[65]
]MADAME PEACOCK
CHARACTER DRAMA
The battle royal of all time is between character and circumstance. The way we meet the experience that waits for us round the corner is the eternal Comédie Humaine. Success is the hole in the ground—the banana peel—the stumbling block that may trip us up. It is as uncertain as to-morrow.
[67]
]MADAME PEACOCK
CHAPTER I
Of course that was not her name. No one knew just how she had been christened—if at all. To a worshipful public she was known as Jane Goring, which, as names go, answered all purposes and was quite as simple as she was ornate. But “Peacock” was the title of the play in which she had made the season’s hit and a wave of fads in honor of it had typhooned over New York in consequence.
There were perfumes with bottles far more valuable than their contents on which strutted the iridescent bird of beauty. There were soaps and powders and sachets sold in green satin boxes similarly decorated and similarly priced. Peacock feather fans swayed at dances and the opera despite the age-old hoodoo. Beaded bags were worked in the popular design. Dressmakers dictated the spreading train. Blues and greens in every conceivably odd shade were introduced as the new color. The peacock coiffure
, originated by Goring, was imitated by dowager and débutante, by movie star and chorus queen, by the girl behind the counter even unto the cash girl—hair drawn flat over the top of the head and puffed out stiffly at the ears, the whole being completed by a comb that jutted at right angles. In Goring’s mahogany swirl, framing as it did a face rather broad at the cheek-bones and tapering heart-shaped to the chin, an impertinent nose and sleepy green-gray eyes that lifted at the corners, the effect was startling. But the variegated [68] ]types it crowned north, south and east of Broadway would scarcely have inspired an artist to his best work.
At the moment we make our bow to Jane Goring—for Goring bowed to no one—she was on the top rung of the ladder of success. Her head had reached the clouds and was held accordingly. So that when she looked at you, she always looked down at you. Which made those whom she addressed feel infinitely small even when they were tall, always excepting representatives of the press. They found her always gracious, always smiling with corners of eyes and lips lifted and a look of wonder at their great kindness to her. Each time she received them it was in some new and amazing costume in one of the shades she had made popular, with jangling jade or emeralds in her ears and green lights darting from the comb in her hair. She spoke at length of the arts and collected immense royalties from candy boxes, silk advertisements and cold creams bearing her name and endorsement.
Somewhere in the dim and distant past her flaming head and Jap-like eyes had graced the chorus. She had lived in a hall bedroom; had been caught frying chops over an alcohol stove; had been lectured by the landlady; had found the milk frozen to her window sill on winter mornings; had known the exquisite thrill of being raised to a few lines of persiflage with the musical comedy’s comedian. In those days a young newspaper man, Bob McNaughton, had found her out, proclaimed her a genius, and married her—not because of her genius, however, but because he adored her. They had spent their [69] ]honeymoon one Sunday on the Palisades, and he had kissed her finger tips one by one and told her how he was going to make her.