Metropolitan Magazine (December 1922)
I
Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses
with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green’s father owned the
second best grocery-store in Black Bear — the best one was “The Hub,”patronized
by the wealthy people from Sherry Island — and Dexter caddied only for
pocket-money.
In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long
Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter’s skis moved
over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course. At these times the
country gave him a feeling of profound melancholy — it offended him that the
links should lie in enforced fallowness, haunted by ragged sparrows for the
long season. It was dreary, too, that on the tees where the gay colors
fluttered in summer there were now only the desolate sand-boxes knee-deep in
crusted ice. When he crossed the hills the wind blew cold as misery, and if the
sun was out he tramped with his eyes squinted up against the hard dimensionless
glare.
In April the winter ceased abruptly. The snow ran down into Black
Bear Lake scarcely tarrying for the early golfers to brave the season with red
and black balls. Without elation, without an interval of moist glory, the cold
was gone.
Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this Northern
spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous about the fall. Fall made
him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself, and
make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies.
October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic
triumph, and in this mood the fleeting brilliant impressions of the summer at
Sherry Island were ready grist to his mill. He became a golf champion and
defeated Mr. T. A. Hedrick in a marvellous match played a hundred times over
the fairways of his imagination, a match each detail of which he changed about
untiringly — sometimes he won with almost laughable ease, sometimes he came up
magnificently from behind. Again, stepping from a Pierce-Arrow automobile, like
Mr. Mortimer Jones, he strolled frigidly into the lounge of the Sherry Island
Golf Club — or perhaps, surrounded by an admiring crowd, he gave an exhibition
of fancy diving from the spring-board of the club raft. . . . Among those who
watched him in open-mouthed wonder was Mr. Mortimer Jones.
And one day it came to pass that Mr. Jones — himself and not his
ghost — came up to Dexter with tears in his eyes and said that Dexter was the
—— best caddy in the club, and wouldn’t he decide not to quit if Mr. Jones made
it worth his while, because every other —— caddy in the club lost one ball a
hole for him — regularly —
“No, sir,” said Dexter decisively, “I don’t want to caddy any
more.” Then, after a pause: “I’m too old.”
“You’re not more than fourteen. Why the devil did you decide just
this morning that you wanted to quit? You promised that next week you’d go over
to the State tournament with me.”
“I decided I was too old.”
Dexter handed in his “A Class” badge, collected what money was due
him from the caddy master, and walked home to Black Bear Village.
“The best —— caddy I ever saw,” shouted Mr. Mortimer Jones over a
drink that afternoon. “Never lost a ball! Willing! Intelligent! Quiet! Honest!
Grateful!”
The little girl who had done this was eleven — beautifully ugly as
little girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be
inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men. The
spark, however, was perceptible. There was a general ungodliness in the way her
lips twisted down at the corners when she smiled, and in the— Heaven help us! —
in the almost passionate quality of her eyes. Vitality is born early in such
women. It was utterly in evidence now, shining through her thin frame in a sort
of glow.
She had come eagerly out on to the course at nine o’clock with a
white linen nurse and five small new golf-clubs in a white canvas bag which the
nurse was carrying. When Dexter first saw her she was standing by the caddy
house, rather ill at ease and trying to conceal the fact by engaging her nurse
in an obviously unnatural conversation graced by startling and irrelevant
grimaces from herself.
“Well, it’s certainly a nice day, Hilda,” Dexter heard her say.
She drew down the corners of her mouth, smiled, and glanced furtively around,
her eyes in transit falling for an instant on Dexter.
Then to the nurse:
“Well, I guess there aren’t very many people out here this
morning, are there?”
The smile again — radiant, blatantly artificial — convincing.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now,” said the nurse,
looking nowhere in particular.
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll fix it up.”
Dexter stood perfectly still, his mouth slightly ajar. He knew
that if he moved forward a step his stare would be in her line of vision — if
he moved backward he would lose his full view of her face. For a moment he had
not realized how young she was. Now he remembered having seen her several times
the year before — in bloomers.
Suddenly, involuntarily, he laughed, a short abrupt laugh — then,
startled by himself, he turned and began to walk quickly away.
“Boy!”
Dexter stopped.
“Boy — ”
Beyond question he was addressed. Not only that, but he was
treated to that absurd smile, that preposterous smile —the memory of which at
least a dozen men were to carry into middle age.
“Boy, do you know where the golf teacher is?”
“He’s giving a lesson.”
“Well, do you know where the caddy-master is?”
“He isn’t here yet this morning.”
“Oh.” For a moment this baffled her. She stood alternately on her
right and left foot.
“We’d like to get a caddy,” said the nurse. “Mrs. Mortimer Jones
sent us out to play golf, and we don’t know how without we get a caddy.”
Here she was stopped by an ominous glance from Miss Jones,
followed immediately by the smile.
“There aren’t any caddies here except me,” said Dexter to the
nurse, “and I got to stay here in charge until the caddy-master gets here.”
“Oh.”
Miss Jones and her retinue now withdrew, and at a proper distance
from Dexter became involved in a heated conversation, which was concluded by
Miss Jones taking one of the clubs and hitting it on the ground with violence.
For further emphasis she raised it again and was about to bring it down smartly
upon the nurse’s bosom, when the nurse seized the club and twisted it from her
hands.
“You damn little mean old thing!” cried Miss Jones wildly.
Another argument ensued. Realizing that the elements of the comedy
were implied in the scene, Dexter several times began to laugh, but each time
restrained the laugh before it reached audibility. He could not resist the
monstrous conviction that the little girl was justified in beating the nurse.
The situation was resolved by the fortuitous appearance of the
caddy-master, who was appealed to immediately by the nurse.
“Miss Jones is to have a little caddy, and this one says he can’t
go.”
“Mr. McKenna said I was to wait here till you came,” said Dexter
quickly.
“Well, he’s here now.” Miss Jones smiled cheerfully at the
caddy-master. Then she dropped her bag and set off at a haughty mince toward
the first tee.
“Well?” The caddy-master turned to Dexter. “What you standing
there like a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady’s clubs.”
“I don’t think I’ll go out to-day,” said Dexter.
“You don’t — ”
“I think I’ll quit.”
The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite
caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to
be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional
shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.
It is not so simple as that, either. As so frequently would be the
case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams.
II
Now, of course, the quality and the seasonability of these winter
dreams varied, but the stuff of them remained. They persuaded Dexter several
years later to pass up a business course at the State university — his father,
prospering now, would have paid his way — for the precarious advantage of
attending an older and more famous university in the East, where he was
bothered by his scanty funds. But do not get the impression, because his winter
dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there
was anything merely snobbish in the boy. He wanted not association with
glittering things and glittering people — he wanted the glittering things
themselves. Often he reached out for the best without knowing why he wanted it
— and sometimes he ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in
which life indulges. It is with one of those denials and not with his career as
a whole that this story deals.
He made money. It was rather amazing. After college he went to the
city from which Black Bear Lake draws its wealthy patrons. When he was only
twenty-three and had been there not quite two years, there were already people
who liked to say: “Now there’s a boy — ” All about him rich men’s sons
were peddling bonds precariously, or investing patrimonies precariously, or
plodding through the two dozen volumes of the “George Washington Commercial
Course,” but Dexter borrowed a thousand dollars on his college degree and his
confident mouth, and bought a partnership in a laundry.
It was a small laundry when he went into it but Dexter made a
specialty of learning how the English washed fine woollen golf-stockings
without shrinking them, and within a year he was catering to the trade that
wore knickerbockers. Men were insisting that their Shetland hose and sweaters
go to his laundry just as they had insisted on a caddy who could find
golf-balls. A little later he was doing their wives’ lingerie as well — and
running five branches in different parts of the city. Before he was
twenty-seven he owned the largest string of laundries in his section of the
country. It was then that he sold out and went to New York. But the part of his
story that concerns us goes back to the days when he was making his first big
success.
When he was twenty-three Mr. Hart — one of the gray-haired men who
like to say “Now there’s a boy” — gave him a guest card to the Sherry Island
Golf Club for a week-end. So he signed his name one day on the register, and
that afternoon played golf in a foursome with Mr. Hart and Mr. Sandwood and Mr.
T. A. Hedrick. He did not consider it necessary to remark that he had once
carried Mr. Hart’s bag over this same links, and that he knew every trap and
gully with his eyes shut — but he found himself glancing at the four caddies
who trailed them, trying to catch a gleam or gesture that would remind him of
himself, that would lessen the gap which lay between his present and his past.
It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar
impressions. One minute he had the sense of being a trespasser — in the next he
was impressed by the tremendous superiority he felt toward Mr. T. A. Hedrick,
who was a bore and not even a good golfer any more.
Then, because of a ball Mr. Hart lost near the fifteenth green, an
enormous thing happened. While they were searching the stiff grasses of the
rough there was a clear call of “Fore!” from behind a hill in their rear. And
as they all turned abruptly from their search a bright new ball sliced abruptly
over the hill and caught Mr. T. A. Hedrick in the abdomen.
“By Gad!” cried Mr. T. A. Hedrick, “they ought to put some of
these crazy women off the course. It’s getting to be outrageous.”
A head and a voice came up together over the hill:
“Do you mind if we go through?”
“You hit me in the stomach!” declared Mr. Hedrick wildly.
“Did I?” The girl approached the group of men. “I’m sorry. I
yelled ‘Fore!’”
Her glance fell casually on each of the men — then scanned the fairway
for her ball.
“Did I bounce into the rough?”
It was impossible to determine whether this question was ingenuous
or malicious. In a moment, however, she left no doubt, for as her partner came
up over the hill she called cheerfully:
“Here I am! I’d have gone on the green except that I hit
something.”
As she took her stance for a short mashie shot, Dexter looked at
her closely. She wore a blue gingham dress, rimmed at throat and shoulders with
a white edging that accentuated her tan. The quality of exaggeration, of
thinness, which had made her passionate eyes and down-turning mouth absurd at
eleven, was gone now. She was arrestingly beautiful. The color in her cheeks
was centered like the color in a picture — it was not a “high” color, but a son
of fluctuating and feverish warmth, so shaded that it seemed at any moment it
would recede and disappear. This color and the mobility of her mouth gave a
continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality —
balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes.
She swung her mashie impatiently and without interest, pitching
the ball into a sand-pit on the other side of the green. With a quick,
insincere smile and a careless “Thank you!” she went on after it.
“That Judy Jones!” remarked Mr. Hedrick on the next tee, as they
waited — some moments — for her to play on ahead.“All she needs is to be turned
up and spanked for six months and then to be married off to an old-fashioned
cavalry captain.”
“My God, she’s good-looking!” said Mr. Sandwood, who was just over
thirty.
“Good-looking!” cried Mr. Hedrick contemptuously, “she always
looks as if she wanted to be kissed! Turning those big cow-eyes on every calf
in town!”
It was doubtful if Mr. Hedrick intended a reference to the
maternal instinct.
“She’d play pretty good golf if she’d try,” said Mr. Sandwood.
“She has no form,” said Mr. Hedrick solemnly.
“She has a nice figure,” said Mr. Sandwood.
“Better thank the Lord she doesn’t drive a swifter ball,” said Mr.
Hart, winking at Dexter.
Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of
gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of
Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the
even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the
harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a
clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on his bathing-suit and swam out to the
farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet canvas of the
springboard.
There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around
the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs
of last summer and of summers before that — songs from “Chin-Chin” and “The
Count of Luxemburg” and “The Chocolate Soldier” — and because the sound of a
piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay
perfectly quiet and listened.
The tune the piano was playing at that moment had been gay and new
five years before when Dexter was a sophomore at college. They had played it at
a prom once when he could not afford the luxury of proms, and he had stood
outside the gymnasium and listened. The sound of the tune precipitated in him a
sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what happened to him
now. It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was
magnificently attune to life and that everything about him was radiating a
brightness and a glamour he might never know again.
A low, pale oblong detached itself suddenly from the darkness of
the Island, spitting forth the reverberate sound of a racing motor-boat. Two
white streamers of cleft water rolled themselves out behind it and almost
immediately the boat was beside him, drowning out the hot tinkle of the piano
in the drone of its spray. Dexter raising himself on his arms was aware of a
figure standing at the wheel, of two dark eyes regarding him over the
lengthening space of water — then the boat had gone by and was sweeping in an
immense and purposeless circle of spray round and round in the middle of the
lake. With equal eccentricity one of the circles flattened out and headed back
toward the raft.
“Who’s that?” she called, shutting off her motor. She was so near
now that Dexter could see her bathing-suit, which consisted apparently of pink
rompers.
The nose of the boat bumped the raft, and as the latter tilted
rakishly he was precipitated toward her. With different degrees of interest
they recognized each other.
“Aren’t you one of those men we played through this afternoon?”
she demanded.
He was.
“Well, do you know how to drive a motor-boat? Because if you do I
wish you’d drive this one so I can ride on the surf-board behind. My name is
Judy Jones” — she favored him with an absurd smirk — rather, what tried to be a
smirk, for, twist her mouth as she might, it was not grotesque, it was merely
beautiful — “and I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house
there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the
dock because he says I’m his ideal.”
There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around
the lake were gleaming. Dexter sat beside Judy Jones and she explained how her
boat was driven. Then she was in the water, swimming to the floating surfboard
with a sinuous crawl. Watching her was without effort to the eye, watching a
branch waving or a sea-gull flying. Her arms, burned to butternut, moved
sinuously among the dull platinum ripples, elbow appearing first, casting the
forearm back with a cadence of falling water, then reaching out and down,
stabbing a path ahead.
They moved out into the lake; turning, Dexter saw that she was
kneeling on the low rear of the now uptilted surf-board.
“Go faster,” she called, “fast as it’ll go.”
Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray mounted
at the bow. When he looked around again the girl was standing up on the rushing
board, her arms spread wide, her eyes lifted toward the moon.
“It’s awful cold,” she shouted. “What’s your name?”
He told her.
“Well, why don’t you come to dinner to-morrow night?”
His heart turned over like the fly-wheel of the boat, and, for the
second time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life.
III
Next evening while he waited for her to come down-stairs, Dexter
peopled the soft deep summer room and the sun-porch that opened from it with
the men who had already loved Judy Jones. He knew the sort of men they were —
the men who when he first went to college had entered from the great prep
schools with graceful clothes and the deep tan of healthy summers. He had seen
that, in one sense, he was better than these men. He was newer and stronger.
Yet in acknowledging to himself that he wished his children to be like them he
was admitting that he was but the rough, strong stuff from which they eternally
sprang.
When the time had come for him to wear good clothes, he had known
who were the best tailors in America, and the best tailors in America had made
him the suit he wore this evening. He had acquired that particular reserve
peculiar to his university, that set it off from other universities. He
recognized the value to him of such a mannerism and he had adopted it; he knew
that to be careless in dress and manner required more confidence than to be
careful. But carelessness was for his children. His mother’s name had been
Krimslich. She was a Bohemian of the peasant class and she had talked broken
English to the end of her days. Her son must keep to the set patterns.
At a little after seven Judy Jones came down-stairs. She wore a
blue silk afternoon dress, and he was disappointed at first that she had not
put on something more elaborate. This feeling was accentuated when, after a
brief greeting, she went to the door of a butler’s pantry and pushing it open
called: “You can serve dinner, Martha.” He had rather expected that a butler
would announce dinner, that there would be a cocktail. Then he put these
thoughts behind him as they sat down side by side on a lounge and looked at
each other.
“Father and mother won’t be here,” she said thoughtfully.
He remembered the last time he had seen her father, and he was
glad the parents were not to be here to-night — they might wonder who he was.
He had been born in Keeble, a Minnesota village fifty miles farther north, and
he always gave Keeble as his home instead of Black Bear Village. Country towns
were well enough to come from if they weren’t inconveniently in sight and used
as footstools by fashionable lakes.
They talked of his university, which she had visited frequently
during the past two years, and of the near-by city which supplied Sherry Island
with its patrons, and whither Dexter would return next day to his prospering
laundries.
During dinner she slipped into a moody depression which gave
Dexter a feeling of uneasiness. Whatever petulance she uttered in her throaty
voice worried him. Whatever she smiled at — at him, at a chicken liver, at
nothing — it disturbed him that her smile could have no root in mirth, or even
in amusement. When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a
smile than an invitation to a kiss.
Then, after dinner, she led him out on the dark sun-porch and
deliberately changed the atmosphere.
“Do you mind if I weep a little?” she said.
“I’m afraid I’m boring you,” he responded quickly.
“You’re not. I like you. But I’ve just had a terrible afternoon.
There was a man I cared about, and this afternoon he told me out of a clear sky
that he was poor as a church-mouse. He’d never even hinted it before. Does this
sound horribly mundane?”
“Perhaps he was afraid to tell you.”
“Suppose he was,” she answered. “He didn’t start right. You see,
if I’d thought of him as poor — well, I’ve been mad about loads of poor men,
and fully intended to marry them all. But in this case, I hadn’t thought of him
that way, and my interest in him wasn’t strong enough to survive the shock. As
if a girl calmly informed her fiancé that she was a widow. He might not object
to widows, but —
“Let’s start right,” she interrupted herself suddenly. “Who are
you, anyhow?”
For a moment Dexter hesitated. Then:
“I’m nobody,” he announced. “My career is largely a matter of
futures.”
“Are you poor?”
“No,” he said frankly, “I’m probably making more money than any
man my age in the Northwest. I know that’s an obnoxious remark, but you advised
me to start right.”
There was a pause. Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth
drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him, looking up
into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter’s throat, and he waited breathless for the
experiment, facing the unpredictable compound that would form mysteriously from
the elements of their lips. Then he saw — she communicated her excitement to
him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment.
They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand
more surfeit . . . kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back
nothing at all.
It did not take him many hours to decide that he had wanted Judy
Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.
IV
It began like that — and continued, with varying shades of
intensity, on such a note right up to the dénouement. Dexter surrendered a part
of himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had
ever come in contact. Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the full
pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of method, no jockeying for
position or premeditation of effects — there was a very little mental side to
any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious to the highest degree of her
physical loveliness. Dexter had no desire to change her. Her deficiencies were
knit up with a passionate energy that transcended and justified them.
When, as Judy’s head lay against his shoulder that first night,
she whispered, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Last night I thought I
was in love with a man and to-night I think I’m in love with you — " — it
seemed to him a beautiful and romantic thing to say. It was the exquisite
excitability that for the moment he controlled and owned. But a week later he
was compelled to view this same quality in a different light. She took him in
her roadster to a picnic supper, and after supper she disappeared, likewise in
her roadster, with another man. Dexter became enormously upset and was scarcely
able to be decently civil to the other people present. When she assured him
that she had not kissed the other man, he knew she was lying — yet he was glad
that she had taken the trouble to lie to him.
He was, as he found before the summer ended, one of a varying
dozen who circulated about her. Each of them had at one time been favored above
all others — about half of them still basked in the solace of occasional
sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long
neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to tag
along for a year or so longer. Judy made these forays upon the helpless and
defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything
mischievous in what she did.
When a new man came to town every one dropped out — dates were
automatically cancelled.
The helpless part of trying to do anything about it was that she
did it all herself. She was not a girl who could be“won” in the kinetic sense —
she was proof against cleverness, she was proof against charm; if any of these
assailed her too strongly she would immediately resolve the affair to a
physical basis, and under the magic of her physical splendor the strong as well
as the brilliant played her game and not their own. She was entertained only by
the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm.
Perhaps from so much youthful love, so many youthful lovers, she had come, in
self-defense, to nourish herself wholly from within.
Succeeding Dexter’s first exhilaration came restlessness and dissatisfaction.
The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her was opiate rather than tonic. It
was fortunate for his work during the winter that those moments of ecstasy came
infrequently. Early in their acquaintance it had seemed for a while that there
was a deep and spontaneous mutual attraction — that first August, for example —
three days of long evenings on her dusky veranda, of strange wan kisses through
the late afternoon, in shadowy alcoves or behind the protecting trellises of
the garden arbors, of mornings when she was fresh as a dream and almost shy at
meeting him in the clarity of the rising day. There was all the ecstasy of an
engagement about it, sharpened by his realization that there was no engagement.
It was during those three days that, for the first time, he had asked her to
marry him. She said “maybe some day,” she said “kiss me,” she said “I’d like to
marry you,” she said “I love you” — she said — nothing.
The three days were interrupted by the arrival of a New York man
who visited at her house for half September. To Dexter’s agony, rumor engaged
them. The man was the son of the president of a great trust company. But at the
end of a month it was reported that Judy was yawning. At a dance one night she
sat all evening in a motor-boat with a local beau, while the New Yorker
searched the club for her frantically. She told the local beau that she was
bored with her visitor, and two days later he left. She was seen with him at
the station, and it was reported that he looked very mournful indeed.
On this note the summer ended. Dexter was twenty-four, and he
found himself increasingly in a position to do as he wished. He joined two
clubs in the city and lived at one of them. Though he was by no means an
integral part of the stag-lines at these clubs, he managed to be on hand at
dances where Judy Jones was likely to appear. He could have gone out socially
as much as he liked — he was an eligible young man, now, and popular with
down-town fathers. His confessed devotion to Judy Jones had rather solidified
his position. But he had no social aspirations and rather despised the dancing
men who were always on tap for the Thursday or Saturday parties and who filled
in at dinners with the younger married set. Already he was playing with the
idea of going East to New York. He wanted to take Judy Jones with him. No
disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion
as to her desirability.
Remember that — for only in the light of it can what he did for
her be understood.
Eighteen months after he first met Judy Jones he became engaged to
another girl. Her name was Irene Scheerer, and her father was one of the men
who had always believed in Dexter. Irene was light-haired and sweet and
honorable, and a little stout, and she had two suitors whom she pleasantly
relinquished when Dexter formally asked her to marry him.
Summer, fall, winter, spring, another summer, another fall — so
much he had given of his active life to the incorrigible lips of Judy Jones.
She had treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with
indifference, with contempt. She had inflicted on him the innumerable little
slights and indignities possible in such a case — as if in revenge for having
ever cared for him at all. She had beckoned him and yawned at him and beckoned
him again and he had responded often with bitterness and narrowed eyes. She had
brought him ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit. She had caused
him untold inconvenience and not a little trouble. She had insulted him, and
she had ridden over him, and she had played his interest in her against his
interest in his work — for fun. She had done everything to him except to
criticise him — this she had not done — it seemed to him only because it might
have sullied the utter indifference she manifested and sincerely felt toward
him.
When autumn had come and gone again it occurred to him that he
could not have Judy Jones. He had to beat this into his mind but he convinced
himself at last. He lay awake at night for a while and argued it over. He told
himself the trouble and the pain she had caused him, he enumerated her glaring
deficiencies as a wife. Then he said to himself that he loved her, and after a
while he fell asleep. For a week, lest he imagined her husky voice over the
telephone or her eyes opposite him at lunch, he worked hard and late, and at
night he went to his office and plotted out his years.
At the end of a week he went to a dance and cut in on her once.
For almost the first time since they had met he did not ask her to sit out with
him or tell her that she was lovely. It hurt him that she did not miss these
things — that was all. He was not jealous when he saw that there was a new man
to-night. He had been hardened against jealousy long before.
He stayed late at the dance. He sat for an hour with Irene
Scheerer and talked about books and about music. He knew very little about
either. But he was beginning to be master of his own time now, and he had a
rather priggish notion that he — the young and already fabulously successful
Dexter Green — should know more about such things.
That was in October, when he was twenty-five. In January, Dexter
and Irene became engaged. It was to be announced in June, and they were to be
married three months later.
The Minnesota winter prolonged itself interminably, and it was
almost May when the winds came soft and the snow ran down into Black Bear Lake
at last. For the first time in over a year Dexter was enjoying a certain
tranquility of spirit. Judy Jones had been in Florida, and afterward in Hot
Springs, and somewhere she had been engaged, and somewhere she had broken it
off. At first, when Dexter had definitely given her up, it had made him sad
that people still linked them together and asked for news of her, but when he
began to be placed at dinner next to Irene Scheerer people didn’t ask him about
her any more — they told him about her. He ceased to be an authority on her.
May at last. Dexter walked the streets at night when the darkness
was damp as rain, wondering that so soon, with so little done, so much of
ecstasy had gone from him. May one year back had been marked by Judy’s
poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence — it had been one of those rare
times when he fancied she had grown to care for him. That old penny’s worth of
happiness he had spent for this bushel of content. He knew that Irene would be
no more than a curtain spread behind him, a hand moving among gleaming
tea-cups, a voice calling to children . . . fire and loveliness were gone, the
magic of nights and the wonder of the varying hours and seasons . . . slender
lips, down-turning, dropping to his lips and bearing him up into a heaven of
eyes. . . . The thing was deep in him. He was too strong and alive for it to
die lightly.
In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on
the thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at Irene’s
house. Their engagement was to be announced in a week now — no one would be
surprised at it. And to-night they would sit together on the lounge at the
University Club and look on for an hour at the dancers. It gave him a sense of
solidity to go with her — she was so sturdily popular, so intensely “great.”
He mounted the steps of the brownstone house and stepped inside.
“Irene,” he called.
Mrs. Scheerer came out of the living-room to meet him.
“Dexter,” she said, “Irene’s gone up-stairs with a splitting
headache. She wanted to go with you but I made her go to bed.”
“Nothing serious, I— ”
“Oh, no. She’s going to play golf with you in the morning. You can
spare her for just one night, can’t you, Dexter?”
Her smile was kind. She and Dexter liked each other. In the
living-room he talked for a moment before he said good-night.
Returning to the University Club, where he had rooms, he stood in
the doorway for a moment and watched the dancers. He leaned against the
door-post, nodded at a man or two — yawned.
“Hello, darling.”
The familiar voice at his elbow startled him. Judy Jones had left
a man and crossed the room to him — Judy Jones, a slender enamelled doll in
cloth of gold: gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper points at her
dress’s hem. The fragile glow of her face seemed to blossom as she smiled at
him. A breeze of warmth and light blew through the room. His hands in the
pockets of his dinner-jacket tightened spasmodically. He was filled with a
sudden excitement.
“When did you get back?” he asked casually.
“Come here and I’ll tell you about it.”
She turned and he followed her. She had been away — he could have
wept at the wonder of her return. She had passed through enchanted streets,
doing things that were like provocative music. All mysterious happenings, all
fresh and quickening hopes, had gone away with her, come back with her now.
She turned in the doorway.
“Have you a car here? If you haven’t, I have.”
“I have a coupĂ©.”
In then, with a rustle of golden cloth. He slammed the door. Into
so many cars she had stepped — like this — like that— her back against the
leather, so — her elbow resting on the door — waiting. She would have been
soiled long since had there been anything to soil her — except herself — but
this was her own self outpouring.
With an effort he forced himself to start the car and back into
the street. This was nothing, he must remember. She had done this before, and
he had put her behind him, as he would have crossed a bad account from his
books.
He drove slowly down-town and, affecting abstraction, traversed
the deserted streets of the business section, peopled here and there where a
movie was giving out its crowd or where consumptive or pugilistic youth lounged
in front of pool halls. The clink of glasses and the slap of hands on the bars
issued from saloons, cloisters of glazed glass and dirty yellow light.
She was watching him closely and the silence was embarrassing, yet
in this crisis he could find no casual word with which to profane the hour. At
a convenient turning he began to zigzag back toward the University Club.
“Have you missed me?” she asked suddenly.
“Everybody missed you.”
He wondered if she knew of Irene Scheerer. She had been back only
a day — her absence had been almost contemporaneous with his engagement.
“What a remark!” Judy laughed sadly — without sadness. She looked
at him searchingly. He became absorbed in the dashboard.
“You’re handsomer than you used to be,” she said thoughtfully.
“Dexter, you have the most rememberable eyes.”
He could have laughed at this, but he did not laugh. It was the
sort of thing that was said to sophomores. Yet it stabbed at him.
“I’m awfully tired of everything, darling.” She called every one
darling, endowing the endearment with careless, individual comraderie. “I wish
you’d marry me.”
The directness of this confused him. He should have told her now
that he was going to marry another girl, but he could not tell her. He could as
easily have sworn that he had never loved her.
“I think we’d get along,” she continued, on the same note, “unless
probably you’ve forgotten me and fallen in love with another girl.”
Her confidence was obviously enormous. She had said, in effect,
that she found such a thing impossible to believe, that if it were true he had
merely committed a childish indiscretion — and probably to show off. She would
forgive him, because it was not a matter of any moment but rather something to
be brushed aside lightly.
“Of course you could never love anybody but me,” she continued. “I
like the way you love me. Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last year?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten.”
“Neither have I!”
Was she sincerely moved — or was she carried along by the wave of
her own acting?
“I wish we could be like that again,” she said, and he forced
himself to answer:
“I don’t think we can.”
“I suppose not. . . . I hear you’re giving Irene Scheerer a
violent rush.”
There was not the faintest emphasis on the name, yet Dexter was
suddenly ashamed.
“Oh, take me home,” cried Judy suddenly; “I don’t want to go back
to that idiotic dance — with those children.”
Then, as he turned up the street that led to the residence
district, Judy began to cry quietly to herself. He had never seen her cry
before.
The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up
around them, he stopped his coupé in front of the great white bulk of the
Mortimer Joneses house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the splendor of the
damp moonlight. Its solidity startled him. The strong walls, the steel of the
girders, the breadth and beam and pomp of it were there only to bring out the
contrast with the young beauty beside him. It was sturdy to accentuate her
slightness — as if to show what a breeze could be generated by a butterfly’s wing.
He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if
he moved he would find her irresistibly in his arms. Two tears had rolled down
her wet face and trembled on her upper lip.
“I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why
can’t I be happy?” Her moist eyes tore at his stability — her mouth turned
slowly downward with an exquisite sadness: “I’d like to marry you if you’ll
have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I’m not worth having, but I’ll be so
beautiful for you, Dexter.”
A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness
fought on his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying
off with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor. This was
his girl who was speaking, his own, his beautiful, his pride.
“Won’t you come in?” He heard her draw in her breath sharply.
Waiting.
“All right,” his voice was trembling, “I’ll come in.”
V
It was strange that neither when it was over nor a long time
afterward did he regret that night. Looking at it from the perspective of ten
years, the fact that Judy’s flare for him endured just one month seemed of
little importance. Nor did it matter that by his yielding he subjected himself
to a deeper agony in the end and gave serious hurt to Irene Scheerer and to
Irene’s parents, who had befriended him. There was nothing sufficiently
pictorial about Irene’s grief to stamp itself on his mind.
Dexter was at bottom hard-minded. The attitude of the city on his
action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city,
but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was
completely indifferent to popular opinion. Nor, when he had seen that it was no
use, that he did not possess in himself the power to move fundamentally or to
hold Judy Jones, did he bear any malice toward her. He loved her, and he would
love her until the day he was too old for loving — but he could not have her.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had
tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
Even the ultimate falsity of the grounds upon which Judy
terminated the engagement that she did not want to “take him away” from Irene —
Judy, who had wanted nothing else — did not revolt him. He was beyond any
revulsion or any amusement.
He went East in February with the intention of selling out his
laundries and settling in New York — but the war came to America in March and
changed his plans. He returned to the West, handed over the management of the
business to his partner, and went into the first officers’ training-camp in
late April. He was one of those young thousands who greeted the war with a
certain amount of relief, welcoming the liberation from webs of tangled
emotion.
VI
This story is not his biography, remember, although things creep
into it which have nothing to do with those dreams he had when he was young. We
are almost done with them and with him now. There is only one more incident to
be related here, and it happens seven years farther on.
It took place in New York, where he had done well — so well that
there were no barriers too high for him. He was thirty-two years old, and,
except for one flying trip immediately after the war, he had not been West in
seven years. A man named Devlin from Detroit came into his office to see him in
a business way, and then and there this incident occurred, and closed out, so
to speak, this particular side of his life.
“So you’re from the Middle West,” said the man Devlin with
careless curiosity. “That’s funny — I thought men like you were probably born
and raised on Wall Street. You know — wife of one of my best friends in Detroit
came from your city. I was an usher at the wedding.”
Dexter waited with no apprehension of what was coming.
“Judy Simms,” said Devlin with no particular interest; “Judy Jones
she was once.”
“Yes, I knew her.” A dull impatience spread over him. He had
heard, of course, that she was married — perhaps deliberately he had heard no
more.
“Awfully nice girl,” brooded Devlin meaninglessly, “I’m sort of
sorry for her.”
“Why?” Something in Dexter was alert, receptive, at once.
“Oh, Lud Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don’t mean he
ill-uses her, but he drinks and runs around — ”
“Doesn’t she run around?”
“No. Stays at home with her kids.”
“Oh.”
“She’s a little too old for him,” said Devlin.
“Too old!” cried Dexter. “Why, man, she’s only twenty-seven.”
He was possessed with a wild notion of rushing out into the
streets and taking a train to Detroit. He rose to his feet spasmodically.
“I guess you’re busy,” Devlin apologized quickly. “I didn’t
realize — ”
“No, I’m not busy,” said Dexter, steadying his voice. “I’m not
busy at all. Not busy at all. Did you say she was —twenty-seven? No, I said she
was twenty-seven.”
“Yes, you did,” agreed Devlin dryly.
“Go on, then. Go on.”
“What do you mean?”
“About Judy Jones.”
Devlin looked at him helplessly.
“Well, that’s — I told you all there is to it. He treats her like
the devil. Oh, they’re not going to get divorced or anything. When he’s
particularly outrageous she forgives him. In fact, I’m inclined to think she
loves him. She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit.”
A pretty girl! The phrase struck Dexter as ludicrous.
“Isn’t she — a pretty girl, any more?”
“Oh, she’s all right.”
“Look here,” said Dexter, sitting down suddenly, “I don’t
understand. You say she was a ‘pretty girl’ and now you say she’s ‘all right.’
I don’t understand what you mean — Judy Jones wasn’t a pretty girl, at all. She
was a great beauty. Why, I knew her, I knew her. She was — ”
Devlin laughed pleasantly.
“I’m not trying to start a row,” he said. “I think Judy’s a nice
girl and I like her. I can’t understand how a man like Lud Simms could fall
madly in love with her, but he did.” Then he added: “Most of the women like
her.”
Dexter looked closely at Devlin, thinking wildly that there must
be a reason for this, some insensitivity in the man or some private malice.
“Lots of women fade just like that,” Devlin snapped his
fingers. “You must have seen it happen. Perhaps I’ve forgotten how pretty she
was at her wedding. I’ve seen her so much since then, you see. She has nice
eyes.”
A sort of dulness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in
his life he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing loudly
at something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it was or why it was
funny. When, in a few minutes, Devlin went he lay down on his lounge and looked
out the window at the New York sky-line into which the sun was sinking in dull
lovely shades of pink and gold.
He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was
invulnerable at last — but he knew that he had just lost something more, as
surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes.
The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort
of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a
picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and
gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft
down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy
and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no
longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.
For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his
face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and
moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away
and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone
down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all
time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of
illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had
flourished.
“Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now
that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I
cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”