Just behind him, as arresting as an exclamation point in her slim black coat and infinitesimal hat, stands his lawful wedded wife Gertrude. Trudi is an amazing person—small, thin to the point of emaciation, brown as a gypsy, with hair and eyes the colour of her skin, and a mouth the colour of the red rag that waves at bulls; she has the face of an abnormally intelligent street urchin, the ease of manner of a grand duchess, and the absence of manners of a fishwife. Ten years ago she was the Cinderella of the Washington group—the daughter of a retired army colonel and the rather pathetic product of a procession of army posts reaching from Vermont to Honolulu. Nine years of affluence have metamorphosed her into the most redoutable bridge player in North America and one of the most perfect hostesses in the world. She never wears a jewel of any kind—her “wind-blown” bob takes thirty-five minutes to arrange if she is lucky—she has ankles and feet that would give Mistinguett a bad moment, and a careless husky voice that is oddly disturbing. Her clothes are absolutely simple; the morning ones come from Chanel, the afternoon ones from Lelong, and the evening ones from Vionnet, and they cost twenty-five thousand dollars a year no matter what Neil is making.
The roof-garden apartment on Park Avenue in which she lives for two months of the year and affectionately refers to as the Shanty contains a silk-quilted closet occupied by two hundred pairs of assorted footgear, most of them highly fantastic, and six severely plain little felt hats, in different shades of the same shape, which constitute her entire stock of millinery. It also boasts a pirate’s chest which conceals three dozen varieties of liqueurs. Children, dogs, visiting potentates, and servants adore Trudi; all men like her and some women love her. She treats dowagers and infants with a grave and attentive friendliness that renders them her slaves; the rest of the world take what they can get of her and are thankful. No one knows her exact age—she never made any formal début in Washington, and occasionally observes that she must be somewhere between forty and fifty. What evidence there is points to the early thirties. She can look eighteen or forty-eight with equal facility. The Sheridans have no children.
Chatty Ross, curled up at one end of the long sofa with her small scuffed Oxfords tucked neatly under her, is a delightful person—small, gay, curly-headed, and irresponsible, in spite of the fact that she is the mother of four children and the only lady in the group who would be caught dead in the shabby gray coat that many rabbits died to consummate many years before. It is too long, too wide, far, far too worn, but it is Chatty’s best coat, and above its flopping collar her eyes shine and her cheeks flush and dimple. There is not an atom of pretence in her entire make-up, and for all her dowdiness she is as hilarious as a small child over this miraculous party. She inhabits a six-room frame cottage in Hartsdale, has a coloured helper called Bohemia, a three-year-old Dodge sedan, and a husband of whom she is just as proud as though he were the president of General Motors.
Tom Ross is not the president of General Motors—on the contrary. He is that least to be envied of all wage-earners, the struggling young lawyer who is no longer particularly young. Somewhere on the pleasant road that led so bravely out of Harvard, where he and Sheridan had roomed together, he took the wrong turning; perhaps it was the turn that led him away somewhat abruptly from the flourishing young firm of Kountz, Maury & Sheridan to the more hallowed portals of Hale & Dawes. Nine years have passed since they clanged to behind him, and Tom’s curly brown hair has begun to retreat slightly from his temples, and his pleasant blue eyes are occasionally a somewhat bleak gray. Slim, tragically neat in order to counteract his decent shabbiness, he is as sensitive as his adored Chatty is oblivious, and there is something a little strained and fine-drawn about his smile. For more reasons than one this reunion is painful to him, but he has put his pride in his pocket and come in order to give her the only pleasure that she has begged for in eight years. Tom is thirty-six. There are days—yes, and nights—when he feels fifty-six, and pretty well tired of everything in the world except Chatty’s small warm hands and delighted laughter.
At the other end of the sofa sits Hanna Dart, her magnificent black sables framing a dream of ivory and gold. Hanna is that rarest of creatures outside of books and the English aristocracy—a real beauty. She is not pretty, or lovely, or attractive, or charming; she is beautiful. With her silver gilt hair parted severely in the centre and coiled over her ears in two shining wheels, her wide-set eyes, flawless and brilliant as aquamarines under dark and delicate brows, the lovely flow of colour coming and going beneath the satiny skin, the perfect curve of mouth and chin and shoulder—Hanna, daughter of our one-time ambassador to Spain, is divinely tall and most divinely fair. She is also as great a lady as it is possible for one not quite thirty to be—gentle-mannered, gentle-voiced, gentle-hearted. She has an amazing collection of diamonds, a golden-haired heir apparent of three, and practically no sense of humour. She wears nothing but black or white, in either of which she is totally devastating, and once in a long time she forgets to conceal her adoration of the quiet man seated at her elbow.
Gavin Dart is considerably older than the rest of the group—somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, with dark hair turning to steel, a pair of shrewd and ironic eyes, and a rather formidable mouth that is surprisingly unformidable when he smiles. He is a fairly tired business man, having amassed five million before fifty, but he is not too tired to find life diverting, his wife beautiful, and the coal industry absorbing. His home is in Pittsburg—his hobbies criminal law, cruises, and modern first editions; he has a nice wit when he cares to use it, immense self-possession, and is even better at listening than he is at talking. In spite of the fact that he is a victim of acute insomnia, his nerves are under such perfect control that, like Talleyrand, he would not start if you came up behind him in the dark and kicked him.
The young things seated on the farthest love-seat with their fingers openly and shamelessly linked are Rachel and Joel Hardy. It is difficult to think of the Hardys separately, as they never leave each other’s side for more than three minutes, unless forcibly handled, but if you inspect them closely it is quite easy to tell them apart. Of course they are both thin and dark as gypsies and both muffled in enormous tweed coats, but the one with the little scarlet felt hat cocked over one eye is Ray, and the one with the scarlet foulard tie is Joel. Ray is a highly diverting person, with a tilted nose, a small cloud of freckles, a wide, disarming grin, round hazel eyes, and hair so closely shorn that it looks like a little brown velvet cap. She is the only outsider in the group, with the exception of Gavin Dart, and she is almost ten years younger than its youngest member. She had met Joel in New York at her coming-out party nearly a year before, had fallen in love with him with a promptness and violence that astounded them both, and had pursued him shamelessly and relentlessly throughout her entire first season, at the end of which time he collapsed and married her. Their diversion in each other’s society since then has been so flagrant and unflagging that it is occasionally embarrassing to the innocent bystander, but everyone who knows them delights in the Hardys. Under her impish exterior Rachel is the simplest of all the children of nature, mischievous as a monkey, superstitious as a sailor, an arrant little coward, and possessed of more curiosity than the Elephant’s child himself. She believes in everything—ghosts, fairies, platonic friendship, undying love, the equality of man, the intuition of woman, the devotion of dogs, fortune tellers, and four-leaf clovers. She is lost and undone without Joel, and makes no bones whatever about it.
Joel is a dark and dreamy-eyed young man with a misleadingly poetic expression which conceals an infantile fondness for nonsense in any form and a passion for detective stories. He also knows the words and music of every song composed in America since the Mayflower landed, and is anxious that you should know them, too. Many is the time that he and Kit Baird have sung the sun down and the moon up, and just at present he is feeling slightly morose because Ray has left his cherished accordion at home.
During the year in which he d
allied with the State Department and a diplomatic career he was the most sought-after dinner partner in a radius of thirty miles of Washington, and he has lost none of his insinuating and effortless charm. He spent 1917 and 1918 driving an ambulance in France. During the first year he was known to his adoring comrades as Hell Bent Hardy and during the second as Careful Joe, the somewhat abrupt transition being accounted for by the intrusion into his life of a bomb that made a neat part down the centre of his hair, and missed the end of his nose by a scanty quarter of an inch. The Hardys have a fairly comfortable income inherited from a worshipping grandaunt of Joel’s. They inhabit a delightful and uncomfortable old farmhouse just outside of Greenwich, which they have remodelled very badly indeed; they have as obvious assets an elderly French couple, a large English sheep dog, a small black kitten, and a perfectly magnificent time. It would be difficult to discover anyone nicer anywhere.
Seated on the far corner of the great couch in front of the fire, her hands still linked about the little fur cap on her knee, her bare head bright, sits Jill Leighton, the sister of that Sylvia who had been the twelfth of this group and had died so many years ago. Jill is one of those lucky people who wear charm and distinction as obviously printed on their faces as visas on the passport to good fortune. A plumber would know in the space that it took to draw a breath that here, slight and serene, sat a lady—a grand duke would know it, too. There is something engagingly young and untouched about her, in spite of the highly sophisticated atmosphere in which she has lived for nearly thirty years; her mother, who is invariably referred to even at fifty-three as the “Beautiful Mrs. Leighton,” is known from London to Budapest for her clothes and her complexion, and Jill has followed loyally in her radiant wake. The beautiful Mrs. Leighton prefers an international atmosphere, and three years in pre-war Washington have been her only experiment on her native heath in more years than she cares to remember. Even in Washington her acute ears caught occasional horrified echoes from the Boston that she had left outraged and gasping twenty years before, and she feels more securely comfortable in her lacquered jewel box of an apartment, in the Avenue Henri Martin, where Jill has installed her before returning for the first time since the war for a long visit to Lindy Marsden. Jill sits quite still, her eyes on her linked hands, so that it is impossible to see whether their larkspur blue is unshadowed, but at any rate she holds her fine small head with its wreath of tawny gold hair lightly and smilingly erect—a gracious and graceful little figure silhouetted sharply against the soft fur lining of the coat that she has flung open.
Lindy Marsden is seated a handbreadth from her, small, velvet-eyed, and velvet-voiced, as dark as Jill is fair, and most lovely to look at with her warm white skin and shadowy lashes. Lindy, with her exquisite voice, her exquisite manners, and her exquisite hands, is very Southern and very feminine; she is also a romanticist, flagrant and unashamed. Byron is still her hero, as he was her grandmother’s. The nice boy that she married on a frantic impulse that bitter January morning ten years ago has left her enough money to gratify every whim, and Lindy has whims enough. A little house in New York, a great house in Georgetown, a garden and a balcony in Fontainebleau—Lindy trails through them all her pansy-coloured velvets and flower-coloured chiffons, with lace falling softly about her wrists and jewels swinging softly at her ears. Her shadowed eyes are forever seeking—and finding—candlelight and starlight, and fires dancing discreetly on open hearths; Strauss waltzes and little dinners in leafy corners of the Bois; interminable talks over empty liqueur glasses with gentlemen who are civilized enough to be deftly and urbanely romantic; low lights, low voices, music over starlit waters, the dying fall of songs, and the drifting perfume of wallflowers in the sunlight and jasmine in the moonlight. She fits as perfectly into the great shadowy room as did the dark-eyed girl for whom it was built, dead and gone a hundred years before; it is from her that she has inherited other treasures, too—the slim lovely hands, the delicate and elusive smile, and the languid grace as sure and unpremeditated as a flower’s.
She is bestowing the smile now on the red-headed young man who is seated beside her on the arm of the couch. Kit Baird is the handsomest man in the room, thoroughly well aware of the fact, and most contemptuously indifferent to it. Well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, and long-fingered, he is the ungrateful possessor of eyes so darkly blue that you might mistake them for black, hair so darkly red that you might mistake it for copper, eyelashes long enough for a movie actress, close-set ears peaked like a fawn’s, and a fine arrogant mouth that he has learned to keep fast closed whenever it pleases him—which is frequently. He is also the possessor of a breath-taking smile, and a voice so misleadingly caressing that it has been his undoing on more than one occasion.
None of the people in the room know a great deal about him—his age, lineage, past life, present occupation and future intentions are his own secret. He drifted in to Joel Hardy in the State Department a year or so before the war with an infectiously enthusiastic letter of introduction from Joel’s roommate at Yale, who had been sharing a peculiarly boring revolution with him in Venezuela, and who urged vehemently that Joel should induce Mr. Baird into the consular service—Mr. Baird’s principal qualifications for such a post appearing to be red hair, a smattering of French, Spanish, and German, a thorough mastery of the guitar, a charming, melancholy tenor voice, and an unrivalled collection of ribald cowboy laments, railway rounds, Kentucky mountain ballads, and Mexican folk songs. The letter also enthusiastically dwelt on an apparently unlimited capacity to consume rum and go without sleep, and a fine disregard for life, limb, and reputation that had come close to landing its possessor in jail or eternity on more than one occasion.
Joel, properly impressed and immensely intrigued by the cool and casual young man, promptly manoeuvred him into an obscure position in his office and a more prominent one in the apartment that he and Larry Redmond shared together in Wyoming Avenue. The fact that Kit Baird could dance better than any man in Washington proved an open sesame from then until the day that the declaration of war saw him enlisted in the Marine Corps. For a year he lingered on at Quantico, a fever of restless unease burning behind the mocking, indifferent eyes, then the war swept him off, too, and the March Hares had seen him no more. Only a week ago he had run into Trudi Sheridan in a night club in New York, and now once more he is sitting in the old charmed circle, as carelessly at ease as though it had been ten minutes instead of ten years since he had last flung a possessive arm across the back of the old sofa and smiled down over a frosted rim into Lindy Marsden’s lifted eyes.
The two remaining men standing within convenient reach of Sherry’s hospitable ministrations are Larry Redmond and Doug King.
Larry is an agreeable-looking young man, tall and lean and brown, with a good hard jaw, a good straight eye, and hair that you might call bronze if you were romantically inclined and brown if you weren’t. He is the president of a small, solid, conservative bank in Boston; at the time that this honour descended on him, as a matter of fact, he was the youngest bank president in the United States. He is a man’s man, and therefore women like him, and children, too, and dogs—all the traditional attributes are his. In the war he proved more daring and resourceful than even his best friends prophesied; he could not have done better if he had been a black sheep, and he emerged from it, somewhat to his discomfort, with a neat collection of honours and decorations, which he has not laid eyes on from that day to this. In the old days before that almost forgotten war he was rumoured engaged to Jill Leighton, but rumour was apparently as inaccurate as usual, since they have not seen each other since he sailed for France, and he has scarcely glanced in her direction since they entered the room. His warm, friendly smile is at present resting on Doug King, who is holding forth hilariously over his second cocktail.
In more homely circles King would undoubtedly be known as the Life of the Party. Tall, genial, and blondly handsome, he is so richly endowed with animal spirits and a ca
refree and infectious laugh that his enthusiasm winds up by being extremely contagious. He is the original founder and moving spirit of the March Hares, and there is undoubtedly no better raconteur within a hundred miles of any place where he stands. If there is about him the barest hint of the jovial travelling salesman with his “Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” no one ever really stops Doug; there is too promising a twinkle in his blue eyes, too hospitable a use of the flask of really excellent Bourbon that invariably occupies his hip pocket, too lavish a distribution of the fat dark Coronas that live snugly in the fine straw case in his right-hand vest pocket or the aristocratic Russian cigarettes that dwell in the slim gold case in the left. His sheer linen handkerchiefs are adorned with huge, intricate monograms, his boots are made in England and his ties in France; he calls every head-waiter in every night club in New York by his right first name and they reward him by a special smile and a special table; his excellent tweed suits bear with them a faint aroma of good tobacco, Russian leather, and fern and heather in the sunshine—a breath from the moors that seems indigenous to them, even if it does cost him thirty dollars an ounce in small, severely plain crystal flasks. Doug King is interested in real estate; he has been interested in it ever since he invaded Washington from Panama twelve years before with a grandiose project in which he optimistically hoped to interest an unduly phlegmatic government. Failing signally in that, he joined forces with an enterprising young real estate firm and devoted himself for two years to that and the more congenial task of leading the March Hares in concentrating on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The war proved not too rude an interruption to him as the adaptable and assiduous aide of a very prominent general, and at its conclusion he made his headquarters in New York, where he flourished sufficiently to open branches in Palm Beach and Southampton. He has seen something from time to time of Lindy and the Sheridans—they frequent the same ambulatory set that nominally constitutes New York society, and that actually spends four or five weeks of the year there, and then forms itself into a gay caravan that dances its way from Palm Beach to Pinehurst, from Pinehurst to Paris, from Paris to Southampton, from Southampton to Aiken, from Aiken to Havana, from Havana to Palm Beach and around again, only stopping long enough to try out a new step on the Lido or an old step in London. Lindy is too lazy and too fastidious to keep up with it continuously; she drops out for long weeks of dreaming before the great fires of her Georgetown house or under the horse-chestnuts of her little walled garden in Fontainebleau, but Trudi, Sherry, and Doug never get out of step for longer than it takes to powder a nose or snatch a highball.
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