She coughed, rising, “Oh, travel’s expensive.” Then she gestured to the orange oblongs of the ballroom windows. “D’you think any one of those women would hesitate a minute between being the next lady of the White House or the mistress of the Prince of Wales? Of course not! Give Margot my love. Good-bye. Too chilly out here.” She rattled away.
Gurdy dropped into the chair and stared after her. He should tabulate this woman at once with her romantic illusions of aristocracy and patriotism. Margot supervened and seemed to move across the moony stones of the terrace. He thought frantically of Colonel Dufford. He thought solidly of marriage for ten minutes. Beyond doubt he was in love with Margot. He stirred in the chair, repeating maxims. Passion wasn’t durable. He might tire of her. He argued against emotion and blinked at the gold lamps on the bastard French face of this house. He was too young to select sensibly, didn’t want to be sensible, suddenly. His pulse rose. He marvelled at love. In the morning he announced his present departure. At noon he had a special delivery letter from his youngest brother, Edward Bernamer, Junior, a placid boy of thirteen interested in stamp collecting. The scrawl was the worse for that complacency.
“Dear Gurd, For the love of Mike come on home and help take care of Margot E. Walling. She has got mamma and the girls all up in the air. Grandfather is getting ready to shoot her. I heard him talking to dad about writing Uncle Mark to take her away. I sort of like her. Eggs and Jim think she is hell.”
Gurdy came whirling east to New York and found Mark at the 45th Street Theatre, humming over the model for a scene of “Captain Salvador.” But plainly Mark knew nothing of any fissure in the sacred group at Fayettesville. He was busy rehearsing a comedy, had been to the farm only once. In any event Mark mustn’t be hurt. Gurdy took breath and delicately put forth, “I want you to do something damned extravagant, Mark.”
“Easy, sonny. Just got the estimate for the mirrors at the Walling. Not more than ten thousand, please!”
“Not as bad as that. Get a cottage on Long Island for July and August. The farm’s all right for Margot for a while. But grandfather goes to bed at nine. The kids play rags on the phonograph all afternoon. It gets tiresome after a while. I—”
“Oh, son,” said Mark, “I’m not so thickheaded I can’t see that sister’ll get bored down there.” He beamed, thinking Gurdy superb in grey tweeds, his white skin overlayed with pale tan. “No, I expect I’d get bored with the cows and chickens if I was there enough.—And we ought to have some kind of a country place of our own.—There’s some friend of Arthur Hopkins has a place on Long Island he wants to let.—Olive Ilden’ll be here in July and we ought to have a cottage somewhere. I don’t think your dad and Olive’d have much to talk over.” Mark grinned. Gurdy laughed, curling on a corner of the desk, approving the man’s common shrewdness. Mark patted his palms together. “Look, you pike on down to the farm. Margot’s got your car there. You fetch her up in the morning and you two go look at this cottage. I’ll ’phone Hopkins and find where it is. Oh, here’s this piece Margot’s friend Dufford’s sent over. I hear it’s doing a fair business in London but nothing to brag of. Read it and see what you think. Get going, son. You can catch the three o’clock for Trenton.”
Gurdy strove with this fragility in neat prose all the way to Trenton. It had to do with a climber domiciled by mistake in the house of a stodgy young Earl. It was wordy and tedious. The name, “Todgers Intrudes,” made him grunt. He laughed occasionally at the tinkling echoes of Wilde and Maugham. It might be passable in London where the lethal jokes on “Dora” and “Brass Hats” would be understood. He diligently tried to be just to Colonel Dufford’s art which served to keep his pulse down and his mind remote from the approaching discomfort. Margot wasn’t perfect. She had upset the family. It was best to get her quickly away from Fayettesville. He hired a battered car at Trenton. The Fayettesville Military Academy was closing for the summer, by all signs. Lads bustled toward the station towing parents and gaudy sisters in the beginning of sunset. He overtook his three brothers idling home toward the farm and gave them a lift. No one spoke of Margot directly. Edward, his correspondent, smiled sideways at Gurdy and drawled, “Must have been having a damn good time in Chicago, Gurd,” but nothing else was said. The car panted into the stone walled dooryard. His grandfather waved a linen clad arm at Gurdy from the padded chair on the veranda. His sisters accepted the usual candy and hid a motion picture magazine from him, giggling. Mrs. Bernamer was at a funeral in Trenton. Gurdy found Bernamer in the dairy yard studying a calf. It was always easy to be frank with the saturnine, long farmer. His father didn’t suffer from illusions. They sat on the frame of the water tower and lit cigarettes, before speech.
“How’s Margot been behaving, dad?”
“You sweet on her, son?”