To-morrow Morning (Parrish)/Chapter 16

by Anne Parrish

Chapter Sixteen

KATE gave a cry of delight, and jumped up so quickly that the card table rocked, and a splash of water leaped from the glass to the poster she was painting for St. Stephen's spring bazaar.

"Joe! Well, for mercy's sake! I didn't expect you to-day, darling. How are you? I expected you yesterday, and then when you didn't come I thought you wouldn't come till to-morrow, because I thought maybe you'd remember it was Effa's day off and there wouldn't be much for supper—what a pretty tie, Joe! Did you get that in New York? It makes you look very English, all dotty. Joe Green, you didn't take any of your stage scenery, and I told you to! I told you to take the set for that sea play and show it to Belasco or somebody while you were in New York. Yes, you could; you could call up ahead and make an appointment. You'll certainly never get anywhere by hiding it under your old raincoat in the closet. Well, but I think it's so foolish, when you do such beautiful work, not to let anyone see it! I'm not going to scold you, though; I'm too glad to see you. Did you have a nice time? I want to hear every single solitary thing you did. What plays did you see?"

"I didn't go to the theater."

"Didn't go to the theater? Well, why not? Oh, I did wish you'd gotten home last night. There was the best movie at the Palace—Charlie Chaplin in 'Shoulder Arms'—he's in the army, you know, and of course it's screamingly funny, but very touching, too. One place everybody gets packages from home except Charlie, and he turns away so sadly and eats the cheese out of the mousetrap. Well, I mustn't tell you about it, because you may get a chance to see it sometime, and I don't want to spoil it for you. I hadn't an idea of going. I was just planning to stay quietly at home and finish these posters. How do you like them?"

"They're fine!"

"Oh, I think they're awful—not striking enough. This one's rather pretty. Look, Joe, the old-fashioned little girl. But this is awful—when will I learn not to try to do blue skies with water color? They always streak. Still, the effect isn't bad, is it? I guess they'll have to do; anyway, I'm certainly not going to waste any more time; and they have to have them to-morrow. I would have finished them last night, only Charlotte and Hoagland came to get me to go to the movies. Charlotte's had a permanent wave. What did you do if you didn't go to the theater?"

"Bill Salisbury had a dinner——"

"Then you did need your dinner coat! Joe Green, what did I tell you?"

"No, I didn't. It was in a Russian place; you didn't have to dress."

"Russian! Well! That must have been interesting. Oh, Joe, I don't know why Russian makes me think of Mrs. Carr-Smith—yes, I do, Russian sables. You know, that Mrs. Carr-Smith that puts on such airs, Mrs. Roberts's friend. Don't you remember? Mrs. Roberts was having a little tea for her yesterday? Oh, Joe, I told you! Patronizing! I didn't like her at all! All about visiting her dear friend Countess Somebody or other in Paris—old boaster—and then she said to me in this superior tone, 'And where do you stop in Paris?' Look, Joe, like this. 'And wheah do you stop in Paris?' And when I said I'd never been to Paris she raised her eyebrows and said in the most incredulous voice, 'Imagine!' But I got even—I called her Mrs. Smith; it made her madder than hops. Oh, Joe, it's lovely to have you home again. I missed you awfully. I went over to Aunt Sarah's for supper Tuesday night. They want to give up the house and board somewhere, only Aunt Sarah says she's afraid they might get in with a family that would insist on being pleasant to them—you know the way she talks. Carrie had a dreadful cold, as usual, and Benjie's learned to make a sound just like her blowing her nose—it's uncanny! I must stop talking and go and see if there's anything for supper; I don't believe there's a thing. Look, Joe, what a pretty sunset! And a little new moon. I hope you have some money in your pocket—I certainly haven't!"

The ship was cleaving the sea, turning back the water in two folds of surging foam, going on and away, farther and farther, carrying Evelyn from him. What was she doing now? He could not know, and it was torture to him; he could hardly bear to think of her leading a separate life in which he had no part, in which she did not need him.

 

They had played bridge in the smoke room all afternoon. Mrs. Prather had been so successful that her gold mesh bag looked as if it were about to bear a golden litter. Now, with the third round of cocktail glasses empty, and the napkin-lined dish of potato chips down to salty fragments, her chin seemed to wag detached, like a grotesque plaster figure in a shop window, as she settled to anecdotes greeted by roars of laughter.

"So the fireman said to the bride——"

"Hey, steward! The same all round."

"Not for me," said Evelyn. She went out on deck, where the pre-dinner promenades were beginning. Linked ladies tottered past, clutching their hand-bags, men expanded their chests and stepped out virilely, because they were on the rolling sea, asking one another: "Ever happen to run across a fellow by the name of Henderson—Elwood T. Henderson of Henderson, Day, and McClintic? Plays the course at Twin Pines a good deal?" Mrs. Marx and Mrs. O'Dowd in their steamer chairs compared addresses of Paris shops. Evelyn leaned against the rail and thought of Joe with happiness and misery. Surging foam, white clouds in the sky, sinking clouds of turquoise under the dark glassy slope of the water. Where are you now, my darling? Why are we apart?

The little rocking town goes on toward darkness, tied by invisible threads of memory to the shore, spinning them out as she goes. Some of them grow fine and vanish; some are so strong they will last to the end, drawing her back from every voyage. The white clouds change to long feathers of gold, motionless in the sky, while transparent dove-colored clouds flow over them, and over a thin white curl of new moon. The water says hush—hush——

 

"Joe's not like other boys; he's never cared anything for girls," Kate complacently told Mrs. Driggs, Mrs. Roberts, Mrs. Jackson, so often that they grew weary of polite response. "I only wish he did. I just have to push him out to anything, and my dearest wish is to have him happily married to some nice girl." And then was in a panic if he looked with the mildest interest at the nicest girl.

She loved the evenings when she put "Forgotten" or "Little Gray Home in the West" on the Victor, and played Canfield, while Joe read the paper.

"Where's that Jack of diamonds? When the toil of the long day is past, I will come to con-tent-ment and rest—too high! Who's that a photograph of, on the society page, Joe?"

"Miss Marie Louise Fielding."

"Oh! What's she done?"

"Nothing."

"Look, Joe! All these little hearts out, and the ace under where I can't get it! I believe I'd have gone out, only for that. Do you suppose she's a daughter of those Fielders Charlotte knows?"

"I hardly think so."

"Lit-tul gray home in—the—west! Well, no rest for the weary. I've got to sew some new rosettes on my slippers. We might as well have a little music, though. It really is wonderful when you stop to think, here we can have Caruso singing right in this room. I mean it almost seems like magic, doesn't it?"

She squatted on the floor, sliding records in and out of the cabinet Joe had made and she had labeled—Vocal, Instrumental, Dance, Red Seal. Not that any of them had been kept in their proper pigeonholes after the first week.

"'Whispering Hope'—'Alexander's Rag Time Band'—Tarra terump! Tarra terump! There's an awful crack in 'Sweet Genevieve'——"

She put on "Good-by," and settled to her sewing.

"Good-by forever! Good-by forever! Where are my scissors?"

Hark, a voice from the far away,
"Listen and learn, it seems to say,
All the to-morrows shall be as to-day,
All the to-morrows——"

And suddenly she gave a little bounce that made Joe look up inquiringly. But she couldn't explain that she was so happy just because she had thought of the way the wild orange lilies would look next summer in the long wet grass on the Blue Hill Road. She saw Joe and herself in the high tremulous Ford, with a thermos bottle and a basket of sandwiches and deviled eggs, and a trowel, stored away in the back, streaming through the sweet air of summer evenings. "How devoted Joe Green is to his mother!" "Yes, their companionship is really beautiful!"

"There! Those don't look bad at all, with the new rosettes, do they, Joe?! I India-inked the worst places, but I don't believe it shows. You haven't a pencil, have you, darling? I think I'll make my flower-seed list; it'll be planting time before you know it. I don't need any columbine; it's seeded itself all over the garden. Love-in-a-mist—I must have some of that. That's a pretty name, isn't it? They call it Devil-in-a-bush, too, but I think Love-in-a-mist is prettier Would you get two packets of blue Miss Jekylls and one white, or would you get a blue and a white Miss Jekyll and a couple of double mixed? I must get some more wallflower seed, too. Mrs. Carr-Smith—I hope you heard me say Mrs. Carr-Smith—was telling us how beautiful it was in the Gardens of the Luxembourg——"

And then she said what she had been planning to say for so long. She brought it out with elaborate casualness, but her eager eyes were shining.

"Joe, I was thinking. A trip abroad wouldn't cost so terribly much if we——!"

She was too breathless to finish.

"Mother, I can't. I have to save everything I possibly can, because I'm engaged to be married!"

 

"What kind of a girl would get engaged in three days?" Kate asked Carrie, beginning to cry again.

"Well, it certainly doesn't sound very modest or ladylike! I know I certainly wouldn't!"

"Still, Joe's a good judge of character, Carrie, I must say that."

"Oh yes, I know——"

"He says they're a very fine family, but they haven't any money, so they travel with this very rich lady, sort of as companions. You see, they've lived abroad a great deal since Mr. Thorne was killed by a fall out hunting——"

"Oh, my!" said Carrie, much impressed by this creditable, even glamorous death.

"Joe says she has dark hair and light-blue eyes. I said sort of jokingly, though goodness knows, Carrie, I didn't feel much like joking, 'I suppose, of course, she's radiantly beautiful,' and he said, 'Why, yes, of course,' as if it had been in the papers! He says she has beautiful bones."

"Mercy! How gruesome!"

"Well, we all have bones, Carrie."

"Ye-es, I suppose so, but it sounds so sort of—spooky——"

Kate talked the engagement over with Charlotte, too.

"I don't know what possessed him, Charlotte; it just seems utterly crazy to me."

"It does to us, too, Aunt Kate. Hoagland says he thinks they must both have been out of their minds."

"Well, I don't know that it's such an insane thing to fall in love with Joe!"

"We——"

"After all, I think Joe's capable of picking out whoever he wants to marry, without our assistance."

Hoagland, indeed! Who had asked Hoagland for his opinions? But, oh dear! Oh dear!

How lonely and old I am, Kate thought. Look at my hands and my scrawny old neck! She glared at herself in the mirror. Why can't I feel old? It would be so much easier. But it doesn't matter. Joe doesn't see me any more, and there's nobody else to care. Two tears welled up, overflowed. She watched them trickle down her cheeks with mournful interest.

Youth flowing on, passing—no, not passing, but disappearing like those lost rivers that disappear underground. Her youth lay deep in her hidden heart.

She read the beauty advertisements. "Tired skins made lovely again"—"A few minutes' care each morning and night will accomplish wonderful results for you"—"Erase those hateful lines around eyes and mouth"—"Complexions youthified." They said you could work this magic with a home-treatment box—balsam astringents, satiny water-lily creams, geranium-petal rouges. Of course I wouldn't use rouge, she thought. But it wouldn't hurt to try the other things. I needn't tell anyone.

Oh, but what was the use? Life was over for her, now, and her heart was broken.

But it couldn't be true. From Monday until Thursday was too short a time to work such destruction. If only they hadn't sent Joe to New York! If only they'd waited until this week! If only he'd looked up that man on Tuesday instead of Monday! If only there had never been a war! If only——

She thought piteously that if she did not remind him of what he never forgot he would get over this delusion.

"Of course, not seeing her, he can keep his ideals about her," she explained to Carrie. "She's just a sort of dream girl to him now, and I'm afraid he's going to have a sad awakening if he sees her again. Well, I'm not taking it very seriously."

But tears came often, no matter how hard she tried to make it true that nothing had happened, by pretending.

I really believe my heart is broken, she thought, running her needle in and out of the strands of wool across her darning egg. How does Joe get such holes in his heels? This awful feeling in my chest, so sore and heavy; sometimes I can hardly—breathe. She leaned forward suddenly and peered out of the window as the gate clicked. The expressman with a big box. What in the world?

"What is it, Effa?" she called over the stairs.

"Box from Flawrda."

"From Florida! That must be from Mr. and Mrs. Driggs. That's right, get the tack lifter——"

The shrieking boards were torn back.

"Awrnges and grapefruit."

"Well, isn't that nice? That certainly was thoughtful. Will you look at the size of those grapefruit, Effa? You must take some home to-night. We'll get Mr. Joe to carry it down to the cellar when he comes home; it says keep in a cool place. I believe I'll just Tun over to Mrs. Whipple's right now with a few."

And she went out with a basket on her arm, through delicate spring sunlight. Yellow crocuses were wide open on the Wells lawn; bees crawled in and out of them. She smiled and hummed a little song, because she was taking somebody a present.

 

Evelyn lay awake at night, listening to all the little voices that spoke through the ship, thinking of Joe, loving him and wanting him. Often she wept. But the days were full of distractions.

She put on the soft white coat with its big fluff of white fur collar. It really was wonderfully becoming, worth the work it had been to get Cornelia McMillan to give it to her. She had tried it on "just for fun," and exclaimed over it, and flattered Cornelia, and talked about being poor, until Cornelia, half kind, half contemptuous, had said: "Take it. I don't want it. No, go ahead. I've worn it so much I'm tired of it." Evelyn was sick of this hinting for presents, hinting for invitations, but she and her mother had had to do it so much that it was easier than it used to be. Anyway, the coat was a hundred times more becoming to her than to fat Cornelia with her sallow skin.

Mrs. Prather was still in bed, propped up by pink-satin pillows covered with lace, when Evelyn went in to say good morning. She wore a net cap to keep her waves in place, a rubber chin strap, a pink-chiffon jacket edged with swan's-down, and rubber gloves. Her breakfast tray was on the dressing table, rimmed with pushed-back silver and crystal, a heap of cigarette stubs, big square bottles of green and amber perfumes, a vase of nearly dead flowers, and a copy of If Winter Comes, which she could not read in public because it made her cry so that the mascara washed off her lashes and zigzagged sootily down her cheeks. An empty coffee cup, a bit of sausage, a bit of griddle cake with maple-syrup streaks, buttery crumbs, and grape skins, explained the need of the pink rubber corsets waiting on a chair.

The cabin smelled of fruit from all the mauve and gilt steamer baskets, with their pears and apples and little unopened pots of jam. A wardrobe trunk frothed with beaded chiffon. The porthole curtains were drawn, but day cut through them with two knives of light. A staring whiskered griffon lay on top of the bed, a Pomeranian had crept under the covers and broke into needle-sharp barks as Evelyn came in.

"Hello, sweet thing! Hush, Puff! hush, darling! Muvver can't hear one fing. Well, so we land to-morrow morning!"

"It's been a wonderful trip."

"I'll say it has—for you! With the Irving fellow and Durand running around in circles. What would Ralph say?"

"What should he say? My affairs are none of Ralph's business."

"Oho! Your mother says he's coming over soon, that he's taken a palazzo in Venice. Drop that powder puff, Whisky! Take it away from him, Evelyn. Bad boy! Yes'a was, a bad boy! Muvver 'pank!"

Mrs. Prather didn't know she was engaged. No one knew but her mother, who wept about it at first, and later, more restfully, refused to take it seriously.

It had been a wonderful trip. Such nice people, and the thought of Joe's love for her a secret treasure. She went out on deck, passing Harry Fisher, who lay with his cap pulled over his closed eyes, rather green, and with a tray with a little tea awash in a cup and an untouched half of grapefruit beside him. She sat down in Mrs. Prather's chair, nestling into her soft light rug with its enormous monogram, lifting her feet so the deck steward could tuck the rug around them. "Yes, indeed, a heavenly morning. . . . Really? Does anybody call this rough?"

She had her writing portfolio; she was going to finish her letter to Joe. But first she must look at this bright blue sky, feel the soft air stroke her cheeks and lift the ends of her hair. Then the steward stepped over the high brass sill with a tray of cups. She drank her bouillon and listened to the mild little man gotten up in loud sport clothes being polite to the bleached blonde two chairs away.

"How er you this merning?"

"Just fine, thenk you! How's Mrs. Dole?"

"Well, she feels kinda mean this merning; she thinks she musta eaten something."

"Say, there's quite a roll this merning; I guess a lot of folks eren't feeling any too good."

She would write to Joe about that cream-and-black checkerboard cap, the green knickerbockers bristly as wild cucumbers. She put down the cup and the sloppy saucer and opened her portfolio. But that was as far as the letter got, for Tommy Irving came along to pull her up—"That one don't mind showing her legs!" Mrs. O'Dowd told Mrs. Marx—and make her take a walk.

Blue sky, blue sea, tingling health, when so many of the rug-wrapped cocoons were wan, Tommy so tall and good-looking in his not-too-new English clothes, refreshing, reflections of herself as they passed the smoke-room windows, with her tight white cloche pulled down over her entrancing eyes, the white ruff of fur, her loose white gloves, her slim: white-silk ankles. She felt eyes lifted over books; people spoke of them as they swung past.

"How about a dry Martini?"

"Starting cocktails at half past eleven?"

"Better late than never."

"All right, but twice around the deck first."

And there was John Durand, falling into step with them. She thrust a hand through John's arm, one through Tommy's, and they swept around the deck, not getting out of the way for anybody.