What Will People Say? A Novel
"Eighteen is the legal age for women," said Ten Eyck.
Winifred resumed her cigarette with a mock childishness. "Then I can
just qualify. I was eighteen last--"
"Last century, my dear?" Mrs. Neff cooed.
"For that you can scrub the pots and pans, darling," Winifred crooned.
"And I was going to let you off with the wine-glasses. Another crack
like that and I'll have you stoking the range."
"I am a martyr in the cause of truth," Mrs. Neff groaned. "Come on;
let's get it over with."
Winifred was a sharp taskmaster, and so bulky that none of the women
dared to disobey. Nor the men either. Forbes was for helping Persis and
saving her delicate hands, but Winifred would not have him in the pantry
at all:
"The little snojer cooked the dinner, and he gets a furlough. If I could
trust the rest of you I'd walk with him in the moonlight and let him
hold my dainty white mitt in his manly clasp."
Forbes was banished, and spent his exile pacing up and down smoking and
peering in at the window, where Persis, aproned and wet-armed and with a
speck of soot on her nose, buried her jeweled fingers in greasy
dish-water, and smoked the while her customary cigarette. She was more
fascinating than ever to Forbes, whose mind kept ringing the domestic
chimes.
When the kitchen and dining-room chores were done to the satisfaction of
Winifred, who demanded as much of her amateur scullions as she would
have demanded of her own servants, they were all exhausted. Returning to
the living-room, they sprawled in those inelegant attitudes that tired
laborers assume. Their minds were jaded with their muscles.
"I never understood before why my servants are so snappy at night," said
Mrs. Neff. "If anybody speaks to me I'll cry."
"Pull down your skirts, at least, mother," said Alice.
"They're too far away," sighed Mrs. Neff. "And nobody's interested in my
old legs."
Alice, with the fierce decency of the young, rose wearily, bent down,
put her mother's ankles together, and covered them with the skirt.
"Isn't it odd," sighed Mrs. Neff, "how we pretend that old people must
go along to chaperon the young? It ought to be the other way about."
Alice was too tired to get up. She sank on the floor and laid her head
on her mother's knee. And Mrs. Neff put out a thin, white hand upon the
girl's soft hair.
"It's a nice little girl, sometimes," she sighed.
"And it would be a nice little mother," said Alice, "if--"
"Don't say it, my child. He's not the man for you at all. I know best.
I'm thinking of your happiness." Alice shrugged a skeptical comment.
Her mother went on: "Do you remember how you had all the chocolate
creams you wanted--once? You couldn't look at one for a year after.
Well, living on love alone is like trying to live on chocolate creams
alone. And he couldn't afford even to keep you in chocolate creams."
Alice made no answer. She sat studying her own thoughts.
Forbes felt a sudden kinship with Alice's absent lover and beloved, this
Stowe Webb, whose crime was lack of money. He imagined that Persis'
mother had told her the same cold things that Alice was hearing now. He
began to believe that many daughters must hear such financial talk
against love from their mothers. He had heard so many married women
scoff at love as a delusion. He wondered if, after all, it were not
really man, rather than woman, who is the romantic animal.
"Men," he pondered, "write the great poems and the great romances, paint
the great pictures, fight the great fights against nature and ignorance
and oppression and poverty. They compose the great music, supply the
demand for love songs and love stories, and build the places to love in.
Then they lay their wealth and ambition and achievement at the feet of
little women, and each little woman selects from those that gather at
her feet the one that she thinks will dress her best and house her best
and give her the best time."
He had read much in books, written chiefly by gallant gentlemen whose
flattery was greater than their accuracy, that woman was a slave, a toy,
a plaything, a victim of man's cruelty. Now he began to believe that in
the vast bulk of instances the reverse was true. The little women set
their feet on the men's necks and rode upon their shoulders, and when
they were displeased pulled the men's hair, poked fingers into their
eyes, or abandoned them entirely.
He felt again what he had felt when he studied Fifth Avenue and its
womankind; for every woman's finery some man pays. Woman was the
grasping sex, the exacting, yet extravagant sex. The eternal feminine
was the eternal calculatrix.
He had wondered what these women paid for what they got from men. He
believed now that he had found the answer. They paid with their bodies,
their kisses, the encircling of arms, the cooing of tender words. In
return for so much money they granted permission to spend yet more.
He studied Persis; how beautiful she was, how soft and gracile, how apt
to endearments! Yet she held herself at a price, at a high price, and
called it pride, self-protection. What was it but self-exploitation?
Yet what man ever desired an object less because it was beyond his
means? Persis was certainly no less adorable to Forbes because he could
not buy her. He would have to get along without her. But, having once
held her in his arms while she held him in hers, he would never cease to
desire her. Like the father of a spendthrift child, he rather felt
ashamed of himself for being incompetent to meet her demands, than
contemned her for making them.
After a while of silent meditation Mrs. Neff spoke up, briskly:
"There's only one thing that would rest me, and that's a tango. Where
are those records we bought this afternoon?"
On the homeward way the motor party had passed a shop where disks were
kept, and had bought up the entire visible supply of latter-day tunes to
replace the dances of yesteryear. There was general agreement that it
was high time to turkey-trot again.
"I'll run the machine," said Winifred. "Bob Fielding isn't here, and
I'll be true to his memory for a dance or two."
"I choose to dance with Major General Forbes," said Mrs. Neff, "unless
he's otherwise engaged."
"Before we dance," said Willie, "I have an announcement to make. Ladies
and gentlemen, so to speak"--he cleared his throat and ran his fingers
round inside his tight collar--"I am about to--er--give birth--er--to an
after-dinner speech--my first and only."
"Hear! Hear!"
"Some time ago Miss Persis--er--Cabot, whom you all know, did me
the--er--unspeakable honor of consenting to become Mrs.
William--er--Enslee. Circumstances rendered it--er--advisable to
defer--er--the publication of the glorious--er--news, so to speak. But
Miss Cabot has to-night given me--er--permission to announce--"
"I have not!" Persis broke in; but Willie put up his hand.
"Order in the court--er! Anyway, now you know the worst. You behold in
me the happiest man on--er--earth."
There was a round of applause, and Ten Eyck proposed "three lusty chahs
and a tigress for the--er--bride and--er--groom--er."
Forbes felt as if a shell full of shrapnel had burst at his feet.
Military instinct brought his heels together, and he stood as erect as
Dreyfus did when they tore the buttons from his tunic and snapped his
sword in two before him. He stared at the revel that broke out around
Persis and Enslee. In his eyes it had something of the hideousness of
savages dancing. It was a torture dance, and he was the man at the
stake.
CHAPTER XLI
Forbes tried to smile, but his muscles seemed unable to support his
lips. He heard much noise, yet distinguished nothing till he seemed to
wake suddenly at finding Willie Enslee smirking up at him.
"You haven't congratulated me, Mr. Ward--er--Forbes."
Forbes seized Enslee's small hand and wrung it, and said in a tone more
fitted to condolence:
"I do congratulate you, indeed, and Miss Cabot, I--I congratulate her."
He tried to look at her, but Willie was clinging to his hand and
driveling on: "I want to thank you for--er--at least trying to save her
when her horse bolted this morning. They told me you were--er--quite
splendid, and I take it as a--er--personal favor."
"Don't mention it, please."
"And now let's--er--dance," said Willie. "I will dance with the blushing
bride, if you don't mind. Let 'er go, Winifred."
Winifred set off the Victrola, and a blare of nasal cacophony broke from
the machine imitating a steamboat whistle; then ensued a negroid music
of infinite inappropriateness to Forbes' tragic mood. He saw the woman
who loved him, and whom he loved, tagged and claimed by a contemptible
pygmy, the accidental inheritor of wealth. He saw his beautiful Persis
in the fellow's incompetent arms and her body drooping over him as if he
had carried her off in a kind of burlesque rape of the Sabines. The
music was not Wagnerian epopee, nor were the words something from
Sophokles; it was a romping ditty about
'Way down on the lev-ee
In old Alabam-y,
There's daddy and mam-my,
There's Ephraim and Sam-my
On a moon-light night.
Forbes felt Mrs. Neff's presence in front of him. Her wiry arms clutched
him and danced him away. She was chattering reproaches because he had
not taken her advice and captured Persis for himself. And her unwitting
irony ran on against the words that Alice and Ten Eyck were singing as
they danced:
Watch them shuf-flin' along,
See them shuf-flin' along.
Go take your best--gal--real--pal,
Go down to the lev-ee,
I said to the lev-ee,
And join that shuf-flin' throng.
Hear that mu-sic and song.
It's simply great--O mate.
Waitin' on the levee, waitin' for the _Robert E. Lee_.
Forbes felt a ribaldry in the whole situation, an intolerable contumely.
He watched Persis darting here and there as Willie urged her. The little
whelp could not keep time to the music, and his possession of Persis was
as grotesque as the presence of a gargoyle on a cathedral. But
cathedrals are thick with gargoyles, and life is full of such pairings.
For the second dance Forbes demanded Persis, and she granted him the
privilege with some terror; the look on his face had alarmed her.
The music now celebrated "dancing with the Devil; oh, the little Devil!
dancing at the Devil's ball." There was a fiend raging in Forbes' heart,
and something infernal in the frenzy with which he whipped Persis this
way and that.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he groaned. "Why didn't you warn me? The last
I knew was that you and I were to be married. And suddenly that man
speaks up and claims you. And you don't deny it. What in God's name does
it mean?"
"Not so loud, my love!"
"'My love?'" he quoted. "You can call me that?"
"You're not going to make a scene, are you?" she whispered, trembling in
his arms.
"A scene!" he laughed. "Is that your greatest terror in life?"
"One of them."
"You intended to marry him, and you let me kiss you! Were you simply
making a fool of me?"
("_At the Devil's ball, at the Devil's ball._")
"No, Harvey, no! I love you. It is you that were making a fool of me. I
can explain, but I don't think you would understand."
("_I saw the cute Mrs. Devil, so pretty and fat._")
"When will you explain?"
"The first chance I get."
("_Dressed in a beautiful fireman's hat._")
"To-night?"
"I don't dare. Willie is going to stand guard, as he said he would.
Seeing you dancing with Mrs. Neff, he was just telling me what a joke it
would be to lock you out. He's going to pretend to go to bed. Then he's
going to slip down-stairs, lock the front door, and wait till you and
Mrs. Neff come back. Isn't it ridiculous?"
("_Dancing with the Devil; oh, the little Devil!_")