The Gay Cockade
robbed me of my future, of the little home, my fine, strong
husband. He robbed me of my woman's heritage of a child in my arms.
"And in return he gave me--nothing. I have found in the years that
I have been with him that he likes to be admired and looked up to
by pretty women. He likes to mold us into something exquisite and
ornamental, he likes to feel that he has molded us. He likes to see
our blushes. All these years that I have been with him, he has
liked to feel that I looked upon him as the ideal toward which all
my girlish dreams tended.
"He is not in love with me, and I am not in love with him. But he
has always known that if he had been free and had wooed me, I
should have felt that King Cophetua had come to the beggar maid.
Yet, too late, I can see that if he had been free he would never
have wooed me. His ambition would have carried him up and beyond
anything I can ever hope to be, and he would have sought some woman
of his own circle who would have contributed to his material
success.
"And now he is trying to spoil your life, Nannie--to make you
discontented with your future with Dick. You look at him and see in
your life some day a Prince Charming. But I tell you this, Nannie,
that Prince Charming will never come. And after a time all you will
have to show for the years that you have spent in the office will
be just a pretty room, a few bits of wood and leather and bronze in
exchange for warm, human happiness, clinging hands, a husband like
Dick, who adores you, who comes home at night, eager--for you!
"You can have all this--and I have lost it. And there isn't much
ahead of me. I shan't always be ornamental, and then Mr. Knox will
let me drop out of his life, as he has let others drop out. And
there'll be loneliness and old age and--nothing else.
"Oh, Nannie, I want you to marry Dick. I want you to know that all
the rest is dust and ashes. I feel tired and old; and when I think
of your youth, and beauty, I want Dick to have it, not Mr. Knox,
who will flatter and--forget.
"Tear this letter up, Nannie. It hasn't been easy to write. I don't
want anybody but you to read it."
But Nannie did not tear it up.
She tucked it in her bag and went to telephone to Dick.
And would he meet her on the corner under the street lamp that night
when she came home from the office? She had something to tell him.
Dick met Nannie, and presently they pursued their rapturous way. A
little later Tommy Jackson passed by. Something caught his eye.
A bit of white paper.
He stooped and picked it up. It was Mary's letter to Nannie. Nannie had
cried into her little handkerchief while she talked to Dick, and in
getting the handkerchief out of the bag the letter had come with it and
had dropped unnoticed to the ground.
It had been years since Tommy had seen any of Mary's writing. A sentence
caught his eye, and he read straight through. After all, there are
things permitted an officer of the law which might be unseemly in the
average citizen.
And when he had read, Tommy began to say things beneath his breath. And
the chances are that had Kingdon Knox appeared at that moment things
would have fared badly with him.
But it was Mary Barker who came. She had under her arm in a paper
parcel the fat doll with the blond curls and the blue socks. She did not
see Tommy until she was almost upon him.
Then she said: "What are you doing here, Tommy?"
"Why shouldn't I be here?"
"This isn't your beat."
"It has been my beat since two weeks ago. I've seen you go by every
night, Mary."
She stood looking up at him. And he looked down at her; and so, of
course, their gaze met, and something that she saw in Tommy's eyes made
Mary's overflow.
"Mary, darling," said Tommy tenderly.
"You said you wouldn't forgive me."
"That was fifteen years ago."
"Tommy, I'm sorry."
Tommy stood very straight as became an officer of the law with, the eyes
of the world upon him.
"May," he said, "I just read your letter to Nannie. She dropped it. If
I'd known the things in that letter fifteen years ago I'd have stayed on
my job until I got you. But I thought you didn't care."
"I thought so too," said Mary.
"But the letter told me that you wanted a husband's loving heart and a
strong arm," said Tommy, "and, please God, you are going to have them,
Mary. And now you run along, girl, dear. I can't be making love when I'm
on duty. But I'll come and kiss you at nine."
So Mary ran along, and her heart sang. And when she got home she
unwrapped the fat doll and kissed every curl of her, and she set her
under the lovely lamp; and then she got a long box and put something in
it and wrapped it and addressed it to Kingdon Knox.
And after that she went to the window and stood there, watching until
she saw Tommy coming.
And the next morning when Kingdon Knox found the long box on his desk,
addressed in Mary's handwriting, he thought it was a Christmas present,
and he opened it, smiling.
But his smile died as he read the note which lay on top of a string of
jade beads:
"I am sending them back, Mr. Knox, with my resignation. I should
never have taken them. But somehow you made me feel that I was a
sort of fairy princess, and that jade beads belonged to me, and
everything beautiful, and that some day life would bring them. But
life isn't that, and you knew it and I didn't. Life is just warm
human happiness, and a home, and work for those we love. And so,
after all, I am going to marry Tommy. And Nannie is going to marry
Dick. In a way it is a happy ending, and in a way it isn't, because
I've grown away from the kind of life I must live with Tommy, and I
am afraid that in some ways I am not fitted for it. But Tommy says
that I am silly to be afraid. And in the future I am going to trust
Tommy."
And so Mary went out of Kingdon Knox's life. And on Christmas Day at the
head of a great table, with servants to the right of him and servants to
the left, he carved a mammoth turkey; and there was silver shining, and
glass sparkling and lovely women smiling, all in honor of the merry
season.
But Kingdon Knox was not merry as he thought of the jade beads and of
Mary's empty desk.
BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK
I
With the Merryman girls economy was a fine art. Money was spent by them
to preserve the family traditions. Nothing else counted. Everything was
sacrificed to the gods of yesterday.
Little Anne Merryman had shivered all her short life in the bleakness
of this domestic ideal.
"Why can't I have butter on my bread?" she had demanded in her
long-legged schoolgirl days, when she had worn her fair hair in a fat
braid down her back.
The answers had never been satisfying. Well-bred people might, Amy
indicated, go without butter. Their income was not elastic, and there
were things more important.
"What things? Amy, I'm so hungry I could eat a house."
It was these expressions of Anne's about food which shocked Amy and
Ethel.
"I'd sell my soul for a slice of roast beef."
"Anne!"
"Well, I would!"
"I--I don't see how you can be so ordinary, Anne."
"Ordinary" in the lexicon of Amy and Ethel meant "plebeian." No one in
the Merryman family had ever been so ordinary as Anne. Hitherto the
Merrymans had been content to warm themselves by the fires of their own
complacency, to feed themselves on past splendors; for the Merrymans
were as old as Norman rule in England. They had come to America with
grants from the king, they had family portraits and family silver and
family diamonds, and now in this generation of orphaned girls, two of
them at least were fighting the last battles of family pride. The
fortunes of the Merrymans had declined, and Amy and Ethel, with their
backs, as it were, to the wall, were making a final stand.
"We must have evening clothes, we must entertain our friends, we must
pay for the family pew"; this was their nervous litany. The Merrymans
had always dressed and entertained and worshiped properly; hence it was
for lace or tulle or velvet, as the case might be, that their money
went. It went, too, for the very elegant and exclusive little dinners to
which, on rare occasions, their friends were bidden; and it went for the
high place in the synagogue from which they prayed their pharisaical
prayers.
"We thank thee, Lord, that we are not as others," prayed Amy and Ethel
fervently.
But Anne prayed no such prayers. She wanted to be like other people. She
wanted to eat and drink with the multitude, she wanted a warm, warm
heart, a groaning board. She wanted snugness and coziness and comfort.
And she grew up loving these things, and hating the pale walls of their
old house in Georgetown, the family portraits, the made-over dinner
gowns that her sisters wore, her own made-over party frocks.
"Can't I have a new one, Amy?"
"It's Ethel's turn."
So it was when Anne went to a certain diplomatic reception in a
made-over satin slip, hidden by a cloud of snowy tulle, that Murray
Flint first waked to the fact of her loveliness.
He had waked ten years earlier to the loveliness of Amy, and five years
later to the beauty of Ethel.
And now here was Anne!
"She's different though," he told old Molly Winchell; "more spiritual
than the others."
It was Anne's thinness which deceived him. It was an attractive
thinness. She was pale, with red lips, and the fat fair braids had given
way to a shining knot. She wore the family pearls, and the effect was,
as Murray had said, spiritual. Anne had the look, indeed, of one who
sees heavenly visions.
Amy had never had that look. She was dark and vivid. If at thirty the
vividness was emphasized by artificial means the fault lay in Amy's
sacrifice to her social ideals, She needed the butter which she denied
herself. She needed cream, and eggs, and her doctor had told her so. And
Amy had kept the knowledge to herself.
Ethel, eating as little as Amy--or even less--had escaped, miraculously,
attenuation. At twenty she had been a plump little beauty. She was still
plump. Her neck in her low-cut gown was lovely. Her figure was not
fashionable, and she lacked Amy's look of race.
"They are all charming," Molly Winchell said. "Why don't you marry one
of them, Murray?"
"Marriage," said Murray, "would spoil it."
"Spoil what?"
Murray turned on her his fine dark eyes. "They are such darlings--the
three of them."
"You Turk!" Molly surveyed him over the top of her sapphire feather fan.
"So that's it, is it? You want them all."
Murray thought vaguely it was something like that. For ten years he had
had Amy and Ethel--Amy at twenty, fire and flame, Ethel at fifteen, with
bronze locks and lovely color. In those years Anne had promised little
in the way of beauty or charm. She had read voraciously, curled up in
chairs or on rugs, and had waked now and then to his presence and a hot
argument.
"Why don't you like Dickens, Murray?"
"Oh, his people, Anne--clowns."
"They're not!"
"Boors; beggars." He made a gesture of distaste.
"They're darlings--Mark Tapley and Ruth Pinch. Murray, if I had a
beefsteak I'd make a beefsteak pie."
There was more of pathos in this than Murray imagined. There had been no
beef on the Merryman table for many moons.
"Murray, did you ever eat tripe?"
"My dear child---"
"It sounds dee-licious when Toby Veck has it on a cold morning. And
there's the cricket on the hearth and the teakettle singing. I'd love to
hear a kettle sing like that, Murray; wouldn't you?"
But Murray wouldn't. He had the same kind of mind as Amy and Ethel. He