Читать книгу Cristina and I - Stringer Arthur - Страница 5

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I nursed the delusion that I was taking Cristina in to town. But I realized, long before we landed at the Ritz for luncheon, that it was Cristina who had taken me under her wing. I felt, in fact, considerably like a liner being maneuvered about by a busy little harbor-tug. And Cristina, I noticed, knew nooks and corners of the great city that had altogether escaped me. She found a silk-shop on a side-street where you could buy cobwebby and apricot-colored unmentionables for a trifle less than twelve dollars an ounce; she found a shoe-shop up on Madison Avenue that sedulously concealed every trace of its footwear and looked more like a drawing-room of the Second Empire than an emporium of trade; she found a cellar dispenser of bijoutry who sold amber and jade at a forty per cent. discount, and she found a piously respectable speak-easy where you could get an Orange Blossom that left no regrets and the lining on your boiler-pipes.

And Cristina, I also discovered, was better known than I imagined. She even made me feel a bit of a mossback as she was waved at, from time to time, from passing cars, as she was nodded to by women in the store-aisles and bowed to by presentable youths about the telephone-booths which she found it essential to visit on an average of at least once every half-hour. She even knew the Ritz waiter by his first name, and cold-bloodedly practised her French on him, and had a somewhat disappointing portion of broccoli changed for asparagus tips, and made a brave but not too prolonged effort, since it was her day, to impound and pay the check which the sad-eyed philosopher in black had placed midway between us.

Then, having tamped out her third cigarette, applied the war-paint where it would do the most good, and adjusted a Czechoslovakian scarf which the balminess of the air precluded from being reckoned as a preserver of calories, she led me forth to the multi-colored pageantry of Fifth Avenue, where our course was blocked by a line of marching potentates in blue and gold pinnies.

They went by proudly, keeping time to the thumping of drums and the braying of brass. But Cristina studied them with an unsympathetic eye.

“Men,” she finally asserted with the devastating candor of beauty and the airy intolerance of youth, “are a pack of peacocks.” And there was a look of scorn in her eyes as she continued to watch that Avenue parade of a certain Benevolent Order in full regalia.

“It’s not often we break out this way,” I pallidly contended as the brass band and the plumed resplendent marchers in blue and gold and purple passed up the street. “But I suppose women hate to see us stealing their thunder.”

“Our thunder?” cried Cristina, stabbing me with an indignant side-glance as we went on our way again. “Why, men have reveled in this sort of thing from the time they found something showier than the fig-leaves of Palestine. They were made the strutting sex and they’ve strutted in everything from a Roman toga to a frock coat, from a Sioux war-bonnet to a Crusader’s helmet, from an Assyrian coronation-robe to a modern college-graduate’s gown. And it always gives me a rather tired feeling when men talk about the vanity of women.”

“Then you regard men as more vain than women?” I inquired of the decorative Cristina, who looked especially attractive that afternoon in a frock of pansy-colored chiffon festooned with the Czecho-Slovakian scarf that made me think of a double rainbow put through a clothes-wringer.

“Don’t you?” countered Cristina, stopping to glance at a turquoise necklace in a shop-window.

“That might not be easy to answer until we agreed on just what we mean by vanity,” I ventured. “How would you define it?”

“I’d say that vanity,” asserted Cristina with an abstracted glance at her half-profile in the shop-window, “is being pettily over-proud of yourself and your appearance, of what you own or of what you do. It’s self-love. And most men are so full of it they’d float off like a dirigible, if that same self-love had one-half the lifting-power of helium. Why, I know a devoted wife who after seven years of married life says she really ought to get a divorce from her husband simply because—with that male thing of hers so much taken with himself—they are both so hopelessly in love with the same man!”

“And women are different?” I acidulously inquired after digesting Cristina’s mot. “Women think so little of themselves and give so much less time and thought to dress and adornment and doing their hair and powdering their noses and making themselves generally attractive?”

“We do those things, of course,” agreed Cristina, “and we may even spend a great deal of time over them. But it’s because men make us. For with women in the modern world, vanity is a sort of business. It has a purpose, and a pretty solemn one. Man has made it a part of our life-work to look appealing. If we fail in that, we just about fail in everything. And to look pretty you naturally have to be a little interested in your own prettiness.”

“Which might be construed,” I suggested, “as not a petty, but a petting, interest in life?”

“Don’t be catty,” almost snapped Cristina. “Men and women are partners, remember, in this high adventure known as life, and there wouldn’t be so many clinging vines, old dear, if it weren’t for the colossal vanity of you sturdy oaks. And if women have their own little vanities, a few thousand years of being the under-dog has at least left them clever enough to keep those vanities under cover. Or if they can’t keep them under cover, they hemstitch them into attractiveness. When you pay a compliment to a woman, she may smile her gratitude, but she goes on her way unruffled. When you pay a compliment to a man, I’ve noticed, he shuts down the works, calls in his friends, and passes the precious nugget around as though it were a second Kohinoor straight from Kimberley.”

“We get so few,” I weakly contended.

“You deserve still fewer,” retorted Cristina. “And you’re all so childishly vain in the face of flattery! Tell a man about three times an hour that he’s wonderful, tell him just that and nothing more, and he’ll pass around the news that you’re one of the most brilliant conversationalists he ever clashed swords with. Or announce to the meanest-looking worm in trousers that there’s something distinguished looking about him and he’ll swear you’re a Solomon in petticoats. Or meekly let some male brag about his golf or his garden or his setting-up exercises and his iron muscles or his mysterious power over women or how he cures dandruff and can’t eat cucumbers, and he’ll be so grateful he’ll want to take you out and buy you a new bonnet. Why, I know wives who soften their husband’s disposition that way every morning exactly the same as the husbands use soap to soften their own beards before they shave.”

“Speaking of beards,” I craftily interposed, remembering that it always paid to be gallant with Cristina, “it was Hadrian, the fourteenth emperor of Rome, who introduced them to his age. And we are told he did this to hide the warts on his face. Which is, I suppose, another case of man’s vanity?”

“Wouldn’t you call it vanity,” Cristina triumphantly contended, “to try to impress the world as being more attractive than you really were?”

“But you have just intimated,” I meekly reminded her, “that this was the one big business of woman’s career.”

“Yes, but we don’t do it so much for ourselves as for racial and eugenic reasons,” asserted the agile-minded lady beside me. “If we are to have beautiful children, you see, we must first have beautiful mothers. And the more beautiful we make ourselves the more we deserve to have children.”

“And the more likely you’re to, my dear,” I sagely interposed.

“Quite outside of that,” pursued the frowning Cristina, “women have an impersonal love for the beautiful and the delicate. They seem to be born with an abstract love for lovely things.”

“Especially if they’re expensive,” I was foolish enough to proclaim. “And I can’t help wondering what Ezekiel, who prohibited even woolen garments, would have to say about the silk things of our degenerate age. Or you may recall the advice of Crœsus to Cyrus, reported by Herodotus, pertaining to the debilitating and deteriorating influences of superfluous apparel.”

“I don’t know much about Crœsus,” retorted Cristina, “but I know the modern girl can be dressed from head to foot in a pound and a half of material. So I fancy she’s as healthy as those old Hittite ladies who scarcely showed the end of their noses to the world. And we don’t wear our clothes because a high-priest orders it, but because we like them and express ourselves in the choice of them.”

“And in exercising this newer esthetic sense,” I cynically suggested, “you widen the horizon of worldly happiness quite as much as you think of your own?”

“Of course we do,” retorted Cristina. “We make the lordly male quite as happy as we make ourselves. Perhaps, Sir Oracle, you’ll remember that time, about three or four years ago, when I came down with more make-up on than you approved of. You stopped me in the hall and said: ‘Go up and take it all off!’ And I did. And when I came down in twenty minutes you looked me over with a disapproving eye and said: ‘Go up and put it all on again!’”

That seemed to remind Cristina of something, for she stopped to take a two-by-four mirror out of her vanity-case and study a countenance that might have belonged to a coral-lipped figurante from the rue de la Paix.

“But men don’t use lip-sticks and powder-compacts and rouge-pots,” I deferentially pointed out to her when I once more had access to her attention. “They don’t load themselves down with ornamental jewelry and wear attire that looks like an explosion in a dye-factory and roll their stockings and expose their manly breasts and——”

“They’d be much more comfortable if they did something like that in hot weather, instead of being so vainly timid about being seen in their shirt-sleeves.”

“And they dress for convenience rather than for effect; and they aren’t crassly exploited by a bunch of foreign fashion-makers who add to the strain and stress of life and even more to the cost of living by imposing seasonal styles on women and——”

“How about those awful plus-fours you men stood for?” inquired Cristina. “And those absurd balloon trousers your college-boys adopted from Oxford, and those Fair-Isle sweaters and golf-stockings you’ve all been decorating the great open spaces with? And what can you say in defense of the plug hat? Or the high collar made stiff with cooked starch?”

“Well, we don’t tattoo butterflies on our knees,” I stubbornly contended.

“No, but you go with a razor-back crease ironed down the center of your pants-legs and when you get in full dress you parade enough white shirt-front to make it look like the tomb-stone of an intelligent man’s thinking power. You say, of course, that it’s an accepted mode, a uniform, and that you never give it any thought. But you nearly pass away if you wander into a formal gathering without your fish-and-soup clothes on. That’s the trouble with men. They haven’t the courage to be individual, to be conspicuously attractive, poor dears. They’re so inordinately vain about their modesty that they’re actually manipulated into wearing humdrum clothes that can be turned out like letterheads.”

I waited while Cristina blew a kiss to a bare-armed girl with the eviscerated body of a black fox draped about her shoulders. Then I went on with my argument.

“But that slavery to humdrum clothes, sweet maid, leaves us free to think about other things. And if the world is to go on, men can’t spend fifty per cent. of their working-day deciding on what color-scheme they’ll ride down to the office in next morning.”

“That’s exactly where men are so selfish,” proclaimed the volatile Cristina. “They’re too cowardly to announce their own well-being or advertise their own prosperity, so they expect their womenfolk to be walking advertisements of the lordly male’s success. They pile the pearls and diamonds and minks and sables on the female of the species and make us do the scrambling, to keep up our one-sided competition in the proclamation of family prosperity. Then, because the competition has become unexpectedly keen, because we have to give a good deal of thought to it, you sit back and call us the vain sex.”

“It’s amazing what ready victims you women are in the matter of this mink and sable hardship,” I said as we stopped in front of a furrier’s window.

“Well, when we decorate, we at least get away with it,” asserted the young woman at my side. “We have at least that much in our favor. But when a man tries it on, he just naturally makes himself ridiculous.”

“Those are the occasions when we usually describe him as being as vain as a woman!”

But Cristina, at the moment, wasn’t listening to me. She was staring at a fluffy blue-fox throw with a metal throat-clasp jeweled with aquamarines. And I knew, even before I saw the estimative look in her eye, that she wasn’t thinking of eugenics or the future welfare of the race.

“And besides,” I continued, trying to make my voice carry across that No Man’s Land of egocentric preoccupation, “you’re not only illogical and self-contradictory when you charge man with being the strutting sex while in almost the same breath you attempt to indict him for the sobriety of his apparel, but you’re also historically inaccurate when you claim he has always delegated the parade-function to his females. That movement, in fact, has been quite modern. There was a time when the cavalier and the soldier may have fixed the style in the matter of men’s clothing. And in that earlier day, heaven knows, man’s apparel had enough gold and lace and color and general splendor to liven up the landscape and satisfy the eye. But military science and modern firearms put a stop to all that. Twentieth-century warfare compelled the fighting man to become inconspicuous, taught him the need of protective coloration and put him in khaki. That wave of repression may have attempted too suddenly to key down our dominant note in attire, since our inhibited color-hunger still breaks out here and there in the college soph and the city toiler turned loose on the golf links. But, for all this, I contend that man, preoccupied as he is with the more serious businesses of life, is less active in the solicitation of the admiration of others, is less pettily preoccupied with his own appearance and attainments, in plain English, is less vain, than the modern woman to whom he has, willingly or unwillingly, deputized the function of—— But you’re not even listening to me.”

Cristina’s smile as she linked her arm in mine was warm and wistful.

“You’re absolutely right, old dear,” she said as she nodded toward the blue-fox throw. “Wouldn’t that be nifty, Arthur, with my new beryl English broadcloth? Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”

“Wonderful for warmth?” I testily inquired.

“No, you old darling, just to strut in,” said Cristina as she tugged me toward the door.