CHAPTER IV
ALL ELSE IS HERESY
There are certain people, good people to whom orthodox precepts and preachments are more than the constant evidence of their own eyes, who will find displeasure in this story. For they are accustomed to a formula in all such tales and are not likely to abide a departure from it.
By it they have come to know immediately, whenever a woman with instincts of doubtful propriety is introduced early in the action, just what to expect. Her doom has struck. The frightful end which will be hers is only a deferred matter still in the hands of her historian: The dark river, a rushing car over an embankment to swift oblivion, a living agony of remorse,—the rewards it will be noted bear a distinct resemblance each to the other. For the wages of sin have long been classified, tabulated and fixed, a minimum of mercy, a maximum of disaster. All else is heresy.
They have been told this so many times that they not only believe it, just as Cecille Manners once believed, utterly, fervidly, but they derive therefrom an ardent satisfaction. This might seem strange, but it is stranger far that they never look about them, just for a moment, at life itself—just for a moment, just long enough to wonder. But they do not. They believe in and expect the worst, demand it indeed. And so this story will not please them—no. Not at all in so far as it chronicles the life of Felicity Brown.
But the other half, the half which has been wondering for quite a while, just as Cecille came to wonder, may read it and approve.
Once it was considered adequate to combat wickedness with fear, but methods change. It has come to seem wiser, if less orthodox, to urge that heaven is fair instead of insisting first that hell is so foul. And so perhaps it would be well for a change to bear less heavily upon the wages of sin, and extol, just a little, the wages of virture. For too constant insistence upon an evil thing is sure to breed doubt in the mind of one who is in the habit of thinking at all. It did in Cecille's. If it be so true, so inevitable, so frightful, surely it should be self-evident now and then, instead of a mere matter of report. And beautiful generalization, never anything but vague, becomes noticeable after a time, questionable. The things of glory in this world are not so tediously many that they will not bear once or twice the telling. Why not refuse, for once, to blink the facts, even though they may not be suitably sordid? Why not go into detail, once in a while, if the prospect is as fair as they would have one fancy?
This story does, I hope. It would be honester that way.
It is not easy to account for the intimacy which existed between those two girls. It is doubtful if either of them could have done much to account for it. Pressed for an explanation, Felicity Brown, it is true, might have essayed an answer of sorts. "Oh, Cele's kind of a nut," she might have declared, "but she's a good scout," or something equally unsatisfactory. But Cecille, unless urged, quite likely wouldn't have made any answer at all. Then, "I don't know," she would have murmured. And in the face of such gravity her inquisitor must surely have sought a different topic.
Yet the intimacy was a fact,—one of those odd facts which life persists in producing. They had shared an apartment (that is a nice compliment, that phrase, applied to their sitting-room, bedroom and bath) for almost a year, continuing in a state of amiability possible only between two people so widely separated in ideals and hopes that there could never be a clash. There had never been much companionship, however. Now and then they ate one meal together, an early dinner for Cecille and a late breakfast for Felicity, at six o'clock in the evening. For Cecille's working day was over before Felicity's began. But there had been no intimacy of the spirit. And yet each knew the soul of the other as well as though it had been a meal sack which could be turned inside out, exposing every seam to scrutiny.
Felicity Brown belonged to the Midnight Roof Club's famous Aero Octet. That is, of course, a needless bit of information, presumptuous even to the initiate, for everybody knows her, almost everybody. She was the third from the left, the one in new-grass green, with balloons pendant from the scalloped corners of her short, stiff-wired skirt—black balloons like huge dull pearls. The one with the smile. Yes, I know that the others smiled, too, constantly, provocatively; but sometimes the set of their lips was likely to seem anything but the curl of mirth. But not Felicity's.
It never lost its challenge. And her dancing was like that, tireless, serenely abandoned, the essence of knowing grace. Half-pagan, half-divine, Denby, the young cover artist, badly smitten, once put it with striking unoriginality. And with exceeding inaccuracy, too. For there are all too many who will insist that the pagan portion rather over-balanced the rest. But her sheer vitality was amazing.
An unobserving person, still seeking the key to their intimacy, could easily blunder upon the old bromide and repeat that a pretty woman invariably prefers a plain one for a foil. But he would have to be a very blind fool indeed. For Felicity Brown's beauty, perfect enough under the spot of the Midnight Club's miniature stage, became a less flawless thing in contrast with Cecille. Perhaps that sounds far-fetched. Perhaps, having seen Felicity for yourself, you are inclined to smile and shrug. Nevertheless it is so.
Not one of a million Denbys would ever have called Cecille half-pagan or divine in any degree. He wouldn't have noticed her, even, unless his attention had been pointedly called that way. And if another, contemplating her with an eye not greedy of the flesh alone, had finally hit upon the word poignant to describe the hungry youth of her, the odd little tilt of her head, the soft and eager promise in swelling line of hip and breast, Denby himself most certainly would have murmured absently:
"Poignant. Yes—yes, poignant. Quite so—quite so!"
And yawned.
For she did not challenge instantly, as did Felicity. A man might look at her a long time before her perfection smote him. It usually happened that way; it happened exactly like that to Perry Blair. He looked at her many, many times before he saw with seeing eyes and realized how shyly precious and flagrantly bold girlhood like hers could be.
Her smile was not as ready as that of the girl who danced. And it had become a little strained, a little edged, before the end. But it never lost its freshness. It was always as shining as fine rain at dawn. And the inquiry in her eyes was not part calculation. They were more wistful, less expectant maybe. But they were steady. And gray as a November sea.
Once, remarking the incongruity of their names, Cecille repeated her own with a shade of scorn and provoked from her companion one of the few personalities in which she ever indulged.
"Cecille Manners!" she drawled. "Cecille Manners—gown-fitter's assistant! With a name like that I should be in a Broadway chorus."
It happened late one evening. Cecille was half undressed for bed. And Felicity, busy at the mirror, turned an instant to follow with a dispassionate eye the slight, knickered figure crossing the room.
"With a figure like that, you mean," she amended. "It's plain stingy to keep it under cover. Think of the thousands who are panting to pass over three-fifty per, just to sit out front and give it the up and down!"
Nor did the girl at the mirror see the raw flush which her cool comment brought to Cecille's face, nor would she have understood it had she seen. That one's privacy, one's physical fastidiousness, could be affronted by mere words, would have astounded her. Fastidiousness carried that far—fastidiousness of any sort—was incomprehensible to Felicity. But she found the topic momentarily of interest.
"It is kind of stagy," she pursued it. "Your own?"
"Naturally."
Cecille's crispness was lost upon her. They could never have quarreled. And Cecille had found a dressing-gown and hugged it tight around her knees.
"Oh, not necessarily," Felicity said, abstractedly judicious. "Take me for instance. I tried out four or five before I was inspired with the one I'm wearing now. And a couple of them woulda knocked you dead, take it from me. But the Vere de Vere stuff is bla now. Too phony. There's no class to that kind of a monicker any more. And, believe me, you can't afford to overlook any bets, nowadays; you got to have class in everything. Something simple—something demure, that's what they want. You got to be a lady."
And perhaps that is the best explanation, after all, of Felicity's cultivation of the other girl. One cannot of oneself acquire breeding, but it is possible to study technique. And I think Cecille's reason for sticking to Felicity to the very end is clear too. Once, before things happened, she was one of those people who believed in the inevitable dark river, or swift oblivion, or an agony of remorse. Believed pathetically.
I think Felicity Brown served her as a fearsome revelation of life stripped to its rawest essentials,—a demonstration of shattering truths which she would never have believed had she not stood by, looking on. It held her as a snake's eye holds a bird, fascinated, in deadly peril.
But they got on together. And as an economic arrangement it left nothing to be desired. Cecille sewed well and was paid twenty-two fifty a week. For her appearance in the Aero Octet Felicity received, at the beginning, forty-five. This may astonish some. It shouldn't.
"I don't pay my girls much." So Fiegenspann, the proprietor of the Roof Club, bluntly advised her, after she had passed his scrutiny and been pronounced unusual enough even for the Aero Octet. "I don't have to. Because the opporchoonities here are big—very big. And I like my girls to be sociable. It makes business."
Felicity knew then that she had finally found the right man—the right market. She appreciated his frankness and reciprocated.
"I get you," she said, "and forty-five it is. And I'm sociable, or I can be, if sufficiently persuaded. Only let's be clear about that point right now, at the start. You can send Opporchoonity's card in whenever he calls and I'll be pleased to meet him. But he mustn't crawl up to the curb in any Decrepid Four—understand? He's got to be hitting on twelve."
Fiegenspann understood. He nodded his heavy head. He began to see, then and there, that Felicity Brown was going to add another page to the Roof Club's history. He even essayed a compliment.
"My clientele is of all the world," he said. "And you—you look expensif."
"I am," said Felicity. "No pikers need apply."
And with that business conference between Felicity and Fiegenspann began the revelation which during the months that followed Cecille watched in a kind of stricken suspense that must, it seems, have been childish anticipation in the beginning of the pitiless blast which would complete the other's sure destruction.
Since the day when freakish chance had thrown them together she had had no illusions concerning Felicity's ultimate destiny. It had surprised her not that Felicity was traveling the road, but that she had not long since arrived. She had not learned then how coolly Felicity herself had selected that destiny and taken it in hand. She had not surmised with what dispassionate judgment she had husbanded her resources, once the route was chosen.
And she wouldn't believe the evidence of her own eyes and ears, at first. It never happened this way—it couldn't! Such things were the black fruit of one reckless moment; of nameless impulses; of bitter betrayal. Someone had written something like that. One more unfortunate, rashly importunate—that was it. She couldn't remember the rest. And then her suspense, which was half fearsome expectancy, was overwhelmed by a thought which really frightened her.
If all that they had taught her wasn't so; if all that she had accepted so blindly wasn't the literal truth, inexorable for every individual (life was a too bitterly personal thing for her to concern herself with a doctrine which, accurate in the main, could be shrugged aside when it failed in isolated cases) then all the rest, all that she had clung to just as blindly, could be a lie. And if it was—if it was—
The thought struck at all she knew, all she had, her creed and code and hope of to-morrow.
Felicity when she burst in with the news that she had landed Fiegenspann did a wild can-can up and down the room. She danced as no one else ever saw her dance, in a surrender to exultation that was wanton savagery. But her mood passed quickly. The next moment, like an implacable campaigner, she was summing up the excellences of her latest step.
"Now you watch me!" she said. "Now you watch my dust!"
It was cold-blooded; it was as passionless as chess. And it was about then that Cecille began to draw nearer and nearer in spirit, like a bird hypnotized by a snake. The simile is hectic, I know. But it was like that.
She tried to hold aloof. She used to wonder why she had not packed her bag that night and got out. She used to shiver when she remembered Felicity's dance. One couldn't touch pitch and not be denied. There were, it seemed, an overwhelming number of such proverbs, and most of them forbidding.
But she stayed on. More than that, she found herself after a time stammering a question concerning each new cavalier as he appeared. And each time Felicity's answer was unbelievably unconcerned and laconic.
"Nothing doing," she'd say. "He's hard boiled."
Familiarity breeds complacency oftener than contempt. But it was neither the one nor the other which forced Cecille to ask, over and over again. Once Felicity surprised in her eyes the light that invariably accompanied the question.
"You're a queer kid," she added that time, after the usual answer. "I sure don't get you."
Later she thought she had solved it.
"Don't you worry, Cele," she reassured her. "When the fall comes you'll hear the crash. I'll slip you the returns a little ahead of time so that you can get out from under."
"It—it wasn't that," protested Cecille quickly.
She wondered why she didn't pack up and get out.
But she was still there another night when Felicity finally came home again with every lithe line of her body pulsing triumph. She was even sitting up, which was unusual. An unusual occurrence accounted for it.
In the beginning Felicity had tried to share with the other girl those prospects who, for one reason or another, were of no importance.
"Come on along," she often urged. "These guys mean nothing in my young life except a dinner. And you needn't worry. Believe me, you'll be shown the same respect as if you were out with your maiden aunt. They know I'm refined and won't stand for anything else. And it'll do you good."
Cecille did go, once. So far as her escort was concerned she found that Felicity had spoken the truth. He was innocuous. He was, indeed, quite entirely unaware of her presence most of the evening. That did not displease her. She found him little stupider than a swain of the same age might have been in her own home town, even though his name did appear in heavy block type in the Social Register. But she went only once. She made a mistake. She had that day helped to costume a sister of one of the men. She happened now to mention that sister's prettiness.
The man looked her in the eye, coldly, for a prolonged moment.
"Let's leave my sister out of it," he said at length deliberately.
And Cecille's cheeks were still pale from his tone when they arrived back at the apartment.
"That was a bad crack you made," Felicity told her then.
"I—I didn't know."
"They don't like to discuss their own womenfolks with girls like us."
"Oh!"
The exclamation was little more than a whisper.
"But no harm done," airily. "He has to depend on the old man for his bank-roll. I just thought I'd tip you off."
She didn't go again. She stopped wanting to go anywhere, even to the movies, for quite a while. And then, just at eleven one night, while Felicity was before the mirror preparing to go to work and wondering where Cecille could be, the latter came quietly in. Felicity hardly marked her entrance until she dropped suddenly into a chair and began to laugh. It was the laugh which made Felicity turn so sharply. She had had experience with that shrill note in women's voices and knew what it could mean. Such breakdowns were ugly to handle.
She flung sharply round.
"What's tickling you?" she barked harshly. "Shoot! Let's have it. Cut that, now!"
It stayed the slighter girl's hysteria.
"I've been—I've been to a dance," she gurgled.
Felicity gave her no foolish respite.
"Well, I don't get it," she rapped on. "Maybe I'm English. Where's the joke?"
"A—a dance over at the Central Palace, given for Worthy Working Girls—"
"That's funnier! But go ahead. Snap into it! Don't let it drag—don't let it drag—"
It seemed a potent cure.
"I went because I saw in the paper that Mrs. Schuyler Driggs was going to be among the patronesses to receive."
The hysterical giggle was gone from Cecille's voice. She shut tight her teeth and raised her chin. Felicity felt that it was safe now to remain silent. And she was right, partly right. She only failed to realize that Cecille was all too calm.
"I'm sorry, Felicity," the latter apologized meekly. "But I couldn't help it. I thought I'd laugh and cry and scream, right on the street, before I could get here. But I held on. Shall I finish?"
"Mrs. Schuyler Driggs has just made her entrance—"
"Yes. She was in the shop this morning." The recital seemed simple and orderly now. "I helped to fit her. I usually do. She's never very cordial, but this morning she was—oh, she was a beast! She nagged and nagged and nagged, until I got nervous. I couldn't help it. I got worse and worse, until I stuck a pin into her. Not just a scratch." The gurgle threatened. "But deep—deep!"
"If you go off again," promised Felicity, "I'll dump that pitcher of water over you."
"I won't. I stuck the pin into her, and she—she grunted. And then—I never saw anyone grow so furious. She turned purple. I'm not sure that she didn't strike at me.
"'You did that on purpose,' she grated at me. Grated, that's the only word that describes it. 'You fool! You damned clumsy little fool!'"
Felicity waited until it was evident that she would have to speak.
"Well?" she asked then in a voice grown hard. "What did you say? What was the snappy come-back?"
"I couldn't think of anything to say, not just then—"
"Folks like you usually can't," said Felicity drily. "They think of a knock-out a half an hour too late. But not me. Language comes easy to me in a spot like that, language that I can't use regular without getting pinched, and I'm generous with it."
"I was a little more than a half hour late in having my say," Cecille admitted. "But I had it. I saw the announcement of the dance in the afternoon paper and her name, and I decided to go. I don't know why; that is, I didn't—not until she recognized me. Then I knew! She was shaking hands with me and telling me to have a good time. She was just passing me on to the next in line, when she blinked at me, like that—she's fat—and stopped me.
"'Haven't I seen you somewhere before, my dear?' she asked. 'You seem somehow very familiar.'
"Then I knew why I'd come. And I let her have it!
"'You have,' I was just as throaty as she was. 'And I should be,'—meaning familiar. 'At ten-thirty o'clock this morning when I stuck a pin into you, fitting that gown you have on, you cursed me. If I remember accurately you called me a damned clumsy little fool.'"
"—seven—eight—nine—ten!" chanted Felicity joyously. "And out! What did she do?"
And then, quite without any warning at all, came the break. It was like the shattering of brittle glass.
Cecille rocked to crazy mirth.
"She had them put me out!" she shouted. "She called the matron and had her put me out! She said the language I'd used before her was positively vicious. She said I'd—contaminate—those—worthy—working girls!"
And it took Felicity almost three-quarters of an hour to bring her round. In one brief interval of calm she managed to slip to the telephone and call a taxi. The rest of the time she spent on her knees beside the girl in the chair crooning softly. And she never knew that most of the words she set to her soothing, extemporaneous tune would have contaminated anybody, most of all Mrs. Schuyler Driggs herself.
At eleven-thirty, when Cecille was crying comfortably, she rose. And seeing that her work was well done, she became brisk.
"I'll get a bawling out from Fiegenspann," she said, and ran to a window. "Thank God, that taxi's here. And now you'd better get to bed. Maybe hereafter you'll know better than to mix it with somebody outa your class. You oughta known in the first place that perfect ladies have got it all over girls like us, before we start. They've got everything fixed, the judges and the referee, before you step into the ring."
She ran out—and flashed back.
"Don't get me wrong, Cele." For one reason or another she hurried it. "I ain't got time to explain just what I meant to say, but there's one thing I didn't mean. Don't get me wrong. If you ain't a lady, then I'm the Prince of Wales."
That was the second time Cecille heard it.
"A girl like us."
After a time her sobs subsided until they were no more than long, unsteady breaths. But she stayed at the window, staring down into the street. Once she dug the knuckles of one fist into her eyes and wistfully shook her head.
"I wonder," she whispered. "I wonder."