Читать книгу His Second Wife - Ernest Poole - Страница 4

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Her first month in town was a season of shopping and of warm anticipations—and then came a sudden crash. Afterward it was hard to remember. For tragedy entered into these rooms, and it was not easy to look back and see them clearly as they had been. That first month became confused, the memories uneven; in some spots clear and vivid, in others hazy and unreal.

"I want you to be gay, my dear," Amy told her at the start. "You've been through such a lonely time. And what earthly good will it do poor Dad to have you go about in black? You're here now and you've got to make friends and a place for yourself. If he were alive I know he'd agree. He'd want you to have every chance."

So they started in to shop. And though Ethel had her memories, her moods of homesick longing for the old soldier who was gone, these soon became less frequent. There was little time to be lonely or sad.

Amy herself felt new youth these days. Relieved of the first uneasiness with which she had gone to Ohio to bring her young sister to New York, surprised and delighted at finding how the awkward girl she had known had developed since the last time they had met, Amy now took Ethel about to get her "clothes fit to be seen in." And as with intent little glances she kept studying "Ethel's type" in order to set off her charms, the slightly bored expression, the look of disillusionment left Amy's pretty countenance. For Ethel's freshness had given to Amy new zest and belief in her own life, in its purpose and importance. To get Ethel clothes, to show her about, to find her friends, to give her a gay winter in town and later to make a good match for her—these aims loomed large in Amy's mind. She felt her own youth returning, and she prolonged this period. She wanted Ethel all to herself. She even shut her husband out.

"You can rest up a bit," she told him, "for what's coming later on." And Joe, with a good-natured groan at the prospect of late hours ahead, made the most of the rest allowed to him.

Each morning the two sisters fared forth in a taxi. And Amy began to reveal to her sister the dazzling world of shops in New York: shops large and small, American, French and English, shops for gowns and hats and shoes, and furs and gloves and corsets. At numberless counters they studied and counselled, and lunching at Sherry's they shopped on. And the shimmer and sheen of pretty things made life a glamourous mirage, in which Ethel could feel herself rapidly becoming a New Yorker, gaining assurance day by day, feeling "her type" emerge in the glass where she studied herself with impatient delight.

There were little reminders now and then of what she had left behind her. One day in a department store, as they stood before a counter looking at silk stockings, all at once to Ethel's ears came the deep tones of an organ, and turning with a low cry of surprise she looked over the bustling throngs of women to an organ loft above, where a girl was singing a solo in a high sweet soprano voice. In a flash to Ethel's mind there came a vivid picture of the old yellow church at home. And with a queer expression looking about her at the crowds, she exclaimed, "How funny!" She was again reminded of church when one afternoon in a large darkened chamber she sat with scores of women whose eyes were fixed as though in devotion upon a softly lighted stage where "models" kept appearing. What lovely figures some of them had. Others rather took her breath, and gave her the feeling she'd had before in her sister's bedroom. But then as her eye was caught again by the rapt faces all about, she chuckled to herself and thought, "There ought to be candles and incense here!"

She was appalled at the prices. And as the exciting days wore on, uneasily in her room at night she would sit down with pencil and paper and ask, "How much did I spend today?" Her father had left her nothing but the shabby old frame house. This she had sold to a friend of his, and the small fund thus secured she had resolved to husband.

"Oh, Ethel, go slow, you little fool. This is every penny you have in the world."

But the adorable things she saw, and the growing hunger she felt as she began to notice with a more discerning eye the women in shops and on the streets—just why they were so dashing and how they got this and that effect—all swept aside her caution, the easier because of the fact that everything she bought was charged.

One evening in a large café she sat watching Amy who was dancing with her husband. It was at the time when the new style dances were just coming into vogue. In Ohio they had been only a myth. But Amy was a beautiful dancer; and watching her now, Ethel reflected, "She expects me to be like that. If I'm not, she'll be disappointed, ashamed. And why shouldn't I be! What do you ever get in this world if you're always saving every cent? You miss your chance and then it's too late. I'll be meeting her friends in a few weeks more. I've simply got to hurry!" And with Amy's dancing teacher she arranged for lessons—at a price that made her gasp. But the lessons were a decided success.

"You've a wonderful figure for dancing," the teacher said confidingly, "and a sense for rhythm that most of these women haven't any idea of." He smiled down at her and she fairly beamed.

"Oh, how nice!" sighed Ethel. Something in the little look which flashed between them gave her a thrill of assurance. And this feeling came again and again, in the shops and while she was seated at luncheon in some crowded restaurant, or on the streets or back at home, where even Joe was beginning to show his admiring surprise.

"You're making a fine little job of it," she heard him say to Amy one night.

She caught other remarks and glances from strangers, men and women. And Ethel now began to feel the whole vast bustling ardent town centred on what in her high-school club, as they read Bernard Shaw, they had quite frankly and solemnly spoken of as "Sex." All the work and the business, the scheming and planning and rush for money, were focussed on this. And for this she was attracting those swift admiring glances. What she would be, what she wanted to be, what she now ardently longed to become, grew clearer to her day by day. For the picture was there before her eyes. Each day it grew more familiar, as at home in Amy's room she watched her beautiful sister, a stranger no longer to her now, seated at her dressing table good-humouredly chatting, and meanwhile revealing by numberless deft little things she was doing the secrets of clothes and of figure, and of cheeks and lips and eyes, with subtle hints behind it all of the ancient magic art of Pan. She felt Amy ceaselessly bringing her out. This gave her thrills of excitement. And looking at her sister she asked:

"Shall I ever be like that?"

And they kept talking, talking. And through it all the same feeling was there, the sense of this driving force of the town.

With the sturdy independence which was so deep a part of her, Ethel strove to hold up her end of these intent conversations and show that she had views of her own. She was no old-fashioned country girl, but modern, something different! They had discussed things in her club which would have shocked their mothers, discussed them long and seriously. They had spoken of marriage and divorce, of love and having children, and then had gone eagerly on to suffrage, jobs and "mental science," art, music and the rest of life. She had gathered there an image of New York as a glittering region of strong clever men and fascinating women, who not only loved to dance but held the most brilliant discussions at dinners livened by witty remarks—a place of vistas opening into a world of great ideas. And now with her older sister, she questioned her about it all, the art and all the "movements," the "salons" and the clever talk. She asked:

"Do you know any suffragists? Do you know any men who write plays or novels, or any musicians or painters—or actresses?" And again and again by an air of assurance Ethel tried to hide her dismay, as her sister subtly made all this seem like a school-girl's fancies.

"Yes," Amy would say good-humouredly, "there are such people, I suppose—plenty of them, all over town. And they talk and talk and hold meetings, and they go to high-brow plays—and some women even work. But it doesn't sound very thrilling, does it? I don't know. They never seem to me quite real."

And then Amy would go on to hint what did seem real to her in life. And again that picture of the town, all centred on what emerged from the shops and poured into the cafes to dance, was painted for her sister.

But behind her smiling manner of one with an intimate knowledge of life, Amy would glance at the girl by her side in a curious, rather anxious way. For vaguely she knew that years ago when she herself had come to New York, she too had had dreams and imaginings of what her young sister called "the real thing." And she knew that these had dropped away—at first in the struggle, which for her had been so intense and narrowing, to gain a foothold in the town; then through rebuffs from the clever friends of Joe Lanier when she married him; and later through a feeling of lazy acceptance of her lot. But Ethel's talk and Ethel's eyes recalled what had been left behind. And Amy thought of her present friends, and again with a little uneasy pang she put off their meeting with Ethel. For they did not seem good to her then, and the picture she found herself painting of their lives and her own appeared a bit flat and trivial in the light of Ethel's eagerness. They dressed and went shopping, they went to tea dances, they dined in cafés or in their homes, rushed off in taxis to musical plays, and had supper and danced. They loved and were loved, they "played the game."

"My dear," she said decisively, "it's not what you say that interests men; it's how you look and what you have on."

But despite her air of assurance and her own liking of her life, she felt the picture growing flat, and so she added quietly:

"Oh, my friends aren't all I'd like. They never are, if you've anything in you. If you really want to be somebody—" and here her whole expression changed to one of resolute faith in herself—"you need just one thing, money. And you can't do anything about that, you have to wait for your husband. Joe's a dear, of course, and he's working hard. And he's getting it, too, he's getting it!" A gleam of hunger almost fierce came into her clear violet eyes. "I want a larger apartment—I've picked out the very one. And I want a car, a limousine. I know just how I'll paint it a mauve body with white wheels. And I want a house on Long Island. I've picked out the very spot—just next to Fanny Carr's new place."

As her sister spoke of these ideals, again Ethel had that feeling of church, but only for a moment.

"Who's Fanny Carr?" she asked alertly.

Amy was slowly combing her hair, and she smiled with kindly tolerance, for her little confession had brought back her faith in herself and her future.

"Fanny was a writer once—"

"Oh, really!"

"Yes. She ran a department on one of the papers." It had been the dress pattern page, but Amy did not mention that. Instead she yawned complacently. "Oh, she dropped it quick enough—she thought it rather tiresome. She's one of the cleverest women I know. She'd have got a long way up in the world, if it weren't for her second husband—"

"Her second?"

"Yes. The first one didn't do very well. She told me once, 'If you want to get on, change your name at least once in every three years.' Her second, as it happened, was no better than the first. But she was clever enough by then to get an able lawyer; and when it came to the divorce, Fanny succeeded in keeping the house, the one out on Long Island."

"Oh," said Ethel tensely. Her sister shot a look at her.

"I don't care especially for Fanny's ideas about husbands," she said.

"But at least she has a love of a home." And Amy went on to explain to

her sister the value and importance of being able to give "week ends."

Again the gleam came into her eyes.

"It's money, my dear, it's money. They are the same women in Newport exactly—just like all the rest of us—only they are richer. That's all—but it is everything. Put me in a big house out there, and my friends wouldn't know me in a few years."

A cloud came on her face as she looked in the glass.

"But that's just the trouble. A few years more and I'll be too late. You've got to get there while you're young. And there's so little time. You lose your looks. It's all very well for some women to talk about ideas and things—and travel and—and children. I did, too, I talked a lot—oh, how I wanted everything! But one has to narrow down. Thank heaven, Ethel, you've years ahead. I've only got a few more left—I'm already thirty-one. And my type ages fast in this town, if you do the things you're expected to do. But you—oh, Ethel, I want you to marry well! Not a millionaire—that's rather hard, and besides he'd probably be too fat—but the kind who will be a millionaire, who has it written all over his face and makes you feel it in his voice! Don't sell yourself too cheap, my dear! Don't go running about with men who'll keep you poor for the rest of your days. They talk so well—some of them do; and it sounds so fine—ideas and books and pictures and—I knew one who was an architect. And it's all very well for later on, but what you've got to do right at the start—while you have the looks and youth—is to find the man who can give you a house where all those other people will be tumbling to get in—because you'll have the money—you'll be able to entertain—and give them what they really want—in spite of all their talking."

Once more, with a weary sigh, she dropped the religious intensity, and smiled as she wistfully added:

"That's where some man can put you. They do, you know, they do it. Some man does it every day. You can see his name in the papers. Dozens of wives get to Newport each year. And what do they do it on? Money!

"That's romance enough for me, my dear. And if you want work and a career, the most fascinating kind I know is to study the man you've married—find what's holding him back and take it away—what's pushing him on and help it grow! You've got to narrow, narrow down! You may want a lot of children. They're loves, of course, to have around. But you run a big risk in that. I could give you so many cases—mothers who have just dropped out. If you want to really get on in this town, you've got to stick to your husband and make your husband stick to you! There are things about that you will learn soon enough. It comes so naturally, once you are in it—married, I mean. And that's your hold.

"And if you love him as I love Joe," she added almost in a whisper, "you find it so easy that often you forget what it is you're trying to do, what you're really doing it for. You're just happy and you shut your eyes. But then you wake up and use it all—everything—to drive him on. You can do that while you are still young and have what he wants—the looks, I mean—and can make him see that any number of other men would be glad to step into his shoes. But you give them only just enough to keep your husband from feeling too safe. You hold them off, you make him feel that he's everything to you if he'll work and give you what you ought to have! And unless you're a fool you don't listen to this talk of women's rights and women doing the work of men. You keep on your own ground and play the game. And you keep making him get what you need—before it's too late!" All at once she gave a sharp little laugh. "It's a kind of a race, you see," she said.

The night after this talk, Ethel lay in her bed, and tried to remember and think it out. How new and queer and puzzling. So many vistas she had dreamed of had been closed on every hand.

"What's the matter with me?"

The matter was that her old ideals and standards were being torn up by the roots, roots that went deep down into the soil of life in the town in Ohio. But Ethel did not think of that. She scowled and sighed.

"Well, this is real! I was dreaming! And after all, this is much the same, but different in the way you get it. This is New York. One thing is sure," she added. "Amy needs every dollar Joe can make—and she must not have me on her hands. I've got to find what I really want—a job or a man—and be quick about it!"

It threw a tinge of uneasiness into those breathless shopping tours. And it changed her attitude toward Joe. He had not counted for much at first; he had been a mere man of business; and business men had had little place in her dreams of friends in the city. But watching him now she changed her mind.

Joe Lanier was what is called "a speculative builder." He was an architect, building contractor and real estate gambler, all in one. He put up apartment buildings "on spec," buildings of the cheaper sort, most of them up in the Bronx, and sold them at a profit—or a loss, as the case might be. He dealt in the rapidly shifting values of neighbourhoods in the changing town. "The gamble in it is the fun," he remarked to Ethel one evening. Joe was just the kind of a man, as Amy had told her sister, to make a big sudden success of his work. Unfortunately he was tied to a partner, Nourse by name, who held him back. This man Amy keenly disliked. She said that Nourse was a perfect grind, a heavy tiresome creature who thought business was everything in the world.

"Sometimes I really believe he forgets it's for making money," Amy declared. "He's as anxious about it as an old hen, and he wants it steady as a cow. He detests me, as I do him. He has stopped coming here, thank heaven. And the time is not so far away when I'll make Joe see that he's got to lose his partner."

Joe's image gained steadily in importance to Ethel's awakening eyes. Of his force as a man, all that she saw made her more and more certain that Amy was right. Joe was the kind who was bound to succeed. He not only worked hard, his work was a passion. At night and on Sunday mornings he could sit for hours absorbed in the tiresome pages of real estate news in his paper. He went out for strolls in the evenings; one night he asked Ethel to come along; and his talk to her about buildings, the growth of the city by leaps and bounds, now in this direction, now in that, caught her imagination at once. Joe felt the town as a living thing, as she had felt it that first night. Different? Yes, this was business. But even business, to her surprise, as Joe saw and felt it, had a strange thrilling romance of its own.

And she soon noticed something else that drew her to Joe. Almost every evening he would sit down at his piano and start playing idly. As a rule he played dance music, popular songs from Broadway. But sometimes leaning back he would drift into other music. And though his hand would bungle and only sketch it, so to speak—in his black eyes, scowling slightly over the smoke of his cigar, would come a look which Ethel liked. But vaguely she felt that Amy did not, that it even made her uneasy. For almost invariably at such times, Amy would come behind him, her plump softly rounded arm would find its way down over his shoulder—and little by little the music would change and would come back to Broadway.

When Joe heard one evening that Ethel was "mad to learn to sing," he took her by the arm at once and marched her over to the piano. And they had quite a session together—till Amy suggested going out to a new cabaret she had heard of that day. Her voice sounded hurt and strained. And Ethel from that night on dropped all mention of singing.

Her curiosity deepened toward this city love affair, this husband and wife who apparently had left so many things out of their lives, things vital in the Ohio town. The sober wee girl in the nursery kept just as quiet as before. Often Ethel opened that door and went in and tried to make friends with its grave shy little inmate and the hostile nurse. And returning to her room she would frown and wonder for a time. But the pretty things piling in from the shops, and the gay anticipations, soon crowded such questioning out of her mind. Swiftly this household was growing more real, the rooms familiar, intimate; the day's routine with its small events were becoming parts of her life. Her own room was familiar now, for by many touches she'd made it her own. And the dining-room and the living room, where she grew acquainted with Joe, these too assumed an intimate air. Most of all, her sister's room grew more and more vivid in her thoughts, though this was still far from familiar, It held too much, it meant too much.

"Shall I ever live with a man like that?"

The way they looked at each other at times! The way they seemed keeping watch on each other. If Joe were out very late at night, Amy would almost invariably grow uneasy and absentminded, and there would be a challenging note in the way she greeted him on his return. On one such occasion Ethel was in Amy's room. She went out when Joe came in; but a queer little gasping sigh behind gave her a start and a swift thrill, for although she did not turn around she knew they were in each other's arms. And again, late one afternoon when the sisters came home and found Joe at work with a tired anxious look on his face, his wife came up behind him. And the picture of her small gloved hand upon Joe's heavy shoulder remained in Ethel's memory. It seemed so soft and yet so strong.

"She can do anything with him she likes. When I marry somebody how will it be?"

Upon the living-room mantel was a photograph of Amy. And on the smooth and pretty face with the lips slightly parting, and in the smiling violet eyes, there was the expression of something which Ethel did not quite name to herself—for she had forgotten the night long ago in her high-school club when they had sturdily tackled the word "sensual" and what it meant. But the picture grew familiar and real, filled in by the living presence here of this woman who so carefully tended her beautiful body, her glossy hair, her cheeks and lips; this sister with so many moods, now intent and watchful, now good-humoured, indolent, now expectant, hungry, now smilingly content and gay.

And as the picture grew more real, warm and close and thrilling, it symbolized for Ethel that mysterious force which she could feel on every side, driving the throngs of humanity—in this city where so many things she had once deemed important were fading rapidly away. That hungry hope of a singer's career, that craving for work and self-education, trips to Paris, London, Rome, books, art and clever people, "salons," brilliant discussions of life; and deeper still, those mysterious dreams about having children and making a home—all began to drop behind, so quietly and easily that she barely noticed the change.

For this was happening in a few weeks, in the first whirl and excitement of those dazzling streets and shops, those models, gowns, hats, gloves and shoes. "It's not what you say that interests men—it's how you look and what you have on." The image of her sister grew vivid in Ethel's eager mind. And with it came the question, now ardent though still a little confused:

"Shall I ever be like that?"