Читать книгу Pink Magic - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 4

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Hardly had we left the Back Bay Station than I could see the trip was going to be definitely super. Mrs. Candee, who was to be the chaperon for us three “younger girls” (as we were simperingly called), is of course a schoolteacher, but not in the strict meaning of the word, for she is a divorcée. In a very prim way, naturally. She is fairly old. My guess is about twenty-nine, though Horty insists she must be all of thirty. But at least she once was exposed to a man, even if only temporarily and unsuccessfully.

There were two other “girls” for this part of the trip. Horty Evans, whose mother couldn’t bother with her this summer while she is in Reno, Nevada, picking up the usual commodity for which that area is famous. She is going to try a new marriage. But Horty says it will be the same old chassis with a new paint job.

The other girl is Corney Baker, who is a ripe seventeen, with tired, experienced eyes. I tried to pretend I was also seventeen, but Horty said, “Listen, Lambie-dumpling, Candee told my mother all the facts about you, so don’t get delusions of grandeur.”

Horty is a very athletic-type girl, but it has never stood in her way, since she doesn’t seem to run to muscle but rather to slow curves. Her hair is a bit alarming when you first see it, but you soon get used to it. It is jet black underneath, with gold on the top layer. There is a mourning border of black on each side of the part. Her head in fact is a kind of gold-and-black-striped tiger pelt. This is because there was a bad rainy Sunday last winter at Miss Dean’s School, when nobody knew what to do with themselves. Miss Dean had hysterics when nine brass blondes came down to supper.

It would have turned out all right, except that the parents were so reactionary they wouldn’t stand for the upkeep, and everyone had to let her hair grow back just any way it wanted to. Horty says the two months she was a pure blonde were “the best years of her life.”

“I’ve been a pure blonde all my life,” I said, “and I’ve never found anything so wonderful about it.”

“There’s such a thing as being too pure a blonde,” Corney said.

I couldn’t follow the reasoning in that remark; I should think the more blonde the better. But our acquaintance was too young for arguing. Indeed, what a wonderful world it would be if all acquaintances were considered too young for arguing!

At any rate, when Horty’s eighteen next year, she’s going to have a lawyer write a letter to her mother, saying she is of age, and she can own and operate her own scalp as she pleases. But this summer, she is frankly a mess, if you aren’t in the “know” enough to appreciate what her peroxided hair stands for. You might mistake her for a repentant waitress when you first saw her, but when she opens her mouth, you know she is Junior League to the bone. It’s what Daddy calls “provocative contradiction.”

We heard about the Dean débâcle at Miss Winslow’s, and the only thing we could do to match it was to have our ears pierced. Not spectacular, of course, but at least permanent. We considered some modest tattooing strategically placed, but there was no reliable tattooer north of Scollay Square, Boston, or south of Bath, Maine, and Miss Winslow’s School is just halfway between.

Horty, naturally, does not regret the Sunday afternoon, although she has to pretend some tripey remorse to her mother. Matter of fact, most of our better schools heard all about it, and it gives those nine striped blondes a certain distinction. Next year they’ll be coming out in nine of our nicest cities, and their hair is a kind of badge of daring among kids who know what’s what.

Horty has very nice black eyes and good eyebrows, and I imagine she wears clothes well. I say I imagine, because naturally in Mexico nobody wears clothes much.

All this description of Horty is ipso facto, because of course it would have been impossible for me to speak in such an experienced and worldly fashion at the time I was furtively observing her and Corney, during our first hours together. As I dimly remember, then I was terrified of them both, so I was scowling at them from behind my glasses, and trying to give the impression that I thought they were pretty silly, and even immature. That was more than a month ago, when I was Somebody Else. Since then I have overtaken them in sophistication, if not actually outstripped them. (No pun intended!)

In a frightened blur I saw them as two of my natural enemies. Not safe and tiresome, as adults are. But people I’d not want to trust. For they obviously had Appeal. And they would soon recognize that I had none, and would begin reviling, ridiculing, and finally, what is worse, ignoring me. It has happened to me so many times when I have been forced to venture out among my contemporaries, that I can feel the cruel cold breath of scorn blown on me the moment I am looked at by any girl who has dated and who knows her Way Around.

I knew it would be impossible to impress them in their own field, which was obviously sex, and that they would have no interest in my field, which is everything else that is left after sex has been removed from the world. But what, in heaven’s name, is left? That has always been my dilemma.

“I hear you’re a wonderful student,” Corney said accusingly. “That’s super, I imagine.”

“On the contrary,” I said haughtily, “I loathe the whole ghastly process so much... education, that is ... that I’m trying to dash through it as quickly as possible. To get it over with, you know.”

“Umm,” they said vaguely, seeing through me perfectly, and not being interested in the slightest.

Corney, so named because her father is a professor at a certain university, is an entirely different type from Horty. Smaller and deadlier. Brighter, hence not so good-natured. She is very dark and pretty in a fragile misleading little way. She has an appetite which would choke a horse, as the saying goes. Nothing she eats seems to show on her the way it does on most normal people. Her waist is twenty when she breathes and eighteen when she doesn’t, which was supposed to be an asset in the last century, and is becoming so again.

She has a small refined lazy little voice, except when you are alone with her (just girls, I mean); then she quite likely scrapes her words off the bottom of her throat, or peels them off the roof of her mouth. Her profanity would take the varnish off a merry-go-round. She says she learned it from a riding teacher she was in love with two years ago at Miss Makepeace’s in Connecticut.

She wears her hair parted in the middle, and draws it down demurely in a dark curtain on each side of her face. Her eyes are wide and gray. She is the perfect madonna type. Outside, that is. Inside, she is a swearing, sweating female wrestler.

Naturally she hasn’t the slightest interest in Art, but she had heard that Mexican men are terrific. So she persuaded her parents to let her study in this special course connected with the University of Mexico.

Both Corney and Horty had fat bulging billfolds with leaves of double cellophane in which they have dozens of boys’ pictures, past, present, and future. You can tell how each boy rates by his position in the billfold. The farther-back ones are almost forgotten, but are present only to give confidence on the days of discouragement, when you want to count over your achievements and buck yourself up.

Horty broke up with her boy just before she left home. He’s a sad character, unnerved by the war. He is twenty-two, which is the oldest man any girl I’ve personally known has ever gone with. He would have got overseas in another week if the war hadn’t ended. Although he told Horty he just wanted to be free, she thinks it is really a case of another woman. Sometimes she was pretty sunk when she thought about him, and breaking up and all. It just shows how the war has ruined the world, she says. She only heard from him five times the whole month.

Corney’s billfold had more pictures in it than Horty’s. You’d know that to look at them, for Corney is the obvious valentine type that practically any boy would find his head swimming about. Horty is more of an acquired taste, like camembert cheese.

Also Corney has much more skill in handling men. For instance, Corney says no matter how much in love she is, she never goes steady with anybody.

“I go semi-steady,” she says.

“With how many boys at once?” Horty asked, without a gleam of humor.

“Well, sometimes with three boys and sometimes with four. Depending.”

I tried to pin them down about just what semi-steady involves, but it ran into decimals, and I’ve never enjoyed mathematics. Especially in the summer.

They showed me their billfolds as soon as the train pulled out, and I was terrified for fear they would ask to see mine. I intended to say that my mother stole it that very morning. But they didn’t ask me. When I realized that was because they knew all too well that I didn’t have any pictures, I felt very depressed. Anybody would know to look at the big sprawling size of me that I haven’t any love-life. It is a gruesome thing to have your love-life show the minute anybody looks at your figure.

But although I was pretty discouraged and inferior-feeling, I felt myself reviving with every ten miles I traveled away from home. I felt my old self dropping off like a garment, as I think it says in the Bible. Or Shakespeare. Anyway, my unfortunate environment was fading from my appearance. At home everyone thinks of me as a plump, clumsy, unattractive child, the way I was a couple of years ago. That Lambie Prowder. But here I was being born into a new world, where my empty past wouldn’t matter. It was a daring and dangerous thought, and I sat by the window watching the fields and towns fly past, and thought about it until chills went up and down my backbone.

I made up my mind that the first thing I’d do was lose my round straw hat that Mummy made me wear. I got up, stepping on Horty’s toes in my excitement, and went out of our compartment.

“Excuse... I’ve got to go to the john,” I mumbled.

“We’ve a private lavatory right here, Lambie,” Mrs. Candee said, but I pretended not to hear her.

I plunged down the aisle of the pullman, noticing all kinds of men reading newspapers or looking out windows, and burst into the Ladies’ john at the end of the car. Without a moment’s doubt, I stuffed the hat down the john, hoping it wouldn’t get stuck in the trap door. I felt better the minute it disappeared. It was only a symbol of what I intended to do to my entire environment. If not my heredity.

As I came staggering back to our own drawing room, I happened to notice a very unusual woman. I was looking at the man with her, of course, and then my eye sort of slid off of his face onto hers. I nearly gasped because she was so beautiful. She looked something like that great actress from Italy, Valli, only much more aristocratic and romantic-looking. The man with her was also dark and rather foreign-looking, but a common type. The thought occurred to me instantly that he might be a faithful retainer of her family sent to travel with her. Later, when we became acquainted and I asked her if this was true, she admitted that it was. That shows you how intuitive was my understanding of Estrellita from the first moment I looked at her.

She must have seen me gazing helplessly at her, for she looked up, then glanced down quickly to hear what her companion was saying, and then again raised her lovely eyes to my face. Then she smiled.

It was not an American smile. I do not know how to describe it, except to say that it came out of the Old World. And out of another century, when romance ruled. I stumbled back to our compartment, just as Mrs. Candee was starting out to look for me.

“Lambie... I’ve promised your mother you are not to wander about by yourself,” she said sternly.

I muttered I-don’t-know-what, and sank back into my place by the window. The wide wonderful world lay before me, and mystery had already beckoned to me. One short walk down the aisle of a pullman, and I had blundered into an unguessed enchantment. My hands were quivering with excitement in my lap.

Horty and Corney were getting out their cards to play a little gin. I looked at them with pity. For the first time in my life, I looked at two girls with appeal, and wasn’t afraid of them. Somebody dangerous and beautiful had been attracted to me, and had smiled.

The next couple of days were practically wasted flying through America on a beeline to the Mexican border. We could understand perfectly why Candee made a mess of marriage, for she was certainly a woman of strong character. Never once, except in a hideous group, would she allow us to venture out of that compartment. She said very grimly that she had promised our parents, and that was that. No matter how scathingly we looked at her, she did not relent.

For at least an hour before each mealtime, Horty and Corney would work on their appearance, going over their skin with a magnifying mirror in case some little blackhead had invisibly popped out since they looked last, turning up their eyeballs in hideous gymnastics while they studied each hair of their eyebrows, and putting on at least three mouths before they finally got one that suited them. But all of it was in vain, for as Horty said, what man could possibly get a load of one of us, when we were all lumped together like a bunch of bananas. Candee walked behind us through the cars on the way to the diner, and she kept us moving at breakneck speed. Men barely had time to get their eyes up from the sports page before we were gone.

Even in the dining car, we didn’t have a chance. Candee wouldn’t hear of us breaking up and sitting two and two at a table (though that would have done me no good, as I would certainly have drawn her). We had to wait at the end of the dining car until a big family table for four was vacant. It was nauseating.

The only break we got at all was a portly sexagenarian who must have been all of forty, lolling against the window waiting for a single place. He straightened up and smoothed down his disappearing hair when he saw us come in.

“Well, you girls look like you’re out on mischief bent,” he said with a leer.

“We’re bent anyway,” Horty said, before Candee could leap in with one of her wholesome girls’-camp smiles.

“How do the four of you manage to get out with no chaperon?” Old Faithful said, knowing perfectly well what the situation was, considering Candee’s crows’-feet, but trying to be cute.

“Why, I’m the chaperon,” Candee said, breaking out a couple of dimples and a blush.

“Oh, come now... I can’t believe that,” he said, looking ardently at her. “I think you’re pulling my leg.”

“Please, leave us not get anatomical, shall we?” Horty murmured, but neither Candee nor the decrepit Lothario noticed her. They went on with a few more clumsy attempts at humor, until the head waiter motioned to us that our table was ready.

But, tiresome as it was, I think that encounter gave us an idea. Later, while Candee was in the john, we talked it over.

“It seems like a terribly roundabout way of doing things,” Horty said, “but I think the only chance we have of getting to know Anybody, is to fix Candee up first.”

“She’s much too old,” I said.

“Yes. But she doesn’t know it.”

“Besides, there’s no age limit,” Corney said. “Look at your mother, Horty.”

“Yes, look at her,” Horty said. “But in her case, it’s partly financial. She’s got to live, you know.”

“You mean she’s a woman of shame!” I gasped. (I admit this now, only to show what a long way I had to come out of the dark clouds of innocence. Now, of course, I know all about women of shame; in fact, I would not even call them by such a stuffy literary term.... One thing about being naïve I have noticed is that it is just the opposite state of mind from what people usually believe it is. Naïve people suspect things of being much worse than they are. When you don’t know much, you think everything is much wickeder and more romantic than it turns out to be. It would be a great disappointment to me if sin itself is only a rumor, after all. But on with the story.)

After they had got through hooting with mirth at my stupid faux pas, we discussed our plan for getting Candee occupied in some way that would give us a chance.

That led us into a discussion of love, as practically everything does. But this was a somewhat scientific discussion, having to do with the different ages’ ability to feel love. Horty doesn’t believe anyone over twenty knows much about love. Except motion-picture people who must live in a constant atmosphere of it for their Art’s sake. Corney is very academic about it, and believes that the system has dried up entirely by the time it is thirty, but that people sometimes get away with pretending. I frankly do not know. I feel sure my own system is at its peak this summer.

It seems very disgusting to me that elderly people should want to think about love. There ought to be something else for them to do. I cannot think of anything just now, but I’m sure I could work out a useful program to occupy them, as long as is biologically necessary.

Well, as I say, the trip looked like a complete waste of time, except for a few important conversations Corney and Horty and I had. It was not easy for us to talk freely, since we were confined in a small space with Candee, who likes to preserve an appearance that we all understand each other. But she did fall asleep occasionally, with her reading glasses on. And then I learned many enlightening things. I did my best to give the impression that I am experienced. Only reticent about discussing my experiences. I would have died rather than admit to them that I had never dated in my life.

But when we reached the Mexican border, Fate obviously took over.

It was very exciting. We woke up early... about nine o’clock... hearing all kinds of foreign voices angrily shouting back and forth at each other. The train was standing still, and once in a while a foreboding whistle tooted.

We looked out the window, and all lands of people were walking along the tracks, carrying luggage and looking most disturbed. At first I hoped it was a wreck. Not a serious wreck, of course, just something which could be an Experience.

Candee was jerking and yanking at her girdle, and telling us not to be excited, which of course was silly, for this was the first real chance we’d had to be excited and we were certainly going to take advantage of it. Corney was brushing out her long dark hair, and I could see her planning to run down the tracks scantily clad, but ravishing.

It turned out to be nothing very dramatic, however. Only a pullman strike, which wasn’t going to permit any pullmans to come into Mexico. The distracted train officials were unloading all the passengers from their reservations, and fitting them unwillingly into day coaches. We were overjoyed, naturally, that circumstance had unclasped the strangle-hold Candee had on us. From here on we knew she would be unable to act as an iron curtain between us and life. Once we got ourselves absorbed into the other passengers, anything might happen. Or, to be more exact, Anybody.

In a few minutes we had gathered up all our scattered possessions and had stuffed them into bags. I am naturally very systematic, so I seized a bag and put everything I could lay my hands on into it. Candee, a somewhat categorical-minded woman, was quibbling about putting possessions into their proper owner’s luggage, but this was mere hair-splitting at such a time. The important thing was to get out and see the excitement, hoping for violence, if possible.

The adults, as usual, were disturbed and grumbling about the lovely emergency, entirely missing the point. One old man, with his shirt insecurely anchored in his pants, was declaiming against labor, and saying he would send a report of the whole thing to the embassy. Nobody was paying the slightest attention to him, except several equally ineffectual old dodderers. Financiers and capitalists, obviously.

In the midst of the confusion, I saw Estrellita once more, and my bones turned to jelly because she looked so beautiful. Her fine sensitive face had fear written on it, and I wanted to go over and reassure her that everything was going to be all right. Two men, one a very crude-looking American, were talking to her. I looked around for the bodyguard who had been with her two days before, but he had disappeared. Later, when I asked her about him, she said he had abandoned her, and she feared he might be connected with some plot. She thought he might even have brought about this trouble, but she asked me not to mention it to anyone.

When we were finally herded into the day coaches, I managed by sheer brute will-power to get us into the same coach with Estrellita. I sensed that she was unprotected now, and all my chivalry demanded that I be at hand to protect her if danger arose. I think she recognized me, for once again, when I was crowding behind her, she smiled at me over her shoulder.

When I overheard her speaking to someone else, I was amazed that she had no accent. Later, when she and I got acquainted, her accent came back to her, and when I asked about this, she said that whenever she talked to Americans of the lower classes, she made a heroic effort to speak as they speak so that there would be no class discrimination against her. Of course her stage training made this possible, but she admitted that it required great concentration for her to speak without accent.

During the first hours in the day coach, everybody was babbling to everyone else, the way people do. Everyone wanted to tell exactly where he was and what he was doing when he heard that the train had been stopped by labor bandits (my inspired name, which the whole day coach soon was using).

Horty and Corney had quickly looked over the available men, and were very much disappointed to discover that most of them were traveling with families of one kind or another, or else were old and impossible. It is a wistful fact that men you only catch a forbidden glimpse of always seem more stunning than they are when you can sit across an aisle and study them.

There was, however, a baseball team from Texas on its way down to play a few games with Mexican teams. But after a few attempts to draw them into something, Horty and Corney gave them up as definitely on the bumpkin side.

But while they were still barking up that tree, I got acquainted with Estrellita. We had not talked for fifteen minutes before I realized that she and I had more in common than anyone I ever had met. Everything I believe, she agreed with almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth. She was the first to remark how very much alike we were; I probably would have been too shy to have pointed it out.

“We look not alike... no?... and yet, inside...” she said with her adorable tilted-up accent.

She asked me all about my family and seemed very much interested. Her mother, she said, was an Italian countess, who had gone back to Italy a few months ago to dispose of some of the ancestral jewels. Her father is connected with a secret department of the U.N., but she preferred not to talk about that. She herself had been working in Hollywood, but only to amuse herself. She told me a great deal about motion pictures. Several of the big studios had wanted to star her, but she cannot permit that because of her family’s importance in the Old World. She has allowed them, however, to give her some small parts, on condition that they never will let her name appear on the screen. Her name, I forgot to say, is Estrellita de Varis, and I personally think it is the most beautiful name I ever listened to.

While we were talking, far into the afternoon, several men kept passing our straw seat and trying to signal to her. But she ignored them all, like the aristocrat she is.

“Waat d’you say, Babe?” one red-haired man said, leaning over and speaking nauseatingly close to her face.

“Bleaze,” she said, “do not force me to call the official.”

He looked like a surprised goldfish as he backed away. Then, because she is such a kindhearted person, and cannot bear to have anyone hurt or slighted, she winked at him.

“Okay, whatever you say,” he gulped, and went spraddling down the aisle. (I cannot find that word in the dictionary, but it is a phonetic description of his locomotion.)

Estrellita was going to Mexico City to visit some old friends of her family, very conservative people who have a hacienda in the hills. She warned me that I must not tell the others about it.

“But I will come to your funny little students’ hotel, and keednap you some day and show you the beautiful houze of my friends,” she promised me.

Horty and Corney tried to muscle into our conversation, but Estrellita was not interested in them.

“Forgeeve me for saying eet, Ursula, but they are gommon and gauche, your leetle playmates,” she said gently.

By the end of the day, we were old friends, tried and true. I asked Mrs. Candee if I might have permission to have dinner alone with Estrellita in the crowded dining car. She thought it over a minute, and then said that since Estrellita was not a man, she couldn’t see any objection to it.

As we were coming back through the day coaches, after I had had the pleasure of being her hostess, Estrellita said to me, “What is that lomp in the middle of your chest, chérie?” Usually when people mention lumps they are referring disparagingly to my figure. But I knew Estrellita would not be as crude as that. I glanced down at myself. Her quick eye had detected the lump of bills which I had pinned inside my bra. I laughingly explained.

“You must not ruin your lufly form with such things,” she said very seriously.

I explained that I’m inclined to be a little absent-minded about my handbag, and that Mummy had suggested that I keep my big bills pinned on me.

“Perhaps you will want me to keep it for you, until we part?” she said with the sweetest possible smile.

When we came to the next coach’s vestibule, I reached inside and unpinned the money and gave it to her.

“Nize and warm,” she said. “You are a nize warm young thing.” She took the wad and tucked it into her own purse.

“It will be safe there,” she said. “When we part I will geeve it back to you, chérie.”

“It’s three hundred dollars,” I said. “I’m going to bring back presents for my parents and such people.”

“You are generous, no?”

“To people I love,” I said boldly, not having the faintest idea what I meant, but thinking it sounded rather well.

“Perhaps I can help you find suitable geefts in Mexico. You will be very busy studying the Art, yes?”

“We could go shopping together,” I said dizzily. “Now that Candee has given me permission... I imagine we can just spend oodles of time together.”

“I must not interfere with the Art,” she said sternly. “I only want to be an influence for good for my leetle friend.”

I could not tell her then... or ever, of course... but somehow, in a way I cannot explain, she had already become a great influence for good to me. A torrent of goodness, and a desire to be protective, to help her and protect her, was making me feel all battered with emotion inside. And in another way, also, she was an influence for good, for already in a few short hours I had outgrown much of the silliness about boys which had possessed me. It did not seem important now that I had never had a date. I wanted only to give my life to humanity... maybe I would go to Italy and help the little starving children she had told me about. I saw myself, a kind of big healthy Florence Nightingale. I was glad, for once, that I am big and strong and strapping. I knew I could stand any hardship. Especially if Estrellita, too, could devote her life to working with me.

Everyone had to sleep in the day coaches, but for once I was not pleasantly stimulated by the discomfort and inconvenience. Candee made us curl up all together on two coach seats, turned to face each other, so that our feet were all mixed up with the rest of us. I pretended to go to sleep immediately so I wouldn’t have to listen to a lot of silly gabble from the others. In the privacy behind my eyelids I thought thrillingly about all the wonderful vistas of experience that had opened up to me.

In the morning a terrible disappointment faced me. It was not pure disappointment, however, because I did have a little note from Estrellita, something tangible she had given to me. It was passed to me by the conductor.

The note said:

I met an old family friend on the train. His chauffeur had brought his car to meet the train, and he has invited me to riding with him. I would liked to asking you to drive with us, but

I was afraid of that Monster guarding you. Do not fear, chérie, I will find you at your hotel.

It was signed merely E. But she had drawn a simple little crest beside her initial. My blood ran hot and cold as I read the lovely quaint note.