She touched him on the arm and looked up at him with dancing eyes and a teasing smile. "Not this time, Marty," she said, and was across the sidewalk in a bound. "Quick," she said to Palgrave. "Quick!" And he, catching the idea with something more than amusement, sprang into the car after her, and away they went.
A duet of laughter hung briefly in the air.
With all the blood in his head, Martin, coming out of utter surprise, made a dash for the retreating car, collided with the porter and stood ruefully and self-consciously over the burly figure that had gone down with a crash upon the pavement.
It was no use. Joan had been one too many for him. What, in any case, was the good of trying to follow? She preferred Palgrave. She had no use, at that moment, for home. She was bored at the mere idea of talking things over. She was not serious. She refused to be faced up with seriousness. She was like a precocious child who snapped her fingers at authority and pursued the policy of the eel at the approach of discipline. What had she cried out that night in the dark with her chin tilted up and her arms thrown out? "I shall go joy-riding in that huge round-about. If I can get anybody to pay my score, good. If not, I'll pay it myself, whatever it costs. My motto's going to be 'A good time as long as I can get it, and who cares for the price!'"
Martin helped the porter to his feet, stanched his flow of County Kerry reproaches with a ten-dollar bill and went back into the Crystal Room. He had gone there half an hour ago with a party of young people to kill loneliness and forget a bad hour of despair. His friend, Howard Oldershaw, who had breezed him out of the reading room of the Yale Club, was one of the party. He was in the first flush of speed-breaking and knew the town and its midnight haunts. He had offered to show Martin the way to get rid of depression. Right! He should be put to the test. Two could play the "Who cares?" game; and Martin, cut to the quick, angry and resisted, would enter his name. Not again would he put himself in the way of being laughed at and ridiculed and turned down, teased and tantalized and made a fool of.
Patience and gentleness--to what end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp; he had married a butterfly. Why continue to play the martyr and follow the fruitless path of rectitude? Hadn't she said, "I can only live once, and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go?" He could only live once, and if life was not to spin with her, let it spin without her. "Who cares?" he said to himself. "Who the devil cares?" He gave up his coat and hat, and went back into that room of false joy and syncopation.
It was one o'clock when he stood in the street once more, hot and wined and careless. "Let's hit it up," he said to Oldershaw as the car moved away with the sisters and cousins of the other two men. "I haven't started yet."
The red-haired, roistering Oldershaw, newly injected with the virus of the Great White Way, clapped him on the back. "Bully for you, old son," he said. "I'm in the mood to paint the little old town. I left my car round the corner in charge of a down-at-heel night-bird. Come on. Let's go and see if he's pinched it."
It was one of those Italian semi-racing cars with a body which gave it the naked appearance of a muscular Russian dancer dressed in a skin and a pair of bangles. The night-bird, one of the large army of city gypsies who hang on to life by the skin of their teeth, was sitting on the running board with his arms folded across his shirtless chest, smoking a salvaged cigar, dreaming, probably, of hot sausages and coffee. He afforded a striking illustration of the under dog cringing contentedly at the knees of wealth.
"Good man," said Oldershaw, paying him generously. "Slip aboard, Martin, and I'll introduce you to one of the choicest dives I know."
But the introduction was not to be effected that night, at any rate. Driving the car as though it were a monoplane in a clear sky, with an open throttle that awoke the echoes, Oldershaw charged into Fifth Avenue and caught the bonnet of a taxicab that was going uptown. There was a crash, a scream, a rending of metal. And when Martin picked himself up with a bruised elbow and a curious sensation of having stopped a punching bag with his face, he saw Oldershaw bending over the crumpled body of the taxi driver and heard a girl with red lips and a small white hat calling on Heaven for retribution.
"Some men oughtn't to be trusted with machinery," said Oldershaw with his inevitable grin. "If I can yank my little pet out of this buckled-up lump of stuff, I'll drive that poor chap to the nearest hospital. Look after the angel, Martin, and give my name and address to the policeman. As this is my third attempt to kill myself this month, things ought to settle down into humdrum monotony for a bit now."
Martin went over to the girl. "I hope you're not hurt?" he asked.
"Hurt?" she cried out hysterically, feeling herself all over. "Of course I'm hurt. I'm crippled for life. My backbone's broken; I shall have water on both knees, a glass eye and a mouth full of store teeth. But you don't care, you Hun. You like it."
And on she went, at the top of her voice, in an endless flow of farce and tragedy, crying and laughing, examining herself with eager hands, disbelieving more and more in the fact that she was still in the only world that mattered to her.
Having succeeded in backing his dented car out of the debris, Oldershaw leaped out. His face had been cut by the glass of the broken windshield. Blood was trickling down his fat, good-natured face. His hat was smashed and looked like that of the tramp cyclist of the vaudeville stage. "All my fault, old man," he said in his best irrepressible manner, as a policeman bore down upon him. "Help me to hike our prostrate friend into my car, and I'll whip him off to a hospital. He's only had the stuffing knocked out of him. It's no worse than that. . . . That's fine. Big chap, isn't he--weighs a ton. I'll get off right away, and my friend there will give you all you want to know. So long." And off he went, one of his front wheels wabbling foolishly.
The policeman was not Irish or German-American. He was therefore neither loud nor browbeating. He was dry, quiet and accurate, and it seemed to Martin that either he didn't enjoy being dressed in a little brief authority or was a misanthrope, eager to return to his noiseless and solitary tramp under the April stars. Martin gave him Oldershaw's full name and address and his own; and the girl, still shrill and shattered, gave hers, after protesting that all automobiles ought to be put in a gigantic pile and scrapped, that all harum-scarum young men should be clapped in bed at ten o'clock and that all policemen should be locked up in their stations to play dominoes. "If it'll do you any good to know it," she said finally, "it's Susie Capper, commonly called 'Tootles.' And I tell you what it is. If you come snooping round my place to get me before the beak, I'll scream and kick, so help me Bob, I will." There was an English cockney twang in her voice.
The policeman left her in the middle of a paean, with the wounded taxi and Martin, and the light of a lamp-post throwing up the unnatural red of her lips on a pretty little white face. He had probably gone to call up the taxicab company.
Then she turned to Martin. "The decent thing for you to do, Mr. Nut, is to see me home," she said. "I'm blowed if I'm going to face any more attempts at murder alone. My word, what a life!"
"Come along, then," said Martin, and he put his hand under her elbow. That amazing avenue, which had the appearance of a great, deep cut down the middle of an uneven mountain, was almost deserted. From the long line of street lamps intermittent patches of light were reflected as though in glass. The night and the absence of thickly crawling motors and swarming crowds gave it dignity. A strange, incongruous Oriental note was struck by the deep red of velvet hangings thrown up by the lights in a furniture dealer's shop on the second floor of a white building.
"Look for a row of women's ugly wooden heads painted by some one suffering from delirium tremens," said Miss Susie Capper as they turned down West Forty-sixth Street. "It's a dressmaker's, although you might think it was an asylum for dope fiends. I've got a bedroom, sitter and bath on the top floor. The house is a rabbit warren of bedrooms, sitters and baths, and in every one of them there's some poor devil trying to squeeze a little kindness out of fate. That wretched taxi driver! He may have a wife waiting for him. Do you think that red-haired feller's got to the hospital yet? He had a nice cut on his own silly face--and serve him right! I hope it'll teach him that he hasn't bought the blooming world--but of course it won't. He's the sort that never gets taught anything, worse luck! Nobody spanked him when he was young and soft. Come on up, and you shall taste my scrambled eggs. I'll show you what a forgiving little soul I am."
She laughed, ran her eyes quickly over Martin, and opened the door with a latchkey. Half a dozen small letter boxes were fastened to the wall, with cards in their slots.
"Who the devil cares?" said Martin to himself, and he followed the girl up the narrow, ill-lighted staircase covered with shabby carpet. Two or three inches of white stockings gleamed above the drab uppers of her high-heeled boots. Outside the open door of a room on the first floor there was a line of milk bottles, and Martin sighted a man in shirt sleeves, cooking sausages on a small gas jet in a cubby-hole. He looked up, and a cheery smile broke out on his clean-shaven face. There was brown grease paint on his collar. "Hello, Tootles," he called out.
"Hello, Laddy," she said. "How'd it go to-night?"
"Fine. Best second night in the history of the theater. Come in and have a bite."
"Can't. Got company."
And up they went, the aroma following.
A young woman in a sky-blue peignoir scuttled across the next landing, carrying a bottle of beer in each hand. There was a smell of onions and hot cheese. "What ho, Tootles," she said.
"What ho, Irene. Is it true they've put your notice up?"
"Yep, the dirty dogs! Twelve weeks' rehearsals and eight nights' playing! Me for the novelties at Gimbel's, if this goes on."
A phonograph in another room ground out an air from "Boheme."
They mounted again. "Here's me," said Miss Capper, waving her hand to a man in a dirty dressing gown who was standing on the threshold of the front apartment, probably to achieve air. The room behind him was foggy with tobacco smoke which rose from four men playing cards. He himself was conspicuously drunk and would have spoken if he had been able. As it was, he nodded owlishly and waggled his fingers.
The girl threw open her door and turned up the light. "England, Home and Beauty," she said. "Excuse me while I dress the ship."
Seizing a pair of corsets that sprawled loosely on the center table, she rammed them under a not very pristine cushion on the sofa.
Martin burst out laughing. The Crystal Room wine was still in his head. "Very nippy!" he said.
"Have to be nippy in this life, believe me. Give me a minute to powder my nose and murmur a prayer of thanksgivin', and then I'll set the festive board and show you how we used to scramble eggs in Shaftesbury Avenue."
"Right," said Martin, getting out of his overcoat. How about it? Was this one way of making the little old earth spin?
Susie Capper went into a bedroom even smaller than the sitting room, turned up the light over her dressing table and took off her little white hat. From where Martin stood, he could see in the looking- glass the girl's golden bobbed hair, pretty oval face with too red lips and round white neck. There, it was obvious, stood a little person feminine from the curls around her ears to the hole in one of her stockings, and as highly and gladly sexed as a purring cat.
"Buck up, Tootles," cried Martin. "Where do you keep the frying pan?"
She turned and gave him another searching look, this time of marked approval. "My word, what a kid you look in the light!" she said. "No one would take you for a blooming road-hog. Well, who knows? You and I may have been brought together like this to work out one of Fate's little games. This may be the beginning of a side-street romance, eh?"
And she chuckled at the word and turned her nose into a small snow- capped hill.
IV
Pagliacci was to be followed as usual by "Cavalleria." It was the swan song of the opera season.
In a part that he acted as well as he sang, Caruso had been permitted finally to retire, wringing wet, to his dressing room. With all the dignity of a man of genuine feeling and sensitiveness he had taken call after call on the fall of the curtain and stood bent almost double before the increasing breakers of applause. Once more he had done his best in a role which demanded everything that he had of voice and passion, comedy and tragedy. Once more, although his soul was with his comrades in battle, he had played the fool and broken his heart for the benefit of his good friends in front.
In her box on the first tier Mrs. Cooper Jekyll, in a dress imaginatively designed to display a considerable quantity of her figure, was surrounded by a party which attracted many glasses. Alice Palgrave was there, pretty and scrupulously neat, even perhaps a little prim, her pearls as big as marbles. Mrs. Alan Hosack made a most effective picture with her black hair and white skin in a geranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life. Mrs. Noel d'Oyly lent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely but all too ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel intimacy. Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with diamonds glistening in her hair like dew. Of the four men, Gilbert Palgrave, standing where he could be seen, might have been an illustration by Du Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen. He made the other three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type, appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were--the young old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of the male and female spider.
