Fair Tomorrow

by Emilie Loring

  From an alcove he dragged a large table on wheels. On an expanse of green paper, to simulate a lawn, was a cardboard model of the farmer’s cottage. Dormers had been let into the roof, a porch faced a shellac shore sprinkled with sand, which edged a scrap of brilliantly blue painted sea. Pamela regarded it incredulously.

  “How could you copy the cottage so perfectly?”

  Philip Carr perched on the arm of her chair. His eyes were boyishly eager. “I told you that often I feasted on milk and cookies in the farmer’s house. Besides my memory of it I had a photograph of your grandmother’s place to work from. It belongs to Father but I lugged it off to New York and — there we are! This noon — after leaving you and your stepmother — hope I didn’t mess things up more — I confirmed the measurements. Like it? A man I know gave me pointers on a development scheme. See those marks? They indicate where more houses will stand if we make good on this. I’m out to make your real estate a going concern. We’ll keep the cottages of the same type as the Leigh house. The severely straight lines cost less to build. Big central chimney in exact centre of roof, windows placed directly above each other, entrance door in centre. No porches on old houses but I have added one. See the garage? Looks like a woodshed. Notice the pitch of the roof? Slightly less than a right angle. That, and no visible foundation give the squatty look.”

  “It is perfect. I hate to be little Miss Killjoy, but won’t remodelling cost more than four thousand dollars? There it is again. Money! Money!”

  “It won’t cost that. The model is made to scale of ¼ inch to the foot. If you okay it I will go on with specifications. We ought to get at it. You will have the time of your life selecting wall-papers. Got any furniture you are not using?”

  “The attic is full of it.”

  “Bully! This will be the house of the month when we get through. Come in, Mother. What do you think of the development scheme? Houses going here and here and —”

  “After we have rented the first cottage,” Pamela interpolated gaily. She slipped her arm within Mrs. Carr’s. “See the windows just like those at the Silver Moon, the black band on the chimney?”

  “That band stood for loyalty to the King, in the old days. You have been wise to keep the lines simple,” Mrs. Carr approved. “Sandy-the-carpenter can make those alterations and additions without supervision.”

  “I shan’t leave it entirely to him. I mean to be here every week-end to boss the job, Mother.”

  “Really?” Her face was pathetic in its radiance. The light of happiness waned. “Then you must be more diplomatic with your father. Try, try to agree with him at least one time in ten.”

  “I’ll do my best for your sake, Mother, but nothing I say or think seems right to him. We are everlastingly arguing. He is so infernally suspicious of me. I’ll bet that when he hears that I suggested moving the farmer’s cottage he’ll think I have a personal rake-off up my sleeve. Just because stuffy courtrooms are the breath of life to him, he can’t bear it that I prefer to work on houses and stage-sets. I’m sorry, Pamela — don’t mind if I scrap formality, do you — to rattle the family skeleton in your hearing.”

  Mrs. Carr defended, “There isn’t a family skeleton, only — only Philip’s father is so much older than he that he fails in sympathetic understanding. The moment a subject comes up they take opposite sides. They have many traits alike; oh, yes, you have, Philip, that is the trouble.” She abruptly changed the subject. “Have you planned the inside of the cottage?”

  Young Carr flung down his pencil. “Not yet. What say if we go nail Sandy-the-carpenter, Pamela? He won’t mind talking business on the Sabbath day. When we get back to the Silver Moon I’ll take another look at the cottage.”

  Pamela sensed his mother’s wince at his curt answer to her query. It was as if he had slammed a door in her face. Did it pay to lavish love and care on a child? Even the best of them were brutal at times.

  “Coming?” inquired Philip from the threshold.

  Pamela spoke to her hostess. “Thank you for a delightful evening. It has been perfect in this perfect house. May I say good-night to Mr. Carr?”

  What inexplicable urge had prompted the request, she asked herself, as she noticed the glance between mother and son. Why hadn’t she let sleeping dogs lie? Mrs. Carr acquiesced smoothly:

  “Of course. We will find him in the Ship Room.”

  The tall man rose as they entered. Courtly manner; no wonder Grandmother Leigh had liked and trusted him, Pamela thought, as she laid her hand in his. Again she felt the premonition that somewhere behind the curtain of the future he would cross her lifeline and change the pattern. Uncanny feeling. She tried to shake it off as she said lightly:

  “Sometime I will show you my one lone ship. It is bottled.”

  “I know that ship, Miss Pamela, it is a museum piece. I know every treasure in your grandmother’s house. There is nothing finer in the country than the old maple she left you. I hear that you are talking of making over the farmer’s cottage.”

  How had he heard? Pamela knew from the startled glances exchanged by mother and son that the information had not come from them. Milly! Had she overheard Phil at the telephone? She acknowledged quickly:

  “It is more than talk. I shall do it. Philip has the model ready.”

  She was aware of the challenging earnestness of her voice, for all the world as if she were pleading a cause. Phineas Carr warned curtly:

  “Don’t rely too much on Philip. He is more artistic than practical.”

  Pamela refuted indignantly: “Not practical! I think him most practical. Hasn’t he figured out a way to increase our income, at least to take care of taxes and repairs? Turning the farmer’s cottage from a liability to an asset is my idea of constructive planning.”

  “If — he sees it through,” Phineas Carr amended drily.

  “Believe me, I’ll see this proposition through.” Philip’s voice was hoarse with anger. “Going to fool you this time. Come on, Miss Pamela Leigh.”

  Outside the air was cool and clear, scented with the fresh smell of wet earth. Pamela drew a long breath. What a night after the storm! Stars blinked through hazy patches of cloud; one low-hung, brilliant, was setting in the west. All day the world had been overcast. Now it was gleaming into beauty. Was life like that? While apparently it was befogged with problems, were happiness and good fortune just waiting their chance to break through the gloom?

  Philip Carr yanked the roadster into gear. There was light enough for Pamela to see his angry eyes, his sneering lips. Evidently his father’s words still rankled. His resentment boiled over.

  “You heard him! Never gives me credit. Just because I hate law, he thinks I can’t do anything. I’ll show him a thing or two on this cottage.”

  “He didn’t really mean it, Phil. Why don’t you tell him about the stage-settings, and the revue?”

  “If he can’t trust me he doesn’t deserve to know. I’m his son and Mother’s; that ought to count for something.”

  “Some day you’ll make a grand crack at fame and then he will be so proud of you that he will bore his cronies to death talking about his wonderful boy. Meanwhile, cheer’o! Fair tomorrow!”

  Not until the words were spoken did Pamela realize that she had adopted her grandmother’s “sunshiny philosophy.”

  Chapter X

  Pamela leaned her head against the high back of her chair in the Pullman and closed her eyes. Only eight o’clock in the morning and she was dead tired. It was the first time she had sat down since she had risen before the crack of dawn that she might leave everything arranged for Hitty Betts and Terrence to carry on. Was a day off worth the exertion? Yesterday had been hectic. Through her absorption, at intervals, had pricked Phineas Carr’s caustic comment:

  “Don’t rely too much upon him. He is more artistic than practical.” Then his doubting, “If he sees it through.”

  Had the indictment been merely an older person’s impatience with an obviously spoiled boy or was there t
ruth behind it? She liked Philip Carr. Would he lose interest in the project he had started once she was committed to it? Was life disappointment all along the line? Maybe everyone was unstable inside, maybe everyone rebelled against carrying through to the finish when a newer project beckoned alluringly. Would she herself go on with the Silver Moon Chowder House if old-man Necessity did not wriggle his automatic between her shoulders to keep her stepping forward? She would not. She would abandon it so quickly that a chance oyster left in stock would gape open in surprise.

  Her eyes were on the confused blur flying past outside. The wheels ground an accompaniment, as her thoughts and time trooped on. Even if Philip Carr lost interest in the cottage she could carry it through. She had the money. Last night Sandy-the-carpenter had been eager to begin moving it. Scott would help. She would not tell him of Cecile’s visit, of the Babe’s attack on the second Mrs. Leigh, of her threat to hale her stepdaughter into court, of Philip Carr’s acquaintance with her — most certainly not that. He was carrying enough of their perplexities now. Scott! The thought of him warmed her. That didn’t get her anywhere. If numerous telephone calls were an indication he was still stepping out with Hilda Crane or her extravagant sister. Was Pamela Leigh a dog in the manger? That was what he could call a rhetorical question. She was.

  The city! Already she could hear the main roar punctuated by crashes and bangs and an ear-splitting siren. She adjusted her hat, removed any possible speck of dust with her powder pad. Even before the train stopped, her mood was quickstepping to the stir and stimulation about her, so different from the unchanging sameness of the country. She smiled at the reflection in the mirror of her compact. That girl tired? Her eyes were brilliant, her color high. She was on the very top of the world. She could have done without that absurd dimple at one corner of her mouth which her smile routed from ambush. It was too childish for the business woman she had become. She would go directly to Scott Mallory’s office, get the banking business behind her. Once her credit was established, she would cash the cheque she had brought to spend on electrical equipment for the Silver Moon.

  The elevator shot to the fourteenth floor with a speed which gave her the sense of having somehow, somewhere lost connection with her breath.

  “Far’s we go,” announced the boy. He cocked his head in its rakishly tipped, gorgeously braided hat toward a door down the corridor. “Mallory & Carter.”

  She gave her name to another boy at a switchboard. Her old tweed suit, garnished with the neck-piece she had had fashioned from Grandmother Leigh’s Russian sables, had looked sufficiently smart in the mirror in her own room but one glance at the modish, obviously, girl-on-her-own, who opened a door marked “Mr. Mallory”, made her hotly aware that fashion had broken into a forward run since she had retired to the country. Miss Cryder? She recognized her at once as the perfect office secretary of the talkies. Her head with its ruddy waves might recently have left the expert hands of a hairdresser; her brown frock was smartly simple with collar and cuffs of incredible fineness; hosiery and shoes were the last word in shade and model; her hands were perfect with almond-shaped nails which gleamed like gems. Pamela was also aware that her arrival had interested the occupants of the outer office. It seemed to have paralyzed their fingers if one could accept the sudden cessation of the click of typewriters as a sign. Miss Cryder smiled.

  “Mr. Mallory will see you at once, Miss Leigh.” As Pamela entered the book-lined office Scott Mallory stepped from behind a desk on which she noticed one perfect rose in a slender crystal vase. He seemed a curiously different person from the man with whom she had motored, upon whose shoulder — figuratively speaking — she had sobbed out — again figuratively — her troubles. He appeared as impersonal as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Not that she ever had seen that dignitary while earning his daily bread, but as enthroned in authority as she imagined him to be. In short, he was a stranger. As Miss Cryder closed the door from the outside she had the sense of being abandoned on an unfriendly doorstep without the fictional locket of identification about her neck.

  Mallory held out his hand. The sense of remoteness vanished. He picked up his hat.

  “We will attend to the banking business first and then —” He answered the telephone in response to a buzz. As Pamela waited through a conversation in which recurred the words “hearing” — “brief” — “printer” — “away for the day,” she looked out over roofs alive with strutting, preening pigeons, crossed with aerials like gigantic cobwebs, fluttering with flags; looked down into innumerable sunless canyons where taxis scooted, busses lumbered like dinosaurs. Haze dimmed the outlines of towering skyscrapers, of ships and tugs in the distant harbor. It was like a huge Claude Monet canvas. The hum of the city rose. From far away came the muffled beat of a drum.

  “Ready.”

  As beside Scott Mallory she crossed the outer office under fire of a battery of eyes, she felt as childishly self-conscious as she had her first day at school. Down in the crowded elevator, along the street they went, neither of them speaking. As they waited at a corner for the traffic light to change to red and yellow, Pamela looked up at her companion surreptitiously. He was looking down at her. He laughed boyishly. Caught her elbow as she started to cross.

  “Not yet! As a pedestrian’s caution so shall her days be. That is the first time you have seen me this morning. You have looked through me before. You froze me stiff back there in the office.”

  Pamela’s voice reflected the lightening of her spirit.

  “Your obvious importance and the sartorial perfectness of your secretary struck me dumb.”

  “You look like a million yourself. Come on.”

  Nice of him to say it but she was increasingly conscious of the contrast between her costume and the-last-minute frocks and suits — cheap though many of them were — worn by the women and girls hurrying past.

  With the completion of their business in the marble and mahogany fastnesses of the bank the last tinge of Scott Mallory’s professional absorption vanished.

  “That’s that! Now we’ll celebrate! Let’s plan before we leave here. You want to get that electrical stuff, don’t you? Mind if I go with you? Luncheon, talkie — there’s a super-production in town — dinner somewhere we can dance and then home.”

  His voice, his enthusiasm almost swept Pamela into the vortex of his plan. The sight of a woman with every accessory keyed to her chic costume, steadied her. Dinner and dance in her present clothes! Never! Then she would stay at home forever. When would she get money to buy new ones? Every cent she made for a year or two must go into equipment for the Silver Moon. A tide of rebellion swept her. Why should it? She had a purse full of money now. Why spend it for electrical gadgets? Why not on herself? Terry would say, “Sure, Pam! Go to it! You’ve earned it.”

  “Well? We have just this one day to spend together — at present. Where shall we begin?”

  Heart-quickening impatience in Scott Mallory’s voice, the least glint of the pursuing male in his gray eyes. A wave of recklessness left Pamela high and dry on a rock of determination. She would live this one day to the full — no matter if when the clock struck twelve she had to cut all thought of romance from her life for years. The Cinderella motif. Cinderella had had a godmother who changed her calico to satin and pearls. Pamela Leigh had a godmother — of sorts — in her purse. She glanced at the marble and gilt clock on the marble and gilt wall.

  “I will meet you at one-thirty.”

  “Not until one-thirty! It’s a lifetime to wait.”

  “You are an eloquent advocate, aren’t you? I have things to do — heaps and heaps of them. Tell me where to meet you for luncheon. After that my life is in your hands.”

  Sparks of laughter in his eyes flamed to fire. “Do you mean that?”

  “With — reservations. Don’t notice what I say. I’m a wild woman when I get to the city.”

  He hailed a taxi. Wheedled: “Sure I can’t help? I left word at the office that I would not be
back today.”

  “Very sure.”

  He stood on the curb, hat in hand, looking after her as the cab started. A taxi! The first step on her downward course in extravagance. Undoubtedly she would bring up with a smash — not literally, she hoped — but the going promised to be smooth and swift.

  With mounting excitement she looked from the window. The city again! It was heady. Automobiles running the gamut of the scale from unbelievable shabbiness to amazing luxury, crawled up and down the broad street in response to a Cyclopean eye. Shop windows flaunted their riches. Garishness and charm. Elaboration and costly simplicity. Here a choice rug from the Orient; there a painting of tranquillity and beauty; a canvas blazing with color; a bronze depicting man and horse vital with primitive emotions. Jewels dazzled and tempted. Flowers lured by their color and fragrance. There were frocks in all the tints of the spectrum; there were florid hangings; there was furniture from palaces across the sea. A band! “Stars and Stripes Forever”! Marching men! The steady rhythm of feet on the sun-patched pavement. Flags! A bugle! The boom, boom, boom of drums. Pamela sat back with a little bounce of sheer exuberance. The city! The adorable city! She had been starved for it.

  Mallory was waiting when she reached the green and gold foyer of the restaurant at thirty-five minutes after one a little breathless. He looked straight at her without a sign of recognition, before he turned to glare at a wall clock, to impatiently confirm its story by a glance at his watch. Why should he know her? Hadn’t she spent the morning and most of the electrical equipment money in an attempt to look as little as possible like the girl who had entered his office? To save precious time she had confided to a shopping expert what she wanted, what she had to spend and the brief time in which she had to spend it. The capable about-forty woman, had appraised the Russian sable at a glance, had purred enthusiasm. The result was the hat of the week, with a sparkling clip the twin of one which glittered on her antelope bag, a chic short-sleeved black velvet frock with a coat for street and luncheon, cream chamois gloves, a string of synthetic pearls. Pamela — remembering the real gems she had sacrificed — flinched at those, but submitted — they were ravishingly becoming — and crowning extravagances, a pair of long gloves for evening and adorable shoes, smartly modern, fashionably impractical. She had spent the time while alterations were being made, in the beauty shop. She had emerged with a modish wave in her hair, a touch of perfume under one ear and a glaze on her nails like opaline glass.