“John! I’m so glad you called me! Thank you so much for the roses! They’re exquisite! — matchless! — —”
“Not at all!”
“What?”
“If you think they’re matchless, just hold one up beside your cheek and take a slant at your mirror.”
“I thought you were not going to say such things to me!”
“I thought I wasn’t.”
“Are you alone?” She laughed happily. “Where are you, Jack?”
“At the Overseas Club. I stopped on my way from the hospital.”
“Y — es.”
A considerable pause, and then Ilse laughed again —— a confused, happy laugh.
“Did you think you’d — come over?” she inquired.
“Shall I?”
“What do you think about it, Jack?”
“I suppose,” he said in a humourous voice, “you’re afraid of that tendency which you say I’m beginning to exhibit.”
“The tendency to drift?”
“Yes; — toward those perilous rocks you warned me of.”
“They are perilous!” she insisted.
“You ought to know,” he rejoined; “you’re sitting on top of ’em like a bally Lorelei!”
“If that’s your opinion, hadn’t you better steer for the open sea, John?”
“Certainly I’d better. But you look so sweet up there, with your classical golden hair, that I think I’ll risk the rocks.”
“Please don’t! There’s a deadly whirlpool under them. I’m looking down at it now.”
“What do you see at the bottom, Ilse? Human bones?”
“I can’t see the bottom. It’s all surface, like a shining mirror.”
“I’ll come over and take a look at it with you.”
“I think you’ll only see our own faces reflected.... I think you’d better not come.”
“I’ll be there in about half an hour,” he said gaily.
* * * * *
He sauntered out and on into the body of the club, exchanging with friends a few words here, a smiling handclasp there; and presently he seated himself near a window.
For a while he rested his chin on his clenched hand, staring into space, until a waiter arrived with his order.
He signed the check, drained his glass, and leaned forward again with both elbows on his knees, twirling his silver-headed stick between nervous hands.
“After all,” he said under his breath, “it’s too late, now.... I’m going to see this thing through.”
* * * * *
As he rose to go he caught sight of Jim Shotwell, seated alone by another window and attempting to read an evening paper by the foggy light from outside. He walked over to him, fastening his overcoat on the way. Jim laid aside his paper and gave him a dull glance.
“How are things with you?” inquired Estridge, carelessly.
“All right. Are you walking up town?”
“No.”
Jim’s sombre eyes rested on the discarded paper, but he did not pick it up. “It’s rotten weather,” he said listlessly.
“Have you seen Palla lately?” inquired Estridge, looking down at him with a certain curiosity.
“No, not lately.”
“She’s a very busy girl, I hear.”
“So I hear.”
Estridge seated himself on the arm of a leather chair and began to pull on his gloves. He said:
“I understand Palla is doing Red Cross and canteen work, besides organising her celebrated club; — what is it she calls it? — Combat Club No. 1?”
“I believe so.”
“And you haven’t seen her lately?”
Shotwell glanced at the fog and shrugged his shoulders: “She’s rather busy — as you say. No, I haven’t seen her. Besides, I’m rather out of my element among the people one runs into at her house. So I simply don’t go any more.”
“Palla’s parties are always amusing,” ventured Estridge.
“Very,” said the other, “but her guests keep you guessing.”
Estridge smiled: “Because they don’t conform to the established scheme of things?”
“Perhaps. The scheme of things, as it is, suits me.”
“But it’s interesting to hear other people’s views.”
“I’m fed up on queer views — and on queer people,” said Jim, with sudden and irritable emphasis. “Why, hang it all, Jack, when a fellow goes out among apparently well bred, decent people he takes it for granted that ordinary, matter of course social conventions prevail. But nobody can guess what notions are seething in the bean of any girl you talk to at Palla’s house!”
Estridge laughed: “What do you care, Jim?”
“Well, I wouldn’t care if they all didn’t seem so exactly like one’s own sort. Why, to look at them, talk to them, you’d never suppose them queer! The young girl you take in to dinner usually looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And the chances are that she’s all for socialism, self-determination, trial marriages and free love!
“Hell’s bells! I’m no prude. I like to overstep conventions, too. But this wholesale wrecking of the social structure would be ruinous for a girl like Palla.”
“But Palla doesn’t believe in free love.”
“She hears it talked about by cracked illuminati.”
“Rain on a duck’s back, Jim!”
“Rain drowns young ducks.”
“You mean all this spouting will end in a deluge?”
“I do. And then look for dead ducks.”
“You’re not very respectful toward modernism,” remarked Estridge, smiling.
Then Jim broke loose:
“Modernism? You yourself said that all these crazy social notions — crazy notions in art, literature, music — arise from some sort of physical degeneration, or from the perversion or checking of normal physical functions.”
“Usually they do — —”
“Well,” continued Shotwell, “it’s mostly due to perversion, in my opinion. Women have had too much of a hell of a run for their money during this war. They’ve broken down all the fences and they’re loose and running all over the world.
“If they’d only kept their fool heads! But no. Every germ in the wind lodged in their silly brains! Biff. They want sex equality and a pair of riding breeches! Bang! They kick over the cradle and wreck the pantry.
“Wifehood? Played out! Motherhood? In the discards! Domestic partnership? — each sex to its own sphere? Ha-ha! That was all very well yesterday. But woman as a human incubator and brooder is an obsolete machine. Why the devil should free and untramelled womanhood hatch out young?
“If they choose to, casually, all right. But it’s purely a matter for self-determination. If a girl cares to take off her Sam Brown belt and her puttees long enough to nurse a baby, it’s a matter that concerns her, not humanity at large. Because the social revolution has settled all such details as personal independence and the same standard for both sexes. So, a bas Madame Grundy! A la lanterne with the old régime! No — hang it all, I’m through!”
“Don’t you like Palla any more?” inquired Estridge, still laughing.
Jim gave him a singular look: “Yes.... Do you like Ilse Westgard?”
Estridge said coolly: “I am accepting her as she is. I like her that much.”
“Oh. Is that very much?” sneered the other.
“Enough to marry her if she’d have me,” replied Estridge pleasantly.
“And she won’t do that, I suppose?”
“Not so far.”
Jim eyed him sullenly: “Well, I don’t accept Palla as she is — or thinks she is.”
“She’s sincere.”
“I understand that. But no girl can get away with such notions. Where is it all going to land her? What will she be?”
Estridge quoted: “‘It hath not yet appeared what we shall be.’”
Shotwell rose impatiently, and picked up his overcoat: “All I know is that when two healthy people care for each other it’s
their business — their business, I repeat — to get together legally and do the decent thing by the human race.”
“Breed?”
“Certainly! Breed legally the finest, healthiest, best of specimens; — and as many as they can feed and clothe! For if they don’t — if we don’t — I mean our own sort — the land will be crawling with the robust get of all these millions of foreigners, who already have nearly submerged us in America; and whose spawn will, one day, smother us to death.
“Hang it all, aren’t they breeding like vermin now? All yellow dogs do — all the unfit produce big litters. That’s the only thing they ever do — accumulate progeny.
“And what are we doing? — our sort, I mean? I’ll tell you! Our sisters are having such a good time that they won’t marry, if they can avoid it, until they’re too mature to get the best results in children. Our wives, if they condescend to have any offspring at all, limit the output to one. Because more than one might damage their beauty. Hell! If the educated classes are going to practise race suicide and the Bolsheviki are going to breed like lice, you can figure out the answer for yourself.”
They walked to the foggy street together. Shotwell said bitterly:
“I do care for Palla. I like Ilse. All the women one encounters at Palla’s parties are gay, accomplished, clever, piquant. The men also are more or less amusing. The conversation is never dull. Everybody seems to be well bred, sincere, friendly and agreeable. But there’s something lacking. One feels it even before one is enlightened concerning the ultra-modernism of these admittedly interesting people. And I’ll tell you what it is. Actually, deep in their souls, they don’t believe in themselves.
“Take Palla. She says there is no God — no divinity except in herself. And I tell you she may think she believes it, but she doesn’t.
“And her school-girl creed — Love and Service! Fine. Only there’s a prior law — self-preservation; and another — race preservation! By God, how are you going to love and serve if girls stop having babies?
“And as for this silly condemnation of the marriage ceremony, merely because some sanctified Uncle Foozle once inserted the word ‘obey’ in it — just because, under the marriage laws, tyranny and cruelty have been practised — what callow rot!
“Laws can be changed; divorce made simple and non-scandalous as it should be; all rights safeguarded for the woman; and still have something legal and recognised by one of those necessary conventions which make civilisation possible.
“But this irresponsible idea of procedure through mere inclination — this sauntering through life under no law to safeguard and govern, except the law of personal preference — that’s anarchy! That code spells demoralisation, degeneracy and disaster!... And the whole damned thing to begin again — a slow development of the human race, once more, out of the chaos of utter barbarism.”
Estridge, standing there on the sidewalk in the fog, smiled:
“You’re very eloquent, Jim. Why don’t you say all this to Palla?”
“I did. I told her, too, that the root of the whole thing was selfishness. And it is. It’s a refusal to play the game according to rule. There are only two sexes and one of ’em is fashioned to bear young, and the other is fashioned to hustle for mother and kid. You can’t alter that, whether it’s fair or not. It’s the game as we found it. The rules were already provided for playing it. The legal father and mother are supposed to look out for their own legal progeny. And any alteration of this rule, with a view to irresponsible mating and turning the offspring over to the community to take care of, would create an unhuman race, unconscious of the highest form of love — the love for parents.
“A fine lot we’d be as an incubated race!”
Estridge laughed: “I’ve got to go,” he said, “And, if you care for Palla as you say you do, you oughtn’t to leave her entirely alone with her circle of modernist friends. Stick around! It may make you mad, but if she likes you, at least she won’t commit an indiscretion with anybody else.”
“I wish I could find my own sort as amusing,” said Jim, naïvely. “I’ve been going about recently — dances, dinners, theatres — but I can’t seem to keep my mind off Palla.”
Estridge said: “If you’d give your sense of humour half a chance you’d be all right. You take yourself too solemnly. You let Palla scare you. That’s not the way. The thing to do is to have a jolly time with her, with them all. Accept her as she thinks she is. There’s no damage done yet. Time enough to throw fits if she takes the bit and bolts — —”
He extended his hand, cordially but impatiently:
“You remember I once said that girl ought to be married and have children? If you do the marrying part she’s likely to do the rest very handsomely. And it will be the making of her.”
Jim held on to his hand:
“Tell me what to do, Jack. She isn’t in love with me. And she wouldn’t submit to a legal ceremony if she were. You invoke my sense of humour. I’m willing to give it an airing, only I can’t see anything funny in this business.”
“It is funny! Palla’s funny, but doesn’t know it. You’re funny! They’re all funny — unintentionally. But their motives are tragically immaculate. So stick around and have a good time with Palla until there’s really something to scare you.”
“And then?”
“How the devil do I know? It’s up to you, of course, what you do about it.”
He laughed and strode away through the fog.
* * * * *
It had seemed to Jim a long time since he had seen Palla. It wasn’t very long. And in all that interminable time he had not once called her up on the telephone — had not even written her a single line. Nor had she written to him.
He had gone about his social business in his own circle, much to his mother’s content. He had seen quite a good deal of Elorn Sharrow; was comfortably back on the old, agreeable footing; tried desperately to enjoy it; pretended that he did.
But the days were long in the office; the evenings longer, wherever he happened to be; and the nights, alas! were becoming interminable, now, because he slept badly, and the grey winter daylight found him unrefreshed.
Which, recently, had given him a slightly battered appearance, commented on jestingly by young rakes and old sports at the Patroon’s Club, and also observed by his mother with gentle concern.
“Don’t overdo it, Jim,” she cautioned him, meaning dances that ended with breakfasts and that sort of thing. But her real concern was vaguer than that — deeper, perhaps. And sometimes she remembered the girl in black.
Lately, however, that anxiety had been almost entirely allayed. And her comparative peace of mind had come about in an unexpected manner.
For, one morning, entering the local Red Cross quarters, where for several hours she was accustomed to sew, she encountered Mrs. Speedwell and her lively daughter, Connie — her gossiping informants concerning her son’s appearance at Delmonico’s with the mysterious girl in black.
“Well, what do you suppose, Helen?” said Mrs. Speedwell, mischievously. “Jim’s pretty mystery in black is here!”
“Here?” repeated Mrs. Shotwell, flushing and looking around her at the rows of prophylactic ladies, all sewing madly side by side.
“Yes, and she’s prettier even than I thought her in Delmonico’s,” remarked Connie. “Her name is Palla Dumont, and she’s a friend of Leila Vance.”
* * * * *
During the morning, Mrs. Shotwell found it convenient to speak to Leila Vance; and they exchanged a pleasant word or two — merely the amiable civilities of two women who recognise each other socially as well as personally.
And it happened in that way, a few days later, that Helen Shotwell met this pretty friend of Leila Vance — Palla Dumont — the girl in black.
And Palla had looked up from her work with her engaging smile, saying: “I know your son, Mrs. Shotwell. Is he quite well? I haven’t seen him for such a long time.”
And instantly the invisible ant
ennæ of these two women became busy exploring, probing, searching, and recognising in each other all that remains forever incomprehensible to man.
For Palla somehow understood that Jim had never spoken of her to his mother; and yet that his mother had heard of her friendship with her son.
And Helen knew that Palla was quietly aware of this, and that the girl’s equanimity remained undisturbed.
Only people quite sure of themselves preserved serenity under the merciless exploration of the invisible feminine antennæ. And it was evident that the girl in black had nothing to conceal from her in regard to her only son — whatever that same son might think he ought to make an effort to conceal from his mother.
To herself Helen thought: “Jim has had his wings singed, and has fled the candle.”
To Palla she said: “Mrs. Vance tells me such interesting stories of your experiences in Russia. Really, it’s like a charming romance — your friendship for the poor little Grand Duchess.”
“A tragic one,” said Palla in a voice so even that Helen presently lifted her eyes from her sewing to read in her expression something more than the mere words that this young girl had uttered. And saw a still, pale face, sensitive and very lovely; and the needle flying over a bandage no whiter than the hand that held it.
“It was a great shock to you — her death,” said Helen.
“Yes.”
“And — you were there at the time! How dreadful!”
Palla lifted her brown eyes: “I can’t talk about it yet,” she said so simply that Helen’s sixth sense, always alert for information from the busy, invisible antennæ, suddenly became convinced that there were no more hidden depths to explore — no motives to suspect, no pretense to expose.
Day after day she chose to seat herself between Palla and Leila Vance; and the girl began to fascinate her.
There was no effort to please on Palla’s part, other than that natural one born of sweet-tempered consideration for everybody. There seemed to be no pretence, no pose.
Such untroubled frankness, such unconscious candour were rather difficult to believe in, yet Helen was now convinced that in Palla these phenomena were quite genuine. And she began to understand more clearly, as the week wore on, why her son might have had a hard time of it with Palla Dumont before he returned to more familiar pastures, where camouflage and not candour was the rule in the gay and endless game of blind-man’s buff.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 933