The Golden Vanity (17 page)

Mysie surveyed her own polite stranger. He was quite presentable and amiable. He spoke with a foreign correctness and a faint accent. French, she thought. She asked him. He said he was; she did not hear his name clearly, and was never to find out. She gleaned—their conversation was gravely formal—that he had something to do with metallurgy, and had come over to study American methods in structural steelwork and factory and foundry organization. She asked him if he would take back a skyscraper.

He said: "They do not belong anywhere but in New York. In Europe they are a mistake. Perhaps even elsewhere in America?"

Mysie agreed. "The skyscrapers don't pay, you know," she said.

"They do not pay?"

"No. Not in money, interest on the investment. Two or three per cent, I believe, on the older ones; so if they go on building them, with the costs increasing, they haven't a chance." An architect had told her so.

"Then why do they build them?"

"To the greater glory of God. Or because we're all crazy."

"I believe you," he said, and asked her about herself. She said that she worked for her living.

"Publicity, if you know what that is." Though she happened to be playing at the time; Corrigan had kept his word and given her a part; but she was always disinclined to say she was an actress, because it was a bore to have people try to remember whether they had seen her on the stage, when they hadn't. "In France," she said, "I guess there aren't so many of these odd-jobs. You have a profession, and can see your life ahead."

"It appears so," he agreed, "but I am not sure. Perhaps that is an illusion. For example, my grandfather was a scientist, and he died at Sedan. My other grandfather was a physician, and he died of yellow fever at Panama, with de Lesseps. But my father was a soldier, in the engineering corps, and he served over thirty years and retired to a farm in Touraine, dying there peacefully in 1912, on the land of his ancestors. How should one know?"

"You must have been in the war?"

"I was fortunate, a liaison officer in the transport service. I had a dear friend, who was a poet—killed at Verdun. There is no sense in that."

Mysie reached backward over his shoulder to set down her glass on the table. She had a dim recollection of Grandfather Brennan telling how he had seen machinery left by de Lesseps crumbling to rust in the jungles of Panama.

"Would you like another drink?" the Frenchman suggested.

She shook her head. "That was nothing but seltzer. I take it in self-defense, so nobody will pester me with cocktails. This bootleg stuff must taste poisonous to you."

He smiled. "I hid mine behind that lamp; I have not touched it. But truly, in New York one does not need a stimulant."

"I daresay New York strikes you as a madhouse?"

"Not mad—but Atlantean. It confounds judgment. The spirit as much as the scale. All races and nations strive in turn to rebuild Olympus, reach the clouds. We French abandoned Versailles, our Olympian gesture, and asked only to be let alone to become good bourgeois. This is your venture. I cannot think what you will do after."

Mysie laughed at the fantastic turn of the encounter. The enforced proximity enabled her to observe the undertone of his olive complexion, the flecks of brown in his grey eyes, a nick he must have given himself while shaving. He was fortyish, reasonably good-looking, a sound physical specimen; also he kept his hands to himself. . . . They were insulating themselves by this conversation. .. . She would have disengaged herself, only he must be sufficiently bewildered by the customs of the country, so that it might seem she had taken offense when he was so scrupulously giving none. Or perhaps he was at a loss how to extricate himself from the situation without rudeness. She said hastily: "The Olympian attitude is beyond the individual, isn't it? Take off the wig and the high heels, and nobody is any taller. And we cannot reach the top of our skyscrapers without elevators. One has to scramble for a living just the same, or snuffle with a cold in one's head. The undignified details persist. Look at these people; I suspect they are entirely respectable. They are trying to be something more, but it's no use. The drinking and— and the rest—it just doesn't mean anything. They remain ordinary. Pathetically innocent."

"You don't drink?" he said.

"Not as an Olympian effort."

"But you are not ordinary."

"Oh, yes," said Mysie. She was not sure if there was a further implication in his remark.

The entertainers ceased and the orchestra resumed. Would she care to dance? Mysie accepted, as an admirable solution of the situation. "That is a good tune," he said.
You Saint Louis woman with your diamond rings . . .
Mysie acquiesced. "It is good. And quite apropos. The Beale Street Blues."
The graveyard is a nasty old place; They lay you in the ground and throw dirt in your face . .
The floor was overcrowded; another couple cannoned into them, and everybody apologized. The other girl was a statuesque beauty, with her left arm covered with bracelets from wrist to elbow. Her voice blurred, and she broke off in the middle of a sentence to affirm: "It's too hot."

Mysie said: "It is hot." Her partner suggested: "There is a balcony." That seemed a good idea. It was an outside terrace, a narrow ledge protected by a coping. He shut the door after them.

The night air was soft and mild, with a thin mist in which the multitudinous street lights were diffused; the sky was a strange color, grey-lavender above the yellow glow.

He put his arms about her gently. "May I see you again?"

"I don't know," Mysie said. She had half a mind to tell him she appreciated his courtesy. Whatever his intentions, he had given them value by consciousness and privacy... . She thought, we are looking at the sack of a city. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady. . . . She gave him back his kiss. The world seemed to rock a little, a ground swell of the force that made it. All passionate endeavor flowed from this. ... He said again: "When shall I see you?"

She didn't know what she would have answered; they heard the door opening, and she stepped out of his arms. Some more people came. The tune was going on.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; If my singing don't get you, my shimmy must.
She shivered and he said: "Are you cold?" She laughed and went inside. They were elbowed by the crowd again; she caught sight of Jake Van Buren. He had detached himself from his clinging vine. She signaled him by lifting her eyebrows and he obeyed promptly, asking her to dance; they had a system of communications. She turned back just long enough to say to the Frenchman: "Call me up if you like. In the telephone book . . ." She was certain he had not got her name correctly, and their host wouldn't be able to identify her if asked who she was —one stray guest out of so many. It was better not. Meeting again might prove to be just an assignation. Quite ordinary. They mightn't even like each other.

"I don't want to dance," said Mysie, half-way around the floor. "I'm going home. But you don't need to."

"You women," said Jake, "think a man is made of iron."

Mysie said: "Then let's duck."

In the taxi, Jake remarked: "I'd have gone an hour ago, but I didn't wish to tear you from your paramour."

"And who was the lady I seen you with?" Mysie rejoined, yawning.

"I haven't the slightest idea," Jake said veraciously. "She told me her husband was a fine steady man, and she was so tired of him she could scream; and ought she to get a divorce? I advised her to do so. It would be a break for him. When she wandered away in the supper room an egg named George Gish or something confided to me that he was an old college chum of mine and that he had lost his shirt on I. T. & T. He seemed to think that was news. What worried him most was that he meant to sell a month ago, right at the peak, but he didn't because Professor Irving Fisher said there was no possibility of a crash. He was brooding over the Professor."

"Then I guess there wasn't any crash; the newspapers are kidding us. A professor couldn't be wrong," Mysie said. "He'd better just put the professor away and forget about him. Same as my Consolidated Nickel." She also should have sold her fifty shares a month ago. There were lots of things she should have done, and some she shouldn't have. Maybe she should have been a professor. They get paid for pulling boners.

"So that is why," said Jake, "I'll use Aunt Hallie's legacy to put on my play."

"What on earth are you talking about?" Mysie gaped.

"I forgot to tell you," Jake explained, "that Aunt Hallie died last week, and left me some money."

Mysie grasped the fact by degrees, after Jake had begun at the beginning and given full particulars. She then contributed the opinion that Jake was insane. "How much money?"

"About twenty thousand dollars."

"Cash value, right now, with everything shot the way it is?"

"There's about that much in government and municipal bonds."

"It would give you an income for life," Mysie argued.

Jake said: "Aunt Hallie lost more than half her income when the New York New Haven dividends faded away. That used to be considered her best investment; it was the widows' and orphans' special."

"Wasn't that in the panic of 1907?"

"No; it was along about 1912 or 1913. In what are called good times."

"I don't remember," said Mysie. "What happened to it?"

"The bankers got it," said Jake. "Old J. P. Morgan cleaned it out. Blew it up and busted it like a toy balloon. Aunt Hallie never could understand about that."

"But good bonds," Mysie returned to the main point.

Jake again replied obliquely: "There were some odds and ends in Aunt Hallie's tin box, street railway bonds; and then there was a big envelope at the bottom, of relics that must have been left over from Grandfather's time. Rather weird. A canal-boat company."

Mysie waved this ancient history aside.

"You're crazy," she repeated.

Jake declined to discuss his mental condition. He said: "Lew Morris has got one of those play-doctors to go over
Third String
and jack up the plot. Most of his suggestions are too horrible to dwell upon, but he knows all the surefire hokum. If I survive the operation, the part you had will be more important. Would you take a chance on it again?"

"Sure," said Mysie. "You've got to have a keeper. Listen, are we going to spend the rest of the night in this taxi?" It had been stopped for some minutes at Mysie's door. "Yes, here's my key; good night."

She climbed the gloomy narrow stairs and let herself in quietly, to avoid disturbing Thea. The precaution was unnecessary.

Thea was awake, reading. She sat in her accustomed chair, in profile against the light. The inclination of her head, the sweep of her hair, drawn up from her forehead, its sorrel color dimmed with grey, ash over ember, and the spread of her hand holding the book, were strikingly feminine. Tall and spare and straight as she was, with no trace remaining of the soft contours of youth, ordinarily she seemed to have resigned the special business of being a woman. When she played, she was a musician, not a woman displaying an accomplishment. Always she had an unasking air. The traditional feminine manner is expectant. Women wait upon the pleasure or necessity of others—of men, children, a domestic routine. Thea never looked like that. And now obviously she was not waiting for Mysie. She looked, simply, like a woman alone.

"Aren't you back early?" she enquired. "Or am I so late?"

"Both," said Mysie.

"I couldn't sleep," Thea said. "This panic—" She did not finish the sentence.

"Have you any stock?"

"I?" Thea invested the syllable with harsh ironic finality. She added, in a more guarded tone, "No, of course not. It was stupid of me to read the papers. I'll take a sleeping powder; but it wears off, and I didn't want to wake at six in the morning. Did you enjoy the party?"

"So-so. But you can't guess what Jake is planning to do; reason totters on its throne." Mysie repeated the news of Aunt Hallie's bequest and Jake's intention.

Thea commented: "You don't care how Jake spends his money?"

"Certainly not; Jake is like the weather; there's no way to stop it. Besides, I just don't care."

"Then he may as well please himself. Everyone might as well," said Thea.

From habit, Mysie picked up a book before going to her room. "I hope there's hot water," she said in parting.

She undressed, washed, brushed her hair, with automatic motions. . . . She thought perhaps she ought to be more concerned over money. It was the most important thing in the world. But if you gave it first place, it left no room for anything else. For love or disinterested work. ... Or even for fun, she thought, doubtful whether life is real and life is earnest. Maybe it isn't; at moments it looks like a bad joke. She meant—she meant—what did she mean? That if you could even once do a thing right, however perishable the visible result, nevertheless the perfection would exist forever. As one hears a true note in song after the actual sound has ceased.

And you must do against the odds, without favor. It's no use asking to be endowed, exempted from the common and immemorial adventure of getting a livelihood. Wisdom and beauty are not to be had for nothing. Endowments produce only university dons, grammarians, commentators, stalled oxen. How should they understand the nature of work? Work is something that
must
be done.

And love . . . Quantities of solemn and public-spirited investigators compiled statistics and wrote books giving technical instructions. First you carefully choose a suitable person and then you proceed according to plan—Those bewildered revelers getting drunk and tiresome were nearer right, though they were completely wrong. For even passion has its own dignity. It rejects the forced occasion, and takes fire from scornful sobriety, at the kiss of a stranger. . . .

Why can't people be let alone, Mysie thought gloomily.

Between the blasted reformers and the earnest immoralists a pretty good country has been darned near ruined. Neither will recognize that there really are different kinds of people. There used to be room for everybody to be what they were. Cities, small towns, suburbs, farms, backwoods. Rigid respectability with the alternative of doing as you pleased at your own risk. Take it or leave it.