Читать книгу The Eddy - Clarence Louis Cullen - Страница 3

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"If only she were a boy!"

Mrs. Treharne almost moaned the words.

She tugged nervously at her absurdly diaphanous boudoir jacket, vainly attempting to fasten it with fluttering, uncontrolled fingers; and she shuddered, though her dressing-room was over-warm.

Heloise, who was doing her hair, juggled and then dropped a flaming red coronet braid upon the rug. The maid, a thin-lipped young woman with a jutting jaw and an implacable eye, pantomimed her annoyance. Before picking up the braid she glued the backs of her hands to her smoothly-lathed hips. Mrs. Treharne, in the glass, could see Heloise's drab-filmed grey-blue eyes darting sparks.

"I shall resume," croaked the maid in raucous French, "when Madame is through writhing and wriggling and squirming."

Laura Stedham—she was relaxing luxuriously in the depths of a chair that fitted her almost as perfectly as her gown—smiled a bit wickedly.

"Forgive me if I seem catty, Tony," said Laura in her assuaging contralto, "but it is such a delight to find that there is some one else who is bullied by her maid. Mine positively tyrannizes over me."

"Oh, everybody bullies me," said Mrs. Treharne, querulously, holding herself rigid in order not to again draw Heloise's wrath. "Everybody seems to find it a sort of diversion, a game, to browbeat and hector and bully-rag me."

"Surely I don't, afflicted one—do I?" Laura tacked a little rippling laugh to the question.

"You do worse, my dear—you laugh at me," plaintively replied the fading woman huddled before the glass. She was haggard as from a trouble that has been unsuccessfully slept upon, and her mouth—not yet made into a crimson bow through Heloise's deft artistry—was drawn with discontent. "Heaven on high, if only she were a boy!" she broke out petulantly again, after a little pause.

This time there was genuine enjoyment in Laura's laugh.

"Don't scowl, Antoinette—I know I am a beast for laughing," she said, abandoning her chair and lissomely crossing the room to glance at some new photographs on a mantel. "But, really, you say that so often that it sounds like the refrain to a topical song. 'If only she were a boy—If only she were a boy!'—don't you catch the rhythm of it? I wonder, Tony, how many times I have heard you give utterance to that phrase during the past few years—just?"

"You haven't heard me say it any oftener than I've meant it, my dear—be very sure of that," said Mrs. Treharne, without a symptom of a smile. Her sense of humor was embryonic, and Laura's laughter and words, obviously meant merely in mitigation, jarred upon her. "And a remark is none the less true for being repeated, is it?" she went on in her plaintive monotone. "I do wish Louise had been born a boy. You would, too, if you were in my place. You know you would."

"But, dear Tony, it is such a futile, such a dreadfully childish wish," said Laura, striving to erase the smile from her face. "It is like wishing for the fairy prince, or the magic carpet, or the end of the rainbow. Worry makes wrinkles, dear. That may sound bromidic, but it's true. Why worry yourself through all the years with wishing so impossible—I was going to say so insane—a wish? Not only that—forgive me for saying it, dear, won't you?—but it is rather a grisly wish, too; and so unfair to the girl, really. Don't you think—don't you know—that it is?"

"Don't scold, Laura—please," said Mrs. Treharne, almost in a whimper. "You don't know what a miserable mess I am in. You haven't given me time to tell you. Louise is coming home immediately."

"For the holidays, naturally," said Laura. "Why shouldn't the poor child come home for the holidays? It will be the first time she has had her holidays at home since she went away to school—nearly four years, I think—isn't it?"

"I hope you are not meaning that for a reproach," accused the haggard lady, now being corseted by the lusty-armed Heloise. "You are in a shocking humor today; and I did so depend upon you for advice and comfort, if not consolation, when I 'phoned you to come over."

"Oh, I am in a lark's humor," protested Laura, smiling as she rested a gloved hand upon one of the milky shoulders of her troubled friend. "But you puzzle me. Why should you make such a catastrophe of it, such a veritable cataclysm, because your pretty and agreeable and, as I recall her, quite lovable daughter announces that she is coming home for the holidays? Enlighten me, dear. I seem not to discern the point of your problem."

"Problem isn't the word for it!" repined the unhappy lady, upon whose nearly knee-length stays Heloise now was tugging like a sailor at a capstan. "Louise coolly announces—I had her letter yesterday—that she is not returning to Miss Mayhew's school; that she is coming to remain with me for good."

"Well?" said Laura, murdering the smile that strove to break through her visible mask.

"'Well?'" wailed Mrs. Treharne. "Is that all you have to say—'well'? Can't you see how impossible, how utterly out of the question, how——"

"Her quitting school now, you mean?" said Laura. "Really, I think you should be pleased. Her announcement shows that Louise is a woman—a girl of nineteen who has spent nearly four years at a modern finishing school no longer is a young person, but a woman—that she is a woman with a sense of humor. It is very human, very indicative of the possession of the humorous sense, to tire of school. I did that, myself, a full year before I was through. All of the king's horses could not have dragged me back, either. I hated the thought of graduation day—the foolish, fluttery white frocks, the platitudes of visitors, the moisty weepiness of one's women relatives, the sophomoric speechifying of girls who were hoydens the day before and would be worse hoydens the day after, the showing off of one's petty, inconsequential 'accomplishments'—I loathed the thought of the whole fatuous performance. And so I packed and left a full year in advance of it, resolved not to be involuntarily drawn into the solemn extravaganza of 'being graduated.' That, no doubt, is Louise's idea. She is a girl with a merry heart. You should be glad of that, Antoinette."

Laura was simply sparring with the hope of getting her friend's mind off her problem. She knew very well the nature of the problem; none better. The idea of a girl just out of school being plumped into such an environment as that enveloping the Treharne household perhaps was even more unthinkable to Laura that it was to the girl's mother, a woman who had permitted her sensibilities to become grievously blunted with what she termed the "widening of her horizon." But Laura, not yet ready with advice to meet so ticklish a situation, sought, woman-like, to divert the point of the problem by seizing upon one of its quite minor ramifications. Of course it was not her fault that she failed.

"Laura," said Mrs. Treharne, dismissing her maid with a gesture and fumblingly assembling the materials on her dressing table wherewith to accomplish an unassisted facial make-up, "your occasional assumption of stupidity is the least becoming thing you do. Why fence with me? It is ridiculous, unfriendly, irritating." She daubed at her pale wispy eyebrows with a smeary pencil and added with a certain hardness: "You know perfectly well why I dread the thought of Louise coming here."

Laura, at bay, unready for a pronouncement, took another ditch of evasiveness.

"I wonder," she said in an intended tone of detachment, "if you are afraid she has become a bluestocking? Or maybe a frump? Or, worse still, what you call one of the anointed smugs? Such things—one or other of them, at any rate—are to be expected of girls just out of school, my dear. Louise will conquer her disqualification, if she have one. Her imagination will do that much for her. And of course she has imagination."

"She has eyes, too, no doubt," said Mrs. Treharne, drily. "And you know how prying, penetrating the eyes of a girl of nineteen are. You know still better how poorly this—this ménage of mine can stand such inspection; the snooping—wholly natural snooping, I grant you—of a daughter nearly a head taller than I am, whom, nevertheless, I scarcely know. Frankly, I don't know Louise at all. I should be properly ashamed to acknowledge that; possibly I am. Moreover, I believe I am a bit afraid of her."

Laura assumed a musing posture and thus had an excuse for remaining silent.

"Additionally," went on Mrs. Treharne, a little hoarsely, "a woman, in considering her daughter's welfare, must become a trifle smug herself, no matter how much she may despise smugness in its general use and application. What sort of a place is this as a home for Louise? I am speaking to you as an old friend. I am in a fiendish predicament. Of course you see that. And I can't see the first step of a way out of it. Can you?"

"For one thing," said Laura, mischievously and with eyes a-twinkle, "you might permanently disperse your zoo."

Mrs. Treharne laughed harshly.

"One must know somebody," she said, deftly applying the rouge rabbit's-foot. "One can't live in a cave. My own sort banished me. I am declassée. Shall I sit and twiddle my thumbs? At least the people of my 'zoo,' as you call it, are clever. You'll own that."

"They are freaks—impossible, buffoonish, baboonish freaks," replied Laura, more earnestly than she had yet spoken. "You know I am not finical; but if this raffish crew of yours are 'Bohemians,' as they declare themselves to be—which in itself is banal enough, isn't it?—then give me the sleek, smug inhabitants of Spotless Town!"

"You rave," said Mrs. Treharne, drearily. "Let my zoo-crew alone. We don't agree upon the point."

"I thought you had your queer people—your extraordinary Sunday evening parties—I came perilously near saying rough-houses, Tony—in mind in bemoaning Louise's return home," said Laura, yawning ever so slightly.

"Oh, I'd thought of that, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, artistically adding a sixteenth of an inch of length to the corners of her eyes with the pencil. "But my raffish crew, as you call them, wouldn't harm her. She might even become used to them in time. She hasn't had time to form prejudices yet, it is to be hoped. You purposely hit all around the real mark. Louise is nineteen. And you know the uncanny side-lines of wisdom girls pick up at finishing schools nowadays. Since you maliciously force me to mention it point-blank, in Heaven's name what will this daughter of mine think of—of Mr. Judd?"

"Now we are at the heart of the matter," answered Laura. "Heart, did I say? Fancy 'Pudge' with a heart!" There was little mirth in her laugh.

"You must not call him that, even when you are alone with me, Laura," said Mrs. Treharne, petulantly. "I am in deadly fear that some time or other he will catch you calling him that. You know how mortally sensitive he is about his—his bulk."

"Well might he be," said Laura, drily enough. "Is there any particular reason why your daughter should have to meet Judd? Except very occasionally, I mean?"

"How can it be avoided?" asked Mrs. Treharne, helplessly. "Hasn't he the run of the house? You don't for an instant suppose that, even if I implored him, he would forego any of his—his privileges here?"

"I am not so imbecile as to suppose any such a thing," said Laura, with a certain asperity. "But the man might exhibit a bit of common decency. He knows that Louise is coming?"

"I haven't told him," said Mrs. Treharne, fluttering to her feet from the dressing table. "You will hook me, Laura? I don't want to call Heloise. She only pretends that she doesn't understand English, and she knows too much already. No, I haven't told him yet. He resents the idea of my having a daughter, you know. He will be here directly to take me out in the car. I shall tell him when we are going through the Park. Then nobody but the chauffeur and I will hear him growl. I know in advance every word that he will say," and the distraught woman looked wan even under her liberal rouge.

Laura impulsively placed an arm around her friend's shoulder.

"Tony," she said, gravely, "why don't you show the brute the door?"

"Because it is his own door—you know that," said Mrs. Treharne, her eyes a little misty.

"Then walk out of it," said Laura. "This isn't the right sort of thing. I don't pose as a saint. But I could not endure this. Come with me. Let Louise join you with me. You know how welcome you are. I have plenty—more than plenty. You shouldn't have permitted Judd to refuse to let you continue to receive the allowance George Treharne provided for Louise. That wasn't fair to yourself. It was more unfair to your daughter. You shouldn't have allowed her to get her education with Judd's money. She is bound to find it out. She would be no woman at all if that knowledge doesn't cut her to the quick. But this is beside the mark. I have plenty. She is a dear, sweet, honest girl, and she is entitled to her chance in the world. I am sure I don't need to tell you that. What chance has she in this house? The doors that are worth while are closed to you, my dear. You know I say that with no unkind intent. It is something you yourself acknowledge. The same doors would be closed to your daughter if she came here. She could and would do so much better with me. Neither you nor she would be dependent. We are too old friends for that. And I know George Treharne. He would renew the allowance that you permitted Judd to thrust back at him through yourself and his lawyer. Leave this place, this sort of thing, once and forever. I want you to—for your own sake and your daughter's."

Mrs. Treharne wept dismally, to the sad derangement of her elaborately-applied make-up. But she wept the tears of self-pity, than which there are none more pitiful. The reins of a great chance, for herself and her daughter, were in her hands. Perhaps it was the intensity of her perturbation that did not permit her to hold them. Very likely it was something else. But, at any rate, hold them she did not.

"You are a dear, Laura," she said, fighting back her tears for the sake of her make-up. "It was what I might have expected of you. Of all the friends I used to have, you are the only one who never has gone back on me. But you must see how impossible it all is. I am in over my head. So what would be the use?"

"You speak for yourself only, Antoinette," said Laura, a little coldly. "What of your daughter?"

"Oh, if only she were a boy!" the wretched woman harped again.

Laura Stedham removed her arm from her friend's shoulder and shrugged a bit impatiently.

"That refrain again?" she said, the warmth departing from her tone. "I must be going before I become vexed with you, Tony. Your own position would be quite the same in any case—if you had a son instead of a daughter, I mean. For my part, I fail to perceive any choice between being shamed in the eyes of a son of in the eyes of a daughter. True, a son would not have to tolerate so humiliating a situation. A son could, and unquestionably would, clap on his hat the moment he became aware of the state of things here, and stamp out, leaving it all behind him. A son could and would shift for himself. But a girl—a girl just out of school—can't do that. She is helpless. She is at the mercy of the situation you have made for her. I fear you are completely losing your moorings, Tony. When is Louise arriving?"

"Tonight," replied Mrs. Treharne, who had subsided into a sort of apathy of self-pity. "At nine something or other. I shall meet her at the station in the car."

Laura turned a quizzical, slitted pair of eyes upon her friend, now busy again with her tear-smudged make-up.

"Not in Judd's car, surely, Tony?" she said, in earnest expostulation. "Why do that? Why not let the girl in upon your—your tangled affairs a little more gradually? How could she help wondering at the extravagant, vulgar ornateness of Judd's car? For of course she knows perfectly well that your own finances are not equal to such a whale of a machine as that."

"It will not take her long to find out everything," said Mrs. Treharne, a little sullenly. "She need not be uncommonly observant to do that. And you remember how embarrassingly observant she was even as a child."

"Give her a chance to observe piecemeal, then," said Laura, laconically. "I shall be with you at the station. One of my poor accomplishments, you know, is the knack of ameliorating difficult situations. And I was always so fond of the child. I am stark curious to see how she has developed. She was a starchy Miss of fifteen when last I saw her. We'll fetch her home in a taxicab. That will be better. It is arranged, then?"

"Everything that you suggest is as good as arranged,' Laura," replied Mrs. Treharne, with a wan smile. "Your gift of persuasion is irresistible—I wish I knew the secret of it. It is extremely good of you to want to meet the child. If I could only meet her with—with such clean hands as—well, as I should have!"

"Never mind—there'll be a way out of it," said Laura, cheerily. "I am off."

She grazed the adeptly-applied artificial bloom of the other woman's cheek with her lips.

As they stood side by side in the juxtaposition of a caress—they were friends from girlhood—the contrast between the two women was sufficiently striking. Laura Stedham, a woman of thirty-five, had the slender yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl of twenty who passes all her days in the open air—minus the indubitable blowsiness which some open-air young women can't help but reveal to the dissecting eye. Unusually tall, she had the gliding grace of movement which so many women of uncommon stature lack. Even in the cluttered dressing room of her friend she made nothing of the obstacles that barred her path, but, walking always with a sort of nervous swiftness, passed around them to her point of destination—a mantel, a table, a hanging picture—with a threading ease of locomotion that made it seem oddly doubtful if she were dependent upon the ground at all for a base. There are tall women who, if they do not collide with stationary objects when they undertake a tour of a room, at least arouse the fear that they will infallibly do so. Laura possessed an eye for the measurement of distances, and the litheness perfectly to follow her measurement. Her complexion was that of a woman to whom a long tramp, even in the city, in the mist or in the blinding rain, was not a task, but a delight. Her hair, all her own, yet worn in the final perverse mood of exaggeration of the coiffure "artist," was of an incredible burnished black, in unusual contrast with her full, kindling, Celtic-grey eyes. A certain irregularity in the outline of her features—especially of her nose, which, far from being aquiline, was too short by the merest fraction—lent a certain piquancy to her expression, even when her face was in repose. She had the habit, growing rare in a world of social avoidances and white lies, of looking the person addressing her straight in the eye. It was not an impaling, disquieting gaze, but one that fairly demanded truthfulness and candor; a gaze unconsciously calculated to cause the liar to stutter in the manufacture of his lie.