That winter she married Jack Drayton. The afternoon we rehearsed for the wedding I looked at her, before we pranced down the aisle and endured the endless silly giggles of the bridesmaids, and the usher louts who would fall out of step, and grew more peevish by the minute. I looked her over then, and I said to myself: “You feeble paranoiac, imagine that girl tying up with you.” Well, I couldn’t very well imagine it, although I tried. But I was extremely noisy, and I heard two or three of the bridesmaids, to say nothing of the maid of honor and the bridegroom’s mamma, tapping their gentle hammers, at my expense, at the breakfast. It was a year afterward that I began to fag regularly for the Drayton establishment.
Jack Drayton, by rights, ought to have been poisoned. He’d be the first to acknowledge it now. Perhaps if he’d married a girl who insisted on having things out the moment they began, the things wouldn’t have happened. But Natica Melsford wasn’t that sort. She was the kind that simply looked scorn into and clear through you, when she thought you were acting low down. This, with a man strung like Jack was, simply put the fat into the fire. It would have been different with me. I’d—well—I’d have made an abject crawl, to be sure. You see, her knowing this was the thing that must have always queered me with her. A woman prefers a man she can get furious at and who’ll stick it out a bit, to one who caves in at the first sign of a frown. But Jack carried things too far.
No, he didn’t mind my frequenting the house. He liked me and I liked him. But, all the same, I knew he didn’t regard me as a foeman worthy of his steel. And, although the knowledge made me raw now and then, when he’s come in with his easy, careless way, still I swallowed the mean feeling because it gave me a chance to see her. And don’t imagine I went around hunting for trouble. It was at the club one night—I’d just come from the Draytons, and Jack hadn’t been home to dinner—that I heard Rawlins Richardson and Horace Trevano chattering about Maisie Hartopp. The “Jo-Jo” song had made the biggest kind of a hit that winter at the Gaiety, and the hit had been made by the Hartopp singing it to a stage box which the Johnnies scrambled to bid in nightly.
It seemed like small game for Jack Drayton to be trailing along with the ruck—the ruck meaning Tony Criswold and the rest of that just-out-of-college crew—but I didn’t need signed affidavits, after five minutes of club chatter, to know that he was pretty well tied to an avenue window at Cherry’s after the show. The Ruinart, too, that kept spouting from the bucket beside it, was a pet vintage of the Hartopp.
There was a lot of that silly chuckle, and I recalled reading somewhere that there was a husband belonging to the Hartopp, a medium good welterweight, who picked up a living flooring easy marks for private clubs at Paterson, N. J., and the like, and occasionally serving as a punching bag for the good uns before a championship mill. What the devil was there to do? I couldn’t answer the riddle.
It sounds like old women’s chatter, the meddlesome way I scribble this down. It would take a real thing in the line of literature to paint me right, anyway, I fancy. When a third party keeps mixing in with husband and wife, he deserves all the slanging that’s coming to him; which same is my last squeal for mercy.
A month went by—two of them. Natica Drayton wasn’t the strain that needs spectacles to see through things. Then, too, I guessed the loving friend sympathy racket was being worked by some of the bridge whist aggregation which met up with her every fortnight. She laughed more than she ought to have done. This was a bad sign with her. Once or twice, when the three of us dined together, and she was almost noisy over the benedictine, I could have choked Jack Drayton, for he didn’t see. It’s not a pretty thing for an outsider to sit à trois, and see things in a wife’s manner that the husband doesn’t or won’t see; and worse than that, to know that the wife knows you see it and that he doesn’t. Speak to Jack? I wouldn’t have done it for worlds. As I said, I’m willing to burn my fingers and even cuddle the hurt; but I don’t meddle with giant firecrackers except on the Fourth of July, and that didn’t come until afterward.
I was to take her to the opera one night—Drayton had the habit of dropping in for an act or two and then disappearing—but on her own doorstep she tossed off her carriage wrap and sent Martin back to the stables.
“Let’s talk, instead,” she said, and she made me coffee in the library, with one of those French pots that gurgle conveniently when you don’t exactly know what to say. That pot did a heap of gurgling before we began to talk. When she spoke, what she said almost took me off my chair.
“Percy, have you seen the show at the Gaiety?” she asked.