I've got behind again."

"There is that," Jake agreed. "Good night, Thea." Mysie snatched a green velvet evening cloak, and wrapped it about her as they went downstairs. They caught a taxi at once.

"If Geraldine is ready we can get to Gina's by ten o'clock," Mysie calculated, "so maybe I can be home at midnight and get some sleep. If only I had time to sit down and think—"

"What about?" Jake wished to know.

"Oh, shut up," said Mysie. The taxi stopped suddenly for the lights, jolting them together in a heap. They sorted themselves out politely. "This is known as the mad rush of New York's life, waiting for hours in taxis at crossings. It's five years since Gina was married— I don't know what that has to do with it, though. Only you don't see people for years, and then you gallop to meet them as if it were a fire." Someone had spoken to her on the steps . ..

Where had those five years gone out of her own life? Just as to-day had gone, running, breathless, accomplishing nothing. She was twenty-nine, would be thirty in six months. She had got nowhere in her profession, hardly was sure she had a profession any more. She was doing publicity as a stop-gap. Neale Corrigan had promised her a part; but his recent productions had nothing suitable for her type, his directors said. She was useful to Corrigan, knew how to get on with him, the feminine touch! . . . I'm one of those competent women, she thought with horror. I can always earn an honest living. So I'll never be kept in luxury. By a kind husband, or whatever. . . . My type! Blast, damn, hell! I can play anything. So they won't let me. There is no
acting.
Just walk-ons. No, I can't play anything, but if there is brains in it I can. If I'd learn to gurgle and swoop up and down on the lines— such lines, there really isn't anything else to do with them. Broadway comedy—synthetic gin. It makes me sick!

"There are no
plays."
She said that aloud.

Jake gave her his undivided attention and affirmed with passionate conviction that one of America's leading dramatists, whom he named, was a low-grade tomato worm. In Jake's opinion, the drama need not concern itself exclusively with subnormal creatures expressing themselves in a dialect compounded of East Lynne and Way Down East. "Not that I have anything against morons as such," he qualified, "but
does
the total absence of a sense of humor in itself constitute genius?"

"Among the Best People, it does," said Mysie. "I hope I may restrain myself at Gina's, and not dish your laudable ambition to chisel that job out of little Arthur. God knows I've tried hard enough to like the rich, for the sake of their money; but it can't be done. Once is enough to be told that Mussolini made the Italian railways run on time; and that Hoover has the international mind."

"Listen," said Jake. "I have told you and told you that it will get you
nowhere
to try verbal first aid on those cases. Why you go so far as to leap from the pedestal upon which I have enshrined you and scutter down to the abysms of such monsters and hold converse with them and put yourself in the way of receiving such surprising whacks over the pituitary I cannot imagine. Leave them alone! Leave them alone! They may serve some inscrutable purpose by saying those things—who are we to judge, after all, whom they were sent here to bore to death? If you start trying to enlighten one, you have to stand at the elbow of the patient forever, through long eternities, doing the same thing without any net results, for the remedy does not reach the real seat of the disease. I've seen you working on them. They finally get so they can't call their souls their own and say even worse things in their efforts to please. You believe in the possibility of ameliorating the condition of the mentally or spiritually submerged. You, a grown woman—"

"I don't," said Mysie. "All I ask is that they should go away and die somewhere out of my sight. They come up and speak to me. There are times, and plenty of them, when in self-defense you've got to use an ax."

Jake said: "It does seem the only way to get the sensation to the forebrain. But to-night—"

"Yes, yes," said Mysie. "I will, really. Besides, Arthur isn't like that himself. Of course he doesn't know the difference; he has never heard anything else in his born days. But he's rather sweet. You can tell. He has such lovely manners, and sees that everybody gets drinks, and looks bewildered because nothing makes sense. Usually only the nouveau riche are tolerable, because at least in early life they got it slapped into them. I've never talked to Arthur to any extent; Gina asked me to lunch a couple of times, but he was at the other end of the table. Then she dropped me because I didn't get my name up in electric lights. She's civil to Geraldine since Geraldine's novel went over. It's lucky I was there when she telephoned to invite Geraldine, so she had to ask me too. It tickled Geraldine to ring me in. Like most respectable married women, Geraldine sticks at nothing."

"Marriage blunts the finer feelings," said Jake.

"How do you figure that? I am sure you can, but your logical processes fascinate me, even after all these years."

"The very idea of going to bed night after night with someone you're living in the same house with—it's incestuous!"

"What would be your idea? Total strangers?" So we were, Mysie thought.

"Well, someone you meet on a moonlight night. For what is called romantic love, enormous obstacles are helpful."

"That's simple; if obstacles don't exist, you invent them. But there are so many strangers, how would you pick out one from another? I guess there's no real solution." She brooded.

Jake is cuckoo, she thought. He must be a genius, and a genius isn't human. I should have known at sight. However, there's no harm done, because if I don't make one mistake I make another .. .
Oh,
that was
Teddy McKee!
On the steps . . .

She felt a genuine horror and a great dismay. Reverse English, she thought; if your whole life should flash before your eyes, you'd go and drown yourself. . . . She had simply forgotten about Teddy McKee. Didn't even remember when she saw him. . . .

But she had forgotten deliberately, meant to wash it out. . . . The street lights slid by the taxi. They were dodging about under the Sixth Avenue Elevated, with intermittent maddening thunder overhead, trucks and street cars looming monstrous in the path; the taxi nosed through imminent destruction with fantastic insouciance. Had to go on, go through; there would be no point in stopping, either, in that spate of power pouring between artificial cliffs. There was nothing else to do, once started. And how even avoid starting? Mysie strained her eyes to catch a street number, and desisted. It didn't matter. She had looked automatically, on the instinct that you ought to know where you are and your direction and destination. But something happened to your sense of direction in New York. It had no relation to the sky and sun.

I am a lost soul, she thought. Not damned, just lost. But when did it really happen? When I was a child? ... You find yourself when you find what belongs to you, your own people. Where are mine? Jake isn't exactly; he's a fellow traveler. I don't know about Michael Busch, either—yes, somehow we belonged. But anyhow, Johnny Disston was a stranger, one of those strangers Jake means. Of course Jake is a stranger to everybody on this earth.

But it seems as if I got turned around, she thought, with Johnny. Until then I felt as if I were going somewhere definite, I didn't know exactly where, but there seemed to be a road and it seemed as if it would come out right, as if it must be my road.

While the street lights went spinning by, she thought back, with idle clarity. Beginning with Johnny Disston. She was barely eighteen, and working in the mill office, the summer Johnny came to Sequitlam. Could that be only a little over ten years ago? Johnny had come up on business, a projected farm land development, buying and clearing cut-over timber tracts, that kept him all summer but didn't keep him very busy. ... He was at least, she thought in self-justification, uncommonly good looking. Like Baldur the Beautiful; his face was broad across the cheekbones, slightly Scandinavian, and his hair was bright gold; he kept it clipped close to prevent it curling; he didn't exploit his good looks. And he had that exceptional vitality, an easy strength that is a kind of physical genius. When he moved, his coat moulded to the muscles of his shoulders. Both men and women liked him. Mysie had met him several times before the day he came into her office when she was reaching for something on top of the high old-fashioned safe. She was alone. The first thing she knew, she was swung into the air; he took her by the waist with his two hands and lifted her off her feet. Don't mention it, he said... . After that, whenever she saw him she had a sensation of lightness and helplessness.