What Will People Say? A Novel
Happiness was bound to elude him as easily as that woman of the white
query-plume eluded him when he in his ten-cent bus pursued her in her
five-thousand-dollar landaulet. All he had of her was the back of her
hat and the number of her car--N. Y. 41508. Or was it N. Y. 85140,
or--what the devil was the number?
He had not brought away even that!
CHAPTER IV
Nothing can be lonelier than a room in even a best hotel when one is
lonesome and when one's window looks out upon crowds. Forbes had pitched
his tent at the Knickerbocker, and his view was of Longacre Square.
The Times Building stood aloft, a huddled giraffe of a building. A
fierce wind spiraled round it and played havoc with dignity. It was an
ill-mannered bumpkin wind from out of town with a rural sense of humor.
Women pressed forward into the gale, bending double and struggling with
their tormented hats and writhing skirts. Some of the men seemed to find
them an attractive spectacle till they felt their own hats caught up and
kited to the level of the fourth and fifth windows.
A flock of newsboys, as brisk as sparrows, drove a hustling trade in
recovering hats for men who were ashamed of bare heads as of a
nakedness. The gamins darted among the street-cars and automobiles,
risking their lives for dimes as sparrows for corn, and escaping death
as miraculously.
At the western end of Forty-second Street stood a space of sunset like a
scarlet canvas on exhibition. Then swift clouds erased it, and gusts of
rain went across the town in volleys of shrapnel, clearing the streets
of a mob. Everybody made for the nearest shelter.
The onset ended as quickly as it began. The stars were in the sky as
suddenly as if some one had turned on an electric switch. On the
pavements, black with wet and night, the reflected electric lights
trickled. All the pavements had a look of patent leather.
Forbes sat in the dark room in an arm-chair and muffled his bathrobe
about him, watching the electric signs working like solemn acrobats--the
girl that skipped the rope, the baby that laughed and cried, the woman
that danced on the wire, the skidless tire in the rain, the great sibyl
face that winked and advised chewing-gum as a panacea, the kitten that
tangled itself in thread, the siphons that filled the glasses--all the
automatic electric voices shouting words of light.
Forbes wanted to be among the crowds again. He could not tolerate
solitude. He resolved to go forth. It inspired him with pride to put on
his evening clothes. While he dressed he sent his silk hat to be ironed
by the hotel valet. It came back an ebon crown.
He set it on his head, tapped the top of it smartly, swaggered to the
elevator, bowed to the matronly floor clerk as to a queen, went down to
the main dining-room, and tried to look at least a duke. He was glad to
be in full dress, for the other people were. The head waiter greeted him
with respect and handed him the bill of fare with expectation.
He ordered more than he had appetite for, and tried not to blanch at the
prices.
The flowers, the shaded candles, the tapestries, the china and the glass
and silver, the impassioned violinist leading the sonorous orchestra,
all gave him that sense of royalty from which money is most easily
wooed. But the cordiality of the thing was fascinating. The whole city
seemed to be attending a great reception. New York was giving a party.
And now, indeed, he was in New York again--in it, yet not of it; a poor
relation at the wedding feast. He lingered at his solitary banquet like
a boy sent away from the table and forced to eat by himself. His
extrusion seemed to be a punishment for not being rich. But while his
funds held out to burn he would pretend.
The room emptied rapidly as the hour for opera and theater arrived. But
he lingered, not knowing where to go. He pretended to be in no hurry. He
had, indeed, more leisure than he enjoyed. Still he sat smoking and
protracting his coffee, and haughtily playing that he was not starving
for companionship.
When almost the last couple was gone he realized that he faced an
evening of dismal solitude. He realized also that a number of
kind-thoughted gentlemen had erected large structures for the
entertainment of lonely people and had engaged numbers of gifted persons
to enact stories for their diversion.
He called for his account, paid it with a large bill, and ignored the
residue with a ruinous lifting of the brows as he accepted a light for
his exotic cigar.
He helped to put false ideas in the hat-boy's head with the price he
paid for the brief storage of his hat and coat and stick. He sauntered
to the news-stand with the gracious stateliness of a czarevitch
incognito, and asked the Tyson agent:
"What's a good play to see?"
The man named over the reigning successes, and some of their titles fell
strangely pat with Forbes' humor:
"Romance," "The Poor Little Rich Girl," "Oh, Oh, Delphine!" "Peg o' My
Heart," "The Lady of the Slipper," "The Sunshine Girl."
"They're mostly about girls," Forbes smiled.
"They mostly always are," the agent grinned. "But there's others:
'Within the Law,' 'The Argyle Case,' 'The Five Frankfurters,' 'Years of
Discretion.'"
"I reckon I'd better see 'Within the Law.' I've heard a good deal about
that."
"I guess you have. It's been a sell-out for months."
"Can't I get in?"
"I'm afraid not. How many are you?"
"One."
"One? Let me see. Here's a pair ordered by a party that hasn't called
for them. Could you use them both?"
"I could put my overcoat in one seat," Forbes groaned, at this added
irony in his loneliness and penuriousness.
"I'd split the pair, but it's too late to sell the other one."
"I'll take both." Forbes sighed and waved a handsome five-dollar bill
farewell.
The boy who twirled the squirrel-cage door told him that the theater was
just down the street, and received a lavish fee for the information.
Forbes was soon in the lobby, but the first act was almost finished.
Rather than disturb the people already seated, he stood at the back,
leaning over the rail. He thrilled instantly to the speech of the
shop-girl sentenced to the penitentiary for a theft she was not guilty
of, and warning the proprietor that she would amply revenge herself when
she came back down the river. At the height of the outcry of militant
innocence Forbes heard the susurrus of robes and turned to see a small
group of later comers than himself.
At the head went something that he judged to be a woman, though all he
saw was a towering head-dress, a heap of elaborately coiffed hair, a
wreath of mist, an indescribably exquisite opera-cloak shimmering down
to an under-cascade of satin.
This tower of fabrics went along as if it were carried on a pole, and
Forbes could see no semblance of human shape or stride inside it. But he
judged that it contained a personality, for it paused to listen to
something another pile of fabrics said to it, and from both came a
snicker--or was it only a frou-frou of garments? In any case, it angered
the part of the audience adjacent. The group went down the side-aisle,
up a few steps to the little space behind the box.
From where he stood Forbes could see the usher helping them lay off
their wraps. They showed no anxiety to catch the remainder of the act,
but stood gossiping while the frantic usher waited, not daring to
reprimand them, yet dreading the noise of their incursion.
Forbes watched one of the clothes-horses stripped of its encumbrances.
From somewhere in the chaos two long-gloved arms came up; they were
strangely shapely; they made motions like swan's necks dipping into
water-lilies. A garland of fog came away, and a head on a throat
appeared, a bust set upon a heap of drapery. Then the opera-cloak
slipped off into the usher's hands. And now design emerged, a woman
stood revealed. The head and throat were seen to be attached to a scroll
of shoulders, and a figure like a column rose from the floor--strangely
columnar it was, and so slender that there was merely the slightest
inslope of waist, merely the slightest entasis at the hips.
In other periods only portions of the human outline have been followed
by the costume. The natural lines have been broken, perverted, and
caricatured by balloon sleeves, huge farthingales, or paniers like a
jennet's pack-saddles, the incredible Botocudo ideal of the bustle,
corsets like hour-glasses, concentric hoops about the legs, with
pantalets coquetting inanely at the ankles--the almost impossible facts
of fashion.
Just then the costume was hardly more of a disguise than the gold or
bronze powder smeared on by those who pose as statues at the
vaudevilles. Inside their outer wraps women were rather wall-papering
themselves than draping their forms. It was saner so, and decenter, too,
perhaps.
And yet Forbes stared at this woman as Adam must have stared at Eve when
the scales were off his eyes. Even her hair was almost all her own, and
it was coiled and parted with simple grace. Her head-dress was something
bizarre--not a tiara of diamonds, but a black crest with a pearl or two
studding it--the iridescent breast of a lyre-bird it was, though he did
not know. A cord of pearls was flung around her throat. At the peak of
each shoulder her gown began, but the two elements did not conjoin till
just in time above the breast, and just a little too late at the back.
The fabric clung lovingly to the loins, thighs, and calves, so closely
that an inverted V must be cut between the ankles to make walking
possible at all. There was a train of a fish-tail sort, a little
twitching afterthought. And so this woman-shape came forth from a
shapelessness as Aphrodite from the sea-foam.
Forbes was so startled that he felt all the chagrin of one who is caught
staring at a woman just returned from the surf in a wet bathing-suit. He
shifted his eyes from her. When he looked back she had vanished into the
crimson cavern of the box.
The other women followed her, and the men them. They seated themselves
just as the curtain fell.
And now Forbes felt at liberty to go to his own seat, found an usher to
pilot him down the aisle. He bowed and murmured "Beg pardon" and "Thank
you" to each of those who shoved back awkwardly and wonderingly to let
him in. He felt like explaining to them that he had not just arrived,
and that he really was not so foolish or so dilatory as he looked. He
put his overcoat in his extra seat and studied his program.
A voice that should have reminded him of the landaulet, but did not,
caught his ear and led his eyes to the box. He was not far from the late
arrivals.
They were attracting a deal of attention from the audience, and paying
it none. The loudness of their speech and their laughter would have
shocked him in a crowd of farmers. Coming from people of evident wealth
and familiarity with town customs, it astounded him.
He had not yet seen the face of the woman of whom he had seen so much
else. She was talking to a man in the interior of the box. Her back was
turned to the house.
It never occurred to Forbes that it might be the same back he had
followed up the Avenue. How could he have told?
That back was clothed and cloaked, and even that famous left arm was
sleeved. These shoulder-sheaths, not blades, were so astoundingly bare
that he felt ashamed to look at them. Their proprietress was evidently
not ashamed to submit them for public inspection. One might not approve
her boldness, but one could hardly fail to approve her shoulders. When
she moved or shrugged or laughed or turned to speak, their exquisite
integument creased and rippled like shaken cream.
At length the footlights went up, the curtain went up. The three women