The Gorgeous Girl Part 12

Oh, I adore New York! I'm wild to live there. I nearly pa.s.sed away in New England, but of course we had to stay as long as they would have us."

She looked at herself in a mirror, conscious of Mary's amused expression. She wore a painfully bright blue tailored suit--she had made the skirt herself and hunted up a Harlem tailor to do the jacket--round-toed, white leather shoes st.i.tched with bright blue, white silk stockings, an aviatrix cap of blue suede, and a white fox fur purchased at half price at a fire sale.

"I haven't any new jewellery except my wedding ring," she mourned. "I expected Gay's sister to give me one of her mother's diamond earrings--I think she might have. They are lovely stones--but she never made a move that way--she's horrid. As soon as I can afford to be independent I shall cut her, for she did her best to politely ask us to leave."

"You were there several weeks, weren't you?" Mary ventured.

"Yes--I grew tame. I learned a lot from her--I was pretty crude in some ways." Which was true. Trudy was quite as well-bred looking, at first glance, as the Gorgeous Girl. "It is always better to get your experience where the neighbours aren't watching. I didn't lose a minute. If I never did an honest day's work for Steve O'Valley I worked like a steam engine learning how to be a real lady, the sort Gay tried to marry but couldn't!"

"As if you weren't a little lady at all times," Mrs. Faithful added.

"Of course we are stony broke but Gay's brother-in-law just had to loan us some money in order to have us go. They gave us fifty dollars for a wedding present. Well, it was better than nothing. Gay has talked to a lot of concert managers and he's going to have some wonderful attractions next season. People have never taken g.a.y.l.o.r.d seriously; he really has had to discover himself, and he is----"

"Are you practising small talk on me?" Mary asked.

"You've said it," Trudy admitted. "That last is the way I'm going to talk about g.a.y.l.o.r.d to his friends. I'll make him a success if he will only mind me. Just think--I'll be calling on Beatrice O'Valley before long! She will have to know me because Gay helped furnish her apartment and was one of her ushers. It will mean everything for us to know her--and I'm never going to appear at all down and out, either.

People never take you seriously if you seem to need money. Debt can't frighten me. I was raised on it. All I need is Gay's family reputation and my own hair and teeth and I'll breeze in before any of the other entries. I came to ask if you won't come to see where I live?" She smiled her prettiest. "Gay is at his club and we can talk. It was quite a bomb in the enemies' camp when he married--people just can't dun a married man like they do a bachelor."

"I'll come next week." Mary tried putting off the evil day.

"No--now. I want your advice--and to show you my clothes."

"You will have clothes, Trudy, when you don't have food."

"You have to these days--no good time unless you do."

She kissed Mrs. Faithful and promised to have them all up for dinner.

Then she tucked her arm in Mary's and pranced down the street with her, talking at top speed of how horrid it was that they had to walk and not drive in a cab like Beatrice, and concluding with a dissertation on g.a.y.l.o.r.d's mean disposition.

"I'm not mean, Mary, unless I want to accomplish something--but g.a.y.l.o.r.d is mean on general principle. He sulks and tells silly lies when you come to really know him. Oh, I'm not madly in love--but we can get along without throwing things. It's better than marrying a clod-hopper who couldn't show me anything better than his mother's green-plush parlour."

"Doesn't it seem hard to have to pretend to love him?"

"No, he's so stupid," said the debonair Mrs. Vondeplosshe as she brought Mary up before the entrance of the Graystone, a cheap apartment house with a marble entrance that extended only a quarter of the way up; from there on ordinary wood and marbleized paper finished the deed. The Vondeplosshes had a rear apartment. Their windows looked upon ash cans and delivery entrances, the front apartments with their bulging bay windows being twenty-five dollars a month more rent. As it was, they were paying forty-five, and very lucky to have the chance to pay it.

Trudy unlocked the door with a flourish. All that Trudy had considered as really essential to the making of a home was a phonograph and a pier gla.s.s; the rest was simple--rent a furnished place and wear out someone else's things. The bandbox of a place with four cell-like rooms was by turns pitiful and amusing to Mary Faithful.

"We are just starting from here," Trudy reminded her as she watched the gray eyes flicker with humour or narrow with displeasure. "Wait and see--we'll soon be living neighbour to the O'Valleys. Besides, there is such an advantage in being married. You don't have to worry for fear you'll be an----"

"Old maid," finished Mary. "Out with it! You can't frighten me. I hope you and Gay never try changing your minds at the same time, for it would be a squeeze."

She selected a fragile gilt chair in the tiny living room with its imitation fireplace and row of painted imitation books in the little bookcase. This was in case the tenants had no books of their own--which the Vondeplosshes had not. If they possessed a library they could easily remove the painted board and give it to the janitor for safekeeping. There were imitation Oriental rugs and imitation-leather chairs and imitation-mahogany furniture, plated silver, and imitations of china and of linen were to be found in the small three-cornered dining room, which resembled a penurious wedge of cake, Mary thought as she tried saying something polite. The imitation extended to the bedroom with its wall bed and built-in chiffonier and dresser of gaudy walnut. Trudy had promptly cluttered up the last-mentioned article with smart-looking cretonne and near-ivory toilet articles. There was even a pathetic little wardrobe trunk they had bought for $28.75 in New York, and Trudy had painstakingly soaked off old European hotel labels she had found on one of Gay's father's satchels and repasted them on the trunk to give the impression of travel and money.

The kitchen was nothing but a dark hole with a rusty range and nondescript pots and pans. "Being in the kitchen gets me nothing, so why bother about it?" Trudy explained, hardly opening the door. "We have no halls or furnace to care for, and an apartment house sounds so well when you give an address. I wish we could have afforded a front one; it will be hard to have people climbing through the back halls. I have put in a good supply of canned soups and vegetables and powdered puddings, and we can save a lot on our food. We'll be invited out, too, and when we eat at home I can get a meal in a few minutes and I'll make Gay wash the dishes. Besides, I have a wonderful recipe for vanishing cream that his sister bought in Paris, and I'm going to have a little business myself, making it to supply to a few select customers as a favour. I'll sell small jars for a dollar and large ones for three, and I can make liquid face powder, too. Oh, we won't starve. And if you could wait for the money I know I owe you----"

"Call it a wedding present," Mary said, briefly.

"You lamb!"

Trudy fell on her neck and was in the throes of explaining how grateful she was and how she had an evening dress modelled after one of Gay's sister's, which cost seven hundred dollars before the war, when Gay appeared--very debonair and optimistic in his checked suit, velours hat, and toothpick-toed tan shoes, and his pale little eyes were quite animated as he kissed Trudy and dutifully shook hands with Mary, explaining that the Hunters of Arcadia had just offered him a clerical position at the club, ordering supplies and making out bills and so on--because he was married, very likely. It would pay forty a month and his lunches.

"And only take up your mornings! You can slip extra sandwiches in your pockets for me, deary. I'll give you a rubber-pocketed vest for a Christmas present," Trudy exclaimed. "Oh, say everything in front of Mary--she knows what we really are!"

At which Mary fled, with the general after impression of pale, wicked eyes and a checked suit and a dashing, red-haired young matron with a can opener always on hand, and the fact that the Vondeplosshes were going to lay siege to the O'Valleys as soon as possible.

Mary decided that it was a great privilege to be a profane lady concealing a heartache compared to other alternatives. At least heartaches were quite real.

CHAPTER VII

It was almost Christmas week before the realization of Trudy's ambition to have Beatrice call upon her as the wife of g.a.y.l.o.r.d Vondeplosshe instead of an unimportant employee of her own husband.

Trudy counted upon Beatrice to help her far more than g.a.y.l.o.r.d dared to hope.

"Bea is like all her sort," he warned Trudy when the point of Beatrice's having to invite the Vondeplosshes for dinner was close at hand; "she is crazy about herself and her money. She would cheat for ten cents and then turn right round and buy a thousand-dollar dress without questioning the price."

Which was true. Beatrice had never had to acquire any sense of values regarding either money or character. By turns she was penurious and lavish, suspecting a maid of stealing a sheet of notepaper and then writing a handsome check for a charity in which she had only a pa.s.sing interest. She would send her soiled finery to relief committees, and when someone told her that satin slippers and torn chiffon frocks were not practical she would say in injured astonishment: "Sell them and use the money. I never have practical clothes."

If a maid pleased her Beatrice pampered her until she became overbearing, and there would be a scene in which the maid would be told to pack her things and depart without any prospect of a reference; and someone else would be rushed into her place, only to have the same experience. Beatrice was like most indulged and superfluously rich women, both unreasonable and foolishly lenient in her demands. She had no schedule, no routine, no rules either for herself or others. She had been denied the chance of developing and discovering her own limitations and abilities. She expected her maids and her friends to be at her beck and call twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four, she would not accept an excuse of being unfitted by illness for some task or of not knowing how to do any intricate, unheard-of thing which suddenly it occurred to her must be done.

When a servant would plead her case Beatrice always told her that for days at a time she left her alone in her beautiful home with nothing to do but keep it clean and eat up all her food and very likely give parties and use her talking machine and piano--which was quite true--and that she must consider this when she was asked to stay on duty until three or four o'clock in the morning or be up at five o'clock with an elaborate breakfast for Beatrice and her friends just returning from a fancy-dress ball.

On a sunny day she often sent the maids driving in her car, and if a blizzard came up she was certain to ask them to walk downtown to match yarn for her, not even offering car fare. She would borrow small sums and stamps from them and deliberately forget to pay them back, at the same time giving her cook a forty-dollar hat because it made her own self look too old. She had never had any one but herself to rely upon for discipline, and whenever she wanted anything she had merely to ask for it. When anything displeased her it was removed without question.

American business men do not always toil until they are middle-aged for the reward of being made a fool by a chorus girl or an adventuress.

That belongs to yellow-backed penny-dreadfuls and Sunday supplement tales of breach-of-promise suits. More often the daughter of the business man is both the victim and the vampire of his own shortsighted neglectfulness. The business man expresses it as "working like a slave to give her the best in the land." And sometimes, as in the case of Steve O'Valley, it is his own wife instead of a blonde soul mate who lures him to destruction in six installments.

When Beatrice first knew of g.a.y.l.o.r.d's return she was inclined to pay no attention to his wife, despite her remarks to Steve. Then g.a.y.l.o.r.d telephoned, and she had him up for afternoon tea, during which he told her all about it. He was very diplomatic in his undertaking. He pictured Trudy as a diamond in the rough, and in subtle, careful fashion gave Beatrice to understand that just as she had married a diamond in the rough--with a Virginia City grandfather and a Basque grandmother and the champion record of goat tending--so he, too, had been democratic enough to put aside precedent and marry a charming, unspoiled little person with both beauty and ability, and certainly he was to be congratulated since he had been married for love alone, Truletta knowing full well his unfortunate and straitened circ.u.mstances.... Yes, her people lived in Michigan but were uncongenial. Still, there was good blood in the family only it was a long ways back, probably as far back as the age of spear fighting, and he relied upon Beatrice, his old playmate, to sympathize with and uphold his course.

Secretly annoyed that the tables had been so skillfully turned, yet not willing to admit it to this bullying morsel, Beatrice was obliged to say she would call upon his wife and ask them for dinner the following week.

g.a.y.l.o.r.d fairly floated home, to find Trudy remodelling a dress, sc.r.a.ps of fur and shreds of satin on the floor.

"Babseley, she's coming to call to-morrow!" he said, joyfully, hanging up his velours hat and straddling a little gilt chair.

"Really? I wish we had a better place. I feel at a disadvantage. If it were a man I wouldn't mind, I could act humble and brave--that sort of dope. But it never goes with a woman; you have to bully a rich woman, and I'm wondering if I can."

"I did," he said, his pale eyes twinkling with delight. "It was easy, too. I dragged in O'Valley's orphan-asylum days and all, and how we both married diamonds in the rough. Woof, how she squirmed!" He rose and went to the absurd little buffet, pouring out two gla.s.ses of "red ink" and gulping down one of them. "I wish I had O'Valley's money; I'd put away a houseful of this stuff. I'm going to dig up a few bottles at the club--in case of illness." Trudy did not want her gla.s.s, so he drank that as well.

"You take too much of that stuff," Trudy warned, gathering up her debris; "and when you have taken too much you talk too much."

g.a.y.l.o.r.d rewarded her by consuming a third gla.s.s. "Shall we eat out?"

She shook her head. "Too expensive. There's no need for it now. I bought some potato salad and I have canned pineapple and sugar cookies."

She dumped her work into a basket and flew round the dining room until she summoned g.a.y.l.o.r.d to join her in a meal laid out on the corner of a dingy luncheon table.