Who Cares? Part 13

VI

She wanted Martin. Everything that had happened that night made her want Martin. He knew that she was a kid, and treated her as such. He didn't stand up and try and force her forward into being a woman--although, of all men, he had the right. He was big and generous and had given her his name and house and the run of the world, but not from his lips ever came the hard words that she had heard that night.

How extraordinary that they should have come from Alice as well as from Gilbert.

She wanted Martin. Where was Martin? She felt more like a bird, at that moment, than a b.u.t.terfly--like a bird that had flown too far from its nest and couldn't find its way back. She had been honest with Martin, all along. Why, the night before they had started on the street of adventure, she had told him her creed, in that dark, quiet room with the moonlight on the floor in a little pool, and had frankly cried out, "Who cares?" for the first time. And later, upstairs in her room, in his house, she had asked him to leave her; and he had gone, because he understood that she wanted to remain irresponsible for a time and must not be taken by the shoulders and shaken into caring until she had had her fling. He understood everything--especially as to what she meant by saying that she would go joy-riding, that she would make life spin whichever way she wanted it to go. It was the right of youth, and what was she but just a kid? He had never stood over her and demanded payment, and yet he had given her everything. He understood that she was new to the careless and carefree, and had never flung the word honest at her head, because, being so young, she considered that she could be let off from making payments for a time.

She wanted Martin. She wanted the comforting sight of his clean eyes and deep chest and square shoulders. She wanted to sit down knee to knee with him as they had done so often on the edge of the woods, and talk and talk. She wanted to hear his man's voice and see the laughter-lines come and go round his eyes. He was her pal and was as reliable as the calendar. He would wipe out the effect of the reproaches that she had been made to listen to by Alice and Gilbert.

They might be justified; they were justified; but they showed a lack of understanding of her present mood that was to her inconceivable. She was a kid. Couldn't they see that she was a kid? Why should they both throw bricks at her as though she were a hawk and not a mere b.u.t.terfly?

Where was Martin? Why hadn't she seen him for several days? Why had he stayed away from home without saying where he was and what he was doing? And what was all this about a girl with a white face and red lips? Martin must have friends, of course. She had hers--Gilbert and Hosack and the others, if they could be called friends. But why a girl with a white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle? That didn't sound much like Martin.

All these thoughts ran through Joan's mind as she walked about the drawing-room with its open windows, in the first hour of the morning, sending out an S. O. S. to Martin. She ought to be in bed and asleep--not thinking and going over everything as if she were a woman.

She wasn't a woman yet, and could only be a kid once. It was too bad of Alice to try and force her to take things seriously so soon.

Seriousness was for older people, and even then something to avoid if possible. And as for Gilbert--well, she didn't for one instant deny the fact that it was rather exciting and exhilarating for him to be in love with her, although she was awfully sorry for Alice. She had done nothing to encourage him, and it was really a matter of absolute indifference to her whether he loved her or not, so long as he was at hand to take her about. And she didn't intend to encourage him, either.

Love meant ties and responsibility--Alice proved that clearly enough.

There was plenty of time for love. Let her flit first. Let her remain young as long as she could, careless and care-free. The fact that she was married was just an accident, an item in her adventure. It didn't make her less young to be married, and she didn't see why it should.

Martin understood, and that was why it was so far-fetched of Alice to suggest that her att.i.tude could turn Martin's armor into broadcloth, and hint at his having ceased to be a knight because he had been seen with a girl--never mind whether her face was white and her lips red, and her hair too golden.

"I'm a kid, I tell you," she said aloud, throwing out her justification to the whole world. "I am and I will be, I will be. I'll play the fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there. Who cares?" And she laughed once more, and ran her hand over her hair as though waving all these thoughts away, and shut the windows and turned out the lights and went upstairs to her bedroom. "I'm a selfish, self-willed little devil, crazy about myself, thinking of nothing but having a good time," she added inwardly. "I know it, all of you, as well as you do, but give me time. Give me my head for a bit. When I must begin to pay, I'll pay with all I've got."

But presently, all ready for bed, she put on a dressing gown and left her room and padded along the pa.s.sage in heelless slippers to Martin's room. He might have been asleep all this time. How silly not to have thought of that! She would wake him for one of their talks. It seemed an age since they had sat on the hill together among the young buds, and she had conjured up the high-reaching buildings of New York against the blue sky, like a mirage.

She had begun to think again. Alice and Gilbert between them had set her brain working--and she couldn't stop it. What if the time had come already when she must pull herself together and face facts and play what everybody called the game? Well, if it had, and she simply couldn't hide behind youthfulness any longer, as Gilbert had said, she would show that she could change her tune of "Who cares?" to "I care"

with the best of them! "I'm only a little over eighteen. I don't know quite what it is, but I'm something more than pretty. I'm still not much more than a flapper--an irritating, empty-headed, fashionable-school-fed, undisciplined, sophisticated kid. I know all about that as well as they do. I'm making no pretense to be anything different. Heaven knows, I'm frank enough about it--even to myself. But it's only a phase. Why not let me get over it and live it down? If there's anything good in me, and there is, it will come out sooner or later. Why not let me go through it my own way? A few months to play the fool in--it isn't much to ask, and don't I know what it means to be old?"

She hadn't been along that pa.s.sage before. It was Martin's side of the house. She hadn't given much thought to Martin's side of anything. She tried a door and opened it, fumbled for the b.u.t.ton that would turn the light on and found it. It was a large and usefully fitted dressing room with a hanging cupboard that ran all along one wall, with several doors. Two old shiny-faced English tallboys were separated by a boot rack. Between the two windows was a shaving gla.s.s over a basin. There was a bookcase on each side of the fire-place and a table conveniently near a deep armchair with a tobacco jar, pipes and a box of cigarettes.

Every available s.p.a.ce of wall was crammed with framed photographs of college groups, some showing men with the whiskered faces and the strange garments of the early Victorian period, others of the clean-shaven men of the day, but all of them fit and eager and care-free, caught in their happiest hours. It was a man's room, arranged by one, now used by another.

Joan went through into the bedroom. The light followed her. There was no Martin. It was all strangely tidy. Its owner might have been away for weeks.

With a sense of chill and a feeling of queer loneliness, she went back to the dressing room. She wanted Martin. If Martin had been there, she would have had it all out with him, freely and frankly. Somehow she couldn't wave away the idea any longer that the time had come for her to cross another bridge. Thank G.o.d she would still be young, but the kid of her would be left on the other side. If Martin had been there, she would have told him some of the things that Alice had said about being honest and paying up, and left it to him to say whether the girlhood which she had wanted to spin out was over and must be put away among her toys.

Alice and Gilbert Palgrave,--curious that it should have been those two,--had shaken her individualism, as well as something else, vague and untranslatable, that she couldn't quite grasp, that eluded her hand. She sat down in the deep chair and with a little smile took up one of Martin's pipes and looked at it. The good tobaccoey scent of it took her back to the hill on the edge of the woods, and in her mind's eye there was a picture of two clean eyes with laughter-lines coming and going, a strong young face that had already caught the sun, square shoulders and a broad chest, and a pair of reliable hands with spatulate fingers clasped round a knee. She could hear birds calling.

Spring was in the air.

Where was Martin?

VII

It was the first dress rehearsal of "The Ukelele Girl," to be produced "under the personal direction of Stanwood Mosely." The piece had been in rehearsal for eleven weeks.

The curtain had been up on the second act for an hour. Scene designers, scene painters and scene shifters were standing about with a stage director, whose raucous voice cut the fuggy atmosphere incessantly in what was intended to represent the exterior of a hotel at Monte Carlo.

It more nearly resembled the materialization of a dope fiend's dream of an opium factory. What might have been a bank building in Utopia, an old Spanish galleon in drydock, or the exterior of a German beer garden according to the cover of Vogue occupied the center of the scene. The bricks were violet and old gold, sprayed with tomato juice and marked by the indeterminate silver tracks of snails. Pillars, modeled on the sugar-stick posts that advertise barber's shops, ran up and lost themselves among the flies. A number of wide stairs, all over wine stains, wandered aimlessly about, coming to a conclusion between gigantic urns filled with unnatural flowers of all the colors of a diseased rainbow. Jotted about here and there on the stage were octopus-limbed trees with magenta leaves growing in flower pots all covered with bilious blobs. Stan Mosely didn't profess to understand it, but having been a.s.sured by the designer that it was art nouveau, which also he didn't understand, he was wholly satisfied.

Not so the stage director, whose language in describing the effect it had upon him would have done credit to a gunman under the influence of cheap brandy and fright. The rehearsal, which had commenced at eight o'clock, had been hung up for a time considerable enough to allow him to give vent to his sentiments. The pause enabled Mosely, squatting frog-wise in the middle of the orchestra stalls, to surround himself with several women whose gigantic proportions were horribly exposed to the eye. The rumble of his voice and the high squeals of their laughter clashed with the sounds of the vitriolic argument on the stage, and the noises of a bored band, in which an oboe was giving a remarkable imitation of a gobbling turkey c.o.c.k, and a cornet of a man blowing his nose. The leader of the band was pacing up and down the musicians'

room, saying to himself: "Zis is ze last timer. Zis is ze last timer,"

well knowing that it wasn't. The poor devil had a wife and children to feed.

Bevies of weary and spirit-broken chorus girls in costume were sprawling on the chairs in the lower boxes, some sleeping, some too tired to sleep, and some eating ravenously from paper bags. Chorus men and costumers, wig makers and lyric writers, authors and friends of the company, sat about singly and in pairs in the orchestra seats. They were mostly bored so far beyond mere impatience by all this super-inefficiency and chaos as to have arrived at a state of intellectual coma. The various men out of whose brains had originally come the book and lyrics no longer hated each other and themselves; they l.u.s.ted for the blood of the stage director or saw gorgeous mental pictures of a little fat oozy corpse surrounded by the gleeful faces of the army of people who had been impotent to protest against the lash of his whip, the impertinence of his tongue or the gross dishonesty of his methods.

One other man in addition to the raucous, self-advertising stage director, Jackrack, commonly called "Jack-in-office," showed distinct signs of life--a short, overdressed, perky person with piano fingers and baldish head much too big for his body, who flitted about among the chorus girls, followed by a pale, drab woman with pins, and touched their dresses and sn.i.g.g.e.red and made remarks with a certain touch of literary excellence in a slightly guttural voice. This was Poppy Shemalitz, the frock expert, the man milliner of the firm, who was required to make bricks out of straw, or as he frequently said to the friends of his "bosom," "make fifteen dollars look like fifty."

Self-preservation and a sense of humor encouraged him through the abusive days of a dog's life.

Sitting in the last row of the orchestra, wearing the expression of interest and astonishment of a man who had fallen suddenly into another world, was Martin. He had been there since eight o'clock. For over six hours he had watched ba.n.a.lity emerge from chaos and had listened to the blasphemy and insults of Jackrack. He would have continued to watch and listen until daylight peered upbraidingly through the c.h.i.n.ks in the exit doors but for the sudden appearance of Susie Capper, dressed for the street.

"h.e.l.lo, Tootles! But you're not through, are you?"

"Absobloominlootely," she said emphatically.

"I thought you said your best bit was in the second act?"

"'Was' is right. Come on outer here. I can't stand the place a minute longer. It'll give me apoplexy."

Martin followed her into the foyer. The tragic rage on the girl's little, pretty, usually good-natured face worried him. He knew that she had looked forward to this production to make her name on Broadway.

"My dear Tootles, what's happened?"

She turned to him and clutched his arm. Tears welled up into her eyes, and her red lips began to tremble. "What did I look like?" she demanded.

"Splendid!"

"Didn't I get every ounce of comedy out of my two scenes in Act One?"

"Every ounce."

"I know I did. Even the stage hands laughed, and if you can do that there's no argument. And didn't my number go over fine? Wasn't it the best thing in the act? I don't care what you say. I know it was. Even the orchestra wanted it over again."

"But it was," said Martin, "and I heard one of the authors say that it would be the hit of the piece."

"Oh, Martin, I've been sweating blood for this chance for five years, and I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. I wish I was dead." She put her arms against the wall and her face down on her arms and burst into an agony of tears.

Martin was moved. This plucky, struggling, hardworking atom of a remorseless world deserved a little luck for a change. Hitherto it had eluded her eager hands, although she had paid for it in advance with something more than blood and energy. "Dear old Tootles," he said, "what's happened? Try and tell me what's happened? I don't understand."

"You don't understand, because you don't know the tricks of this rotten theater. For eleven weeks I've been rehearsing. For eleven weeks--time enough to produce a couple of Shakespeare's bally plays in Latin,--I've put up with the brow-beating of that mad dog Jackrack. For eleven weeks, without touching one dirty little Mosely cent, I've worked at my part and numbers, morning, noon and night; and now, on the edge of production, he cuts me out and puts in a simpering cow with a fifteen-thousand-dollar necklace and a snapping little Pekinese to oblige one of his angels, and I'm reduced to the chorus. I wish I was dead, I tell you--I wish I was dead and buried and at peace. I wish I could creep home and get into bed and never see another day of this cruel life. Oh, I'm just whipped and broke and out. Take me away, take me away, Martin. I'm through."

Martin put his arm round the slight, shaking form, led her to one of the doors and out into a narrow pa.s.sage that ran up into the deserted street. To have gone down into the stalls and hit that oily martinet in the mouth would have been to lay himself open to a charge of cruelty to animals. He was so puny and fat and soft. Poor little Tootles, who had had a tardy and elusive recognition torn from her grasp! It was a tragedy.

It was not much more than a stone's-throw from the theater to the rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street, but Martin gave a shout at a prowling taxi. Not even policemen and newspaper boys and street cleaners must see this girl as she was then, in a collapse of smashed hopes, sobbing dreadfully, completely broken down. It wasn't fair. In all that city of courageous under-dogs and fate-fighters, there was not one who pretended to careless contentment with a chin so high as Tootles. He half carried her into the cab, trying with a queer blundering sympathy to soothe and quiet her. And he had almost succeeded by the time they reached the brownstone house of sitters, bedrooms and baths, gas stoves, cubby-holes, the persistent reek of onions, cigarettes and hot cheese. The hysteria of the artistic temperament, or the natural exaggeration of an artificial life, had worn itself out for the time being. Rather pathetic little sobs had taken its place, it was with a face streaked with the black stuff from her eyelashes that Tootles turned quickly to Martin at the foot of the narrow, dirty staircase.

"Let's go up quiet," she said. "If any of the others are about, I don't want 'em to know tonight. See?"

"I see," said Martin.

And it was good to watch the way in which she took hold of herself with a grip of iron, scrubbed her face with his handkerchief, dabbed it thickly with powder from a small silver box, threw back her head and went up two stairs at a time. On the second floor there was a cackle of laughter, but doors were shut. On the third all was quiet. But on the fourth the tall, thin, Raphael-headed man was drunk again, arguing thickly in the usual cloud of smoke, which drifted sullenly into the pa.s.sage through the open door.