“I think I’ll just step to the telephone a moment.” He rose, and her fingers dropped from his hand. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not at all,” she smiled. “The stars are very faithful friends. I’ll be well guarded until you come back, Louis.”
What she said, for some reason, made him slightly uncomfortable. He was thinking of her words as he called up “long distance” and waited. Presently Central called him with a brisk “Here’s your party!” And very far away he heard her voice:
“I know it is you. Is it?”
“Who?”
“It is! I recognise your voice. But which is it — Kelly or Louis or Mr.
Neville?”
“All three,” he replied, laughing.
“But which gentleman is in the ascendant? The god-like one? Or the conventional Mr. Neville? Or — the bad and very lovable and very human Louis?”
“Stop talking-nonsense, Valerie. What are you doing?”
“Conversing with an abrupt gentleman called Louis Neville. I was reading.”
“All alone in your room?”
“Naturally. Two people couldn’t get into it unless one of them also got into bed.”
“You poor child! What are you reading?”
“Will you promise not to laugh?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Then — I was reading the nineteenth psalm.”
“It’s a beauty, isn’t it,” he said.
“Oh, Louis, it is glorious! — I don’t know what in it appeals most thrillingly to me — the wisdom or the beauty of the verse — but I love it.”
“It is fine,” he said. “… And are you there in your room all alone this beautiful starry night, reading the psalms of old King David?”
“Yes. What are you doing? Where are you?”
“At Ashuelyn, my sister’s home.”
“Oh! Well, it is perfectly sweet of you to think of me and to call me up—”
“I usually — I — well, naturally I think of you. I thought I’d just call you up to say good night. You see my train doesn’t get in until one this morning; and of course I couldn’t wake you—”
“Yes, you could. I am perfectly willing to have you wake me.”
“But that would be the limit!”
“Is that your limit, Louis? If it is you will never disturb my peace of mind.” He heard her laughing at the other end of the wire, delighted with her own audacity.
He said: “Shall I call you up at one o’clock when I get into town?”
“Try it. I may awake.”
“Very well then. I’ll make them ring till daylight.”
“Oh, they won’t have to do that! I always know, about five minutes before you call me, that you are going to.”
“You uncanny little thing! You’ve said that before.”
“It’s true. I knew before you called me that you would. It’s a vague feeling — a — I don’t know…. And oh, Louis, it is hot in this room! Are you cool out there in the country?”
“Yes; and I hate to be when I think of you—”
“I’m glad you are. It’s one comfort, anyway. John Burleson called me up and asked me to go to Manhattan Beach, but somehow it didn’t appeal to me…. I’ve rather missed you.”
“Have you?”
“Really.”
“Well, I’ll admit I’ve missed you.”
“Really?”
Sure thing! I wish to heaven I were in town now. We would go somewhere.”
“Oh, I wish so, too.”
“Isn’t it the limit!”
“It is, Kelly. Can’t you be a real god for a moment and come floating into my room in a golden cloud?”
“Shall I try?”
“Please do.”
“All right. I’ll do my god-like best. And anyway I’ll call you up at one. Good night.”
“Good night.”
He went back to the girl waiting for him in the starlight.
“Well,” she said, smiling at his altered expression, “you certainly have recovered your spirits.”
He laughed and took her unreluctant fingers and kissed them — a boyishly impulsive expression of the gay spirits which might have perplexed him or worried him to account for if he had tried to analyse them. But he didn’t; he was merely conscious of a sudden inrush of high spirits — of a warm feeling for all the world — this star-set world, so still and sweet-scented.
“Stephanie, dear,” he said, smiling, “you know perfectly well that I think — always have thought — that there was nobody like you. You know that, don’t you?”
She laughed, but her pulses quickened a little.
“Well, then,” he went on. “I take it for granted that our understanding is as delightfully thorough as it has always been — a warm, cordial intimacy which leaves us perfectly unembarrassed — perfectly free to express our affection for each other without fear of being misunderstood.”
The girl lifted her blue eyes: “Of course.”
“That’s what I told Lily,” he nodded, delighted. I told her that you and I understood each other — that it was silly of her to suspect anything sentimental in our comradeship; that whenever the real thing put in an appearance and came tagging down the pike after you, you’d sink the gaff into him—”
“The — what?”
“Rope him and paste your monogram all over him.”
“I certainly will,” she said, laughing. Eyes and lips and voice were steady; but the tumult in her brain confused her.
“That is exactly what I told Lily,” he said. “She seems to think that if two people frankly enjoy each other’s society they want to marry each other. All married women are that way. Like clever decoys they take genuine pleasure in bringing the passing string under the guns.”
He laughed and kissed her pretty fingers again:
“Don’t you listen to my sister. Freedom’s a good thing; and people are selfish when happy; they don’t set up a racket to attract others into their private paradise.”
“Oh, Louis, that is really horrid of you. Don’t you think Lily is happy?”
“Sure — in a way. You can’t have a perfectly good husband and baby, and have the fun of being courted by other aspirants, too. Of course married women are happy; but they give up a lot. And sometimes it slightly irritates them to remember it when they see the unmarried innocently frisking as they once frisked. And it’s their instinct to call out ‘Come in! Matrimony’s fine! You don’t know what you are missing!’”
Stephanie laughed and lay back in her steamer chair, her hand abandoned to him. And when her mirth had passed a slight sense of fatigue left her silent, inert, staring at nothing.
When the time came to say adieu he kissed her as he sometimes did, with a smiling and impersonal tenderness — not conscious of the source of all this happy, demonstrative, half impatient animation which seemed to possess him in every fibre.
“Good-bye, you dear girl,” he said, as the lights of the motor lit up the drive. “I’ve had a bully time, and I’ll see you soon again.”
“Come when you can, Louis. There is no man I would rather see.”
“And no girl I would rather go to,” he said, warmly, scarcely thinking what he was saying.
Their clasped hands relaxed, fell apart. He went in to take leave of Lily and Gordon and their guests, then emerged hastily and sprang into the car.
Overhead the June stars watched him as he sped through the fragrant darkness. But with him, time lagged; even the train crawled as he timed it to the ticking seconds of his opened watch.
In the city a taxi swallowed him and his haste; and it seemed as though he would never get to his studio and to the telephone; but at last he heard her voice — a demure, laughing little voice:
“I didn’t think you’d be brute enough to do it!”
“But you said I might call you—”
“There are many things that a girl says from which she expects a man to infer, tactfully and mercifully, the contrary.”
/>
“Did I wake you, Valerie? I’m terribly sorry—”
“If you are sorry I’ll retire to my pillow—”
“I’ll ring you up again!”
“Oh, if you employ threats I think I’d better listen to you. What have you to say to me?”
“What were you doing when I rang you up?”
“I Wish I could say that I was asleep. But I can’t. And if I tell the truth I’ve got to flatter you. So I refuse to answer.”
“You were not waiting up for—”
“Kelly! I refuse to answer! Anyway you didn’t keep your word to me.”
“How do you mean?”
“You promised to appear in a golden cloud!”
“Something went wrong with the Olympian machinery,” he explained, “and I was obliged to take the train…. What are you doing there, anyway?”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“Why, I’m sitting at the telephone in my night-dress talking to an exceedingly inquisitive gentleman—”
“I mean were you reading more psalms?”
“No. If you must know, I was reading ‘Bocaccio’”
He could hear her laughing.
“I was meaning to ask you how you’d spent the day,” he began. “Haven’t you been out at all?”
“Oh, yes. I’m not under vows, Kelly.”
“Where?”
“Now I wonder whether I’m expected to account for every minute when I’m not with you? I’m beginning to believe that it’s a sort of monstrous vanity that incites you to such questions. And I’m going to inform you that I did not spend the day sitting by the window and thinking about you.”
“What did you do?”
“I motored in the Park. I lunched at Woodmanston with a perfectly good young man. I enjoyed it.”
“Who was the man?”
“Sam.”
“Oh,” said Neville, laughing.
“You make me perfectly furious by laughing,” she exclaimed. “I wish I could tell you that I’d been to Niagara Falls with José Querida!”
“I wouldn’t believe it, anyway.”
“I wouldn’t believe it myself, even if I had done it,” she said, naïvely. There was a pause; then:
“I’m going to retire. Good night.”
“Good night, Valerie.”
“Louis!”
“What?”
“You say the golden-cloud machinery isn’t working?”
“It seems to have slipped a cog.”
“Oh! I thought you might have mended it and that — perhaps — I had better not leave my window open.”
“That cloud is warranted to float through solid masonry.”
“You alarm me, Kelly.”
“I’m sorry, but the gods never announce their visits.”
“I know it…. And I suppose I must sleep in a dinner gown. When one receives a god it’s a full-dress affair, isn’t it?”
He laughed, not mistaking her innocent audacity.
“Unexpected Olympians must take their chances,” he said. “… Are you sleepy?”
“Fearfully.”
“Then I won’t keep you—”
“But I hope you won’t be rude enough to dismiss me before I have a chance to give you your congé!”
“You blessed child. I could stay here all night listening to you—”
“Could you? That’s a temptation.”
“To you, Valerie?”
“Yes — a temptation to make a splendid exit. Every girl adores being regretted. So I’ll hang up the receiver, I think…. Good night, Kelly, dear…. Good night, Louis. À demain! — non — pardon! à bien tôt! — parceque il est deux heures de matin! Et — vous m’avez rendu bien heureuse.”
CHAPTER V
Toward the last of June Neville left town to spend a month with his father and mother at their summer Lome near Portsmouth. Valerie had already gone to the mountains with Rita Tevis, gaily refusing her address to everybody. And, packing their steamer trunks and satchels, the two young girls departed triumphantly for the unindicated but modest boarding-house tucked away somewhere amid the hills of Delaware County, determined to enjoy every minute of a vacation well earned, and a surcease from the round of urban and suburban gaiety which the advent of July made a labour instead of a relaxation.
From some caprice or other Valerie had decided that her whereabouts should remain unknown even to Neville. And for a week it suited her perfectly. She swam in the stump-pond with Rita, drove a buckboard with Rita, fished industriously with Rita, played tennis on a rutty court, danced rural dances at a “platform,” went to church and giggled like a schoolgirl, and rocked madly on the veranda in a rickety rocking-chair, demurely tolerant of the adoration of two boys working their way through, college, a smartly dressed and very confident drummer doing his two weeks, and several assorted and ardent young men who, at odd moments, had persuaded her to straw rides and soda at the village druggists.
[Illustration: “A smartly dressed and very confident drummer.”]
And all the while she giggled with Rita in a most shameless and undignified fashion, went about hatless, with hair blowing and sleeves rolled up; decorated a donation party at the local minister’s and flirted with him till his gold-rimmed eye-glasses protruded; behaved like a thoughtful and considerate angel to the old, uninteresting and infirm; romped like a young goddess with the adoring children of the boarders, and was fiercely detested by the crocheting spinsters rocking in acidulated rows on the piazza.
The table was meagre and awful and pruneful; but she ate with an appetite that amazed Rita, whose sophisticated palate was grossly insulted thrice daily.
“How on earth you can contrive to eat that hash,” she said, resentfully, “I don’t understand. When my Maillard’s give out I’ll quietly starve in a daisy field somewhere.”
“Close your eyes and pretend you and Sam are dining at the Knickerbocker,” suggested Valerie, cheerfully. “That’s what I do when the food doesn’t appeal to me.”
“With whom do you pretend you are dining?”
“Sometimes with Louis Neville, sometimes with Querida,” she, said, frankly. “It helps the hash wonderfully. Try it, dear. Close your eyes and visualise some agreeable man, and the food isn’t so very awful.”
Rita laughed: “I’m not as fond of men as that.”
“Aren’t you? I am. I do like an agreeable man, and I don’t mind saying so.”
“I’ve observed that,” said Rita, still laughing.
“Of course you have. I’ve spent too many years without them not to enjoy them now — bless their funny hearts!”
“I’m glad there are no men here,” observed Rita.
“But there are men here,” said Valerie, innocently.
“Substitutes. Lemons.”
“The minister is superficially educated—”
“He’s a muff.”
“A nice muff. I let him pat my gloved hand.”
“You wicked child. He’s married.”
“He only patted it in spiritual emphasis, dear. Married or single he’s more agreeable to me than that multi-coloured drummer. I let the creature drive me to the post office in a buckboard, and he continued to sit closer until I took the reins, snapped the whip, and drove at a gallop over that terrible stony road. And he is so fat that it nearly killed him. It killed all sentiment in him, anyway.”
Rita, stretched lazily in a hammock and displaying a perfectly shod foot and silken ankle to the rage of the crocheters on the veranda, said dreamily:
“The unfortunate thing about us is that we know too much to like the only sort of men who are likely to want to marry us.”
“What of it?” laughed Valerie. “We don’t want to marry them — or anybody.
Do we?”
“Don’t you?”
“Don’t I what?”
“Want to get married?”
“I should think not.”
“Never?”
“Not if I feel abou
t it as I do now. I’ve never had enough play, Rita. I’ve missed all those years that you’ve had — that most girls have had. I never had any boys to play with. That’s really all I am doing now — playing with grown-up boys. That’s all I am — merely a grown-up girl with a child’s heart.”
“A heart of gold,” murmured Rita, “you darling.”
“Oh, it isn’t all gold by any means! It’s full of silver whims and brassy selfishness and tin meannesses and senseless ideas — full of fiery, coppery mischief, too; and, sometimes, I think, a little malice — perhaps a kind of diluted deviltry. But it’s a hungry heart, dear, hungry for laughter and companionship and friendship — with a capacity for happiness! Ah, you don’t know, dear — you never can know how capable I am of friendship and happiness!”
“And — sentiment?”
“I — don’t — know.”
“Better watch out, sweetness!”
“I do.”
Rita said thoughtfully, swinging in her hammock:
“Sentiment, for us, is no good. I’ve learned that.”
“You?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Experience,” said Rita, carelessly. “Every girl is bound to have it.
She doesn’t have to hunt for it, either.”
“Were you ever in — love?” asked Valerie, curiously.
“Now, dear, if I ever had been happily in love is it likely you wouldn’t know it?”
“I suppose so,” said Valerie…. She added, musingly:
“I wonder what will become of me if I ever fall in love.”
“If you’ll take my advice you’ll run.”
“Run? Where? For goodness’ sake!”
“Anywhere until you became convalescent.”
“That would be a ridiculous idea,” remarked Valerie so seriously that
Rita began to laugh:
“You sweet thing,” she said, “it’s a million chances that you’d be contented only with the sort of man who wouldn’t marry you.”
“Because I’m poor, you mean? Or because I am working for my living?”
“Both — and then some.”
“What else?”
“Why, the only sort of men who’d attract you have come out of their own world of their own accord to play about for a while in our world. They can go back; that is the law. But they can’t take us with them.”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 526