Bambi Part 14

"Oh, no. Life is such ecstasy," she threw back at him, as the cab drew up to the clubhouse door.

V

Bambi was out of bed and at her window the next morning early. Her room faced on Gramercy Park, and the early morning sun fell across the little square so sacred to the memory of past glories, and bathed the trees in their new green drapery with a soft, impressionistic colour. Her eyes swept around the square, hastening over the great white apartment buildings, our modern atrocities, to linger over the old houses, which her swift imagination peopled with the fashion and pomp of another day.

"Spring in the city!" breathed Bambi. "Spring in New York!"

She was tempted to run to Jarvis's door and tap him awake, to drink it in too, but she remembered that Jarvis did not care for the flesh-pots, so she enjoyed her early hour alone. It was very quiet in the Park; only an occasional milk wagon rattled down the street. There is a sort of hush that comes at that hour, even in New York. The early traffic is out of the way. The day's work is not yet begun. There comes a pause before the opening gun is fired in the warfare of the day.

Many a gay-hearted girl has sat, as Bambi sat, looking off over the housetops in this "City of Beautiful Nonsense," dreaming her dreams of conquest and success. Youth makes no compromise with life. It demands all, pa.s.sionately; loses all, or wins, with anguish of spirit. So it was with Bambi, the high-handed, imperious little mite. She willed Fame and Fortune for Jarvis and herself in full measure. She wanted to count in this great maelstrom of a city. She wanted two pedestals--one for Jarvis and one for herself--to lift them above the crowd. If all the young things who think such thoughts as these, in hall bedrooms and attic chambers, could mount their visioned pedestals, the traffic police would be powerless, and all the road to Albany lined like a Hall of Fame.

But, fortunately, our practical heroine took no account of failure. She planned a campaign for Jarvis. She would go first to Belasco with his play. Mr. Belasco would receive him at once, recognize a master mind, and accept the play after an immediate hearing. Of course Jarvis would insist on reading his play aloud, so that Mr. Belasco might get the points clearly. He would come away with a thousand dollars advance royalty in his pocket, and then would come the delicious excitement of rehearsals, in which she would help. She saw Jarvis before the curtain making a first-night's speech. A brilliant series of pictures followed, with the Jarvis Jocelyns as central figures, surrounded by the wealth and brains of New York, London, Paris!

While Jarvis was mounting like a meteor, she was making a reputation as a writer. When her place in the literary ranks was so a.s.sured that the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ accepted her stories without so much as reading them; when everybody was asking "Who is this brilliant writer?--this combination of O. Henry, Edith Wharton, and W.D. Howells?" then, and only then, would she come out from behind her _nom-de-plume_ and a.s.sume her position as Mrs. Jarvis Jocelyn, wife of the famous playwright.

So absorbed was she in her moving pictures that Jarvis's rap sounded to her like a cannon shot.

"Yes? Who is it?" she called.

"Jarvis," he answered. "Are you ready for breakfast?"

"Just a minute," she prevaricated. "Wait for me in the library."

She plunged into her tub and donned her clothes in record time.

Fortunately, Jarvis did not fret over her tardiness. He was lost in an article on the drama in a current magazine.

"Good morrow, my liege lord," quoth Bambi, radiant, fresh, bewitching.

"This man has no standards at all," he replied, out of the magazine.

She quietly closed it and took it from him.

"I prefer to test the breakfast standards of this club," she laughed.

"Did you sleep?" she added.

"I always sleep."

"Let's play to-day," she added, over the coffee cups.

"Play?"

"Yes. We've never been anywhere together before. I've put aside an appropriation for amus.e.m.e.nt. I say we draw on that to-day."

"All right. Where shall we go?"

"Let's go on top of the stage to Claremont for lunch, and then we might see some pictures this afternoon, dine here, and the theatre to-night."

"Had it all thought out, did you?"

"What would you plan?" she inquired.

"We will do my way to-morrow, and your way to-day," he said.

"All right. I promise to enjoy your way if you will promise to enjoy mine, not just endure it scornfully."

"You must think I'm a boor."

"No. But I think that until you learn that an artist cannot afford to scorn any phase of life that is human, you will never do great work."

He looked at her keenly.

"Fifth Avenue isn't human. It's an imitation," he objected.

"You're very young, Jarvis," she commented.

"Upon my soul," he laughed, so spontaneously that an old fogy at the next table said audibly to his waitress, "Bride and groom," and for some reason Bambi resented it with a flare of colour.

"It's true," she continued; "until you realize that Fifth Avenue and the Bowery are as inevitable as the two ends of the teeter-totter, you won't see the picture true."

"Sometimes you show a most surprising poise," he granted her. "But of course you are not the stuff of which creative artists are made."

She chuckled, and patted her bag where the bill fold lay, with its crisp hundreds due to some imitation of creative impulse.

"Just where, and in what, am I lacking?" she asked, most humbly.

"A creative artist would not care a fig for truth. He creates an impression of truth out of a lie if necessary."

"But I am in the direct line from Ananias," she protested. "I inherit creative talent of that brand."

So they laughed and chattered, in the first real companionship they had ever known.

True to the plan, they ascended the stage at Eighteenth Street, Bambi in a flutter of happiness. As the panorama of that most fascinating highway unrolled before them, she constantly touched this and that and the other object with the wand of her vivid imagination. Jarvis watched her with amused astonishment, for the first time really thoroughly aware of her.

Again he noticed that wherever she was she was a lodestone for all eyes.

He decided that it was not beauty, in the strictest sense of the word, but a sort of radiance which emanated from her like an aura.

Twenty-third Street cut across their path with its teeming throngs.

Madison Square lay smiling in the sunshine like a happy courtesan, with no hint of its real use as Wayside Inn for all the old, the poor, the derelict, whose tired feet could find refuge there. The vista of the avenue lay ahead.

"It's like a necklace of sparkling pearls," Bambi said, with incessant craning of her neck. "I feel like standing up and singing 'The Song of the Bazaars.' There isn't a stuff, nor a silk, nor a gem from Araby to Samarkand that isn't here."

"It bewitches you, doesn't it?" Jarvis commented.

"Think of the wonder of it! Camel trains, and caravans, merchant ships on all the seas, trains, and electric trucks, all bringing the booty of the world to this great, shining bazaar for you and me. It's thrilling."

"So it is," he agreed. "I hope you mark the proportion of shops for men--dresses, hats, jewels, furs, motor clothes, tea rooms, candy shops, corsetieres, florists, bootmakers, all for women. Motor cars are full of women. Are there no men in this menagerie?"

"No. They are all cliff-dwellers downtown. They probably wear loin cloths of a fashionable cut," she laughed back at him.