Of a sudden life became glorious—more glorious than he had ever believed possible. It commenced on the morning after he had written his letter to Hal.
He was seated in the white mirrored room of the Brevoort which looks out on Fifth Avenue. From the kitchen came the mutter of bass voices, passing orders along in French, and the cheerful smell of roasting coffee. Scattered between tables, meditative waiters were dreaming that they were artists’ models, each with a graceful hand resting on the back of a chair in readiness to flick it out invitingly at the first sight of an uncaptured guest. From the left arm of each dangled a napkin, betraying that he had served his appenticeship in boulevard caf茅s of Paris.
Outside, at irregular intervals, green buses raced smoothly with a whirr-whirr, which effaced during the moment of their passage the clippity-clap of horses. Past the window, from thinning trees, leaves drifted. When they had reached the pavement, the breeze stirred them and they struggled weakly to rise like crippled moths. There was an invigorating chill in the October air as though the sunshine had been placed on ice. Pedestrians moved briskly with their shoulders flung back. They seemed to be smiling over the great discovery that life was worth living, after all.
A boy halted under the archway and threw about him a searching glance. Catching sight of Teddy, he hurried over and whispered. Teddy rose. In the hall the telephone-clerk was watching. “Booth number three, Mr. Gurney.”
As he lifted the receiver he was still discussing with himself whether or no he should send Hal that letter.
“Yes. It’s Mr. Gurney.”
A faint and unfamiliar voice answered—a woman’s voice, exceedingly pleasant, with a soft slurring accent. It was a voice that, whatever it said, seemed to be saying, “I do want you to like me.”
“I didn’t quite catch. Would you mind speaking a little louder?” he asked.
There was a laughing dispute at the other end; then the voice which he had heard at first spoke again:
“This is Janice Audrey, Desire’s friend—Fluffy. Desire’s too shy to phone herself, so I—— She’s here at my elbow. She says that she’s not shy any longer and she’ll speak with you herself.”
It was as though he could feel her gray eyes watching.
A pause. Then, without preliminaries: “You can’t guess where I am. For all you know, I might be dead and this might be my ghost.—No. Let me do the talking. It’s long distance from Boston and expensive; I don’t know how many cents per second. If you were here, I’d let you do the paying; but since you’re not—— Here’s what I called up to tell you: we’re coming in on the Bay State Limited at three o’clock.—I thought you’d be interested. Ta-ta.”
He commenced a hurried question; she had rung off.
Adorably casual! Adorably because she contradicted herself. By calling him up all the way from Boston she had said, “See how much I care.” By not allowing him to speak, she had tried to say, “I don’t care at all.” It amused him; the odd thing was that he loved her the more for her languid struggles to escape him. He agreed with her entirely that the woman who said “No” bewitchingly increased her value. As he finished his breakfast he reflected: she was dearer to him now than a week ago, and much dearer than on the drive from Glastonbury. Instead of blaming her for making herself elusive, he ought to thank her. He’d been too headlong at the start. He fell to making plans to take Vashti’s advice: he wouldn’t speak to her of love any more—he’d try to hide from her how much he was in earnest.
In his eagerness not to disappoint her, he had reached the Grand Central a quarter of an hour too early. He was standing before the board on which the arriving trains are chalked up, when from behind some one touched him.
“Seen you before. How are you? I expect we’re here on the same errand.”
He found himself gazing into the humorous blue eyes which had discovered him playing tricks with his engine before the house in Regent’s Park.
“You’re Mr. Horace Overbridge, I think.”
“Yes. I’m here to see October put on; that’s my new play in which Miss Audrey is acting. What are you doing?” Then, because Teddy hesitated, “Perhaps I oughtn’t to ask.”
At that moment the arrival-platform of the Bay State Limited was announced; they drifted away at the tail of the crowd towards the barrier. Teddy wanted to hurry; his companion saw it. “Heaps of time,” he laughed. “If I know anything about them, they’ll be out last.”
His prophecy proved correct. The excited welcomes were over; the stream of travelers had thinned down to a narrow trickle of the feeble or heavily laden, when Desire, walking arm-in-arm with a woman much more beautiful than her portraits, drew into sight behind the gates. After hats had been raised and they knew that they had been recognized, they did not quicken their pace. They approached still leisurely and talking, as much as to say: “Let’s make the most of our opportunity before we sink to the level of these male-creatures.”
Horace Overbridge, leaning on his cane, watched them with tolerant amusement. “Take their time, don’t they?” he remarked. “One wouldn’t think we’d both come three thousand miles to meet them. What fools men are!”
“Hulloa,” said Desire, holding out her hand gladly, “it’s good to see you. So you two men have introduced yourselves! Fluffy, this is Mr. Gurney.”
It was arranged that the maid should be seen into a taxi to take care of the luggage. When she had been disposed of, they crossed the street for tea at the Belmont. Fluffy and Desire still walked arm-in-arm as though it was they who had been so long separated. At the table Teddy found himself left to talk to Fluffy; Desire and the man with the amused blue eyes were engaged in bantering reminiscences of the summer. The game seemed to be to pretend that you were not in love; or, if you were, that it was with some one for whom actually you didn’t care a rap.
“Did it go well?” asked Teddy.
“Wonderfully.”
“I wish you’d tell me. Of course Desire wrote me; but I don’t know much.”
While she told him, he kept stealing glances at the others. He wondered at what they were laughing; then he came to the conclusion that it wasn’t at what was being said, but at the knowledge each had of the game that was in the playing. He began to take notice of Fluffy. She had pale-gold hair—quantities of it—a drooping mouth and eyes of a child’s clearness. She had a way of employing her eyes as magnets. She would fix them on the person to whom she talked so that presently what she said counted for nothing; questions would begin to rise in the mind as to whether she was lonely, why she should be lonely and how her loneliness might be dispelled. Then her glance would fall away and she would seem to say: “I shall have to bear my burden; you won’t help me.” After that all the impulse of the onlooker was to carry her over rough places in his arms. Her voice sounded as though all her life she had been petted; her face made you feel that, however good people had been, she deserved far more. Why had Desire been so positive that he wouldn’t like her? He did; or rather he would, if she would let him. But he had the feeling that, while she was kind, she was distrustful and had fenced herself off so that he could not get near her. He had an idea that he had met her before; he recognized that grave assured air of being worthy to be loved without the obligation of taking notice of the loving. Then he spotted the resemblance, and had difficulty to refrain from laughing. In her quiet sense of beautiful importance she was like Twinkles.
“It’s wonderful,” she was saying; “I never had such a part. ‘Little girl,’ Simon Freelevy said when he saw me, ‘little girl, you’ll take New York by storm.’ And I shall.” She nodded seriously. “Simon Freelevy ought to know; he’s the cleverest producer in America; I believe he was so pleased with himself that he’d have kissed me if I hadn’t had my make-up on. And then, you see, it’s called October, and we open in October. The idea’s subtle; it may catch on.”
She spoke as though the play was a negligible quantity and any success it might have would be due to her acting. Teddy caught the amused eyes of the playwright opposite. He turned back to Janice Audrey. “What’s the plot?” he asked.
“The plot! I’m the plot. You may smile, but I am.—I am the plot of October—isn’t that so, Horace?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Audrey is the plot,” the playwright said gravely. “I have nothing to do with it, except to draw my royalties.” He picked up the thread of his conversation with Desire.
A puzzled look crept into Fluffy’s clear child’s eyes—a wounding suspicion that she was being mocked. She put it from her as incredible.
“When I say I’m the plot, I mean I gave him the story. I told it to him in a punt at Pangbourne this summer. It’s about a woman called October, who’s come to the October of her beauty, but has spring hidden in her heart. She’d loved a man excessively once, when she was young and generous; and he hadn’t valued her love. After that she determined to wear armor, to keep her dreams locked away in her heart and to leave it to the men to do the loving. She becomes an actress, like me. Almost autobiography! At last, when she realizes that her popularity depends on her beauty and she hears the feet of the younger generation climbing after her—at last he comes, the one wearing a smoke-blue corded velvet, trimmed with gray-squirrel fur at the sleeves and collar. Her hat was the gray breast of a bird and sat at a slant across her forehead. There was a flush of color in her cheeks. Again the beauty-patch had wandered; it was on the left of her chin now. As he watched, he felt the lack of something; then he knew what it was.
“Why, what’s happened to your curl?”
She put her hand up to her neck and opened her eyes widely. “H’I sye, old sort, yer don’t mean ter tell me as I’ve lost it?”
While he was laughing at this sudden change of personality, she commenced searching her vanity-case with sham feverishness; to his amazement she drew out the missing decoration.
“Oh, ’ere it is. You’re learnin’ h’all me secrets, dearie. It ain’t wise. But, Lawd, ‘cause yer likes it and ter show yer ‘ow glad I am ter be wiv yer——”
She deliberately pinned it into place behind her ear; it hung there trembling, looking entirely natural.
Dropping her Cockney characterization, she bowed to him with bewitching archness: “Do I look like Nell Gywnn now? I expect, if she were here for an inquisitive person like you to ask, she’d tell you that hers were false.”
He loved her for her honesty; if any one had told him a month ago that so slight and foolish an action could have made him love her better, he would have laughed them to scorn.
It was intoxicating—transforming. It was as though these stone-palaces of Fifth Avenue fell back, disclosing magic woodlands—woodlands such as his father painted through whose shadows pale figures glided. People on the pavement were lovers, going to meetings which memory would make sacred. Like Arcady springing out to meet him, the Park swam into sight, tree-tufted, lagooned, embowered, canopied with the peacock-blue and saffron of the sunset.
“It’s a pity,” Desire murmured, as though continuing a conversation, “that they couldn’t have remained happy.”
“Who?”
“Those two. They were such good companions, till he began to speak of love. I was with them all summer, wherever they went We used to talk philosophy, and life, and—oh, everything. Then one day I wasn’t with them; after that our happiness stopped.”
“But she must have known that he loved her before he told her.”
“Of course. That was what made us all so glad, because there was something left unsaid—something secret and throbbing. It was all gone when once it had been uttered.”
“It oughtn’t to have gone. It ough............