The rest of the evening was pleasant enough. I was especially taken with Genevieve Rhodes, who has a lovely manner when once awakened. But there is something almost sullen in her usual bearing. She is usually not friendly in any way, and makes no advances whatever. On this occasion she seemed to drop the cloak of indifference she appears, for some purpose of her own, to have assumed.
When the visitors had departed, and Caroline and Jeffreys were up in the parlor at the piano, Mrs. Rhodes, Genevieve, and I lingered at the table, eating nuts and raisins, and indulging in small talk. When I finally rose to go, Genevieve held out her hand and said:
“I am so glad you did not rise to Helen Clay’s gossip. Nobody pays any attention to what she says, and when she starts, it is a case of ‘the least said the soonest mended.’ But I am very sorry it happened at our table.”
I slept like a top that night, and felt much invigorated by my little outing. But this is an unconscionably long letter and an imposition on any human creature, even if he does happen to be one’s best friend. So I guess I might better cut off here, and save the rest for next time.
Give my regards to Broadway—and Lenox Avenue! If you see Marcia, tell her I mentioned her in my letter, and that she owes me a long one.
With best wishes, Buddie, I am,
Davy
Washington, D.C., October 15, 1922
Dear Bob:
I see that I shall have to condense my information, for I realize that in my last letter I was really diffuse. Is not that the word? If only I had power comparable to my facility, I might be somebody before I die. But, as they say, one can’t have everything. In the ardor of writing, the thoughts outrun my pen, and there is so much that I feel would interest you that I do not seem able to select. I am afraid that my letters are a hodgepodge in which the best and most important things are not properly stressed. However, it’s a comfort to think that if you are bored, you can stop reading at any point, for I put the personal things at the beginning and the end, so that you can skip the middle without missing anything vital.
I went to my first dance the other night—mostly college fellows and flappers. Some of the latter, if the clock had been turned back ten years, would have been arrested on two counts— appearing in public without sufficient clothing, and indecent dancing. However, as Caroline says, this is 1922, and the Middle Ages are over. We have left their old-fashioned ideas behind. Sometimes I feel that I am too old for these new things. That is due, no doubt, to my provincial upbringing. It is all a puzzle to me. I can see some good in many of the innovations of the past five years, and it is no doubt true that every generation suffers from accretions of conventionalisms which must be removed at regular intervals, like the barnacles from the hull of a ship. But I must confess that a few of the new ideas and tendencies leave me gasping in a maze of wonder as to how the whole thing will end. After watching one young girl whose dancing was especially atrocious, I asked one of the older men present, “How do they get away with it?” He laughed.
‘They don’t,” he said, “but then,” he added, “they don’t want to.”
With this cryptic remark he left me. I am still thinking it over. Caroline and Jeffreys were present, and danced often together. Her dancing was a trifle too modern to suit my medieval views, but I can say this much at least for her, that she was not the worst. As none of my friends of the weekend party was present, I had to be presented to many strangers, and I had several dances with pretty girls. The woods around here are full of them, Old Man! You ought to come down and look us over—indeed, you should!
Jeffreys presented me to a certain Miss Riddick, whom he and Caroline called Billie. She was a pretty girl, I must admit, but not my style. I suppose you will say that that is a very vague description. Well, I can’t tell you much about her complexion, for she was a strictly modern up-to-date product of the beauty culturist’s art, but she had a pretty figure, and furnished the usual guarantees, for her waist was lacking in the proper places. However, there was something hard and sophisticated in her level glance, which struck a wrong note with me. You are always rigging me for being what you call sentimental, and I guess you are right about that. Call it sentiment, or what you will, but I have always liked women who are better than I am. So when a woman, pretty or not, looks at me with a bold glance which says: “I know all you know, and I defy you to shock me,” then I am through. I yawn politely, and look around for something better.
But I don’t presume to dictate to anyone else what he shall do, as you well know. “There should be no disputing concerning tastes,” said the old medieval monks. In good American: “Choose your own poison,” or “Go to hell your own way.”
However, as Jeffreys and Caroline made rather a point of this introduction to Miss Riddick, politeness seemed to demand that I pay some little attention to the lady. She is a good dancer, and she is not stupid, for she has a ready wit and a caustic tongue. Yet when Caroline and Jeffreys came up at the close of the dance and proposed that we four go somewhere to eat, I was not so pleased, for I should have preferred to choose my own company. But there was nothing to do but acquiesce.
Jeffreys called a taxi and we all hopped in. As I was a stranger, I merely followed the leader. We were only a few moments reaching our destination, which I found to my mild dismay was a cabaret. I can hear you laugh now. Of all places in the world—a cheap cabaret! I have often marveled why decent people go to them. This one was typical of the breed. A lot of fresh boys and flashy girls composed most of the patronage, with a few people of more class thrown in. The singers were the usual kind, with hard, unintelligent over-made-up faces, raucous voices, and coarse, ungraceful, suggestive gestures. The songs were of a type whose cheapness, vulgarity, banality, and utter lack of wit, humor, harmony, or distinction of any kind simply defy description. A high-class bagnio would not have tolerated them for a minute. The themes were hackneyed beyond the power of my poor pen to depict, and how any human being with a spark of intelligence—I don’t say decency—could sit and listen to them, except under actual compulsion, is more than I can fathom. But as I was under a kind of social compulsion, I tried to forget them, and so I paid more attention to Miss Riddick than I might otherwise have done.
The waiter came to take our orders. We all ordered something to eat, and then Jeffreys said a few words in a low tone to the waiter, who looked at me questioningly. Jeffreys laughed.
“That’s all right,” he said. “He is a friend of mine.”
Then he asked me if I would not like something “red” to drink. Thinking of the girls, and reflecting on the possible deadliness of bootleg liquor, I declined politely, whereat he shrugged his shoulders, and said laconically to the waiter, “Bring three!”
But I shall not burden you with a prolonged account of this painful experience, nor do I want you to misunderstand me. I have not the least doubt that in another mood I might have found the evening moderately entertaining. But, possibly because of my aversion to Jeffreys, I just could not get myself in the humor for it. The singers became more distasteful as the time went on, their voices seemed to grow rougher and harsher with every moment, and their gestures and attitudes coarser and more objectionably suggestive, and, finally, when one of them planted herself right beside our table, I could endure it no longer. So I made some conventional excuse about it being very late and about an early morning appointment. By this time the “red” liquor had had its effect on at least one member of our party, for Caroline had become quite noisy. It is queer how little alcohol is needed to muddle the brains of some folks, and yet these same individuals have not the good sense to let it alone. Women with Caroline’s responsibility ought to shut themselves up alone in their rooms, with doors double-locked, before they take a drink, for if they are in company, they surely make a holy show of themselves.
Jeffreys readily acceded to my suggestion that we start for home. On the way Caroline rested her head quite boldly on his shoulder, and I, for one, was very glad when the taxi dropped us
at our door. I hurried up to my room and hastily retired, rather disgusted with all the world, and particularly with myself. Somehow I felt that either I should have refused to go with them, or, having gone, I should have been a good sport, and have fallen in with their program. I had done neither, but I had been simply a “spoil sport,” an unenviable role, indeed!
Next morning I heard Genevieve telephoning Caroline’s principal that she would not be at school that day. Oh, the morning after the night before! I dressed more quickly than usual, and hurried out to breakfast, managing to elude both Genevieve and Mrs. Rhodes, for I had an uneasy feeling that I did not want to see them. That afternoon, coming home somewhat earlier than usual, I found Caroline, attired in a most attractive negligee, curled up on my couch reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which she had picked out of the bookcase. Though she was evidently surprised to see me thus early, she greeted me with careless geniality, asked if she would be in the way, and, receiving a negative answer, said with the utmost sangfroid:
“Then please smoke up, for I am dying for a cigarette. It isn’t much fun smoking out of the window, and I was afraid Mamma might come up. If she comes now, I have an alibi.”
I opened my cigarette case and held it out to her, and she rested her pretty dark curls against my arm while, with great deliberation, she took a light from the match I held for her. Then she stretched out luxuriously on the couch, and heaved a sigh of profound content.
“This is the life, eh?” Then she added mischievously, looking up at me from under her long lashes, “How is the old grouchy bear today? Still growling?”
“I never growl,” said I decidedly, calmly lighting a cigarette for myself, and stretching out in my armchair.
“Well, if you don’t actually growl, you go through all the motions. I love a grouch less than I do Monday morning in school, and I hate wet blankets worse than I do grouches.”
“It’s nice to get one’s exact place,” said I, coolly, and then I added, “but before you go too far on the wrong track, let me make certain things plain. I don’t care two whoops what anybody in this world does, and I shall never interfere with any fellow mortal going to perdition by his own chosen route, but I do object sometimes to accompanying him. You are expecting me to ‘jump’ you about last night, but I am going to do nothing of the kind. You can frequent any kind of cheap joint that suits your taste. You can drink all the bootleg liquor you want, and be as maudlin as you please. I shall probably think you’re a damned little fool who ought to know better, but I shall not interfere with you at all, for it’s really none of my business. If you were my daughter or sister, I should probably give you a good spanking, make you put on more clothes, and stop dancing like a—but I can’t think of a nice word to express the kind of woman some of you girls dance like. But you are not my daughter or my sister, and it is, therefore, none of my affair, as I said before. So you have my permission to go to the demnition bow-wows in your own sweet way, unhampered by any mid-Victorian notions of mine. I shall, however, be interested in watching the procession, I assure you. My grouch last night was due to the fact that I was an unwilling participant. Do you get me?”
Caroline did not move for a moment. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She lay reflectively blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. Then she spoke without turning her head.
“You don’t believe in—ah—circumlocutions, do you? What are you up to? Trying to convert me?”
“No indeed, my dear. When I try my hand at that sort of thing, I shall practice on something easy.”
“Then you positively refuse to try to reform me?”
“I do, most decidedly. It would be a hard job, certainly; a thankless job, in addition; and after all, the game might not be worth the candle.”
“I thank you. You are very plain.”
“Don’t mention it. They say that a burnt child dreads the fire, and this child was certainly burnt. I tried once in my callower youth to reform a girl. I have but one consoling thought connected with that most painful episode. I was not sent to jail. So I said, ‘Never again for me!’ Thus far I have kept my word, and Heaven helping me, I intend to keep on keeping it!”
“Old Bear, you’re just the man I’ve been looking for. Everybody in this house has either tried to reform me—witness Mother and Genevieve—or help me faster down the primrose path. But like dear old Bert Williams, you declare yourself neutral. You for me, and me for you! I thought I’d never live to see you, though I have often dreamed of finding you, and even—in my poor, unregenerate way—prayed for you!”
There are difficulties, as you will have observed, my friend, in talking seriously to Caroline. While she makes not the slightest outward show of culture in her ordinary social relations, she has a quick and ready wit, and a perfectly uncanny fluency of speech, as I have found out to my discomfiture on more than one occasion. But in this case the worst was yet to come. Our conversation continued, more or less in the same vein, with good-natured satire on my side and an absolutely poised and cynical sarcasm on hers, when her mother called her from somewhere below stairs. She cried an answer, jumped up from the couch, walked over to the table and threw her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray, and stood looking down at me with laughing, mischievous eyes.
“For such a prosy, dull, conservative old dear, you look very young—and do you know, if you would only awaken from your long sleep, one could like you a whole lot.”
And without warning, quicker than my slow-following thought, she stooped, put both arms around my neck, making me curiously conscious of a mingled odor of cigarette smoke and perfume, and kissed me squarely on the mouth. In another second she had disappeared down the stairs, laughing gleefully!
Now what, in the name of all the great and little gods, is a poor fellow to do with a girl like that? I ask you! What indeed?
At about seven that evening, I was called to the telephone, and had the pleasure of listening to Lillian Barton’s well-modulated voice, inviting me to come over Sunday evening at five. “Just a little tea,” she said. We had a few minutes’ chat before hanging up. I have been promising myself for several days to call on her, but for one reason or another have been prevented from carrying out my intention. This invitation makes it nicer and easier.
Genevieve met me in the hall as I was turning away from the telephone and spoke, so it seemed to me, rather coolly. I wonder if she blames me for last night’s performance. Since she and Caroline have the same room, she could hardly help noticing that young lady’s condition, unless, indeed she were sound asleep. The thought that she may believe that I had any willing part in it makes me most uncomfortable, but I suppose there is nothing to do but grin and bear it.
Revolving these thoughts in my mind, I went up to my room with the idea of spending the evening reading and writing. Then I changed my mind, dressed hurriedly, and paid a call on Don Verney, of whom you will recall my speaking in connection with the weekend party. Verney is most comfortably—indeed most luxuriously—located. Imagine an oblong room, with low bookcases on three sides, a bed couch at one end, a handsome library table with a fine light, a few unusually beautiful pictures, and very comfortable chairs. I, of course, was most interested in the books, for Verney has the best personally selected library of its size I have ever seen. It is not composed of odds and ends of rubbish handed down from the previous generations, but of some hundreds of live books and the best and most modern reference books. On the table I noted recent numbers of The Nation, The Dial, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and several other periodicals of the highest type.
“How did you achieve it?” I asked, after I had taken a quick glance at his shelves.
“What do you mean—exactly?” he asked.
“Why, the wheat without any chaff,” I answered.
“Well, for one thing, I never buy any trash, and if trashy books do drift in, I either give them away, or throw them in the wastebasket. It takes resolution at first, but one soon gets used to it.”
A h
obby in common is the very best basis, I imagine, for starting a friendship, and soon we were deep in a conversation which I, at least, found most stimulating. I have heard Verney’s friends talk a great deal about him, and he certainly “makes good.” He has a wonderfully well-stocked mind, the gift of keen observation, and an unusual facility in expression. I enjoyed my hour with him hugely, and left with one or two leads for future reading, and a most cordial invitation to call again.
Then I took a walk up You Street while finishing my cigar, and watched the crowds coming out of the three movie theaters and at the entrances of the two or three well-known dance halls. As I look on our folks in these days of prosperity, it is borne in upon me that we are indeed a pleasure-loving people, that we love display for its own sake, and fine clothes and the gauds of life even more than our friends the Jews, and they, alas, can better afford all these things than we can. Of course, I believe in pleasure as a natural and proper element in a well-ordered and normal life, but I fear, somehow, that we have the proportions wrong. Maybe not—I should be glad to know that I had overstated the case against us. Does it not look, though, as if we have mistaken the shows for the substance?
In imagination I can hear you say, “The old preacher is at it again!
When Washington Was In Vogue Page 5