The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
CARLOTTA SEES RED
Standish's was the sort of place which the world sees nightly in the films—discounting their arch magnificence, of course, and leaving as net, something showy, noisy, and crass. Now ordinarily, where men and women, wine, gold, and the passions foregather, it is reasonable to expect romance, colour, if only the much admired hues of the Flowers of Evil. But here even such resplendent blooms are choked by the bindweed Greed. Baudelaire has given way to Irving Berlin. The revels are but so many transactions. And the "atmosphere" has as much of the real quality as a theatre air-cooler matched with the ocean's breath.
Everybody is out on the make, each trying to extract something, in cash or sensation, from his neighbour,—waiter from customer, head-waiter from underling, guest from host, and host from guest—man from woman, and woman from man. Now, on occasion at least, Montmartre can make of merriment an art. One may be a spendthrift yet even through Frailty's rent robe show something of the reprehensible but splendidly natural. Here the hand instead of flinging away with a careless grace, even as it spends is outstretched to seize. The quarry, not the moment's fleeting joy but the hard quid pro quo. No blithe laughter, gay grotesquerie, or real roses—only crinkled things of paper crepe, the aroma of talcum, steam, and sweat, compounded; and the prevailing colour the sickly gilt—the sort that encrusts a radiator.
But one would be sadly lacking in humour to grow sententious over Standish's or to consider it worth an indictment. Besides, it served as an excellent background for the star's robustious dancing, a humour as galeful as the winds that snap around the Flatiron, and an impudence, at times disconcerting, at others well-nigh fetching. But so much for that.
On this evening of the fifth of September, Carlotta, the "divine Carlotta," she who, according to Abey Clout's four-sheet lyric, had performed a most extraordinary service for the world, nothing less than "putting the sin in sin-copation," made the last assault and charge with her lithe hips, and fled the white hoop of the calcium for her dressing-room.
Her metamorphosis from the little Yiddish tomboy who had danced and fought and bit her way up from Stanton Street, into the most approved type of showgirl, shoulder- and hip-sway, slang and all, had been little short of amazing. It was paralleled only by her brother Izzy's sloughing off of the old physical timidity of the Jew, and his debut as Joey McGann, "the Fightin' Harp," at the Harlem A. C. Both created sensations when they came back to Stanton Street (by the L as far as Grand, thence, for effect, by taxi). But for all this innocent show, they were together keeping the fat, girdleless "Momma" and her living stairway, now increased to nine little steps, from collapse.
As for other spending on the part of either, there was little save for board and keep—and not so much of that, it being one of the chiefest of the arts of both ring and cabaret entertainers to escape such expense.
This evening, before changing her costume, Carlotta reached for a newspaper which lay on her dresser, not her favourite daily but the Salthaven Log. She was probably the most remote, certainly the most incongruous, of its subscribers. Among the gilt bottles and makeup boxes the pale old English caption of the sheet stood out like some bulletin from Eden in a boudoir of Babylon, as anachronistic as Carlotta s vivid person would have been on the Salthaven sands.
That the little world whose revolutions it recorded was real, Carlotta knew because it sheltered a being on whom she had actually laid hands. Its existence was of course a rule-proving exception, since the tangible universe was bounded by three rivers, the North, the East, and the Harlem, and one bay; with Newark, Paterson, and Stamford somewhere vaguely out there as the outposts of civilization, sort of baby-farms for newly-born plays. Rural hamlet, Western plain, and lofty Alp, all were figments of the imagination, "sets" for revues, made out of whole cloth for box-office purposes and the livelihood of stage folk like herself. The very stars she had glimpsed once or twice in her life, could one capture them, would be sure to turn out five-pointed things of tinsel, stuck up there by Jake Shubert, Flo Ziegfeld, or some of the gods that be. If Jake said "Lights," there would be light, otherwise the world would gnash its teeth in outer darkness.
Even had she travelled—ay, as long and as far as her charming compatriot, "the Wandering Jew," she would have recognized as existent only those things she could touch or feel, or that contributed to her well-being or purse. The sea, when it wasn't a salon for the display of bathing costumes, was something back of Filet of Sole, perhaps also of its Tartar sauce. Paris was the source of Mary Garden perfume, the slashed skirt, and—marvellous perspicacity here—one intangible thing—that chic which she called "class."
Altogether it was surprising that her superb matter-of-factness was disturbed by that prophecy of the Pell Street medium,—"a long journey"—but even Achilles had his compounding weakness. The solid ore of her practicality was shot through with veins of superstition, as near imagination's gold as she could show.
A violent reaction was produced by the idyllic headline which announced the "Huntington Nuptials." Now usually her displays of temperament were for effect, to please her vanity, or for shrewd professional purpose. One had sometimes the suspicion that this temper of hers was not so very dreadful, after all, but rather humorous and practical, a crude hose and hydrant sort of thing, to be turned at will, off, or on for the bowling over of weak victims. However, on this occasion the outburst was probably more natural.
She ripped the paper in two, back-kicked the gilt chair until its frail underpinning buckled, and hurled a bottle of laboratory beauty at the wardrobe woman whom she had appropriated as her maid, to the fury of her sisters on the bill, and rushed out of the room. A youth with a dinnercoat, a plump purse, and an isosceles profile, lounged against the door, awaiting an engagement with her, which he imagined to be "social," she "strictly business." She breezed past him with a "Fade away, fade away, Milt," whose forceful insolence vastly chagrined him, but which to an impersonal spectator would have been most engaging, even captivating. Then she ordered the majestic negro under the canopy to order a taxi, not a too common vehicle in that year.
One drew up at the curb. She entered and under her directions, most explicit and clean-cut—though a trifle impure—the driver cut across Broadway, down Forty-ninth Street, and through Sixth Avenue, imperiling pedestrians, and skidding across the rain-glimmering asphalt in a succession of "sashays" that reminded one of her own on the polished floor, a little earlier in the evening.
The jolly voyage came to an end on Forty- fourth Street. After a lively little dispute over the fare, she approached the house, a famous brownstone front, and gave the cryptic signal at the grilled doors. Before her flaming imperiousness the doorkeeper blinked and backed a step, then perforce waived his orders not to admit women. Convention and tradition did not restrain her any more than the doorkeeper—they were ever the least of her worries. In fact Carlotta had no inhibitions whatever, even about pork and the passover. Were she in need of a person, and were that particular person at the moment in a Turkish bath—men's day only—she would have instantly traversed every nook and corner of the place with a most admirable sang froid. "I should worry," was the device of her escutcheon—and, believe us, she held it high!
So up the stairs she raced, and into a room, spacious, brilliant with lights, crystal chandeliers, and the massive gilt frames of famous landscapes, as film and story have so often shown us—too often, it is to be feared, to the dispelling of the fascinating mystery.
This much censoring, however, must be made, to be accurate and faithful,—the films universality of clawhammers must be reduced by a few sacksuits, at least, and the desperate and Satanic look rubbed from the faces of the real winners—who happened to know the numbers of both straight and crooked wheels—and an expression somewhat plainer and less alarming substituted.
However, against this now trite and commonplace background two figures stood out in bold and original relief. One, of course, was the raging beauty who loomed in the doorway, her un-removed makeup under the bobbed mane and heavily pencilled eyes seeming more garish than ever; her eyelashes twisted by some ultra-modern process into dark star rays; and the crimson cape trailing over one shoulder to reveal a plump—and—unless you prefer the slender—a pleasing décolleté, swathed in a gleaming cuirass of gilt scales. Altogether a typical rig, for when one remembers Carlotta—person, props, or appointments—it is always in primary colours, never in subtler hues.
Now of late, Carlotta had entered another stage of her rise to Fame. She had been modelling herself after a much advertised tragedy queen. So at the door she paused to slip the melody of her gait into the upper register, and. quite as that lady would have towered upon such a scene, entered the room, to confront the other outstanding figure, her guide and mentor, MacAllister.
To vary the dry routine of poker, faro, baccarat, and roulette, he was reviving that old favourite, "three card Monte." It was a joy, though perhaps a doubtful and dangerous one, to watch him. The young bloods from the Avenue, or Sheridan Road, seemed quite willing to serve as victims on such an altar, as men with a sense of the artistic are willing to be hoaxed, even mulcted, provided the hoaxing or mulcting be not stupidly but deftly done.
Even Carlotta's rage diminuendoed into soft admiration as she gazed at those fingers, ever the first thing you noticed about him, long and white, not tapering but as slender at their base as at their well-manicured tips. It was almost like studying a virtuoso at the piano, his figure carrying out the illusion, so sharply contrasted it was, like the keys, in blacks and whites. Each flick of the deal was a grace note, every shuffle of the deck a finished chromatic scale.
He had seen Carlotta, of course—no one could have missed that dramatic entrance, but it suited him to ignore the tattoo of her bronzed slipper. After a few moments he summoned a substitute, and signing to her, withdrew into a bay window.
In this century of the rough metaphor, an interpreter of the quaint dialogue that followed is scarcely necessary. He first inquired "the occasion," "the motif," of her visit. And she, distrusting the rounded periods and the pulpit highfalutin, which he adopted because it annoyed her, tartly requested him to "cut out the skypilot stuff." Then she condescended to explain the "occasion."
"That simp Huntington" (hitherto she had called the boy—with some show of affection—"the Kid") "was to be married." Andcould he beat it?
MacAllister didn't say as to that, but descending from his tantalizing toploftical plane, inquired in her own dialect, "just what that meant in her sweet, young life?"
Here the bronzed slipper paused for reflection—jealousy, that was the system. MacAllister was her guide, her mentor, and chief. Not that his code was hers, hopskotch, syncopated sort of thing though hers was, but she admired him, was dominated by him. Still he was a male and, though he were Napoleon himself, should have been subject to those reactions (to the feminine) which it was a girl's best strategy, her surest source of revenue, to play upon. But not realizing that MacAllister was immune to her charms, she tried to shower their opulence upon him. The soft, generously-moulded arm fell on his with what she meant to be the lightest of caresses, the rayed eyelashes languishing.
But neither cuteness, pertness, nor languor, suited her Amazonian outlay, and MacAllister, with unerring taste, saw that this manœuvre did not at all become her. He picked up her arm, replaced it at her side, then flicked the residuum of talcum from his sleeve, with the rude request, addressed to her as "Frail Lily of the Vale," that she "deposit her pollen—on some other flower."
However, the rayed eyelashes didn't wither, merely becoming so many adders' tongues once more.
"For Gawd's sake, Mac, don't be so cold! D'y' want me to tellya something? Well, when you cash in, the undertaker won't need no ice t' keep yuh from corruption"—she searched for an even more exquisite figure— "But you should worry. You'll never melt in my snowy bosom. I ain't a-waistin' my tender caresses on no iceberg! So, put that in your pipe an' smoke it!"
"So, little ewelamb, you've seen the light at last," he drawled, then mused for a second.
"What do you want me to do?" he threw out.
Not that he didn't know, but it was always his way to let the other make the suggestion. It flattered the tool, and, in heavier transactions, transferred the burden of the guilt.
She rose to it.
"Old man's got money," she growled out surlily.
Now this attitude was surprising in Carlotta, after her care of the lamb she might have shorn long ere this, and it seemed to pain MacAllister—at least his eyes were expressing an infinite pathos.
"Carlotta"—he groaned and the voice matched his eyes—"you've committed a crime!"
Involuntarily she jerked her head over her shoulder, the black mane snapping like a tangle of whips in the wind.
"What d'y' mean—crime?" she shot out in alarm, fast forgetting the queen of tragedy.Not that she was conscious of anything capital, but when one trained with MacAllister, one felt such possibilities to be probabilities.
"Oh, my dear, my dear, I thought your love for the charming boy" (aside—"damn his fool hide—") "was pure and without alloy. You've destroyed an illusion, a beautiful illusion—that's what you've done—and by all that's holy and sacred, 'tis murder in the nth degree!"
"It was somethin' like what you say it is—without the grenadine, Mister Experience," (referring to a morality play popular that year) "'tleast it was until he giv' me the razz,' and no rube can give me the razz an' get away with it" She crooked back a full arm, toyed with her hair—the gesture models use to display the grace of a gown, then finished,—"Huh, me that could have anything on Broadway!"
He qualified the claim with some sarcasm, then reflected a while.
Without question the mooted enterprise was crude, "old stuff," altogether unworthy of his talents. But he was in straits. Things hadn't broken well at all for him lately. And the trip might prove diverting, satisfying his love of humour, local colour, and cash, at the expense of the provincials. Besides there was a raised check due to reach the clearing house in the morning. And he wasn't so sure about that check.
For the first time in his life he wondered if his hand had lost its cunning. Ordinarily he was as skilful with pothooks as with concealed aces. His cheirography had the hair-trigger nicety of his "stacking," or—so rumour had it—his ability to locate the mortal spot with a bullet, the proper crevice between enemy ribs with cold steel.
He hated bungling even in little things; never had to strike a match twice; never tied a shoelace—or a strangling knot—so that it came undone. He hadn't outlined the form of the circus lady on a board with sharp knives twice a day, six months running, for nothing. What was the matter? Get ting a case of nerves—or Scotch. Last night the drinks had outrun his usual cautious ration.
That check! Again the signature looped and coiled across his fancy like a reptile across a virgin sheet.And for once the debonair MacAllister was experiencing remorse—though of a very practical sort. His whole life had been foreshadowed, summed up, in that short semester at the Seminary, where he had spent enough time in devising ingenious schemes for "cribbing" to stand at the head of his class, had the hours been given to real study. But the quickening of conscience—or of the canny instinct which served him in lieu of that—was not registered on his imperturbable features. MacAllister might be hunted, but he never would wear a hunted look. And tomorrow was another day!
Immediately he struck another note, one which alarmed Carlotta, part banter though it may have been.
"Suppose we take real estate instead of cash?"
"Real estate!" she shot back, "what d'y' mean? Live in that burg? Oh, Mac, have a heart!"
"No—sentence suspended—I just happened to remember that the old man had a yacht."
"Say!" She retorted, "what kind of a dirty deed d'y' think this is? Contrac's all drawn up by a not'ry an' everythin'? Fat chance you got of bein' handed a steam yacht!" But she paused for reflection—of course, he was "kidding," but after all he was capable of putting a legal face even on an illegal transaction—capable, too, of the wildest of "parties"—what did he have on his mind?"Yacht—yacht,"she shuddered—the voice of the medium again! Almost in a panic, she implored him
"For Gawd's sake, yuh ain't a-goin' to take me on no long journey
"Sea air would restore those roses," and rashly he pinched her cheeks, to the rude incarnadining of his fingers.
"Out damned spot," he mimicked, soaring again, "not all the perfumes of Araby"
"Mac, yuh make me sick, this is serious, an' the trains don't run all night. If we're goin to stage any little stop-em-at-the-altar game, we gotta get busy. But no shopliftin' any steam yachts for mine, d'y' understand? I'm not built for deep water, an I'd a sight rather skin live lobsters on Broadway than look at em in their nacheral joints."
"Well, we'll cross the bridge when we hit the coulee. As for the trains, I haven't overlooked any bets. There's a twelve thirty sleeper to Boston. Taxi home with your usual speed, pack and dress with more than your usual, and board her at a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street."
The bobbed mane, the rose cape and the cuirass left the room.
The railroad schedule and their own movements dovetailed to a nicety, and at ten next morning they alighted at the Salthaven station. Here they parted, he repairing by unfrequented side streets to the Veldmann shack, she to the Preble House.
Now all the way up on the New Haven, Carlotta might have been adding to her limited geographical knowledge, but, with a tenacity, conscious or unconscious, she retained all her old backgrounds and attitudes. And when she took the pen from its slip of potato and signed her name on the register, she felt the reward of superior virtue. Here, in spite of unfamiliar surroundings, she was in a homelike atmosphere. For, as the yokel who combined the duties of bellboy, boot black, and bus, led her up the stairs, a score of necks turned like marionettes pulled by a common string. Here were reactions and motivatings which she could understand. They were universal. Nether limbs were as compelling in Arcadia as in Cosmopolis. Even the comments, the dozen repetitions of the standard slogan of the day,—"Oh, you kiddo," all ejaculated in a nasal staccato into which she had excited their usual drawl, testified to her usual triumph.
Perversely she didn't accommodate them with the back-kick she knew they expected. Instead, as she turned the baluster, she essayed the best exit of her idolized tragedy queen.
Her superiority, the maintenance of her standards, had been justified. Had she not always stood, loyally "from Missouri," in all disputes in plays, books, or conversations, where the higher morality of Arcady had been argued?
And now not only in matters spiritual but in those material, was her philosophy shown to be sound. Proof indeed in the bedroom's lack of plumbing, the musty bed and carpet, the cracked pitcher over whose midnight interior a spider hung suspended!
"Of all the jay towns!" she exclaimed. "Modern improvements, huh!"
The claims of Broadway, even of Harlem, she'd back against Preble Street—against the world!
Then she caught sight of the bay and far-off masts, some of them dropping below the verge, and hurling her vanity case across the room, cried:
"To Hell with that long journey!"
Still she felt a grim foreboding, as if that grim defiance hadn't quite settled it.
Recovering her spirits a little later, she arrayed herself in what she considered her most fashionable dress, a smashing thing woven of flame and snow, with a toque of swan's wings concealing her black hair, and so, like some bright flamingo, sought the Huntington home.
Arrived at her goal, she surveyed it critically, caustically.
"So there's flowers an trees an' everythin'. An' apples hangin' on 'em—the scene-painters wasn't lyin' after all." She raised an imaginary lorgnette in haughty showgirl fashion, "Chawming place—reminds me of—the morchuary on Twenty-third Street. I wonder if the Squire an' Lord Percy are to hum."
The latter, the former informed her, was out. The very door was banged in her face, sending her rage a degree or two higher. However, she decided that she would postpone the fireworks. They could come later—at the, what was it Abie Clout said, oh yes, in the physiological (!) moment. So she flounced down the walk, and sat on the bench for a half-hour or so, commenting with forceful irony on the charm of the scene before her. Meanwhile, from the parlour window, the old gentleman, in a vague alarm that would have been humorous if it hadn't been a bit pathetic, gazed at the vivid flamingo that had come to brood on his lawn, perhaps even to nest in his house.
"H'mmm!" he muttered to himself, "some of Phil's chickens come home to roost—I wonder!"
Nor was he borrowing one of Carlotta's figures, either, though you might have thought so, for she had the way of setting the most sedate to her own tricks,—their bodies to twitching and swaying, their tongues to queerest conversational turns.
Growing impatient, she returned to the hotel and tried the boothless telephone, to the delight of the lobby loungers, who had gotten past the salacity stage of their curiosity and were now merely enjoying the humour of the situation. As for her, she cared not that they heard. Those Huntingtons were going to get all the publicity they needed. Her charge and fee would come later.
"Hello, Phil dear, this is Carlotta"—then, hearing his voice, her own unconsciously softened, though it could never exactly achieve a pianissimo. "Ole guy's in the room," she muttered, as she heard the irrelevant answer:
"Yes, see that there's plenty of gasoline in the tank, and bring her around at six-thirty sharp."
At the other end of the wire, the elder Huntington's suspicions reared their ghastly heads once more. From where he sat he could hear the faint echo of a throaty contralto from the instrument, and it didn't sound at all like the gruff bass of Gus Peters, that hardy pioneer who had turned a wing of his livery stable into the first garage of the town. But he kept his counsel—the boy would be out of harm's way soon.
Still, as she flung herself like a full-fed panther on the bed in her hotel room, Carlotta was rather pleased with herself, that is as long as she could shut out that warning prophecy which sometimes threatened to become an obsession. Her heartache was lost in the sense of the dramatic, in her delighted approval of the makeup of the loungers in the hotel, small-part people in the production she was staging. The situation held sufficient of both tragedy and farce to satisfy the most jaded appetite, and there was promised a most astonishing denouement and curtain, that night. On this she was determined. She would ring it down herself if necessary.
She was not sensing the loveliness of the quiet gardens behind the houses on the street, the sweet old people that worked or drowsed in them, the green roofs of the trees lining the street, and the irregular angles of the housetops sloping down to the sea. That she refused even to look at.
This scene was just what Sally was gazing at so mournfully, a bare half mile away. Now if she had met Carlotta, she never could have understood this distressing slant at the place and people she herself loved so well. Not that Carlotta was exactly a viper, to transform this Eden into an inferno. MacAllister might qualify for such a rôle—not she. But wherever Carlotta went, she could, and did, manage to add a touch of burlesque. Very swiftly she could turn an exquisite idyll into a roaring farce. Had she herself realized to the full this faculty, Carlotta would have been highly delighted. Next to finding "a meal-ticket," she enjoyed nothing so much as "queering things," "crabbing anyone's act." It would have pleased her rarely to know that she had given this grotesque touch to so lovely a setting, and so threatened even the solemnities that were to be celebrated that evening. To Sally the former distortion would have been the sacrilege, the latter wouldn't have mattered much—it was farce enough already.
In a dull apathy she turned from the window and tried to interest herself in the preparations for the reception to follow the ceremony,—the final dusting of bric-a-brac, the making of salads and sandwiches. There was this much of consolation,—her Aunt Abigail had laid aside her soul's stays and whalebones, and, thinking more of satin and chiffons and her social prominence of the evening, was all smiles and approval, for once.
As she passed to and fro in the kitchen, the girl noticed on the windowsill the big blue bowl that had once held the magic golden flood. And the dream came back—the shining islands, floating, beckoning, vanishing, on the sun-smitten sea. But they had indeed slipped over its blue rim.
The dream had vanished with them. The blue bowl held no magic now, only a pool of yeast and potato sponge, which Aunt Abigail had not forgotten even in the importance of the night's event—a mess, not golden at all, but dreary and grey. And so forever would be the sea.