Now the guests were beginning to arrive. The electric thring of the door-bell broke sharply and persistently on accustomed quietness. People were coming in and filling the place with the ease and familiarity of old friends. In the hallway and in the rooms at the front there arose now a confused medley of many voices — the rippling laughter and quick, excited tones of the women mingled with the deeper, more vibrant sonorities of the men. It was a mixture smooth as oil, which fused and mounted steadily. With every sharp ringing of the bell, with every opening and closing of the door, there were new voices and new laughter, a babel of new greetings, new gaiety, and new welcomes.
The whole place — all the rooms front to back — was now thrown open to the party. In the hall, in the bedrooms, in the great living-room, and in the dining-room, people were moving in and out, circulating everywhere in beautiful and spontaneous patterns. Women were coming up to Mrs. Jack and embracing her with the affectionate tenderness of old friendship. Men, drawn together in solemn discussion or in the jesting interplay of wit, were going in and out of Mr. Jack’s room.
Mrs. Jack, her eyes sparkling with joy, was moving about everywhere, greeting people and stopping to talk to everyone. Her whole manner had a quality of surprised delight, as of a person who feels that wonders will never cease. Although she had invited all these people, she seemed, as she spoke to each in turn, as if she was taken aback by the happiness of an unexpected and unhoped-for encounter with an old friend whom she had not seen for a long time. Her voice, as she talked, grew a trifle higher with its excitement, even at times a little shrill, and her face glowed with pleasure. And her guests smiled at her as people smile at a happy and excited child.
Many were moving about now with glasses in their hands. Some were leaning against walls talking to each other. Distinguished-looking men were propped with their elbows on the mantel in the casual earnestness of debate. Beautiful women with satiny backs were moving through the crowd with velvet undulance. The young people were gathered together in little parties of their own, drawn to one another by the magic of their youth. Everywhere people were laughing and chattering, bending to fill glasses with frosty drinks, or moving around the loaded temptations of the dining-table and the great buffet with that “choosy” look, somewhat perturbed and doubtful, which said plainly that they would like to taste it all but knew they couldn’t. And the smiling maids were there to do their bidding, and to urge them to have just a little more. All in all, it was a wonderful scene of white and black and gold and power and wealth and loveliness and food and drink.
Mrs. Jack glanced happily through the crowded rooms. It was, she knew, a notable assemblage of the best, the highest, and the fairest the city had to offer. And others were arriving all the time. At this moment, in fact, Miss Lily Mandell came in, and the tall, smouldering beauty swung away along the hall to dispose of her wraps. She was followed almost at once by Mr. Lawrence Hirsch, the banker. He casually gave his coat and hat to one of the maids, and, groomed and faultless, schooled in power, be bowed greetings through the throng towards his hostess. He shook hands with her and kissed her lightly on one cheek, saying with that cool irony that was a portion of the city style:
“You haven’t looked so lovely, darling, since the days when we used to dance the can-can together.”
Then, polished and imperturbable, he turned away — a striking figure. His abundant hair was prematurely white, and, strangely, it gave to his clear and clean-shaven face a look of almost youthful maturity. His features, a little worn but assured, were vested in unconscious arrogance with the huge authorities of wealth. He moved, this weary, able son of man, among the crowd and took his place, assuming, without knowing he assumed, his full authorities.
Lily Mandell now returned to the big room and made her way languidly towards Mrs. Jack. This heiress of Midas wealth was tall and dark, with a shock of black hair. Her face, with its heavy-lidded eyes, was full of pride and sleepy eloquence. She was a stunning woman, and everything about her was a little startling. The dress she wore was a magnificent gown fashioned from a single piece of dull golden cloth, and had been so designed to display her charms that her tall, voluptuous figure seemed literally to have been poured into it. It made her a miracle of statuesque beauty, and as she swayed along with sleepy undulance, the eyes of all the men were turned upon her. She bent over the smaller figure of her hostess, kissed her, and, in a rich, yolky voice full of genuine affection, said:
“Darling, how are you?”
By now, Herbert, the elevator boy, was being kept so busy bringing up new arrivals that one group hardly had time to finish with its greetings before the door would open and a new group would come in. There was Roderick Hale, the distinguished lawyer. Then Miss Roberta Heilprinn arrived with Mr. Samuel Fetzer. These two were old friends of Mrs. Jack’s “in the theatre”, and her manner towards them, while not more cordial or affectionate than that towards her other guests, was a shade more direct and casual. It was as if one of those masks — not of pretending but of formal custom — which life imposes upon so many human relations had here keen sloughed off. She said simply: “Oh, hello, Bertie. Hello, Sam.” The shade indefinable told everything: they were “show people”— she and they had “worked together”.
There were a good many show people. Two young actors from the Community Guild Theatre escorted the Misses Hattie Warren and Bessie Lane, both of them grey-haired spinsters who were directors of the theatre. And, in addition to the more gifted and distinguished people, there were a number of the lesser fry, too. There was a young girl who was understudy to a dancer at one of the repertory theatres, and another woman who was the seamstress and wardrobe mistress there, and still another who had once been Mrs. Jack’s assistant in her own work. For, as success and fame had come to Mrs. Jack, she had not forgotten her old friends. Though she was now a celebrity herself, she had thus escaped the banal and stereotyped existence that so many celebrities achieve. She loved life too well to cut herself off from the common run of warm humanity. In her own youth she had known sorrow, insecurity, hardship, heartbreak, and disillusion, and she had never forgotten it. Nor had she forgotten any of the people her life had ever touched. She had a rare talent for loyal and abiding friendships, and most of the people who were here to-night, even the most famous ones, were friends who she had known for many years, some of them since childhood.
Among the guests who now came streaming in was a mild, sad-faced woman named Margaret Ettinger. She was married to a profligate husband and had brought him with her. And he, John Ettinger, had brought along a buxom young woman who was his current mistress. This trio provided the most bizarre and unpleasantly disturbing touch to an otherwise distinguished gathering.
The guests were still arriving as fast as the elevator could bring them up. Stephen Hook came in with his sister, Mary, and greeted his hostess by holding out to her a frail, limp hand. At the same time he turned half away from her with an air of exaggerated boredom and indifference, an almost weary disdain, as he murmured:
“Oh, hello, Esther . . . Look”— he half-turned towards her again, almost as if this were an afterthought —“I brought you this.” He handed her a book and turned away again. “I thought it was rather interesting,” he said in a bored tone. “You might like to look at it.”
What he had given her was a magnificent volume of Peter Breughel’s drawings — a volume that she knew well, and the cost of which had frightened even her. She looked quickly at the flyleaf and saw that in his fine hand he had written primly: “For Esther — from Stephen Hook”. And suddenly she remembered that she had mentioned to him casually, a week or two before, her interest in this book, and she understood now that this act, which in a characteristic way he was trying to conceal under a mask of laboured indifference, had come swift and shining as a beam of light out of the depths of the man’s fine and generous spirit. Her face burned crimson, something choked her in the throat, and her eyes grew hot with tears.
“Oh, Steve!” she gasped. “This is simply the most beautiful — the most wonderful ——”
He seemed fairly to shrink away from her. His white, flabby face took on an expression of disdainful boredom that was so exaggerated it would have seemed comical if it had not been for the look of naked pleading in his hazel eyes. It was the look of a proud, noble, strangely twisted and tormented man — the look almost of a frightened child, who, even while it shrank away from the companionship and security it so desperately needed and wanted, was also pleading pitifully: “For God’s sake, help me if you can! I am afraid!”
She saw that look in his eyes as he turned pompously away from her, and it went through her like a knife. In a flash of stabbing pity she felt the wonder, the strangeness, and the miracle of living.
“Oh, you poor tormented creature,” she was thinking. “What is wrong with you? What are you afraid of? What’s eating on you anyway? . . . What a strange man he is!” she thought more tranquilly. “And how fine and good and high!”
At this moment, as if reading her own thoughts, her daughter, Alma, came to the rescue. Cool, poised, lovely, the girl came across the room, moved up to Hook, and said casually:
“Oh, hello, Steve. Can I get you a drink?”
The question was a godsend. He was extremely fond of the girl. He liked her polished style, her elegance, her friendly yet perfectly impenetrable manner. It gave him just the foil, the kind of protection, that he so desperately needed. He answered her at once.
“What you have to say quite fascinates me,” he murmured in a bored tone and moved over to the mantel, where he leaned as spectator and turned his face three-quarters away from the room, as if the sight of so many appallingly dull people was more than he could endure.
The elaborately mannered indirection of his answer was completely characteristic of Stephen Hook, and provided a key to his literary style. He was the author of a great many stories, which he sold to magazines to support himself and his mother, and also of several very fine books. The books had established his considerable and deserved reputation, but they had had almost no sale. As he himself had ironically pointed out, almost everyone, apparently, had read his books and no one had bought them. In these books, just as in his social manner, he tried to mask his shyness and timidity by an air of weary disdain and by the intricate artifice and circumlocution of an elaborately mannered style.
Mrs. Jack, after staring rather helplessly at Hook, turned to his sister, a jolly-faced spinster with twinkling eyes and an infectious laugh who shared her brother’s charm but lacked his tormented spirit, and whispered:
“What’s wrong with Steve to-night? He looks as if he’s been seeing ghosts.”
“No — just another monster,” Mary Hook replied, and laughed. “He had a pimple on his nose last week and he stared at it so much in the mirror that he became convinced it was a tumour. Mother was almost crazy. He locked himself in his room and refused to come out or talk to anyone for days and days. Four days ago he sent her a note leaving minute instructions for his funeral and burial — he has a horror of being cremated. Three days ago he came out in his pyjamas and said good-bye to all of us. He said his life was overall was ended. To-night he thought better of it and decided to dress and come to your party.”
Mary Hook laughed again good-naturedly and, with a humorous shrug and a shake of her head, moved away into the crowd. And Mrs. Jack, still with a rather troubled look on her face, turned to talk to old Jake Abramson, who had been holding her hand and gently stroking it during the last part of this puzzled interlude.
The mark of the fleshpots was plain upon Jake Abramson. He was old, subtle, sensual, weary, and he had the face of a vulture. Curiously enough, it was also a strangely attractive face. It had so much patience in it, and a kind of wise cynicism, and a weary humour. There was something paternal and understanding about him. He looked like an immensely old and tired ambassador of life who had lived so long, and seen so much, and been so many places, that even his evening clothes were as habitual as his breath and hung on him with a weary and accustomed grace as if he had been born in them.
He had taken off his top-coat and his silk hat and given them to the maid, and then had come wearily into the room towards Mrs. Jack. He was evidently very fond of her. While she had been talking to Mary Hook he had remained silent and had brooded above her like a benevolent vulture. He smiled beneath his great nose and kept his eyes intently on her face; then he took her small hand in his weary old clasp and began to stroke her smooth arm. It was a gesture frankly old and sensual, jaded, and yet strangely fatherly and gentle. It was the gesture of a man who had known and possessed many pretty women and who still knew how to admire and appreciate them, but whose stronger passions had now passed over into a paternal benevolence.
And in the same way he now spoke to her.
“You’re looking nice!” he said. “You’re looking pretty!” He kept smiling vulturesquely at her and stroking her arm. “Just like a rose she is!” the old man said, and never took his weary eyes from her face.
“Oh, Jake!” she cried excitedly and in a surprised tone, as if she had not known before that he was there. “How nice of you to come! I didn’t know you were back. I thought you were still in Europe.”
“I’ve been and went,” he declared humorously.
“You’re looking awfully well, Jake,” she said. “The trip did you lots of good. You’ve lost weight. You took the cure at Carlsbad, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t take the cure,” the old man solemnly declared, “I took the die-ett.” Deliberately he mispronounced the word.
Instantly Mrs. Jack’s face was suffused with crimson and her shoulders began to shake hysterically. She turned to Roberta Heilprinn, seized her helplessly by the arm, and clung to her, shrieking faintly:
“God! Did you hear him? He’s been on a diet! I bet it almost killed him! The way he loves to eat!”
Miss Heilprinn chuckled fruitily and her oil-smooth features widened in such a large grin that her eyes contracted to closed slits.
“I’ve been die-etting ever since I went away,” said Jake. “I was sick when I went away — and I came back on an English boat,” the old man said with a melancholy and significant leer that drew a scream of laughter from the two women.
“Oh, Jake!” cried Mrs. Jack hilariously. “How you must have suffered! I know what you used to think of English food!”
“I think the same as I always did,” the old man said with resigned sadness —“only ten times more!”
She shrieked again, then gasped out, “Brussels sprouts?”
“They still got ’em,” said old Jake solemnly. “They still got the same ones they had ten years ago. I saw Brussels sprouts this last trip that ought to be in the British Museum . . . And they still got that good fish,” he went on with a suggestive leer.
Roberta Heilprinn, her bland features grinning like a Buddha, gurgled: “The Dead Sea fruit?”
“No,” said old Jake sadly, “not the Dead Sea fruit — that ain’t dead enough. They got boiled flannel now,” he said, “and that good sauce! . . . You remember that good sauce they used to make?” He leered at Mrs. Jack with an air of such insinuation that she was again set off in a fit of shuddering hysteria:
“You mean that awful . . . tasteless . . . pasty . . . goo . . . about the colour of a dead lemon?”
“You got it,” the old man nodded his wise and tired old head in weary agreement. “You got it . . . That’s it . . . They still make it . . . So I’ve been die-etting all the way back!” For the first time his tired old voice showed a trace of animation. “Carlsbad wasn’t in it compared to the die-etting I had to do on the English boat!” He paused, then with a glint of cynic humour in his weary eyes, he said: “It was fit for nothing but a bunch of goys!”
This reference to unchosen tribes, with its evocation of humorous contempt, now snapped a connection between these three people, and suddenly one saw them in a new way. The old man was smiling thinly, with a cynical intelligence, and the two women were shaken utterly by a paroxysm of understanding mirth. One saw now that they really were together, able, ancient, immensely knowing, and outside the world, regardant, tribal, communitied in derision and contempt for the unhallowed, unsuspecting tribes of lesser men who were not party to their knowing, who were not folded to their seal. It passed — the instant showing of their ancient sign. The women just smiled now, quietly: they were citizens of the world again.
“But Jake! You poor fellow!” Mrs. Jack said sympathetically. “You must have hated it!” Then she cried suddenly and enthusiastically as she remembered: “Isn’t Carlsbad just too beautiful? . . . Did you know that Bert and I were there one time?” As she uttered these words she slipped her hand affectionately through the arm of her friend, Roberta, then went on vigorously, with a jolly laugh and a merry face: “Didn’t I ever tell you about that time, Jake? . . . Really, it was the most wonderful experience! . . . But God!” she laughed almost explosively —“Will you ever forget the first three or four days, Bert?” She appealed to her smiling friend. “Do you remember how hungry we got? How we thought we couldn’t possibly hold out? Wasn’t it dreadful?” she said, and then went on with a serious and rather puzzled air as she tried to explain it: “But then — I don’t know — it’s funny — but somehow you get used to it, don’t you, Bert? The first few days are pretty awful, but after that you don’t seem to mind. I guess you get too weak, or something . . . I know Bert and I stayed in bed three weeks — and really it wasn’t bad after the first few days.” She laughed suddenly, richly. “We used to try to torture each other by making up enormous menus of the most delicious food we knew. We had it all planned out to go to a swell restaurant the moment our cure was over and order the biggest meal we could think of! . . . Well!” she laughed —“would you believe it? — the day the cure was finished and the doctor told us it would be all right for us to get up and eat — I know we both lay there for hours thinking of all the things we were going to have. It was simply wonderful!” she said, laughing and making a fine little movement with her finger and her thumb to indicate great delicacy, her voice squeaking like a child’s and her eyes wrinkling up to dancing points. “In all your life you never heard of such delicious food as Bert and I were going to devour! We resolved to do everything in the greatest style! . . . Well, at last we got up and dressed. And God!” she cried. “We were so weak we could hardly stand up, but we wore the prettiest clothes we had, and we had chartered a Rolls Royce for the occasion and a chauffeur in livery! In all your days,” she cried with her eyes twinkling, “you’ve never seen such swank! We got into the car and were driven away like a couple of queens. We told the man to drive us to the swellest, most expensive restaurant he knew. He took us to a beautiful place outside of town. It looked like a chateau!” She beamed rosily round her. “And when they saw us coming they must have thought we were royalty from the way they acted. The flunkies were lined up, bowing and scraping, for half a block. Oh, it was thrilling! Everything we’d gone through and endured in taking the cure seemed worth it . . . Well!” she looked round her and the breath left her body audibly in a sigh of complete frustration —“would you believe it? — when we got in there and tried to eat we could hardly swallow a bite! We had looked forward to it so long — we had planned it all so carefully — and all we could eat was a soft-boiled egg — and we couldn’t even finish that! It filled us up right to here —” she put a small hand level with her chin. “It was so tragic that we almost wept! . . . Isn’t it a strange thing? I guess it must be that your stomach shrinks up while you’re on the diet. You lie there day after day and think of the enormous meal you are going to devour just as soon as you get up — and then when you try it you’re not even able to finish a soft-boiled egg!”
As she finished, Mrs. Jack shrugged her shoulders and lifted her hands questioningly, with such a comical look on her face that everybody round her laughed. Even weary and jaded old Jake Abramson, who had really paid no attention to what she was saying but had just been regarding her with his fixed smile during the whole course of her animated dialogue, now smiled a little more warmly as he turned away to speak to other friends.
Miss Heilprinn and Mrs. Jack, left standing together in the centre of the big room, offered an instructive comparison in the capacities of their sex. Each woman was perfectly cast in her own role. Each had found the perfect adaptive means by which she could utilise her full talents with the least waste and friction.
Miss Heilprinn looked the very distinguished woman that she was. Hers was the talent of the administrator, the ability to get things done, and one knew at a glance that in the rough and tumble of practical affairs this bland lady was more than a match for any man. She suggested oil — smooth oil, oil of tremendous driving power and generating force.
Along Broadway she had reigned for years as the governing brain of a celebrated art theatre, and her business acuity had wrung homage even from her enemies. It had been her function to promote, to direct, to control, and in the tenuous and uncertain speculations of the theatre to take care not to be fleeced by the wolves of Broadway. The brilliance of her success, the power of her will, and the superior quality of her metal were written plain upon her. It took no very experienced observer to see that in the unequal contest between Miss Heilprinn and the wolves of Broadway it had been the wolves who had been worsted.
In that savage and unremitting warfare, which arouses such bitter passions and undying hatreds that eyes become jaundiced and lips so twisted that they are never afterwards able to do anything but writhe like yellowed scars on haggard faces, had Miss Heilprinn’s face grown hard? Had her mouth contracted to a grim line? Had her jaw out-jutted like a granite crag? Were the marks of the wars visible anywhere upon her? Not at all. The more murderous the fight, the blander her face. The more treacherous the intrigues in which Broadway’s life involved her, the more mellow became the fruity lilt of her good-humoured chuckle. She had actually thriven on it. Indeed, as one of her colleagues said: “Roberta never seems so happy and so unconsciously herself as when she is playing about in a nest of rattlesnakes.”
So, now, as she stood there talking to Mrs. Jack, she presented a very handsome and striking appearance. Her grey hair was combed in a pompadour, and her suave and splendid gown gave the finishing touch to her general air of imperturbable assurance. Her face was almost impossibly bland, but it was a blandness without hypocrisy. Nevertheless, one saw that her twinkling eyes, which narrowed into such jolly slits when she smiled, were sharp as flint and missed nothing.
In a curious way, Mrs. Jack was a more complex person than her smooth companion. She was essentially not less shrewd, not less accomplished, not less subtle, and not less determined to secure her own ends in this hard world, but her strategy had been different.
Most people thought her “such a romantic person”. As her friends said, she was “so beautiful”, she was “such a child”, she was “so good”. Yes, she was all these things. For she had early learned the advantages of possessing a rosy, jolly little face and a manner of slightly bewildered surprise and naive innocence. When she smiled doubtfully yet good-naturedly at her friends, it was as if to say: “Now I know you’re laughing at me, aren’t you? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’ve done or said now. Of course I’m not clever the way you are — all of you are so frightfully smart — but anyway I have a good time, and I like you all.”
To many people that was the essential Mrs. Jack. Only a few knew that there was a great deal more to her than met the eye. The bland ............