Ray, slightly flushed but dauntlessly friendly, did not avail herself of it. She remarked cheerfully, “Don’t mind me, anybody. It still surprises me what a donkey I can be, so no wonder that it comes as a slight shock to some of you! Those little furry things that you see just sticking out through my curls are the beginnings of nice long ears. If you’ll give me one more chance, Lindy, I’ll waggle ’em for you.”
Lindy blew her an airy and contrite kiss through a haze of cigarette smoke.
“Joel, how did you ever find anyone so much nicer than any of us? I wish I were at your table; Ray, I’m never going to get to know you well enough in three days. Anyway, we’re all of us close enough to shout at each other.”
Trudi remarked cavernously from the depths of the winged chair:
“I’m far too weak to shout—far. And I shouldn’t dream of trying to pull up to a table, not while I can lie here in an agreeable coma consuming delicate and nutritious titbits. Jill, you don’t want Larry and Gavin and Tom, do you? Well, then, suppose you send Gavin and Tom over here—I need someone to soothe my brow and another one to chafe my hands if I’m going to get through this evening. Just for the present you two boys can pretend that you’re a pair of nice little blackamoors in red panties, busy as bees gathering honey for the Queen Mother. Well, I dunno—something a dash exaggerated about that. Bees in red panties—oh, well, let it ride! About seven more plates of that salad, I should say, and another pound or so of Doug’s ham. And not another word out of anyone until I get my teeth into them; when I say, ‘Go’ you can all burst into song or dance or hysterical mirth, or anything that tends to divert and sustain me. Lindy, never in my born day did I eat anything to equal these biscuits!”
She caught the glance of rapt gratitude tossed her by Jill, safely isolated in the shadows with Larry by these skilful manœuvres, wagged her head at them in mocking admonition, and diverted the seemingly endless stream of her conversation toward the tranquil Hanna.
“Darling, don’t those earrings give you megrims or something? I should think they’d double you right over; I don’t believe they’re healthy that size—you don’t think they’re healthy, either, do you, Sherry? I’ll say you don’t! Still, I suppose you can get used to anything—like the Indian squaw toting around twin papooses. I hope to heaven they aren’t real. Sherry, you hope they aren’t real, too, don’t you?”
“I know darn well they’re real,” said Sherry. “And you can’t scare me by talking jewellery, either, young woman. The closest that Trudi ever came to wearing jewellery in her life was when she bought a dog collar for the Irish wolfhound. It’s the only thing in God’s world that she doesn’t collect, though, from Chinese porcelains to Persian prints. And shoes! Boy, let me tell you that child spends enough for one shoe to keep a reasonable man in watches and chains for the rest of his life. She’s got two hundred and forty-four pairs sitting around on their haunches in one closet. I could bear it better if they didn’t look as though they all came out of the comic section. Look at those square-toed green things she’s got on now!”
Trudi surveyed the derided objects with marked complacency, stretching her slender legs so that the others might share her gratification.
“And if you ask her why she hands out a hundred and sixty dollars for the little devils,” commented Sherry, striving earnestly to look morose, “she’ll tell you that they’re a real bargain, because the skins come from a special kind of a green manchurian cat off the Gobi desert, and the buckles used to belong to Kubla Khan in person. I wish you’d get her to go in for something economical like diamonds, Hanna.”
Lindy murmured, “Hanna has diamond shoe buckles. Gavin gave them to her for her birthday on the Starling last winter … you remember, Doug, it was just before we picked you up in Palm Beach. I was even more impressed with Hanna’s buckles than Gavin’s yacht! I do know people who have yachts, but I never even heard of one with diamond shoe buckles. Chatty, will your table lend us some of those cheese things?”
“It was an absurd thing of Gavin to do,” smiled Hanna. “But as his only extravagances are diamonds for me and sails for the Starling, we all conspire to humour him.”
“Oh, Hanna, have you really got a yacht? With sails and sailors and cabins and decks and everything?” Chatty’s eyes were pools of delight.
“Everything but a powder-monkey,” proclaimed Doug with a spacious gesture. “‘There are comfits in the cabin
“‘Sugar kisses in the hold—
The sails are made of silk
And the masts are made of gold.
Go-wuld—go-wuld—the masts
Are made of go-wuld!’
I could sing even better than that if Sherry would keep up his end of this party. Doesn’t an empty glass remind you of anything, old comrade?”
Joel said, “Ask me! I’m the closest thing to a poet around here. Turn down an empty glass. Go ahead, Sherry; turn it down.”
“Here’s the bottle,” said the genial Sherry. “Mix your own; I’m busy polishing this plate.”
“Hanna, does it sail everywhere?” demanded the still enthralled Chatty. “Is Gavin the captain? Does he wear those queer patent-leather caps and look through little telescopes all the time? Oh, Lindy, were you on it? When were you on it?”
“We were cruising for almost four weeks, weren’t we, Hanna? After we picked up Doug and those nice Hammonds in Palm Beach, I mean.”
“Didn’t it ever get rough?” asked Chatty breathlessly. “Didn’t you ever get sick? Didn’t—”
“Oh, not ever; not even hardly ever. The water was like blue silk, wasn’t it, Hanna? And the air smelled as fresh as Greenland’s icy mountains and as sweet as India’s coral strands. I couldn’t bear it when we had to stop. When I’m on a boat, I feel as though I could sail forever—it’s like being a fish and a bird and a breeze all at once; there’s nothing so perfect in all the world!”
She leaned forward, catching and holding the red-headed young man’s amused eyes with the shining challenge of her own.
“Almost thou persuadest me!” said that gentleman smoothly. “What an asset you’d make to the navy, Lindy! I’d no idea you were such a little sea-dog.”
Lindy said softly, with the barest flicker of lashes, “Hadn’t you? It’s the way I intend to spend the rest of my life. The only thing I want in the world is a boat…. Hanna, did they ever find out what made you so dreadfully ill that night after we got to Port Limon?”
Hanna did not raise her eyes from her linked hands; she sat staring down at their long whiteness and the great square-cut diamond for almost a minute before she answered.
“No, not ever.… I’d been feeling badly all that day from the heat, and it may have been something that I ate, of course, or drank. It was a wretched way for me to wind up the trip.”
“Hanna sick?” inquired Doug. “At Port Limon? How come no one told me?”
“Oh, Doug, we must have told you. It was the night after we transferred you to the Panama boat,” said Lindy. “We were absolutely terrified out of our wits, and there wasn’t a doctor in the place, when we went ashore, because there was some kind of an epidemic in San José. It was nearly midnight before we got one off a cruiser. I’ll never forget that nightmare of heat and noise as long as I live! They were loading a fruit boat by torchlight and all the darkies were groaning out some kind of dreadful chanteys, and Gavin and I were sitting in that little cabin with our hands over our ears, not even daring to look at each other—”
Hanna said, her eyes still on her hands, “Darling, you’d make measles sound dramatic. You weren’t told, Doug, because—because there simply wasn’t anything to tell.” She pushed the plate before her aside, untasted, and rose to her feet. “D’you mind if I stand by the fire a minute and get warm?”
Chatty, stirring drowsily, protested: “Warm? Oh, Hanna, it’s warmer than toast here now.”
Hanna, spreading long fingers to the blaze, murmured, “I know, I know. It’s absurd of me, but suddenly I felt c
old.”
Lindy, following her with eyes dark with concern, murmured under her breath, “Oh, Sherry, she’s as white as a sheet. I’m an absolute idiot to have brought that up. She was desperately ill, and apparently it upsets her even to think about it.” She rose swiftly, saying, “It’s too cold for any of us in these absurd clothes—and besides, we’ll simply ruin them bobbing for apples. Let’s all run up and put on the old smocks; I found them in a drawer at home, and brought a whole suitcase full—they look better than ever! I brought sweaters for the men, too. Is everyone finished?”
Trudi was on her feet so quickly that she forgot to limp, pouncing energetically on the nearest tray.
“Chatty and I’ll get after this while the rest of you prink,” she announced with decision. “We’re the girls that know how to dress on occasions of state. You can bring us down the smocks for dish-washing, and I’ll be obliged if you’ll remember that mine is the really good-looking one—spinach green trimmed with real mother-of-pearl buttons. If you try and work that nigger pink one off on me again, you’ll do your own dishes. Yours is blue, isn’t it, Chatty?”
Chatty, all dimples, called after the retreating figures, “The light blue, Lindy darling. The deep blue is Hanna’s. Shall we fold up these tables, Trudi?”
“Dunno—let’s just gather up the dishes first. This whole performance is simply a rich and sumptuous dodge on my part to pass a few words with you, my duck. Not having laid eyes on you for the last four years, I feel the need of catching up. I trust it’s mutual?”
“Oh, Trudi darling, indeed it is. I’ve been simply longing to get at you ever since we arrived.”
Trudi, gathering up the dishes with as much speed and precision as though she were the king of bus boys, paused to remark over her shoulder:
“That was the doggonedest performance of Kit’s! I thought for about three delicious seconds that for once in my life I was going to see a perfectly good fight without paying fifty dollars for a ringside seat. Doug certainly had blood in his eye! And if you ask me, I don’t think blood in the eye is particularly becoming to his particular type of beauty. It needs a brunette.”
Chatty inquired in awe-stricken tones, “Trudi, you don’t think they were really angry, do you? Why, Kit was laughing all the time; I could see him, and he was, honestly—and he never even lifted his voice.”
“Laughing, was he?” inquired Trudi darkly. “Not—so—good. The only people that I know of that go in much for laughing are clowns with breaking hearts and villains with their hip pockets full of daggers and fell designs. Kit must have been a whole lot wilder than I thought—and I thought he was pretty good and wild. Help me to fold this thing.”
“Well, I do think it was stupid of Doug to start that tune,” said Chatty forlornly. “Of course I did the same thing, too, but I realized it almost the minute I’d done it, and Doug went straight ahead trampling over everyone to get at poor Lindy and snatching her off that way in spite of everything she said about being tired—and Jill looking as though she were going to die and Joel glaring like a wild cat.… I think it was simply awful! I don’t blame Kit for stopping it. I’d have stopped it myself if I’d been near enough.”
“Great grief, child, I’m not blaming him!”
“And I don’t blame him for being a little angry with Doug, either, for not remembering,” continued the gentle Chatty feverishly. “When you think how Sunny—”
“But, my good child, he did remember. Even the words—didn’t you hear him?”
“No, I mean about how it was Sunny’s own tune—how she—”
“Oh, Chatty, how does anyone as guileless as you survive in this world of sin? Doug remembered perfectly; he even remembered what happened the last time that he played it. He didn’t turn the wretched thing on because he didn’t remember. He turned it on because he didn’t care.”
Chatty set down her burdened tray with a small crash, her eyes round with horror.
“Oh, Trudi, how could he not care? He loved Sunny, too; why, he was crazy about her! Don’t you remember what a tremendous rush he gave her that last fall? Don’t you remember that paper chase when they both got lost for hours, and we were sure that it was on purpose? And that moonlight picnic that we went on to Great Falls, when we waited till nearly one o’clock for them, and Sunny had lost her hat when they came back? It was such a darling hat: a little scoopy green one with buttercups and white clover, and Sunny just laughed, and Doug said that he’d get her another if she’d promise to lose it again with him. I do think that he was crazy about her, Trudi.”
“Well, who wasn’t?” inquired Trudi, unimpressed. “You know as well as I do that Joel and Kit and Tom were all perfectly cuckoo about her. As for Neil Sheridan, he was simply demented on the subject; he told me before he asked me to marry him that he thought it was only fair to me to let me know that he couldn’t ever care for me the way he had for Sunny; and he actually had the insolence to keep me up for three hours one night reading me about four cubic feet of letters that he’d written to her and never sent, because he felt that he wasn’t good enough for her! He was keeping them for his grandchildren—or my grandchildren, if I decided that I wanted a burnt-out volcano as a consort. I hadn’t been particularly interested in him till then, but about the second cubic foot I decided that any human being that could write that amount of unmitigated lunacy, and hang on to it, needed a keeper. Chatty, I give you my word that he had a thing in there that he solemnly assured me would have been a sonnet, if he hadn’t had to make it eighteen lines long because he couldn’t get all he had to say in fourteen! It was sweet, too—you’d have married him yourself if you’d heard it.… Was Tom as bad as that?”
“I don’t know,” said Chatty humbly. “I never thought. I just knew he was the most wonderful person that ever lived or breathed; of course I never realized until after we’d been married how—how absolutely perfect he was, but ever since the first time my brother brought him home from Harvard for the Easter holidays, I knew that every other man that I ever met would just seem like a poor copy of Tom. I was a fat little fourteen-year-old imbecile who never got over seventy at school and had light eyelashes and one tooth out and a dreadful stutter—and, Trudi, he was wonderful to me! He used to take me for long walks, and help me over all the logs, and read all the easiest things to me out of the Golden Treasury and help me with my algebra—and he had a Phi Beta Kappa key and was the star man on the debating team. Oh, Trudi, I’d have blacked his boots!”
“Tom—Tom always was rather a dear,” said Trudi.
“Trudi, I’d black them now. You don’t know—nobody in the world knows—how—how beautiful Tom is. He’s so kind.” The candid gray eyes flooded suddenly with tears, and Chatty added with an apologetic smile, “It’s silly of me, but I can’t learn to be sensible about him. You know what a goose I am, Trudi darling, and how frightfully hard it must be for an intelligent person to have to put up with me for every single day of his life. Trudi, do you know that never once since we’ve been married has Tom said one unkind word to me? No, nor even an impolite one. I don’t believe that very many married people could say that, do you?”
“Just offhand, I should say nary one, Chatty.”
“I’m not even touching these dishes,” murmured Chatty, with a conscience-stricken glance at the still laden tables. “They’ve left glasses simply everywhere.” She picked one up gingerly from the stand by the phonograph, eying the black disk with an expression of sick distaste. “I simply hate that tune—d’you know, Trudi, each time that it’s played I’ve had the strangest, most frightening feeling, as though we’d called her back and she were somewhere in the room, watching us—watching us and wondering how we could bear to be so happy, when she can’t play with us any more. That’s nonsense, isn’t it, Trudi? People can’t come back when they’re dead, can they? No matter how much they want to, they can’t come back ever, can they?”
Trudi said in a strange, quiet voice, “I wonder. It must be lonely—being dead.�
� She pushed the hair back from her forehead, and remarked with a grim smile to the pallid Chatty, “Cheer up, darling. If Sunny is anywhere around, she may not be envying us this party. In my far from humble opinion, Mrs. Ross, there’s something just the least bit rum about this party.”
“Oh, Trudi, it’s wonderful! All of us together again after all these years. I can’t believe it—it’s too beautiful to be true! I’ve missed you all so—you most, Trudi, because we used to have such simply splendid times together. D’you remember how I used to beg Mummy to let me go home with you after parties, and we’d lie awake talking under our breaths till we were so excited that we’d forget, and your father would bang on the wall for us to stop?”
“I remember,” said Trudi. “I remember that we never stopped—not till dawn came, and then we’d turn over and bury our noses under the pink comforters, and sleep, and sleep, till they came knocking on our doors to tell us that lunch had been ready for half an hour.… I’ve never slept as sound since. What did we talk about all those hours and nights, Chatty?”
“We talked about us,” said Chatty. “About what we’d do when we were married, and what flowers our bridesmaids should carry, and whether we’d go to Europe or Canada for our honeymoons, and how much money you had to have before you could afford a maid, and what we’d call our children.… We weren’t even engaged—no one in the world had ever asked me to marry them! It’s funny how sure I was … as sure as I was that I’d go to Europe. D’you know that I’ve never in my life been to Europe, Trudi?”
“I go twice a year,” Trudi told her, the gay mouth suddenly bitter. “Except when I go three times. You can’t get those transparent silk stockings here, no matter what they tell you, and then there’s Château Margaux and the book stalls.… I was sure, too.… I was going to call mine Margot, after my great-aunt. And the little boy was going to be Peter…. Why does everyone always call little boys Peter? It’s an obsession.”
Hide in the Dark Page 10