Chapter 9
Greg found himself breathless. Was something really coming to him at last out of his past? Alice! That was Alice’s voice! For an instant, his mind reeled back into his boyhood and the old familiar drawl of the sweetly indolent voice played upon his senses and drew him with an irresistible power.
“Yes?” he managed to respond, trying to find his way out of the bewilderment that her call had wrought. Then she spoke again.
“Is this really you at last, Greg, after all these years of silence? I never thought you’d cut me cold like that. Don’t you know me, dolling? This is Alice. Have you forgotten your old sweetheart, Allie Blair?”
“Alice Blair!” For an instant, the wild thought went through his brain that perhaps it had been a mistake. Perhaps she never ran away and married Murky Powers! Perhaps the report had been false.
“Alice Blair!” he repeated dazedly, eagerly, again.
“Oh, you’ve come alive at last have you, dolling? Well, you’ve taken your time to it. Here I’ve simply been languishing at home for days expecting you to come to call on me, and at last I’ve been driven to put my pride in my pocket and call you up. I positively couldn’t stand it to wait any longer. Why haven’t you come, Greg? You haven’t forgotten me, have you, dolling?”
As a matter of fact, Alice Blair had not been languishing at home during the days that had elapsed between her reading of the news item about the memorial room and this telephone call. She had been exceedingly busy trying to find her former admirer. And Alice was resourceful. She had scoured the town among his old friends and had called up various hotels and investigated other stopping places. An old friend who was well enough off to give a memorial room to a hospital must surely be worth looking up. Although she reflected that it would be like Greg to have scraped together enough for a memorial for his mother and left nothing for himself to live on. That had always been the trouble with Greg to her mind—he thought too much of his mother. She had been always having to combat ideas and standards that his mother had given him.
But when she found that he was staying at so distinguished a place as the Whittall House, she was all the more eager to find him and secure his attentions once more. If he could afford to stay at the Whittall House, he must have some money at least, and Alice loved money and the things that money would buy.
So Alice had called up several times that day while Greg was out, until she finally found him. And now her voice lilted into pathos with a hint of the old-time lure as she asked pathetically whether he had forgotten her.
Greg found himself stirred by various emotions as he struggled to answer her. He was trying to think out quickly what might have happened in those ten years of his absence. Murky Powers wasn’t dead. He was sure of that. He had seen his name on the sporting page of the paper just the other day. His mother’s fears and an innate caution were battling with his delight that she had called him, his longing to find some friend.
“Why—I—thought you were married!” he blundered out bluntly at last.
A silvery laugh trilled over the wire and rippled in his ear, making pleasant little shivers down his back. It was as if suddenly all his disillusionment had rolled away and Alice Blair was just a little golden girl again that his mother didn’t quite understand yet but would someday.
“Married!” she lilted. “Oh, that’s precious, Greg. Are you really as innocent as that yet? Now don’t tell me you’ve been kept a babe in arms. Married! What’s that got to do with it? Of course I’m married. Twice married, for the matter of that. I divorced Murky, that prince of brutes, before a year was up, and I’m just back from Reno now getting rid of his successor. Safe and sane and disillusioned. But that’s neither here nor there. Once sweethearts is always sweethearts, isn’t that so, Greggie dolling? Or am I mistaken? Is it?”
Greg found himself bewildered by her chirruping. He hesitated an instant, and she went on, her tone graver now with a hint of tears behind it.
“But seriously, Greg, aren’t you coming to see me right away? I need you. I really do. I’ve been through terribly hard experiences, and I need a real friend As soon as I heard you were in town, I rejoiced, for I knew you were just what I needed.”
“But I don’t see how you knew I was here,” murmured Greg, still bewildered. I didn’t let anybody know I had come.”
“Oh, I heard,” triumphed the silvery voice. “Those things get around quickly in the hometown, you know. And I was hurt Really I was, Greg dear. I supposed, of course, you would hunt me up at once the minute you landed. And I was terribly hurt, hour after hour, not even hearing from you.”
“I didn’t know you lived here.” Greg’s voice sounded blunt again. He felt strangely embarrassed at the way this grownup Alice was taking things for granted, calling him darling and telling of her divorces. “Last I heard of you, you were living in New York.”
“Oh, but that’s ages ago. I went to Paris for two years, and then Florida for the winter. Took a trip to the little old Panama Canal incidentally. Oh, I’ve been around a bit. But now I’m home at last. For a while at least. Mother’s still living here, you know. She took a house on the West side. What’s that? No, I’m not with Mother. Her ways are not my ways, never were, you remember.” A careless little laugh rippled over to him. “No, I couldn’t be bothered living where I’m watched every move I make. I have an apartment in The Claridge. It’s really quite swell. And that brings me to the point. I want you to come over and take dinner with me—just us two, you know. Come about seven, and we can have a real talk. You better dress, because there’ll be others dropping in later in the evening, and we’ll likely get around to a night club or two before morning. We always do, so come prepared. Now, you won’t fail me, will you, Greggie dolling! It’s so nice to have you back!”
Greg turned from hanging up the receiver and looked around his room. It was the same strange room, but somehow it looked less lonesome. There was somebody in town who cared. He was going out to dinner! He was going to see Alice again! His heart was warm and eager.
Then he gave himself to the matter of garments. This would be the time for the clothes he had got in Chicago. He recalled the careful directions his brief, casual questions had elicited. He hadn’t been at all sure that he would ever need evening clothes in the new life that was before him, but at least he had prepared himself for an emergency, and here it was.
But whoever would have thought he would be going to take dinner with Alice, of all people? Alice who had been so utterly removed from him all these years by that marriage with Murky Powers! And now to find out she no longer belonged to him! It filled him with elation. And yet—he had always felt that divorces were dreadful things. His mother had left him fine high standards of clean living. He had never favored divorces. Still, there must be cases where it was justifiable. He recalled the adjectives Alice had used to describe Murky, “prince of brutes,” and his blood boiled. Anybody who could ill-treat a little, delicate golden girl like Alice must be a brute. He had never liked Murky. It had been terrible to him when Alice ran away with him. Poor little golden Alice!
Of course his mother had said, “There, you see, Gregory!” but he had always thought his mother just didn’t understand Alice. She hadn’t a very pleasant environment at home according to her own story. Poor Alice!
The disturbing thought came that she had married again after one sharp experience and was again divorced. He knew how his mother would have felt about that, too. He winced himself as he thought about it. Well, at least he would see her, and after he had talked with her, he would be better able to understand.
He was full of anticipation as he prepared for the evening, even whistling a wild bar or two of a nondescript song. Ten years in the wilderness had not tended to increase his repertoire.
It was odd how the wilderness had given him poise, however. When he stood at last in the ornate vestibule of Alice’s apartment waiting to be let in, his manner was cool, repressed, self-contained. The casual observer would ne
ver have dreamed that this was the first time he had ever appeared in evening clothes before except in the store where they were purchased. They sat upon his finely knit figure as well-cut clothes should do, and did not flaunt themselves as alien garments. Greg Sterling was as well turned out as though he had been living on Fifth Avenue all his life.
Only in his deep gray eyes was there a light of eagerness that a discerner of character might read how greatly he was moved. But his outward calm was perfect as the door was opened by a trim maid in uniform.
Greg entered the strangest-looking room he had ever seen. There were hangings of black velvet and silver cloth, and a lot of odd, triangular mirrors in unexpected places. There were flowers everywhere—rare hothouse flowers. It suddenly occurred to Greg that he ought to have sent her flowers.
His mind flashed back to high school commencement time and how he had taken over another fellow’s early morning milk route for several weeks to get extra money to get flowers to send up to Alice when she read her essay at commencement. A dozen little pink roses! And now he could get her as many dozens as he pleased, and he hadn’t remembered to get them!
It occurred to him to wonder who had sent her these roses. Great yellow ones with a glow of crimson in their hearts, dozens of them in a copper bowl reflected in a slab of mirror on a low table. Crimson roses in a tall crystal vase with stems almost a yard long and a perfume that was rare and beguiling. White roses in a strange black jar with silver edges. Pink roses in an alabaster urn. Did Alice buy these roses for herself? Was she rich enough now to revel in luxuries of this sort, or did other men send them to her? The uneasy question shot like a pang through his heart, and then he saw her coming and forgot everything else.
She was wearing a frail evening frock of palest petal-pink satin, whose lovely, revealing lines brought out every charm and grace and enhanced the beauty of her exquisite neck and arms, the contour of her slender back. Her face was like a lovely flower, and her pale gold hair was drawn back smooth and close around her small, symmetrical head and gathered into a knot in her neck, leaving her pretty little ears uncovered and giving her an innocent, childlike air, which the vivid dash of carmine on her small, petulant lips only half belied. If it had not been for the sweet, pitiful shadows under her great appealing blue eyes, she would not have looked a day older than when he saw her last.
A necklace glittered on the whiteness of her neck. There were jewels flashing from her small white hands and arms, and there were long, slender earrings dripping down from her little ears that twinkled as she stirred.
For a moment, she stood poised at the upper end of the long room, letting him get the full effect of her entrance, fairly taking his breath away with her loveliness, appraising him with a delighted glance. Then, with all the gush of the Alice of old, only with perhaps a new touch of artificiality, she cried out joyfully, “Oh, you dolling! Aren’t you perfectly stunning!”
Then she rushed forward, and before he had any idea what was coming, she had seized his face in both her slim smooth hands and kissed him smartly on his mouth.
He started back from her. There was something in that contact he did not like or was not prepared for. It was too soon, he told himself. She seemed a stranger. He had just been looking at her as if she were some supernatural being, and now to have her rush upon him this way somehow cheapened her. Made her seem just a common stranger. He stiffened and met her onslaught almost stolidly.
“Dolling!” she reproached tenderly, holding him off and looking at him fondly. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
In his wilderness home, he had accustomed himself to meet all sorts of emergencies. He had trained his face to express no emotion before the unexpected, be it friend or foe or only a trespassing creature. And he had ever been a lad of few words.
So, now, as he would have done in front of his shack in the wilderness had some strange wild creatures approached him and begun to be familiar, he stood warily regarding her. He did not let her see his shrinking nor guess how he disliked this sort of thing. He just stood and took it solemnly, as if he had withdrawn within himself. And strange to say, this attitude on his part was merely more intriguing to her. She flung the sweetness of her personality against his indifference, determined to strike a spark of interest from those deep gray eyes whose lights she used to know so well, whose interest she had caught on the first glimpse, but whose light seemed suddenly to be no more lit just for her benefit.
She was clever. She did not press her point. She led him to a great, deep velvet chair beside the table with the mirrored yellow roses.
“You’re perfectly stunning there, you know,” she declared, looking at him as though he were a picture she had just purchased, and then she suddenly stooped and kissed him again, this time on his forehead just where the crisp hair fell over the whiteness of the flesh.
He took that caress also as though it had been buckshot rattling off from his coat of armor, as if it were not worth noticing. But something inside clicked. He knew he did not like that either. Not now anyway. Not so soon. Not until he had asked for it.
Was he perhaps old-fashioned? Did women give themselves freely now at their will before they knew that they were desired?
But Alice sensed his mood. She sat down quietly, opposite him, sat so her lovely profile was turned toward him, just the sweet curve of her back with the folds of satin, so like her soft skin, showing gently against the velvet draperies of a great arched window of leaded glass. Sat with a sudden sweetness upon her and a quiver of her delicate chin while she told in hushed sentences, with downcast eyes, of the sorrows that had been hers since last he saw her. Told it as one confides only to the dearest and nearest, a hint here, a frank word there, a dignified reserve at a climax where far more is implied than is told. A little, well-trained tear or two stole out and down her soft cheek like dew on a rose petal and trembled there without doing much damage to her makeup.
Sterling sat and watched her, his heart warming to her. Ah! This was the real Alice! This was the Alice that he had always dreamed his mother would discover in his girl someday! And this dear, sorrowing girl had kissed him twice when he came in! Why had he taken it so coolly? His senses stirred as he watched her now in her sweet gentleness. If she were to come and kiss him now, he would receive her with open arms. He would like to go and sit over there beside her, put his arm around her, draw her head down on his shoulder, and tell her how his heart ached for her. Brutes, those men had been who had married her and made her suffer so. Brutes indeed, and she was well rid of them! Little, delicate, lovely Alice Blair! To think that men would dare to marry her and put her through so much!
Dinner was announced while they were talking, and the subdued mood seemed to last. She seated him opposite her with a quaint dignity and a gentle deference that put him within an atmosphere of intimacy. More and more as the meal went on and he looked into her eyes as she raised them meaningfully to his, he was thrilled with the fact that he was sitting here with Alice, dining with her, just as if they belonged together, as if they had always belonged together.
Once when the waitress had been sent from the room, she passed him the dish of bonbons across the table, and their fingers touched and lingered. Ah! Had he perhaps come home, really home to something real at last?
He tried to put out of his mind that she was a twice-divorced woman, and that it was against all his traditions to marry a woman under those conditions. There were condoning circumstances. There would be some way out for his conscience. His heart grew tender as he watched her.
But the quiet, intimate dinner was over at last, and almost at once a caller was announced. An older man with baggy pouches under his eyes. He who answered to the name of “Mortie” greeted her with outstretched hands and patted her cheek, called her “Blair, dear,” and dared to kiss her fingers. Greg distrusted him from the moment he saw him, hated him, registered a vow to stick around and protect Alice from his attentions.
Then others began to drop in, blasé men w
ho eyed Greg indifferently, noisy girls in abnormal outfits, an artist or two, and a musician who had already been drinking.
Alice introduced them in a group as “the gang” and called Greg “an old sweetheart of mine.” They stared at him briefly, and all began clamoring for drinks.
Greg settled down sternly in a corner to watch this new development, took up a book of modern prints, and looked them over without seeing them. When he looked up again, Alice, his delicate, lovely Alice, was sitting beside that obnoxious Mortie on the couch, lighting a cigarette from his, then puffing away and exhaling from her delicate nostrils. He could see the vivid red of her lips, the flashing of her white teeth. Everybody was drinking, and Alice was drinking, too. The light trill of her laughter rose foolishly above the chatter. She seemed to have forgotten him. She wasn’t the same woman who had sat through that lovely, intimate dinner with him. His soul turned sick within him. What was the matter with everything? Was the matter perhaps with him? Had he stayed too long in the wilderness? He was the only one in the room who was not drinking. Alice noticed him at last and called across the room to him.
“Greg dolling, aren’t you having anything to drink? Oh, I forgot, you used to have principles, didn’t you? But they weren’t your own, you know, they were just your mother’s handed down. Where’ve you been in this age of the world that you haven’t got over them before this? You’ll have to, you know, now that you’re back in the world! Better begin tonight!”
Greg answered nothing, and presently discovering that for a person who had been used to setting his bedtime by star time, it was growing late, he arose and looked around him.
No one seemed to be paying the lightest attention to him. Why should he not go? Someone had turned on the Victrola, and they were beginning to dance. They were all as alien to him as if he had been a great rock out on his own desert.
But Alice perhaps divined his thought and, waving her hand, called, “Come, folks, we’re going out to find a nice place to spend the evening!” and she floated over to Greg and nestled up beside him.
THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE Page 11