IT was Easter Sunday and Gita was strolling along the Boardwalk. Mr. Donald had considerately sent her a check and she had bought a small black sailor hat, which she wore on the back of her head that her cropped hair should further demonstrate her complete indifference to feminine allure. She had also invested in a black sport skirt that she might be able to keep one hand in a pocket, and in the other she carried a swagger-stick. A stiff white shirtwaist and black tie completed her toilette. She flattered herself that she looked like a boy masquerading as a girl and was somewhat disconcerted when no less than two passing men murmured, “Cutie.” Then she was abruptly a haughty young woman—and a Carteret—freezing impertinent libertines.
“But if I only were a boy,” she sighed. “I don’t believe I’d even mind work. And girls are ten thousand times nicer than men. Then I could fall in love with one of them, and now that is forever denied me.”
But she did not really feel sad. The warm gold sun rode in an unflecked sky. The sea rolled in to the white sands in long sparkling indolent waves. Over the hard beach young people were riding horseback and children were driving little carts, or building in the sand. A great liner drifted on the horizon.
The Boardwalk was so crowded that Gita was forced to move at a far more leisurely pace than her habit, and it seemed to her that in all that vast throng there was but one expression: a composite expression of vacant contentment. If they were subject to the common misfortunes and cares of humanity, for the present they were unable to recall them.
Here and there she saw a woman fashionably dressed, but to what world she belonged Gita did not hazard a guess. There were perhaps a hundred tailor-made girls, as slim as laths, very trim, very conscious that they were turned out by one of the autocrats of fashion. But the mass were frankly tourists with no money to spend on anything but cheap imitations of the prevailing styles. There were college boys arm in arm and walking four abreast, and large carefully dressed males with roving predatory eyes.
In the close monotonous procession of rolling chairs propelled up and down the middle of the broad promenade by colored men or white derelicts, were couples too fat and overfed to walk or too old and tired. A few elderly ladies and gentlemen looked as if they may have sauntered on the Walk in its heyday and still came for the ozone which no change in fashion could alter.
Gita wondered what the façade of Atlantic City had looked like when these devitalized relics were in their prime. Today hotels of varying magnificence, with at least one triumph of modern architecture, were connected by a flimsy chain of low-browed buildings: Japanese or Chinese curio-shops; shops for linen, lingerie, sweaters and blouses; candy-stores; shops devoted exclusively to salt-water taffy, “cut to fit the mouth”; restaurants, motion-picture theaters, bookstores, shoe-stores, milliners; displays of costumes unapproachable in elegance and price; cigar stands, cheap rooming-houses, toy-stores, drug-stores, auction-rooms, art-shops of highest and lowest quality; booths where silhouettes were taken while you wait, stands for post-cards, newspapers, magazines; jewelers; five-and-ten-cent stores. Interrupted at set intervals by flights of steps or “inclines” leading down to the avenues of Atlantic City. Opposite, reaching far out into the water, six monstrous piers offering concerts, soft drinks, moving pictures, tearooms, ballrooms, and long decks for chairs.
It was a scene both vulgar and splendid, extravagant and tawdry, mean and aspiring. If a tidal wave washed away all but the hotels it would have a certain stark magnificence, but the miles of pigmy shops gave it the appearance of a chain of village Main Streets that made the great hotels, not themselves, look alien.
Nevertheless the ensemble was gay and exhilarating. Above the mass-murmur of voices rose the cry of the barkers and the deep surge of the Atlantic. These slowly moving smiling crowds gave to the scene an air of careless and unqualified leisure to be found nowhere else in the world.
Behind and below the Boardwalk, between the Inlet and Iowa Avenue, Atlantic City proper, a dignified town of a prevailing gray tone, rambled back to the Thoroughfares and the salt marshes, and on the south merged into the faubourg of Chelsea. It was a town with a life of its own and regarded its façade as almost if not wholly negligible. Its social life, like that of other small towns, revolved about its churches, Episcopalianism representing the flake of the crust, and its women’s clubs were often storm-centers of politics. The men had their professional and business clubs, and some sixty leading citizens met for a weekly luncheon at one of the city hotels either to talk business or forget it, and to sing, with the abandon of boys, the sentimental songs of their youth. Atlantic Avenue, a broad if unpicturesque thoroughfare, had its enormous trolleys that went from the Inlet to Longport, at the southern tip of the island; but Pacific Avenue, with its fine Public Library, its churches and reserved private houses, relied on the humble jitney.
It was not a bustling city but it had a constant surge of life, and there was no apparent poverty except in the negro quarter, whose denizens found compensation in a conscious political power. And it was a proud city, for all its streets were avenues, its shops were serenely independent of the extortionists on the Boardwalk, the best of its private houses looked like dignified old folks, well preserved but with no pretensions to youth, and its air was tonic. Visitors in the great frontal hotels, looking down on the quiet little gray city, assumed that oyster-dredging was still its main industry, and the humbler patrons of the hundreds of hotels and boarding-houses of the town accepted it as an annex to the Boardwalk and knew as little of its life as of its history.
Gita had often wandered about the town, which attracted her more than Chelsea or Ventnor, for although far from contemporary with the manor it represented the vision and enterprise of that group of men, including her great-grandfather, who had founded it in the early fifties, and now it had an elderly dignity and beauty of its own.
Her slow progress had brought her to the incline that led down into States Avenue and she edged her way to the rail and looked over at a large gray wooden house with a round pointed tower. It was on the north side of the avenue—once but a footpath leading from the old United States Hotel to the beach—and, like its neighbors, belonged to a definite and debased period of American architecture. Many of her enterprising great-grandfather’s friends had left Philadelphia to become permanent residents of the new city, either for business reasons or for fashion, and this street demonstrated their theories of comfort and grandeur. A few of their descendants had magnificent houses out on the avenues of Chelsea or Ventnor, others had succumbed to adverse fortune and quietly disappeared. A very few perhaps still lived where their fathers or grandfathers had built. Several of these old houses, once the pride of Atlantic City, were boarding-houses for the better class of vacationists who could not afford the palaces on the Boardwalk.
Gita had spent two hours on that famous promenade and not seen a familiar face. Nor was she likely to see one if she spent the day there. Polly and the girls she had brought to the manor during the past week scorned it wholeheartedly. They might exercise there in the early morning and swim off their secluded beach when the ocean recovered from the chill of winter, but to show themselves in “that crowd” had no part in their program of aristocratic democracy.
Gita, who had entertained her new friends in aired and sunny rooms from which at least a third of the furniture had been removed to the stables (by two stalwart sons of her farmers, the while Topper and Andrew muttered a continuous protest) had lost her desire for solitude, and wondered if the Pelhams were at home. Easter Sunday was no time for a formal call, but Gita, whether fundamentally a Carteret or not, ignored the conventions when it suited her purpose.
She descended the incline and strolled up the avenue to the least remunerative of her possessions. The blinds were raised and several of the windows were open. It was after twelve and if the Pelhams had attended church, as no doubt they had—the church, if not religion, playing so dominant a part in the lives of their kind—they would have returned. The midday dinner and Easter Sunday! Gita shrugged her shoulders and ran up the long flight of steps: the house, following the rule, was built above a high cellar as a precaution against the rare but always possible furies of the sea.
But the Pelhams had a late breakfast on Sunday and an early supper. When the colored maid brought up Miss Carteret’s name they were in their respective bedrooms enjoying the somnolent ease that followed a morning well spent. Chelsea had no more contempt for the Boardwalk than States Avenue.
Mrs. Pelham was the first to descend. She was offended at the informality but as curious as her daughter to see this heir of the Carterets, who had been the subject of much rumor and several newspaper paragraphs.
She was a very tall woman, thin and austere, with iron-gray hair dressed high and flat, and wore a gray dress over corsets as rigid as herself. Even the gold-framed spectacles did not soften her expression. She was a member of the church most active in local politics and all reforms, and the president of a very important club.
Gita felt like making a face but advanced and held out her hand in Millicent’s prettiest manner. “Mrs. Pelham? I am Gita Carteret and I do hope you won’t mind the informality of this call.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Mrs. Pelham stiffly. “Won’t you sit down? It is very polite of you to call so soon. I hardly expected to see you for several weeks.”
An ambiguous remark, but Gita replied sweetly:
“I was feeling lonesome after two hours on the Boardwalk and had a sudden desire to meet old friends of my grandmother.”
Mrs. Pelham looked as if about to thaw, then darted a suspicious glance at her visitor. “Hardly that. I used to meet Mrs. Carteret occasionally when we sat on the same charitable boards, and she was once very kind when I was ill. But I did not feel that I had known her well enough to attend the funeral. Of course I left cards.”
Is this class-consciousness? thought Gita. Do self-respecting Americans really recognize county?
“You were lucky not to feel you had to,” she replied warmly. “It was ghastly. Public funerals—and weddings—should be abolished; don’t you think so? Both are indecent.”
“I certainly do not agree with you. I rank both among the decencies of life.” She looked at Gita as if she approved of nothing about her, but it was a look to which Gita was inured and she merely smiled and crossed her knees, swinging a foot conspicuous in an Oxford bought in the boys’ department of a shoe-store.
She broke a silence that threatened to induce hysteria, recalling the gossip of Topper, who knew the lineage and habits of every family from Egg Harbor to Cape May. “I hear you go in tremendously for good works. That must get away with a lot of time.”
“My time is fully occupied and I certainly do my duty as I see it.”
“Oh—ah—yes. I’ve heard that Atlantic City is particularly fortunate in its women citizens. . . .” And then she sprang into the arena. “I suppose you always intend to live here?”
“Most certainly. I was born in Atlantic City—we once had our own house but it burned down—and I expect to die here. I hope you will renew the lease of this house when it expires—but of course you leave business details to Mr. Donald?”
There was a hint of anxiety in her rasping voice.
“Not altogether. I——You wouldn’t like to buy the house, would you?”
“I should like nothing better, but unfortunately I am unable to afford it.” There was a gleam of real apprehension in her hard gray eyes as she stared at Gita.
“I am afraid I must sell it, then.” Gita was now completely indifferent to the impression she was making on this disagreeable person as well as to the fact of Easter Sunday. “You see, it brings me in no income whatever and I really need more money.”
“I cannot give up this house!” Gita almost jumped. There was a note of fighting passion in the woman’s voice. “I have lived in it for thirty years. My children were born in it.”
“Oh—I’m sorry.” She felt curiously disconcerted, almost sympathetic, but after all she was not turning paupers into the street. “Perhaps—I hardly know what to say. Mr. Donald advised me——”
“I could take in paying guests. We have several spare rooms. I never expected to come to that but I’d do it and pay you more rent.”
“It isn’t so much a matter of income——” And then she rose with a sigh of relief. A girl was coming down the stairs, and she looked as unlike her presumable mother as possible.
Mrs. Pelham stood up. “My daughter, Mrs. Brewster—Miss Carteret,” she said in her stiff precise manner. “I hope you will excuse me for a few moments.” And she hastily left the room.
“ ‘Mrs.!’ ” said Gita, smiling once more as she resumed her seat on a chair as hard as any at Carteret Manor. “I was sure you were a girl like myself.”
“I am only twenty-six, and I’m a widow. My husband died a few months after our marriage. But that seems a long time ago—I was just twenty. I hear this is your first visit East. I hope you like it.”
And they exchanged easy commonplaces on the fertile subject of the Boardwalk and Atlantic City.
Mrs. Brewster was as slim as Gita and hardly as tall. She, also, held herself erectly, but without stiffness; her dark blue frock was of excellent material fashionably cut; and, observed Gita, who had an eye for clothes, singular in one who disdained them, as well “put on” as Polly’s. Her brown hair was cut short and brushed back from a brow of unfashionable nobility, and her large light eyes were both intelligent and humorous. Gita thought she had never seen a more emphatic little nose nor a more determined chin. If she had ever suffered she bore no trace and looked as if her vision would always be set toward the future in confidence and hope.
As the conversation became more personal Gita learned that Mrs. Brewster was buyer for one of the department stores on Atlantic Avenue, a position that took her frequently to Philadelphia and New York. She felt slightly bewildered. It was her first acquaintance with a girl of the business class, and she had assumed vaguely that all members of that order were hard and common. She had once dreaded a similar fate, and although, she told herself, she could not be harder, she had wondered if she would wholly forget the anxious training and admonitions of her mother. But Millicent might have had the bringing-up of Elsie Brewster. Gita wondered if she were a snob and felt secretly humiliated.
“But you don’t like work?” she asked, determined to get to the root of the matter. “You—you look, rather, as if you were both a student and fond of a good time like other girls. Once I thought I should have to go to work, and, frankly, I hated the bare idea.”
Mrs. Brewster smiled. “If you have to do a thing it is better to like it than hate it, don’t you think? But you are rather shrewd, you know. As a matter of fact I am fond of reading and study, and my job leaves me a good many hours of leisure. I also love good times, of course, but when you have a certain object in life——” Her voice faltered and she blushed and glanced hesitatingly at this odd visitor who looked like a boy with an eager girl’s face, and whom she had thought at first she should find detestable. But Miss Carteret was not in the least like other masculine women she had met, and when she forgot to be hard and crisp her voice had deep warm notes that were as attractive an anomaly as those long black eyelashes under that awful sailor hat.
“Yes?” asked Gita, who was now neither the polite Miss Carteret nor the aggressive lad but merely one girl interested in another. “Do tell me what is the object.”
Elsie Brewster smiled as warmly in response and succumbed to the revulsion of feeling. “You see—I lead a double life.”
“What!” Gita’s eyes sparkled. There was no mystery whatever about Polly and her group. “What on earth do you mean? You’re not secretly married again——Oh! No! That would be too commonplace.”
“I should think so. No—but this is quite a secret—my ambition is to be a writer—a novelist, if possible. I’ve had a few things accepted by the magazines: two or three by the best, others just anywhere my agent could place them. Of course it will be a long time before I can make a real income out of writing and give up my job—my mother’s income hardly covers the rent of this house and her subscriptions to charities, and club dues—what I make supports us very comfortably. Reputation—the kind that is remunerative, at least—takes time; but I know I shall succeed in the end!”
“You look as if you would.” Gita glowed with enthusiasm. “I’m frightfully interested. I do wish I had a gift. But I should think that after a hard day’s work you’d be too tired to write.”
“Sometimes I am, but as a rule I manage to put in three or four hours at night.”
“I think you are wonderful! Where do you write your stories?” She glanced around the stiff inhospitable room, furnished in the reps of the seventies. “In your bedroom?”
“Oh, no, I have a real study. Should you like to see it?”
“Shouldn’t I! Lead me to it.”
She followed Mrs. Brewster down the long hall and into a small room fitted up with a large flat desk to which a typewriter was firmly attached, a swivel chair, revolving bookcases, stands for dictionary and atlas, and a filing cabinet.
“Businesslike, isn’t it?” asked the young author. “I’m afraid system has become a part of my nature, and am always wondering if it will cramp my imagination.”
“Why should it? I’m horribly disorderly myself and can’t do a thing. . . . Is—is this a story?”
She was standing by the desk and she passed her hand with a lingering touch over a pile of manuscript, much as she had fingered her grandmother’s jewels.
“Yes. I finished it last night, and it will start off tomorrow on what may be a long and adventurous journey. But if it were rejected by every editor in the country nothing could take away my pleasure in writing it!” she exclaimed with sudden passion.
“I’ll bet it couldn’t.” Gita’s eyes roved over the little room; it seemed to her the most personal room she had ever entered. “Do you write all your stories here?” she asked.
“Yes. I don’t believe I could write anywhere else. If I used the word ‘atmosphere’ I suppose you would think I was talking cant.”
“No, I shouldn’t.” But her heart sank. And then she sighed. The manor would have to wait. She would not turn Elsie out of this room if Mr. Donald talked his head off, although it would have given her acute pleasure to annoy that disagreeable old woman. “I—I really came today to give a gentle hint to Mrs. Pelham that I intended to sell the house when the lease expired, but you may tell her I’ve changed my mind. You see, it tickles my vanity to think that great books may be written in a house belonging to me.”
“Oh!” Elsie Brewster had turned white. “You——Oh, you wouldn’t! It’s an ugly old shell but I love it, and I couldn’t write anywhere else. I’d feel as if my roots had been torn up.”
“Needn’t give it another thought,” said Gita briskly. “Cut it out. Don’t you want to come over and see my old tomb?”
“I should like it very much. I have always longed to see the inside of that old manor. To tell you the truth I once made it the scene of a story, although I had to make up the inside.”
“I am sure it was an improvement on the original. It couldn’t be worse. Do get your hat and come along. I told my old butler not to have luncheon until half-past one. Do you mind walking?”
“I’d love a walk. Just a moment.”