2
Too congenial! Tom was the same perfect companion of an idle hour—instinctively expert in gilding that idleness with delightful talk until it ceased to seem mere idleness—the same old Tom that Felix had loafed away long evenings with last summer, when they were supposed to be writing novels. Tom was still desultorily working upon his novel; but he put it aside to walk in the woods and talk with Felix about Chicago. It was not, however, of the grim Chicago which loomed in Felix’s mind, that Tom talked.
Tom, as Felix now realized, was a romantic soul. Chicago had been to him a series of brilliant vacation-trips, a place of happy occasional sanctuary from the dull realities of middle-class life in Port Royal: an opportunity for brief, stimulating human contacts, not at all a place to earn a living in.
Lying in the cool grass beside the creek where he and Felix had spent so many illusioned hours a summer ago, he talked with dreamy enthusiasm of genial drunken poets and philosophers and friends met at the Pen Club—and of their girl companions, charming and sophisticated, whose loves were frank and light-hearted.
Felix walked up and down impatiently. A year ago he too had dreamed of Tom’s Chicago—
“Midnights of revel
And noondays of song!”
But he knew better now. He could imagine the Pen Club, with its boon-companionship of whiskey and mutual praise. These, he told himself, were the consolations of failure. He might, he reflected grimly, have to fall back on these things at forty. But in the meantime he would try to learn to face reality.
And those light Chicago loves—he suspected that the romantic temperament had thrown a glamour over these also. He was not going to Chicago for Pen Club friendship nor the solace of complaisant femininity.... While Tom Alden reminisced of glorious nights of talk and drink and kisses, Felix was brooding over a scene inside his mind which he called Chicago—a scene in which the insane clamour of the wheat-pit was mingled with stockyards brutality and filth. This was what he must deal with....
“What’s on your mind?” Tom asked.
“Nothing. Except—I came here to study my street map, and I haven’t looked inside it.”
“Never mind your street map just now,” Tom said. “We’re going to the station to meet Gloria and Madge.”
Madge was a cousin of Tom’s, and Gloria her especial—and beautiful—friend. They were just back from a trip abroad, and Tom had asked them out to dinner to hear what they had to tell.
“You mustn’t be prejudiced against Gloria because of her eyelashes,” Tom urged. “She has rather a mind, I think.”
So Felix, reluctantly, went along to the station.
Tom jested at his reluctance. “Why, are you afraid of becoming entangled in Gloria’s celebrated eyelashes?”
“No, I’m not afraid of that,” Felix said.
Tom laughed and put his hand on Felix’s shoulder.
“Think, they bring us news of the great world: London! Paris! Doesn’t that stir you?”
“No,” Felix retorted, “for I don’t believe it. They bring back what they took with them.”
“Wait and see! I hear rumours that Gloria has become fearfully cosmopolitan.”
When Gloria and Madge stepped from the train, it was evident, even to so careless an observer as Felix, that they had been at least outwardly transformed. Every woman in Port Royal was wearing the wide-flaring “Merry Widow” hat; and these girls wore small close-fitting hats—Gloria’s being a jaunty little flower-confection, and Madge’s a tiny straw turban set off by a perky feather.
“Dear old Tom,” said Gloria, embracing him affectionately. “Too busy to come to town to see old friends, so old friends have to come see him. Busy writing great novel?”
“More or less,” Tom answered, and they started back up the road. “How’s Europe?”
“We tore ourselves from the arms of doting relatives to come and tell you—When one’s been all over the world, what’s a few miles more? ... even when it means getting one’s new Paris shoes all dusty! Have you noticed them, Tom?” She paused on one toe and looked down sidewise admiringly at her foot.
“I noticed a generally exotic effect,” Tom admitted.
“Tan suede!” Gloria explained. “And then, our blouses. Something quite new. And—but mustn’t talk to great philosopher about such frivolous things. Must talk about art and socialism. There are lots of socialists over there, in France and Germany—and even in England!”
“So you found that out,” Tom observed. “Now I suppose you regard socialism as quite respectable.”
“Oh, most respectable. But just as hard to understand as ever! Though I was able, when I talked to some of them at the Countess of Berwick’s tea, to appear quite intelligent on the subject, on account of having listened to you. I used ‘proletarian’ and ‘proletariat’ without once getting them mixed.”
“The Countess of Berwick! Our little Gloria flew high, didn’t she?”
“Oh, all sorts of people go to the Countess of Berwick’s teas. You’ve only to be reputed ‘interesting,’ and you get invited everywhere. And how do you suppose I got into the ‘interesting’ class? Not by my gifts of intellect, Tommy. But—you know, they expect Americans to behave queerly. They’re disappointed if we don’t. There was an American poet over there, a tame professor poet, and they were disappointed because he didn’t come to dinner in boots and spurs and a red shirt or something. So I bethought myself—and got invited. You know my baby-talk? I brought it out and polished it up for the occasion. You should have heard me! Baby-talking to England’s brightest and best. And they fell for it. They consider it oh, so American! I nearly set a fashion in London, Tommy. Me, having been brought up in Miss Pettit’s most exclusive school, and taught to act like a lady, and then making a hit in London with bad manners. The baby-talk wasn’t all. Daughter of American Plough Magnate Puts Feet on Table and Tells Naughty Stories—that sort of thing. They like it.”
“You mustn’t believe her, Tom,” Madge interrupted. “She didn’t do any such thing.”
“Tom understands me,” Gloria laughed. “Exaggeration for effect. Just like in a novel. If you put my London visit in a novel, Tom, you’d have me putting my feet on the table, wouldn’t you?”
“But my imagination,” said Tom, “would balk at the picture of you telling naughty stories.”
“Oh, but Tom, I’ve been to Paris since you used to know me, and I’ve become very, very wicked. Don’t contradict me, Madge. I’ve got to persuade Tom that I got some benefit out of my year abroad. Yes, Tom, you’ve no idea how broad-minded Paris has made me. Why, if somebody should mention a man’s ‘mistress’ to me now, I wouldn’t shudder and turn pale. I would probably say, ‘Dear me, has he only one?’ That’s what Paris has made of me. I’m brazen, Tom—brazen.”
They reached the house, and there they chattered on till dinner, and through dinner, and after dinner in Tom’s living room—Felix playing a silent part, and inwardly contemptuous of Gloria’s assumed sophistication. Gloria made a few attempts to draw him into the conversation, but these being resisted, she devoted herself to Tom. Growing confidential, she told him the newest fashions in French lingerie—Madge protesting only slightly, for after all, wasn’t Tom her cousin? and Felix didn’t count. “They’re still wearing muslin over here,” said Gloria, “while we, Tom dear, come from Paris intimately attired in georgette and chiffon—if you know what that means. All the difference in the world, I can assure you! One’s Puritanism goes when one puts on chiffon next to one’s skin. And think, Tom, I never dreamed, all my poor wasted life in Iowa, that nightgowns could be anything but white muslin. Well, you should see the lovely nighties that Madge and I brought home. You’d never guess the colour.... Lavender! Why, the social circles of Port Royal are rocking with it! A blow, Tom, at the very foundations of middle-class morality. Lavender nighties!”
“I do think,” Tom said, “that what people wear makes a difference in their attitude toward life.”
“Oh, I can feel the difference already. My Presbyterian conscience shrivelled up and perished at the touch of that pagan garment. My whole attitude toward life has changed.”
Felix shrugged his shoulders by way of expressing his unbelief in the paganism of lavender nightgowns.
“What are they writing in Paris now?” Tom asked.
“Well, Tom, I admit I was surprised at first. I never dreamed that even the French could be so—French. But I got used to it. I like it now. Even Madge likes it. She makes me translate the wickedest passages for her.”
“I don’t any such thing,” Madge objected.
“What is there so wicked in those passages?” asked Felix, speaking for almost the first time.
Gloria considered him for a moment before replying. “Nothing really wicked at all,” she said. “Wicked only according to our stupid Anglo-Saxon notions. Simply frank, that’s all.”
“I wonder,” said Felix, “if they are really more frank than English novels—the best of them. Defoe and Fielding were rather frank, you know.”
Gloria shrugged her pretty shoulders. “If there was anything like that in Defoe and Fielding, it escaped my innocent young mind when I read them.” She turned again to Tom. “They omit nothing—Nothing!”
“You excite my curiosity,” Tom said sceptically. “Please describe more specifically the Nothing which they omit.”
Gloria laughed, and sketched lightly and brightly the plot of one of the most outrageous new French novels—extreme, she admitted, even for France. “Every other chapter,” she said, “is one which the boldest English novelist would leave to your imagination. In this story, here it is, with, I assure you, a wealth of detail.”
“A wealth of words, rather, I suspect,” said Tom. “The same words that have done duty in the same French novels for a generation: volupté—exquise—baiser—baiser.... The same old thing, so far as I gather from your description, Gloria. That kind of eloquent rhetoric isn’t frankness,—at least not the kind of literary frankness that Felix and I are interested in.”
“Forgive me, Tom!” said Gloria, with mock humility. “My mistake! Here I have been going across the ocean in search of sensation, and all the while the real shock was waiting for me right here at home. In your novel you have doubtless outdone the puny efforts of these mere foreigners. What do they know about frankness? I abase myself, and repent in dust and ashes!”
“I really do think,” said Tom, “that you imagine the truth can be told only in French.”
“I suppose I was guilty of that foolish error. But I pine for enlightenment. Give me the truth—the Truth!—in my own native tongue!”
Tom shook his head. “I didn’t say I had tried to tell it.”
“Oh, don’t disappoint me that way, Tom. Surely you are not going to let these Frenchmen put it over on you! Don’t say that!”
“Well,” Tom said gravely, “Felix has a chapter in his novel here—I found the manuscript in my desk and was just reading it again the other day—that I think goes a little beyond anything I have ever seen in any French novel.”
Gloria turned to Felix and stared. “Well!” she cried. “America is saved! Will you read it to us, Mr. Fay?”
“No,” he said.
“Oh, why not!”
“Don’t want to.”
“I think you show a lack of confidence in us, Mr. Fay. Here we put ourselves in your hand. We open our hearts to you. We conceal nothing. And you sit there with a masterpiece of literary frankness up your sleeve, and refuse to read it. I don’t think it’s fair.”
Felix was silent. He really wanted to read that chapter. He was proud of it. But he must not become interested in novel-writing again. It would distract his mind too much from the Chicago adventure. That unfinished novel ought to remain in that drawer in Tom’s desk until he had made good in Chicago.
“I don’t believe it’s so frank, after all,” said Gloria, returning to the attack. “That’s why you’re afraid to read it. You’re afraid of disappointing our expectations.”
Felix looked at her defiantly.
“All right, I will,” he said.
“Oh, this is worth coming back for.”
He rose and went to Tom’s room. He returned, a little doubtfully, with the manuscript. “I want to say first of all that there is nothing intentionally shocking about this chapter. It simply aims to tell how people really behave under circumstances usually glossed over with romantic phrases.”
At any rate, Gloria would understand; so why should he hesitate?
He began to read. From the first page, he was aware of a transformation in the atmosphere of the occasion. Gloria, who had been leaning forward with dramatic eagerness, became rigid in her attitude, and her humorous smile seemed to have become tensely frozen in its place. Madge had picked up a magazine, opened it to a picture, and continued to look at the picture while listening alertly, with an air of being at a key-hole. Tom continued gravely smoking his pipe, apparently oblivious of any constraint upon the others. After a little, Gloria carefully relaxed her attitude, and leaned back, looking above Felix’s head, with an impassive face and arms straight at her sides. Felix defiantly read on.
He knew there was nothing really shocking about the chapter—at least, to an enlightened and adult mind such as Gloria’s. It did not occur to him that in its local colour and middle-western psychology, there was something—not present in the most highly flavoured French romance—to disturb the pretences and awake the painful and ashamed memories of a middle-western mind: something sufficiently near to the unromantic truth of Gloria’s own secret life, perhaps, to evoke in her an hysterical disgust.... He only knew that the situation was becoming uncomfortable, and that he was sorry he had ever got into it.
He finished the chapter. There ensued a painful silence.
“Very remarkable writing indeed, Mr. Fay,” was all the comment the young woman back from abroad had to offer. Evidently what was delightfully daring in Paris was something else in Port Royal on the Mississippi....
Felix, not knowing quite what to think, went to put his manuscript away. Surely Gloria could not have been really shocked!... When he returned, they were all talking with animation about something else.... Presently it was time for the girls to leave. “I hear you’re going to Chicago soon,” Gloria said sweetly to Felix. “Bon voyage!”
“I have made a fool of myself again,” Felix said to himself bitterly.