Who Cares? Part 9

They were in the middle of the floor. There were people all round them, thickly. They were obliged to keep going in that lunatic movement or be run down. What a way and in what a place to bare a bleeding heart!

For the first time since he had answered to her call and found her standing clean-cut against the sky, Martin held Joan in his arms. His joy in doing so was mixed with rage and jealousy. It had been worse than a blow in the mouth suddenly to see her, of whom he had thought as fast asleep in what was only the mere husk of home, dancing with a man like Palgrave.

And her nearness maddened him. All the starved and pent-up pa.s.sion that was in him flamed and blazed. It blinded him and buzzed in his ears. He held her so tight and so hungrily that she could hardly breathe. She was his, this girl. She had called him, and he had answered, and she was his wife. He had the right to her by law and nature. He adored her and had let her off and tried to be patient and win his way to her by love and gentleness. But with his lips within an inch of her sweet, impertinent face, and the scent of her hair in his brain, and the wound that she had opened again sapping his blood, he held her to his heart and charged the crowd to the beat of the music, like a man intoxicated, like a man heedless of his surroundings. He didn't give a curse who overheard what he said, or saw the look in his eyes. She had turned him down, this half-wife, on the plea of weariness; and as soon as he had left the house to go and eat his heart out in the hub of that swarming lonely city, she had darted out with this doll-man whom he wouldn't have her touch with the end of a pole. There was a limit to all things, and he had come to it.

"You're coming home," he said.

"Marty, but I can't. Gilbert Palgrave--"

"Gilbert Palgrave be d.a.m.ned. You're coming home, I tell you, if I have to carry you out."

She laughed. This was a new Marty, a high-handed, fiery Marty--one who must not be encouraged. "Are you often like this?" she asked.

"Be careful. I've had enough, and if you don't want me to smash this place up and cause a riot, you'll do what I tell you."

Her eyes flashed back at him, and two angry spots of color came into her cheeks. He was out of control. She realized that. She had never in her life seen any one so out of control--unaccountable as she found it.

That he would smash up the place and cause a riot she knew instinctively. She put up no further opposition. If anything were to be avoided, it was a scene, and in her mind's eye she could see herself being carried out by this plunging boy, with a yard of stocking showing and the laughter of every one ringing in her ears. No, no, not that!

She began to look for Palgrave, with her mind all alert and full of a mischievous desire to turn the tables on Martin. He must be shown quickly that if any one gave orders, she did.

He danced her to the edge of the floor, led her panting through the tables to the foot of the stairs and with his hand grasping her arm like a vice, guided her up to the place where ladies left their wraps.

"We're going home," he said, "to have things out. I'll wait here." Then he called a boy and told him to get his hat and coat and gave him his check.

Five minutes later, in pulsating silence, both of them angry and inarticulate, they stood in the street waiting for a taxi. The soft air touched their hot faces with a refreshing finger. Hardly any one who saw that slip of a girl and that square-shouldered boy with his unlined face would have imagined that they could be anything but brother and sister. The marriage of babies! Was there no single apostle of common sense in all the country--a country so gloriously free that it granted licenses to every foolishness without a qualm?

Palgrave was standing on the curb, scowling. His car moved up, and the porter went forward to open the door. As quick as lightning, Joan saw her chance to put Martin into his place and evade an argument. Wasn't she out of that old country cage at last? Couldn't she revel in free flight without being called to order and treated like a school-girl, at last? What fun to use Palgrave to show Martin her spirit!

She touched him on the arm and looked up at him with dancing eyes and a teasing smile. "Not this time, Marty," she said, and was across the sidewalk in a bound. "Quick," she said to Palgrave. "Quick!" And he, catching the idea with something more than amus.e.m.e.nt, sprang into the car after her, and away they went.

A duet of laughter hung briefly in the air.

With all the blood in his head, Martin, coming out of utter surprise, made a dash for the retreating car, collided with the porter and stood ruefully and self-consciously over the burly figure that had gone down with a crash upon the pavement.

It was no use. Joan had been one too many for him. What, in any case, was the good of trying to follow? She preferred Palgrave. She had no use, at that moment, for home. She was bored at the mere idea of talking things over. She was not serious. She refused to be faced up with seriousness. She was like a precocious child who snapped her fingers at authority and pursued the policy of the eel at the approach of discipline. What had she cried out that night in the dark with her chin tilted up and her arms thrown out? "I shall go joy-riding in that huge round-about. If I can get anybody to pay my score, good. If not, I'll pay it myself, whatever it costs. My motto's going to be 'A good time as long as I can get it, and who cares for the price!'"

Martin helped the porter to his feet, stanched his flow of County Kerry reproaches with a ten-dollar bill and went back into the Crystal Room.

He had gone there half an hour ago with a party of young people to kill loneliness and forget a bad hour of despair. His friend, Howard Oldershaw, who had breezed him out of the reading room of the Yale Club, was one of the party. He was in the first flush of speed-breaking and knew the town and its midnight haunts. He had offered to show Martin the way to get rid of depression. Right! He should be put to the test. Two could play the "Who cares?" game; and Martin, cut to the quick, angry and resisted, would enter his name. Not again would he put himself in the way of being laughed at and ridiculed and turned down, teased and tantalized and made a fool of.

Patience and gentleness--to what end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp; he had married a b.u.t.terfly. Why continue to play the martyr and follow the fruitless path of rect.i.tude? Hadn't she said, "I can only live once, and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go?" He could only live once, and if life was not to spin with her, let it spin without her. "Who cares?" he said to himself. "Who the devil cares?" He gave up his coat and hat, and went back into that room of false joy and syncopation.

It was one o'clock when he stood in the street once more, hot and wined and careless. "Let's. .h.i.t it up," he said to Oldershaw as the car moved away with the sisters and cousins of the other two men. "I haven't started yet."

The red-haired, roistering Oldershaw, newly injected with the virus of the Great White Way, clapped him on the back. "Bully for you, old son,"

he said. "I'm in the mood to paint the little old town. I left my car round the corner in charge of a down-at-heel night-bird. Come on. Let's go and see if he's pinched it."

It was one of those Italian semi-racing cars with a body which gave it the naked appearance of a muscular Russian dancer dressed in a skin and a pair of bangles. The night-bird, one of the large army of city gypsies who hang on to life by the skin of their teeth, was sitting on the running board with his arms folded across his shirtless chest, smoking a salvaged cigar, dreaming, probably, of hot sausages and coffee. He afforded a striking ill.u.s.tration of the under dog cringing contentedly at the knees of wealth.

"Good man," said Oldershaw, paying him generously. "Slip aboard, Martin, and I'll introduce you to one of the choicest dives I know."

But the introduction was not to be effected that night, at any rate.

Driving the car as though it were a monoplane in a clear sky, with an open throttle that awoke the echoes, Oldershaw charged into Fifth Avenue and caught the bonnet of a taxicab that was going uptown. There was a crash, a scream, a rending of metal. And when Martin picked himself up with a bruised elbow and a curious sensation of having stopped a punching bag with his face, he saw Oldershaw bending over the crumpled body of the taxi driver and heard a girl with red lips and a small white hat calling on Heaven for retribution.

"Some men oughtn't to be trusted with machinery," said Oldershaw with his inevitable grin. "If I can yank my little pet out of this buckled-up lump of stuff, I'll drive that poor chap to the nearest hospital. Look after the angel, Martin, and give my name and address to the policeman. As this is my third attempt to kill myself this month, things ought to settle down into humdrum monotony for a bit now."

Martin went over to the girl. "I hope you're not hurt?" he asked.

"Hurt?" she cried out hysterically, feeling herself all over. "Of course I'm hurt. I'm crippled for life. My backbone's broken; I shall have water on both knees, a gla.s.s eye and a mouth full of store teeth.

But you don't care, you Hun. You like it."

And on she went, at the top of her voice, in an endless flow of farce and tragedy, crying and laughing, examining herself with eager hands, disbelieving more and more in the fact that she was still in the only world that mattered to her.

Having succeeded in backing his dented car out of the debris, Oldershaw leaped out. His face had been cut by the gla.s.s of the broken windshield. Blood was trickling down his fat, good-natured face. His hat was smashed and looked like that of the tramp cyclist of the vaudeville stage. "All my fault, old man," he said in his best irrepressible manner, as a policeman bore down upon him. "Help me to hike our prostrate friend into my car, and I'll whip him off to a hospital. He's only had the stuffing knocked out of him. It's no worse than that.... That's fine. Big chap, isn't he--weighs a ton. I'll get off right away, and my friend there will give you all you want to know.

So long." And off he went, one of his front wheels wabbling foolishly.

The policeman was not Irish or German-American. He was therefore neither loud nor browbeating. He was dry, quiet and accurate, and it seemed to Martin that either he didn't enjoy being dressed in a little brief authority or was a misanthrope, eager to return to his noiseless and solitary tramp under the April stars. Martin gave him Oldershaw's full name and address and his own; and the girl, still shrill and shattered, gave hers, after protesting that all automobiles ought to be put in a gigantic pile and sc.r.a.pped, that all harum-scarum young men should be clapped in bed at ten o'clock and that all policemen should be locked up in their stations to play dominoes. "If it'll do you any good to know it," she said finally, "it's Susie Capper, commonly called 'Tootles.' And I tell you what it is. If you come snooping round my place to get me before the beak, I'll scream and kick, so help me Bob, I will." There was an English c.o.c.kney tw.a.n.g in her voice.

The policeman left her in the middle of a paean, with the wounded taxi and Martin, and the light of a lamp-post throwing up the unnatural red of her lips on a pretty little white face. He had probably gone to call up the taxicab company.

Then she turned to Martin. "The decent thing for you to do, Mr. Nut, is to see me home," she said. "I'm blowed if I'm going to face any more attempts at murder alone. My word, what a life!"

"Come along, then," said Martin, and he put his hand under her elbow.

That amazing avenue, which had the appearance of a great, deep cut down the middle of an uneven mountain, was almost deserted. From the long line of street lamps intermittent patches of light were reflected as though in gla.s.s. The night and the absence of thickly crawling motors and swarming crowds gave it dignity. A strange, incongruous Oriental note was struck by the deep red of velvet hangings thrown up by the lights in a furniture dealer's shop on the second floor of a white building.

"Look for a row of women's ugly wooden heads painted by some one suffering from delirium tremens," said Miss Susie Capper as they turned down West Forty-sixth Street. "It's a dressmaker's, although you might think it was an asylum for dope fiends. I've got a bedroom, sitter and bath on the top floor. The house is a rabbit warren of bedrooms, sitters and baths, and in every one of them there's some poor devil trying to squeeze a little kindness out of fate. That wretched taxi driver! He may have a wife waiting for him. Do you think that red-haired feller's got to the hospital yet? He had a nice cut on his own silly face--and serve him right! I hope it'll teach him that he hasn't bought the blooming world--but of course it won't. He's the sort that never gets taught anything, worse luck! n.o.body spanked him when he was young and soft. Come on up, and you shall taste my scrambled eggs.

I'll show you what a forgiving little soul I am."

She laughed, ran her eyes quickly over Martin, and opened the door with a latchkey. Half a dozen small letter boxes were fastened to the wall, with cards in their slots.

"Who the devil cares?" said Martin to himself, and he followed the girl up the narrow, ill-lighted staircase covered with shabby carpet. Two or three inches of white stockings gleamed above the drab uppers of her high-heeled boots. Outside the open door of a room on the first floor there was a line of milk bottles, and Martin sighted a man in shirt sleeves, cooking sausages on a small gas jet in a cubby-hole. He looked up, and a cheery smile broke out on his clean-shaven face. There was brown grease paint on his collar. "h.e.l.lo, Tootles," he called out.

"h.e.l.lo, Laddy," she said. "How'd it go to-night?"

"Fine. Best second night in the history of the theater. Come in and have a bite."

"Can't. Got company."

And up they went, the aroma following.

A young woman in a sky-blue peignoir scuttled across the next landing, carrying a bottle of beer in each hand. There was a smell of onions and hot cheese. "What ho, Tootles," she said.

"What ho, Irene. Is it true they've put your notice up?"

"Yep, the dirty dogs! Twelve weeks' rehearsals and eight nights'

playing! Me for the novelties at Gimbel's, if this goes on."

A phonograph in another room ground out an air from "Boheme."

They mounted again. "Here's me," said Miss Capper, waving her hand to a man in a dirty dressing gown who was standing on the threshold of the front apartment, probably to achieve air. The room behind him was foggy with tobacco smoke which rose from four men playing cards. He himself was conspicuously drunk and would have spoken if he had been able. As it was, he nodded owlishly and waggled his fingers.