Katharine Brush

“ She seemed every inch the charming, the popular, the distinguished hostess; and not at all did she seem what she was . . . a lady making her living, just as she had made it every night for almost twelve years. . . .
Every night, that is, except the ones when Jock was with her. And even in twelve years there had not been many of those. Two weeks at Christmas, a week at Easter, a brief hiatus between the closing of school or college and the opening of camp or summer school—no more. Jock's vacations were, and had ever been, at once the glory and the bane of Madelaine Hamill's existence. ”

“ Yvonne began. "Well, for one thing, I don't believe in God. Nor religion. Nor any hereafter. I put no more faith in the Bible than I would in a—a bedtime story! When I die I expect to be through, permanently and positively. Hence—carpe diem. I want to try everything once before I die—everything, however wicked. As a matter of fact what's wicked and what isn't? Who knows? Do you? Do the smug little men up in pulpits? Why do you think old people's eyes are sad, Jock Hamill? Do you think they're sad with repentance? I think they're sad with uncommitted sins." ”

“ The whole was a study in consummate gawkiness.
"Aren't they rich?" whispered Cecily. "Look, Jock—look at Peg's expression! Did you ever see anything funnier? Oh," she added on a little sigh, "I adore all this! It's so crazy. If I ever have a home of my own I'm going to cultivate just this sort of unconventional happy-go-lucky atmosphere."
"So'm I," said Jock without thinking. And then thought that it had been rather a senseless observation, all things considered. A home of which Yvonne was mistress would perhaps be unconventional, but it would certainly never be happy-go-lucky. ”

“ Jock went on. "I wouldn't admit it when I was being polite, but I will now—you're really a burn dancer. You're so heavy, Cecily! You hang on my left thumb like—like a coat on a peg! You make a fellow feel like pounding you on the back and saying, 'Buck up, there!' all the time. Thing to do is, never lean, but support your own weight, and dance on your toes, and forget yourself and the man and the floor—just remember the music—get that in your ears and you'll dance all right. ”

“ Yvonne nodded. "She does. I could tell. The way she looked at you when we passed. And the way she looked at me. . . . Women know all about one another, my dear. I understood her."
"Say!" Jock snorted. "Well, you're wrong for once, honey. Eunice Hathaway doesn't care about anything in God's world except herself and—glitter."
Yvonne repeated the word meditatively. "That's your pet word, isn't it? I've heard you use it a hundred times."
"I'm for it," Jock declared. "It's expressive. Hard and bright and cold. Glitter. Just the sound of it! Things that shine and don't give any warmth. ”

“ Jock dug his hands into his pockets, seeming by this gesture to pull his whole long body lower in the chair. His eyes focussed themselves on a bar pin fastened to the bodice of Yvonne's gown, but she knew he was not thinking of the bar pin.
"Now you take Cecily," he said. "The poor kid looks up to me as if I were her father or somebody. She does everything I tell her. And who the hell am I? That's the point. I've got a sweet nerve to be advising her what to do and what not to do, when all I rate is a rag-picking job in a low-life——"
"Jock Hamill, let's leave tonight." ”

“ Hamill and Yvonne met duly, and appeared charmed with one another. "Although," Jock reflected, "you can't tell a thing by appearances." He had engineered the meeting as a matter of course, knowing it inevitable, but with a certain secret trepidation. One's mother and one's betrothed—well, there was a bar between, always. And when each was a woman fundamentally inimical to all other women, the bar might easily and at once become a grim and immutable thing of iron. ”

“ For an hour, while the fire blazed at their feet and their cigarettes filled the room with a thin fine mist, they talked generalities. A long dreamy lazy hour, full of a brooding peace. Jock felt drugged with it. He felt that he wanted it never to end. . . . Firelight and Yvonne. Little quiet-leaping flames, and Yvonne's voice, like a lullaby. And Yvonne's beauty to look at, to drink up with the eyes. . . . Incredible to remember that somewhere men were playing football and other men were watching them and there was a tumult and a roar and a delirium. ”

“ You're a poseur. You devote all your ingenuity to making everybody think you're different from what you are. Life's a masquerade to you, and you go wearing a—a clown suit."
"Say!" cried Jock, surprised and alarmed. "Say, why, you're uncanny! How did you guess that? Hardly anyone ever does, unless I tell them."
"I don't know how I guessed it," Peg said. "Call it feminine insight, or whatever you like. Anyway, I knew it as soon as I'd talked to you five minutes. I think I even got wind of it before I ever met you, from things Bones said." ”

“ He paused, speculating. "Not so bad to have the girl you loved an actress, would it be? Because then you might see her in some of the costumes and against some of the backgrounds you like to imagine for her. Do you know, Yvonne, I've thought several times you're probably an actress."
"Why? What makes you think that?"
"It's logical. Somebody'd surely capitalize on beauty like that." He chuckled, in amusement and perfect content. "Just imagine loving anybody as I love you, and not knowing one thing about them except that they're the only person in the world!" ”

“ Women? Treacherous. Love? A story-book fallacy. Ideals? As sand huts on a tidal beach, built for destruction.
But there was work. ("Thank God!" said Jock somewhat melodramatically, as young men in like plight have said since time immemorial.) Congenial work. Absorbing work. In a great dirty room full of shirt-sleeved figures, prodigious tables row on row, smooth sheets of copy paper, crumpled wads of copy paper, typewriters that chattered like a million teeth in a chill, air that was dead with smoke and must and dust and printers' ink, and alive—frantic—with breathlessness. ”

“ They opened the door and yanked him in. They surrounded him like bees and buzzed greetings in his ears. They pummeled him joyously. They mentioned Eunice grinning, and elbowed him slyly in the ribs. They thrust at him tall tinkling glasses, and bade him toast the fraternity, the chapter, the college and the world at large.
When the tumult and the shouting had somewhat subsided he separated from the throng one Bones Allen, especially dear to his heart, and together they ascended to the second floor to acquaint themselves anew with the room they were jointly to occupy. ”

“ Nothing was important now but her delicate softness beside him, her perfume in his nostrils, her voice saying, "—unless you are there, Jock Hamill." The face of Parke Demorest of Demorest Motors flashed across his vision and was gone, without effect. He put his arms about Yvonne, and his voice shook a little in the force of its sincerity. "Darling—the only thing you could possibly say that would matter would be that—well, that there isn't any hope for me, ever. That would rip me up into a million pieces. But nothing else in the world could make any difference. Not any thing." ”

“ All of which, in view of the fact that he was suited by Brooks Brothers, worked at journalism, and seldom went out of New York if he could help it, was quite absurd.
Jock had never met a man he liked so well on sight, and as the four of them (Bill Olmstead had arrived, breathless and propitiatory, on the heels of Johnny) sat drinking tea around a table a little later, the liking grew into something deep and strong and destined to last. ”

“ They smiled at one another, Molly meaningly and personally, Jock in a casual sort of way. "She's all right for a prom," he told himself. "Clothes, and looks, and an awfully good dancer. If only she doesn't start talking like an idiot—Oh Lord, she's going to!" he finished. He knew that preliminary flicker of the lashes.
"Jock," said Molly softly, "there were a million girls on that train, and I felt so superior to all of them, you can't imagine, because they were coming to the prom with just any old boy and I was coming with you. ”

“ In the deep well of it, lounging recumbent behind the massive steering wheel—Yvonne. Yvonne in a gray gown and a tight gray turban with long uncurled feathers that sprayed down on one shoulder. Yvonne, with hair that was a loop of flame on her cheek, with diamonds that glittered in the sunlight on her hands, with a Russian wolfhound in a jeweled collar sitting stiffly on his haunches beside her.
A picture almost indelicately sensational. Beauty on parade, demanding every eye. ”

“ And women in rather becoming hats. Women always manage that, somehow. Vain, even in wassail.
Confetti lay on the dance floor in little parti-hued puddles, and marked trails between the tables. It flecked the dark-coated shoulders of men, and glistened in women's hair, and stuck like beauty marks to their moist warm skin. Colored streamers looped from the central chandelier, bunched about the feet of the dancers and tripped them, stacked itself in corners as though a giant ticker-tape basket had upset. ”

“ The world went right on, no matter who lay still and cold in the house next door or the house across the street. A phrase Yvonne was fond of saying recurred to him: "Nothing matters very much." At times like this you knew nothing did. Men were born, and lived a little, and then lay still and cold . . . and people smiled and children with red sleds shouted for glee in the streets . . .
The thing on the door! A circle of flowers, and a trail of lavender gauze that danced up the wind like a sprite. It whipped his heart, that lavender gauze, with its every flutter. ”

“ You're not married already. You say you don't love anyone else any better. What is it? This damn vagueness is driving me crazy, Yvonne! Don't you think it's about time you told me a little about yourself?"
For the barest minute Yvonne seemed to waver, and Jock thought, "Now! Now, I'm going to know!" But when she spoke it was to say, "After I come back I'll tell you everything. But not today. I want to leave you thinking of me—sweetly."
"Nothing you could tell me would ever change the way I think of you, Yvonne. You know that." ”

“ To walk out beside Yvonne into the spotlight, to bow and scrape to the crowd, to kneel and strum, with these two looking on. . . . There was suddenly nothing in all the world he wanted less to do. He felt placed at a definite disadvantage. This fellow Bill—budding architect, Cecily had said—what would he think? What was he thinking now? "Probably looks on me as about one degree higher than a confounded chorus man!" . . . He could imagine Bill on the way home, upbraiding Cecily, saying of himself, Jock, "What do you see in a sap like that? Why, he doesn't amount to anything!" ”

“ He was aroused and fascinated.
"And when I do die," she continued, "I want to die the way I've lived. Sensationally." (As the girl on the ferry, thought Jock.) "If I were a man I'd be a racing-driver. I love the way they die. At the wheel. Expecting to, more or less, and not caring. I knew one who was killed a year or two ago. He had one conscious minute and all he said was, 'I think I could have gone a little faster.'"
Yvonne paused again, and traced hieroglyphics on the table cloth with the point of a glistening fingernail. Jock said nothing. ”

“ There are amusement-park crowds with sleazy dresses and gents' ready-to-wear suits and run-down heels and jaws in perpetual motion. There are baseball crowds, straw=hatted, shirt-sleeved, perspiring. There are football crowds, vast gay menageries of fur. There are movie crowds sticky with candy, pale with bad air; and hotel crowds, dark-clad and middle-aged and smug. But the roadhouse crowd is like no other in the world. ”

“ The junior promenade was in full cry when finally they reached the gymnasium, A typical college prom it was. Typical setting of fir boughs and potted palms, of banners and bunting, of Japanese lanterns and shifting searchlights, of polished floor with an orchestra on a raised dais at each end, of booths marked with the letters of twenty fraternities where chaperones sat yawning behind their feather fans. And a typical scene. Gowns of scarlet and green and orange and turquoise and cloth-of-gold, sophisticated gowns, blasé gowns, wise, knowing, faintly wicked gowns. ”

“ The dinner-coated functionary has to incline his ear to your lips to hear you say, "A table near the floor if you have it," and you have to incline yours to his to hear him reply that he hasn't it but that he'll give you something in a corner.
The room beyond the screen is enormously large, and looks even larger because its walls are dusky-black and seem to mingle with the night in an infinitude of darkness. ”

“ You're the best friend I ever had. Oh, Jock, take care of her, help her forget!"
The next few weeks were freighted with a melancholy so heavy that his whole inner being seemed to droop with the weight of it. And mingled with the melancholy there was a protest, violent and strong. Brad's going had been so futile! So unnecessary! It wasn't right that a man like that should go for a thing like that. . . . After the first chaotic hours he had reduced the situation to its fundamentals: Brad had died so that Eunice might drive a shiny new coupé and wrap about herself the skins of little animals. ”