What Will People Say? A Novel
aligned themselves in profile along the rail as if they were seated on
unseen horses. The men were mere silhouettes in the background.
The bulk of the audience was in darkness; but the people in the boxes
were illumined with a light reflected from the scenery, and it warmed
them like a dawn glowing upon peaks of snow.
And now, at last, Forbes saw the face he had watched for with such
impatience. It did not disappoint him. At first she gave him only the
profile; but that magic light of stage-craft was upon it, and once she
turned her head and cast a slow, vague look along the shadowy valley of
the audience. She could not have seen him, but he saw her and found her
so beautiful, so bewitchingly beautiful and desirable, that he caught
his breath with a stitch of pain, an ache of admiration.
Just a moment her eyes dreamed across the gloom, and she turned back to
watch the stage. It was like a parting after a tryst. Then she broke the
spell with a sudden throe of laughter. The little shoplifter and
blackmailer on the stage was describing her efforts to learn the ways of
society, the technique of pouring tea and pretending to like it. She
swore, and the audience roared. Formerly an actor could always get a
laugh by saying "damn." Now it must be a woman that swears.
Jarred back to reasonableness by the shock of laughter, Forbes looked
again to the box to see what manner of women this woman went with. One
of them was tiny but quite perfect. She had the face of a debutante
under the white hair of a matron. If her age were betrayed by her neck,
the dog-collar of pearls concealed the ravage. She sat exceedingly erect
and seemed to be cold and haughty till another splurge of slang from the
shoplifter provoked her to a laugh that was like a child's.
The other woman laughed, too, laughed large and wide. She was beautiful,
too, a Rubens ideal, drawn in liberal rotundities--cheeks, chin, throat,
bust, hips. No Cubist could have painted her, for she was like a cluster
of soap-bubbles. Her face was a great baby's.
The men were almost invisible, mere cut-outs in black and white.
None of them had the jaded look of boredom that Forbes supposed to be
the chief characteristic of New York wealth. They were as eager and
irrepressible as a box-load of children fighting over a bag of peanuts
at a circus.
One of the men leaned forward and whispered something; all the women
turned to hear. They forgot the play, though the situation was critical.
They chattered and laughed so audibly that the audience grew restive;
the people on the stage looked to be distressed.
Forbes was astonished at such bad manners from such beautiful people. He
wondered how the play could go on. He had heard of actors stepping out
of the picture to rebuke such disturbers of the peace. He expected such
an encounter now.
Then somebody in the audience hissed. Somebody called distinctly, "Shut
up!" The group turned in surprise, and received another hiss in the
face. Silence and shame quieted it instanter. The women blushed like
grown girls threatened with a spanking. Tremendous blushes ran all down
their crimson backs.
Forbes could see that they wanted to run. A kind of pluck held them.
They pretended to toss their heads with contempt, but the mob had cowed
them so completely that Forbes felt sorry for them--especially for her.
She was too pretty for a public humiliation.
When the curtain fell on the second act Forbes saw one of the men in the
box rise and leave along the side-aisle. Forbes knew the man. His name
was Ten Eyck--Murray Ten Eyck.
Forbes dreaded to repeat that voyage through the strait between knees
and seat-backs; but he had seen at last a man he knew. And the man he
knew knew the woman he wanted to know.
CHAPTER V
The women he passed glared hatpins at Forbes and groaned as they rose
and hunched back to let him by. They clutched at the wraps he
disarranged. He rumpled one elaborate hat stuck in the back of a seat,
and one silk tie that had fallen out of the wire rack he kicked under
the row ahead. He had an impulse to go after it; but when he realized
the postures and scrambles it would involve, it was too horrible an
ordeal. He pretended not to have noticed, and pressed onward.
None was so indignant as the man who had similarly climbed out for a
drink the _entr'acte_ before. Forbes knew it was a drink he had gone out
for the moment he passed him. Forbes was not going out for a drink, but
for important information.
He apologized meekly, yet continued on his course. By the time he was in
the open Ten Eyck had disappeared. He was not in the lobby, nor among
the men smoking on the sidewalk or dashing across the street to one of
the cafes where coffee could not be obtained. Forbes found his man at
last in the smoking-room below-stairs.
He was puffing a cigarette, and met Forbes' eager glance with such blank
indifference that Forbes' words of greeting stopped in his throat.
To explain his presence in the smoking-room Forbes lighted a cigar,
though he knew that he could have but a few puffs of it. And it was such
a good cigar! There can only be so many good cigars in the world.
The two men paced back and forth on crisscrossing paths as violently
oblivious of each other as the two traditional Englishmen who were cast
away on the same desert island and had never been introduced.
It was not till Murray Ten Eyck flung down his cigarette and made to
leave that Forbes mustered courage enough to speak, in his Virginian
voice:
"Pardon me, suh, but aren't you Mr. Mu'y Ten Eyck?"
"Yes," said Ten Eyck--simply that, and nothing more.
Forbes, nonplussed at the abrupt brevity of the answer, tried again:
"I reckon you don't remember me."
Ten Eyck showed a hint of interest. If he were a snob he blamed it on
his own weaknesses.
"I seem to, but--well, I'm simply putrid at names and faces. A man
pulled me out of the surf at Palm Beach last winter--I had a cramp, you
know. I cut him dead two weeks later. When I knew what I had done I
wished he had let me drown. So don't mind me if I don't remember you.
Who are you? Did you ever save my life? Where was it we met?"
"It was in Manila. You were--"
"Oh, God bless me! You're Harvey Forbes--well, I'll be--" He reversed
the prayer. "Of course it's you." He was cordial enough now as he
clapped both hands on Forbes' shoulders. "But how the hell was I to know
you all dolled up like this? I used to see you in uniform with cap and
bronze buttons and sword and puttees. You were a lieutenant then. I dare
say you're a colonel by now, what?" Forbes shook his head. "No? Well,
you ought to be. You did save my life out in that Godforsaken hole. And
now you're here! Well, I'll be--Let's have a drink."
"No, thank you!"
"Yes, thank you!" He hurried Forbes up the stairs, out into the street,
and into a peacock-rivaling cafe. With one foot on the rail, one elbow
on the bar, and one elbow crooked upward, they toasted each other in a
hearty "How!" Then, with libations tossed inward, the old friendship was
consecrated anew.
"Tell me," said Ten Eyck, "are you alone--or with somebody? Don't answer
if it will incriminate you."
"No such luck," groaned Forbes. "I'm alone, a castaway on this deserted
island."
"Well, I'm the little rescuing party. How long you here for?"
"I don't know. I was ordered to Governor's Island. I don't have to
report for a week, so I thought I'd have a look at New York."
"That won't take you long. There's nothing going on, and nobody in
town."
Forbes remembered the crowds he had seen, and smiled. "I saw three ve'y
charming ladies in that party of yours."
"Glad you like 'em. Come and meet 'em."
"Perhaps one of them is your wife. Are you ma'ied yet?"
"Not yet. Not while I have my health and strength."
"I'm right glad to hear it. I was beginning to feel afraid that you had
ma'ied that wonderful one."
Ten Eyck shook his head and laughed.
"Who? Me? Me marry Persis Cabot?"
"Is that her name? Well, why not?"
"If you only knew her you wouldn't ask why. I'm not a millionaire."
"She doesn't look mercenary."
"She's not. Money is nothing to her; she doesn't know what it means; she
just tosses it away. She's like a yacht. You think it costs a lot to
buy, but wait till you count the upkeep. Persis is a corker. She's a
fine girl to play with. But you must promise not to marry her."
"I promise."
"Fine! Come along." As they climbed the stairs Ten Eyck was saying: "I
hate an obligation like poison. Always want to pay back a mean turn or
a good one. You made a devil of a hit with me, Forbesy, out in Manila
there, when I was blue and sick and a million miles from home. I suppose
there's nothing makes a hit with a man like calling on him when he's
sick. You got your hooks on me that way, and I'm yours to boss around.
I'll put you up at a lot of clubs and trot you about till you flash the
S. O. S. That is, if you want that sort of thing. Maybe you want to be
let alone. If you do, you can kick me out whenever I'm in the way."
Forbes denied any inclination to solitude. When they reached the head of
the aisle to the box he paused. He had the Southern idea of ceremonial
courtesy, and he suggested that Ten Eyck had better ask the permission
of the ladies before he introduced a stranger. Forbes had the rare knack
of using the word "lady" without an effect of middle class.
And he had never forgotten what Ten Eyck had said to him once: "I love
the extremes of society. I can get along with the highest, and I dote on
the lowest, but God, how I loathe a middle-class soul."
Ten Eyck waived Forbes' scruples, dragged him to the box, and presented
him to the women and the two other men. Forbes was too much perturbed to
catch a single name. Even the last name of Persis escaped both his
memory and his attention.
Ten Eyck gave Forbes a glowing advertisement as a brilliant soldier and
a life-saver, and offered him his own chair next to Persis.
She had answered his low bow of homage with nothing more than a
wren-like nod and half a hint of a smile.
Ten Eyck threw Forbes into confusion by saying:
"You'll have to do better than that, old girl. Mr. Forbes not only
rescued me from the depths, but he told me you were the most beautiful
thing he ever saw on earth."
Persis smiled a little more cordially and murmured:
"That's very nice of him."
She was evidently so used to bouquets in the face that they neither
offended nor excited her. But Miss--or was it Mrs?--anyway, the plump
woman interposed:
"He must have been referring to me. My mirror tells me I am fatally
beautiful, and God knows there's more of me than of anybody else on
earth."
Forbes was in a dilemma. He had not made the comment ascribed to him,
yet he could hardly deny it. Nor could he deny the plump lady's claim to
the praise. He simply flushed and smiled benignly on everybody.
Fortunately, the lights sank just then, and the curtain went up with a
sound like a great "Hush!" The party, having been once rebuked, fell
into silence. Forbes rose to return to his own seat, but Ten Eyck,
standing back of him, pressed him into his chair with powerful hands.
He stayed put. But the play no longer held him. He could think only of
one thing. He was posted at the side of this creature who had fascinated
him from afar and terrified him anear, and whose last name he did not
yet know.
The lesson of the previous act was not long remembered by the
irrepressibles. One of the men, a queer little fellow he was, whispered
a comment to Persis. She laughed and answered it. The other women had to
be told. They giggled. Their voices gradually rose in pitch and volume.
When the thief in the play shot the stool-pigeon with a silencered