Читать книгу High Fences - Grace S. Richmond - Страница 12

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One of the tricks by which the Big Tricks are turned. It requires a flying pencil and a notebook as receptive as a human being. Not all notebooks are like that.

"Yes, Miss Collins, Miss Winthrop is expecting you. Will you please come up?"

Ross went up in the Winthrops' private lift to their twelfth-floor apartment, and was shown to her friend Madge's bedroom. It was a room all amber and green with touches of gold, luxurious yet restrained in effect, after the best manner of to-day's decorating and furnishing.

Madge, having breakfast, sitting up in bed in the midst of silk, chiffon, and lace, all in faint rose tones which became her own delicate coloring, was looking as much like a jewel in a rich setting as usual. She was, however, noticeably heavy-eyed. It was easy for Ross to guess the reason.

"Out most of the night, Fair One? The Atkinson dance--plus?"

"Just that--plus, as you say. Sit down, dear. Won't you have some fruit and coffee--or more?"

"No, thank you. It's my lunch hour, you know. I've just had a whopping bowlful of hot stew at the Oyster Bar. I don't suppose you know that nothing is needed after that."

"Indeed I do. I've been there. It's getting to be quite the thing to do. That's a deliciously filling way of cooking oysters, isn't it?"

"It is. How was the party?"

"We weren't in till four, after such a night! Ross, if it hadn't been for Nicky Gilbert I really don't think I could have come through alive. In his quiet way he somehow manages to look after me, no matter how irresponsible the other men get--and he doesn't do it obtrusively, either. It--endears him to me, in spite of myself."

"I suspect it does. But I'd advise you to hang onto your well-worked-out views regarding your future contentment, not to mention ambition, my Madge. Nice Nick would smother you in the end, you know. And I sometimes fear you're slipping a bit, without knowing it."

"I don't intend to. I couldn't marry Nick--my family would never forgive me.... I mustn't talk about it now, though. I can tell by your bolt-upright position on the edge of that chair that you're on your way to something important."

"I am--or I hope it may turn out that, though I don't need to sit on the edge of my chair quite so long beforehand. I've an appointment in exactly forty-five minutes, and it takes twenty to get there. I'm sorry. I'd love to hear the sort of thing that doesn't make copy for me, but interests me all the more for that, because it concerns you."

"I know, but you want the notes now, and you shall have them. I think they're particularly hilarious ones."

"Splendid! I need them badly."

Madge rang, had the tray removed, and settled back among her pillows. Ross was ready with notebook and pencil.

Once a week when the Winthrops were in town Ross came to see this young woman, the daughter of people of wealth and social prominence, who had been a former classmate at school. The friendship there made had continued, cherished by both because of a strong congeniality of spirit, in spite of the wide gap between their modes of life.

Madge was deeply interested in Ross's weekly magazine column called A Lady of Leisure. It had been begun two years before, inspired by certain contacts Ross had been making with unusual women who interested her. One of them, a visitor from England, had had a dryly original way of commenting upon people and events, which struck Ross as more freshly diverting than any way of putting things she had ever heard. Being herself apt at mimicry she had found herself able to reproduce this woman's style, and to fit it to the uses of her own trade. Long after the Englishwoman had gone back across the water she was unknowingly inspiring Ross to carry on her enlivening methods. Speaking with her laughing lips, using her high-bred yet original and unhackneyed means of expression, A Lady of Leisure had become a well-known and much relished character in the column of a magazine devoted mostly to sophisticated waggery.

But it was Madge Winthrop who had been from the first of invaluable help to Ross. She too had been captivated by the Englishwoman, and had seen the possibilities for her friend in using Mrs. Barnstable as the prototype of a character from whose lips might issue all sorts of merry recountings and descriptions, following the events, the fashions and follies, the lighter issues of the day. But Ross lived in another world than that of the famous Englishwoman, and almost equally far from that of Madge herself--the type of person whom this gay chronicler must be supposed to represent.

Ross had been born the daughter of an unsuccessful merchant who had died--she had long believed--of his failure to provide competently for his wife, Ross's mother, who had come from a family much more intellectual than his, and who had been far more gently bred. The two should never have been mated, perhaps, though there lingered undoubted evidence that Mary Collins had loved her unimportant husband to the end of his undistinguished days. She had shortly followed him, and Ross had been left with quick wits, an instinct for beauty in all forms, and a sturdy independence which came from somewhere far back on her mother's side, as her chief inheritance.

But Henry Collins had somehow seen to it before he left her that this daughter was sent to the best schools, for the sake of her mother, who had been graduated from them years before. Their elder daughter, Ethel, had married early; she had had no taste for the higher education. It was at these schools that Ross had met Madge Winthrop and afterward, through Madge, her social group. Ross was often included by them--and increasingly so as she became known upon the printed page--in their less elaborate plans for amusement and for club work. They considered her extraordinarily endowed with cleverness, audacity, and charm, and liked to have her among them. From their talk she garnered much extremely modern, vivacious material for her Lady. But Madge could give her still more because she deliberately saved up all she heard and saw that could be of use to her friend, and on these weekly visits spread it graphically before her.

"Last night," she would begin, "the rarest thing happened. You know Dicky Derling--his way of making absurd speeches at the most inopportune moments. Well, Adelaide Sydenham had just come in ..." And she would tell the tale, while Ross's flying pencil secured it. In the Lady's next column the story about Adelaide and Dick would appear, transmuted out of all recognition, crammed into one delicious paragraph, making readers look up from reading it to exclaim amidst strangled laughter: "Oh, hear this! Did anyone ever have such a way of turning a quip as Ross Collins? It isn't anything she says, really, it's the way she says it!" Which obviously explains most successful attempts at humor, and its more subtle sister, wit.

So Ross held her sessions with Madge, and considered herself lucky to get them. In return she gave her friend many glimpses into a world of which Madge knew nothing, except through the printed page. In these recitals of Ross's experiences all sorts of people figured. No question that this little person, under the tutelage of one and another of the men and women with whom she had worked at various periods, had come to know intimately not only the highways but the byways of the great city in which she had been born. Under another name than that of Ross Collins she daily wrote of both highways and byways, but with this name she had made no noteworthy reputation outside of a certain newspaper office, nor did she care to make it. Only a few knew her by the fictitious name.

One day she had told Madge, had shown her a column or two signed by the pen name, and Madge had looked at her in amazement.

"Ross! But that's not you at all!"

"How do you know it isn't? That may be the real Me. The Lady of Leisure certainly isn't. If you knew how often I grin at myself as I sit doing the Lady in my grubby room, you'd know I don't even get inside her skin. She's really you, of course."

"Ross! What nonsense! She's Mrs. Barnstable--you know she is. From the very beginning it was Mrs. Barnstable you were visualizing when you did the Lady."

"The cat's out," Ross confessed. "Of course it was Mrs. Barnstable who started off the whole thing. But, fascinating as she is, she's a middle-aged woman, and she dresses a bit too mannishly to be compelling to the male eye. Whereas my Lady, if she's anything, must catch all eyes. I flatter myself I've made her do that. How could I help it, with you for a model? So between you and Mrs. Barnstable, we've made a sort of hit, eh? And don't you think I'm just about equally grateful to you both?"

"You imp, I'm not sure I'm wholly flattered," Madge objected. "As you put it, the Englishwoman furnishes the brains for this composite, while the American supplies the rouge and lipstick and evening clothes!"

"As I begin to write in the composite's person," said Ross, endeavoring with a glint in her eyes to explain, "I see you. Always I see you. Sitting up in bed as you are now, looking exquisitely frivolous in your fripperies.... I adore that shade.... Lunching with some other perfectly turned-out friend--Audrey Cortland, Katherine Colt, Anne Lloyd, your sister Virginia. Dancing with Lynn Fairbairn, or Nick Gilbert, or Ronny Van Dyke. Standing to be fitted by Madame Coline and her assistants. Coming out from a play to stand waiting for your motor, wearing one of those gorgeous evening wraps of yours, all ermine collar rolling up about your beautiful shoulders. Always I see you, my dear. If I didn't I couldn't do my stuff. I--" she smiled--"now you will see that I mean what I say. When I begin to do the Lady I always set that marvellous photograph of you done by Selma Colfax on my desk and keep you there. Why, I doubt if I could do a single one of my columns without it!"

"I should think," mused Madge, "looking at that picture would make you dumb. Why, it's no more like your scintillating Lady than a pigeon is like a--a pheasant."

Ross laughed. "You don't know yourself, do you, my dear? And I'm offering you incontrovertible evidence. I couldn't put a pigeon before me and think a pheasant, could I? Very well. The fact remains. And another thing I want to tell you. With my training in the other school--the sordid school--the one I undeniably do represent in that column I showed you--it would have been easy to make the Lady under all her smoothness a gossiper--a tattler--an insinuator. She might have gone better than she has if I had--with some readers, certainly. But with you for her model, and the remembrance of Mrs. Barnstable's beautiful breeding, I simply couldn't do that, Madge. I had to keep to sheer amusing nonsense, ruling out the viciousness. It's made it a harder job--oh, I promise you it has. Innumerable times I've had to hold my hand, being by nature loving of a sharp stab where a gay flick would do as well. Often it's seemed like trying to get an effect in pastel tints when I wanted to splash on the brilliant oils. But, after all----"

"After all," declared Madge, "you've done the subtler thing. People are enchanted with the Lady--all sorts of people. She's an unusual figure as you present her; there aren't any snarls or jabs in her speeches, yet she's never dull."

"Snarls and jabs do make entertaining reading, though. I'll admit I enjoy 'em myself. Hard hitting fascinates me. I like seeing adversaries stand up to each other in print, and feint and parry and get in a deadly thrust now and then. That's all right, too, if the fight's a fair one. Things can't be smoothed over much in this world--what's there is bound to show. But you, Madge, when you speak in the person of my Lady you have to be the lady you are, and that Mrs. Barnstable is. I make you as sparkling as I know how--as witty, as quick and keen, a perfectly darling rascal in your way--but I won't make you what you couldn't be--underhanded, spiteful, vicious, catty, to be feared. And you know, my dear, having to do you that way is most awfully good for me, for I'd be a natural cynic as regards those born to the purple like you, if you hadn't taught me the contrary."

In this way Ross seemed to herself to live in two worlds. One, vicariously, was that of Madge Winthrop--a sort of super-world, where luxury and pleasure were the chief ends, with an admixture of charitable deeds to even things up--or at least to give the doers comfortable consciences. The other world was that of her work of every day, on a lower level--on many lower levels. To go from a police court where she had watched the lowest types of ragged and ill-smelling human beings crouching and cringing under the hands of the law, to a luncheon with Madge Winthrop among the most fastidious of the so-called upper classes, often made Ross wonder what actually could be defined by the name of "life," and which it really was. Madge was living her life, Ross was living her life, Mary Reilly, haled into court for thieving and child beating, was living hers.... And David MacRoss, whom, amidst all the hurry and scurry of her days, and with all her worry over Jimmy French and his chances for recovery, she had thus far been unable to forget, was living his. Which of them all was most real? She didn't know.