” Pa,” said Joy, “would you let me sing Louise to-day?—I—feel—just—like it!” It was nine o’clock of a Monday morning; Joy had ridden up to town on an early train and gone straight to her lesson. She had burst into the studio, cheeks aflame, singing almost before she entered. Her scales had gone well; her tones were carrying more point, and were delivered with a resonance that made the windows vibrate. Pa was looking exhilarated; his old eyes were almost shining.
“We shall make a Louise out of you!” he said now for the first time since that first day. “As well as a tender Mimi and a piteous Butterfly and a heart-torn Gilda! But not yet. There is no use in toying with those airs for quite a while.”
“But I want to show you,” said Joy. “Please let me, Pa—I may never be in Louise’s mood again!”
Pa threw up his hands and the accompanist played the two opening measures. Joy abandoned herself to the ecstasy of the song . . . so recently—she had been there herself. When the last blissful echo had died away, she threw back her head and looked at Pa in triumph. He looked back at her, and shook his head.
“Of course, you must remember that mood,” he said, “so that some day you may sing it, and set people to dreaming of their first love. But you must be able to take your moods out of your pocket, and hold them in your hand. Do you see, my dear? If you give yourself up to the mood, it gets out of hand—When one is thrilled oneself, one is rarely thrilling one’s audience. Mind! Mind over all—or the result is artistic chaos.”
“I don’t want to sing so that people will think of my mind—” Joy objected, rebellious. “No; but you must have yourself under control or you cannot control your audience. Be blissful, or passionate, or dreaming; but plan it out first; don’t rely upon the moment’s mood for spurts of inspiration.”
She left the studio, her spirits more dashed than a newly-engaged girl’s should have been over such a matter. The singer’s road was so long, so hard—so nerve-racking—She whiled away the trolley journey to the apartment in finding adjectives, none of which were sufficiently comprehensive. Yet, remembering the way her scales had soared—and the windows vibrated—the exultant sense of power that had been hers—the voices within her were more contented lately, she liked to fancy—Yes, music drew one on even while one despaired.
The apartment seemed changed. Had Jerry been house-cleaning in her absence? There was more furniture in the hall than usual, furniture that belonged in the reception room; and everything shone as if it had been newly scrubbed. Ordinarily, while the apartment was not really untidy, it bore an air of very light housekeeping. Joy poked her head inside the reception room, and dropped the suitcase at what she saw.
A strange woman sitting on the comfortable sofa—a woman with very blonde hair and a figure which would have been expansive if given a chance by her potent corsets. An earringed, bejewelled woman, with dark, hard hollows for eyes in a face whose pink and white layers gave her skin an ironed-out look which trembled into telltale wrinkles and creases in the neck. Jerry was standing before her—a changed Jerry in a bright, bizarre gown of some rough green silk which clung to her like a wet bathing-suit—her hair pulled back straight and confined by a ribbon of the same bright silk—jade earrings lilting from her ears. Her face was rouged; her lips a splotch of scarlet. She swayed lithely as Joy stared, spellbound, and was saying, in a silken, rustling voice which reminded Joy oddly of the dress she wore: “I am sure you will enjoy the little frock, Mrs. Bowman. Florence Fay was in Saturday, and I am creating one for her that is very similar.”
Joy felt her jaw dropping, and closed it with a click that made Jerry turn swiftly on the toes of the cream-coloured sandals she wore on her bare feet. “Mrs. Bowman” followed her glance, and lifted a jewelled lorgnette to stare at Joy. “One of your models, Madame?” she asked, in a voice as thick and flabby as her eyelids.
Jerry nodded languidly, with a swift, impinging wink at Joy.
“She’s just my colouring—better than the other,” the doughy voice went on. Joy reacted from the blow by staggering back a step and tripping over the suitcase. “I’d like to see her in some negligées—I’m looking for just the right kind and I must say it’s hard to suit me in them.”
“Let me see,” Jerry wafted her hand to her forehead. “You do not wish light colours, I take it.”
“You know I don’t.” The voice became stickily peevish, although the face did not alter its bland, open look. “My figure is impossible in light colors, you know that quite well.”
“Of course you are at your best in dark, which brings out your hair to a vividness,” Jerry murmured. “I have in mind something all made up, which is distinctly your negligée from the first moment one looks at it. But should I even show it to you?” Her hands interrogated, “Florence Fay saw it, and said she was almost sure she would want it for the bedroom scene in ‘Making a Night of It,’ her new fall vehicle.”
“Oh—h, I must see it!” Mrs. Bowman appealed, her neck working with emotion. “I must, Madame Géry!”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders, a quick, theatrical gesture that threw her gown into all sorts of new ripples and cadences. “Well, possibly there is no harm in showing it to you,” she conceded. “Pardon me for one swift moment—” and she curved out into the hall, gathering Joy after her. “Joy,” she whispered, a goblin grin disturbing her blobby lips, “Joy—do you mind going and putting on that purple negligée Packy and Twink sent, and coming back here to show her how she won’t look? Sorry, but you peeked yourself into this!”
Joy went back to Jerry’s room fighting a wild desire to laugh hysterically and completely. Would there ever be an end to the surprises of this apartment? Sarah was sitting on the bed, hugging a decidedly cross expression. A large, creamy pasteboard box which she had evidently just done up, judging from the papers and string scattered about the room, was lying beside her.
“Will you please tell me,” said Joy, “how long since Jerry has turned modiste?”
“Oh, you’re back,” said Sarah brilliantly. “Have a good time? Is that sunburn or rouge?”
Joy went to the closet for the negligée without replying. “That” was nothing more or less than a hectic flush which had been on her ever since Grant had left her on the train that morning. The ecstatic distress of their first parting had keyed her up to almost fever pitch. Her pulses had been pounding, her blood had mounted to her face, and even the coldwater spray of that singing lesson had not succeeded in bringing her back to normal. Her lips parted now in dramatic recollection, as she slipped into the gorgeous purple brocade of Twink’s settlement. It was beyond belief that there could be such rapture—
“I thought Jerry’d better play that off, too,” said Sarah. “She’s never worn it, and she ought to be able to stick old Mrs. Messy in deep for it.”
Joy snapped the clasp that held the thing together, and went down the hall again. It was a wonderful negligée—it would make even “Mrs. Messy” look like a fresh young twig of a girl. For although not yet a gnarled old bough, one might call her considerable of a branch. How did models walk? She took her cue from Jerry’s modulated ambulations, and swayed into the reception room. “Mrs. Messy’s” lorgnette surveyed her.
“That negligée,” the voice soughed, “is mine. I have to have it. I couldn’t even consider anything else—after seeing it.”
Jerry’s hands fluttered. “But, my dear Mrs. Bowman, Florence Fay——”
“I tell you I must have it! I’ll pay you twice as much as she would!”
“The works of art that I put out,” said Jerry smoothly, “as works of art, contain in their price no relation to material or cost of labour. My years of study and design, of creating lesser works of art—they set the price. Mrs. Bowman, I do not change my values. For you, or for Florence Fay, they remain the same. And since Miss Fay did not absolutely reserve it, I might let you take it—although it is against my custom to disappoint my patrons in a gown they have partially optioned. The negligée is three hundred and fifty dollars, as it now stands.”
Joy’s pose almost disintegrated at this. Although not the type of girl who generally indulges in such remarks, she longed to ask Jerry if that included her too. But Mrs. Bowman showed no sign of shock.
“Have it done up at once, and have the two boxes carried out to my car,” she said in thick satisfaction.
When the door finally closed on Mrs. Bowman and the two boxes which Sarah carried uncordially to the car, Joy turned to Jerry, who was smoking swiftly:
“So this is what you meant, when you said you were going to take in washing on the side!”
Jerry pulled off her green bandeau. “You pinned it on the wall that time—It’s my only regular calling now. I hold these receptions four times a year—in all of the four off-season intervals, when the stores are marking down—the mid-summer sales are on now, you know—and the newly and oozily rich, like our friend Mrs. Bowman, don’t want to demean themselves by going to markdowns—yet want to go right on spending. It gives ’em a thrill to come here to private exhibits of ‘advance models,’ where they get individual attention from a jazzy person who looks like a double life. Isn’t my make-up temperamental?” And she waved her sandals.
“Jerry, I think you’re—wonderful. Were you—were you ever an actress?”
The downward quirk to Jerry’s mouth again. “No. I could have been, couldn’t I?”
Joy was amazed at the depth of her disappointment. She had been cherishing the exciting belief that that was Jerry’s “past,” for so long.
“I like designing and sewing things together,” said Jerry; “it’s the only kind of work I do like. If I liked it better than having a good time, I’d do it all the year around. As it is, whenever I see a dress of good material marked down because of lack of style, I buy it—the same with remnants of materials. Then from time to time I get an idea on a way to change the dress so it will look like Irene Castle improved on. I cut it all over, probably—drape it on Sal, who does an imitation of Mrs. Jarley’s Wax Works while I polish it off. So when the time comes for me to call it a week and I phone announcements to my patrons—telling each of ’em I’m especially calling them instead of sending ’em a printed slip—I have quite a little collection of made-over mark-downs to parade. Sal shows ’em off well, too—that girl’s got style—but if she ever was cast on a desert island without a rouge-box and a marcel-iron and a few other little things I’d hate to look at her. Put her in clothes, and she crashes through. An old friend of mine used to say, and it’s true any way you look at it: ‘Without clothes, you can’t get very far.’”
“But how about that purple negligée?”
“That was pure profiteering. I got into the mood of roasting the old marshmallow; the negligée was handy, you dropped in—Say, tell me about the visit. I haven’t half looked at you yet.”
They were in the living room, and Joy without answering went over to the cellarette. With a leap, Jerry was there before her. “Listen here, Joy—you’ve been without it for several days now. Don’t you think it’s a good time to begin to stop?”
“Why? You drink three times as much as I do——”
“I’m hopeless. You’re not. You’ve just started in, and you can stop—easily.”
Joy considered the lights and shadows of the glass in her hand. “I wonder—if it’s really doing me any harm.” She drank it reflectively, while Jerry went back to her seat with a shrug. “I—I cried a long time, the first night down at the seashore. Jerry, do you suppose this had anything to do with it?”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders again. Having made her appeal, she evidently did not intend either to repeat or reinforce it. There was a brief silence between the two, broken by Joy, who suddenly found that she must pour forth the story of the week-end just passed; such glowing wonder could not be bottled up within her. Jerry listened, first smoking at her usual gait, but as the story wore on sitting with a fresh cigarette unlit between her teeth. When Joy’s narration finally came to an end, she bit into the cigarette.
“Well?” said Joy. It was the first time she had ever approached Jerry with a serious matter, the first time men had entered their conversation as anything but incidentals to a good time, and she did not know how a hint of permanency would hit her.
“Well?” Jerry repeated. “What do you want me to say?”
“Say?” Joy’s look of breathless bliss crumbled as a toy balloon under a pin prick. “Why—why, nothing, if you don’t want to. I’m sorry—if I bored you about it. But you see—I owe him to you, in a way. Because I never would have met Packy if I hadn’t come here, and I never would have met him if it hadn’t been for Packy—I didn’t mean to bore you.”
Jerry lit another cigarette. “Look here, Joy, I don’t want to be a thrill-dispeller or anything, but I can’t put on a quiver I don’t feel. This thing may turn out all right, but at present quoting it sounds to me like a bad case of beach and moon. The whole thing has dusted along with that summer swiftness we all read about.”
“Oh, we realize it’s been swift,” said Joy, “and just to test ourselves, we’re not going to see each other until Wednesday, when I am going to meet him at the Copley for dinner.”
“Wednesday,” Joy murmured. “And to-day’s Monday. Oh, well, absence at this stage of the game only makes you keener—you should have stayed down there a week!”
“Bon soir—a week down there! I couldn’t stand that—not with his mother!”
“I gather from what you said that his mother is a riot. Is he anything like her?”
“Of course not—” Joy began indignantly, but the rise of recollection checked denial. Grant ossifying at the idea of Paragon Park on Sunday. . . . But anyone might do that. She rose, gathering conviction about her as a Shakespearean actor whips his cloak about him before an exit on a sounding phrase. “I can’t talk about it any more, Jerry. But when you know, you know.”
And so for a day or two, things remained as static as unexploded dynamite. Joy received a letter over which she wept ecstatic tears; Jerry shrugged her shoulders at both the tears and the ecstasy.
On Wednesday evening, Joy came to her for inspection, sheathed in defiance. “Do I look all right?”
Jerry was doing up a “little model” in one of her long cream paste-board boxes. She snapped the string around and tied it without replying. Then she said: “For the love of mud put on a veil or something to take the edge off those eyes. It isn’t fair to hit a place like the Copley looking like you do.”
“One should never wear a veil after six in the evening,” Joy retorted. “So I even look as if I were in love, do I?”
“You look—something,” said Jerry. “I haven’t got time to decide what—Bring him back afterwards; Sal and I are going down to Sonntaug with Baldy and his gang, so you’ll have it all to yourself.”
Joy thought, as she trolleyed to the door of the Copley, that Jerry was peculiarly unresponsive about the wonderful turn things had taken. The two days’ separation had made her nervous, and Jerry’s attitude did not tend to make her less so. But she forgot her nervousness in the warm tide of anticipation sweeping over her that she had not dared to allow before.
In coming through the swinging doors, the first person she saw was Jim Dalton, in the act of checking his hat. His recognition was as swift as hers, and he came forward to meet her. “I was just thinking about you,” he said without background. “I was wondering whereabouts Jerry’s apartment was, because I wanted to look you up.”
“How long are you going to be in town?” she asked perfunctorily, as they moved up the “Peacock Alley” of Boston, the long narrow way of chairs and sofas facing each other, with a few stuffy people seated thereon, all glaring at one another.
“I’m working here now, so I expect to be here right along. May I come and see you?”
“I don’t know.” She could not tell him about Grant—But what other excuse was there?” “I—I really don’t know—you see, I’m so awfully busy all the time.”
She had forgotten how keen his eyes were. They were now boring into hers until she cast hers down. “I am coming up sometime, if I may,” he said, “and if I can’t see you, I’ll see Jerry, and talk about you with her.”
They had come to a halt by an empty sofa, and now, as Joy looked at him in a hope that if she looked long enough she could think of something to say, Grant came swiftly up to them from the lobby.
“Good evening, Joy,” he said quietly.
“Oh—Grant—have you met Mr. Dalton—” There was no particular reason for being confused, and showing it, but she was and did. Grant’s demeanor, while not rude, bordered on the glacial as he bowed, then stood waiting for Jim to go. Jim looked from one to the other, a swift, earnest look.
“I’ll see you again, Miss Nelson,” he said, and with a negligent nod to Grant, was gone.
The two went into the dining room in silence. It was only after they had ordered, that Grant spoke.
“Who is that fellow, Joy—where did you meet him and what did he mean when he said he’d see you again?”
Joy put down the roll she had been fingering. In the first keen disappointment over the flatness of their meeting, his words bit like acid. “I met him at a Prom this spring,” she said, striving to keep a pleasant and normal tone. “The only other time I have seen him was at the dance last week. I ran into him by accident here. That is all.”
The waiter brought their first course, and Grant began to talk of impersonal matters. Why, oh, why, had they chosen such a place as this for their first meeting? Joy thought. He had not once looked at her—the way he had always looked at her, before.
When the waiter had taken their plates away, they met each other’s eyes steadily for almost the first time that evening, and Grant’s face softened. “You look rather tired to-night, Joy darling,” he said. “Whatever on earth have you been doing to yourself? You work too hard on your singing.”
“Oh, no, Grant—I’ve been neglecting it really—I’ll have to work much harder to get it where I want it——”
“You sing well enough for me already—and after you belong to me, you’ll not have to peg away at it any more.” He attacked his salad; the subject was closed as far as he was concerned.
She was gazing at him wide-eyed. “You mean you wouldn’t want me to—oh, of course—you—wouldn’t.” She moved her fork in and about her salad aimlessly. Her mother had forgotten her voice—when she had met the man she loved. She had forgotten it, in the rapture of belonging to him—that phrase had such an unpleasant sound. And the generations before her mother had forgotten their voices for those they loved. She was the result; and all the repression of generations lay within her—simmering. She gave Grant a sudden alive, direct glance. This was the man she loved and she had not forgotten her voice. How could this be? He must teach her—teach her to forget—and not make her so vaguely unhappy over such immaterialities as Jim Dalton.
“Hi, Joy! Cheerio, old dear!” She jerked her head up from contemplation of nothing to see Davy Carter and Wigs Smith, Jerry’s and Sarah’s most competent playmates, with some other youths, hailing her boisterously while passing to a table close by. She managed a smile from her abstraction, and fell to pushing her fork about again.
“You seem to have an unlimited supply of casual young men acquaintances,” came from across the table in a voice that weirdly reminded Joy of Mrs. Grey’s chill blue eyes.
“Grant, what a silly attitude to take!” she exploded. “There are nineteen years in which you have not known me. It certainly would be strange if in that time I had met no other men——”
She realized just that fatal fraction of an inch too late, that she had said the wrong thing, and stopped, leaving the appeal in mid air, where it stayed. His face had queerly altered, and the air tingled with silence.
“Let’s go,” he said finally, in an even tone; “that is, if you do not care to eat any more.”
She had eaten practically nothing throughout the dinner; but it was so different from the day when they had both lost their appetites!
As they came through the dining room, Joy collided with a showily-dressed woman who was entering with a large, greasy-looking man. There had been sufficient room for them both to pass, but Joy’s mind had been far away. The woman drew back and raised a monocle upon her.
“Oh—it is one of Madame Géry’s models!” rolled out an unforgettably doughy voice. “How fortunate—will you tell Madame Géry, my dear, that I am coming Saturday instead of to-morrow?”
Joy nodded and made her escape, walking swiftly, battling an insane desire to shriek with laughter and startle the inmates of the Copley out of their stodgy repose. Grant kept his silence on ice as they left the hotel and he signaled for a taxi. When he helped her into the machine that finally drew up, Joy burst forth with the hysterical giggles she had been fighting.
“Will you please stop laughing long enough to tell me your address?” Grant asked, in the same tone with which he told the driver where to go, when she gasped out the number. What nonsense—Grant knew her address. Everything was getting to be nonsense—
They rode for some minutes with no sound but Joy’s laughter. Grant spoke at last. “Did I hear right? Did that—that woman say you were—a model? Is that true, Joy?”
“No—yes,—that is,—well, I was once in a manner of speaking—” She went off again into what sounded like perfect carillons of laughter.
“Joy—can’t you control yourself any better than this—don’t you know how you are hurting me?”
She was suddenly quiet. “You are hurting me, too, Grant. I don’t know what’s happened—but something has—and everything is so awful that I can’t seem to believe that it used to be so wonderful.” She started to sob in pitiful little hiccoughs. He made no move to comfort her, but stared ahead of him in the taxi.
“You’re right, Joy—something has happened. I saw Packy this week—and he said certain things about you that made me pound the everlasting daylight out of him. Knowing you—and everything that had passed between us—naturally I called him a liar and rammed his words back in his throat.”
Joy had stopped sobbing; her hysterics were shocked out of her. “What did he say about me?” she cried sharply. “What did he say about me?”
“He told me—what kind of girls you were living with and the kind of life you led—from man to man instead of from hand to mouth is the way he put it——”
The numbness of utter bewilderment possessed her. In a choked silence she listened to his voice droning over the rattle of the taxi.
“And then—I come to meet you—and find you talking with a man—who seems to think he knows you pretty well—a man who as good as told Packy and me what to do with ourselves, the other night down at the dance, as if he owned you—and then a bunch of would-be speeds that I happen to know are no living good, hail you as a boon companion—call out to you in a way no girl should be spoken to in a public dining-room——”
“Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells, and the Lowells speak only to God!” Joy murmured. A nebular recklessness, as if she were moving in a dream, had settled upon her. “Go on—you haven’t reached the part where I became a model!”
“Joy, for God’s sake, don’t make this any worse by being flippant. You must be frank with me for once and tell me what to think. I never asked any questions about you—but now I have the right to know.”
Their taxi came to a scrunching stop in front of the apartment house, and there was an enforced silence while he paid the man and they journeyed up to Jerry’s apartment. In the living-room they faced each other, pale and vibrant.
“You say, ‘be frank with me for once,’” Joy panted; “I’ve never told you anything about my life, it is true; but that’s only because there wasn’t—time. I’ll tell you the story of my life now—just as fast as I can. But first—oh, Grant—don’t you love me any more—not the smallest bit?”
“I—I don’t know what I love, Joy. Help me—help me to get back to where we were two days ago!”
Standing there, his eyes imploring her, he looked like a pathetic little boy. Joy’s tenderness came back suddenly, with a rush. “Grant, dear—what’s all this about, anyway?” and she took a step toward him.
And then as the gravitation of two bodies who like to speak of such affairs as of the heart or soul, hung imminent—a breath more, and the questioning would have rested in each other’s arms—Grant stumbled over something on the floor. There was a sound of glass shattering to shivery bits,—and the gravitation shattered. He stooped to reclaim the damage he had chanced to wreak—and straightened up again. They were standing by the sofa. On the floor by the head of the sofa was a bottle, a bottle of unmistakable denomination, surrounded by three friendly looking glasses that gave forth the impression of having lived through much. It was one of those glasses, strayed from its brothers, that Grant had rendered incapable of further service.
There was a busy silence in the room. Joy found herself thinking dryly that it must have been Sarah who had left those there; Jerry would never have been quite so more than careless. Grant slowly turned and looked about him—at the clubroom furnishings—and back down at the bottle with those three evil witches of glasses:
“Joy,” he said, his breath making patchwork of his voice; “tell me what Packy meant—tell me what he meant!”
“I don’t know what he meant!” she cried. “You have to tell me just what he said——It’s true I am living here with two girls who are neither Cabots nor Lowells——”
“That’s—quite—evident.” His eyes were again visiting different pungent details of the room. “And how in the name of all that’s fitting—did you happen to come here?”
She wanted to beat her fists against the air—against the wall that was rising between them. She tried to speak, but the full tide of what she had to say clogged her utterance. “I—why—I can’t explain—at a moment like this! At a moment like this! There’s too much to tell!”
He was moving away from her—moving away down the room. With the sharp needle-prick of incredulity she watched him go.
“Joy”—his voice was a long way off, like the echo of a vanished heart-beat—“I—must—think. I’ve—got—to—think.”
Still incredulous, she stood motionless, watching.
“I’ve got to—think!”
And she was alone in the big living-room.