ELSIE had never been able to refurnish her old house, but she could have pink lights in the dining-room, and a bowl of pink roses on the table to draw attention from the worn linen and serviceable plates. Colored servants had long since relieved Mrs. Pelham of the “fine china” and Bohemian glass of palmier days. The simple platters and vegetable-dishes were of indestructible silver and she polished them herself.
Gita, whose table was overloaded with massive silver, fit only for a banquet hall, and who had dropped one of the forks on a priceless dish, the fragments removed by a muttering Topper, felt a sharp pang of homesickness: she was reminded of her mother’s pathetic attempts to give beauty to the homeliest surroundings, if the result were but a bowl of wild flowers or a worn but embroidered kimono thrown over the bald sofa of a pension.
There was a third at the table, for Geoffrey Pelham had met a friend on the Boardwalk and brought him home. Neither of the men wore evening clothes, but Mrs. Pelham, whose austere face shone with a light that seemed to Gita nothing less than miraculous, wore her best black satin (by no means the soft and clinging fabric of fashion), bordered at the neck and wrists with Irish lace. Elsie’s gown of “Caribbean blue” deepened the hue of her eyes, and the revealed pedestal of her neck gave her head and throat a more girlish beauty. She looked barely twenty and her cheeks were very pink, her eyes very bright. Gita, acutely conscious of her own bare neck and arms, with a rosy glow on their ivory surfaces, tried to concentrate her mind on the excellent food, and answered in monosyllables the occasional remarks addressed to her. It was the first dinner she had attended for over three years, and in San Francisco she had persisted, despite Millicent’s tears, in wearing uncomely little dark frocks with elbow-sleeves and a neck curve that fitted the base of her throat.
The conversational ball rolled between Elsie Brewster and Eustace Bylant. Mrs. Pelham merely beamed on her son, who devoted himself to his dinner and rarely volunteered a remark. Gita, who was appreciative of good looks, however grudgingly she might admit their waste, and whose eyelashes were an effective screen for subtle observation, remarked that Geoffrey Pelham had the hard outlines of his mother redeemed by a keen intellectual life of their own, and a high head with an abundance of fair hair, properly cut at the back but indifferently brushed. His eyes, like Elsie’s, were gray-blue but darker, widely and deeply set; and he showed his battle with fortune, his ambition, and his devotion to his chosen science in a certain set grimness of mouth and nostril. His tall figure had the look of recent affinity with a uniform, an expression even doctors brought back from the war. But although Gita inferred he might be found attractive by women if sufficiently responsive, she dismissed this gift as negligible and concentrated her admiration for a moment on his brow. Like his sister’s it was high and full and had the same expression of intellectual nobility. Probably no lie, as she’d tested out Elsie. . . . Below the eyebrows the face was that of a man whose natural expression might have been nervous, eager, sensitive, but trained to constant and severe repression. A man of a single purpose, no doubt of that. Well, surgery could have him.
She turned her eyelashes on Mr. Bylant, who was still talking to Elsie.
Eustace Bylant was a novelist of considerable distinction, thirty-eight in years, and admittedly the bridge across the chasm that divided the “younger generation,” which had brought a new if somewhat strident note into American fiction, and the stable group that went its serene way based firmly on the traditions of England. His own base was as firm as England’s Gibraltar, but his undiminished curiosity, the activity of his mind, and his genuine interest in current life and thought, enabled him without effort to be as modern as the youngsters. Sometimes more so, for the youngsters were often ingenuously mediæval.
And his religion was art, words his flexible tools; he could create a living picture of dire offensiveness without an offensive word. An inexorable realist, he scorned to introduce beauty where beauty was not, but when forced by the exigencies of the story to create an unclean interior inhabited by persons who declined to wash, he conveyed his meaning so craftily that the reader was uncomfortably aware of an assortment of smells and raucous sounds and ugly images, which he remembered long after dismissing the grease and grime and stenches of less accomplished recorders of life at its worst.
Bylant had never made an effort to repress the mobile play of his features and looked less than his thirty-eight years, in spite of the fact that he was a bright light at sophisticate parties when they did not interfere with his work. His long nose was sharp and investigating, his mouth would have been sensuous but for an almost rigid firmness of the lower lip, and his lively gray eyes sparkled with tolerance and good-humor. He wore an infinitesimal mustache and a short pointed beard.
He was always meticulously groomed and radiated good health; his large firm hands were as carefully tended as a fastidious woman’s, although he was as masculine as Geoffrey Pelham and something of an athlete. Gita, who, in her worst days, had polished her nails, compared the hands of the two men. Dr. Pelham’s were long and sensitive and flexible, but no doubt he thought it sufficient to keep them clean and disinfected and wasted no time on a buffer.
Gita had arrived early by request, spent half an hour in Elsie’s bedroom, and listened none too patiently to a brief biography of the distinguished guest. “I’ve not seen so very much of him, considering he’s a great friend of my brother,” Elsie had rattled on, “but he always calls when he comes to Atlantic City; sometimes drops in on me at the office. And I’ve met him at a few parties in New York. He’s known from the first that I am the occasional Elizabeth Pelham of the magazines. Shortly after my début as ‘E. B.’ he introduced me to Suzan Forbes, who took me firmly by the hand and steered me into the haven of the Lucy Stone League, where cognominal transitions from father to husband are sternly tabu. Do I look all right?”
Gita had assured her she looked lovely, and they had gone downstairs arm in arm.
Aloof and apparently absorbed in her “Maryland chicken,” she wondered apprehensively if Bylant were in love with Elsie and decided he was not. His eyes were merely bright with interest as they discussed current tendencies and sophisticate personalities. He had darted a curious glance at herself once or twice in the parlor, and there had been a sudden glow in his eyes when they were introduced that made her stiffen her spine—that unfailing thermometer of her moods—but he had favored her with his notice no further.
At this point it occurred to her that she was acting like a “cub.” In San Francisco, where she had been invited to dinners by girls who both liked and pitied her, eccentricities were condoned and they had expected no help at her hands. Tonight she was not only the guest of honor but the only other girl present, and—she made a wild dive among the shades of her ancestors—she was Miss Carteret of Carteret Manor. She may have accepted the rôle under protest but accepted it she had, and to behave like a sulky outlaw and cast a shade over the feast would no longer be tolerated. Elsie loved her and if she were disappointed would give no sign, but Gita imagined with a shudder the cold disapproval of Mrs. Pleyden if she sat like a sphinx at her table with a picked man on either side to entertain. She might as well begin now.
She turned to Dr. Pelham and asked a tentative question, imbecile, she admitted, but she hardly could be expected to scintillate.
“Are you glad to be home, to have seen the last of the West?”
Pelham smiled slightly. “Oh, I rather liked Butte.”
“Mining town, isn’t it?”
“Rather.” He was in no mood for small talk, for his mind was full of his suddenly dazzling future, but he recognized that he was host, and if this hitherto agreeably silent guest were suddenly inspired to conversation, it was his duty to humor her. “A very noisy town. There are three shifts, you know, and groups of miners on the street corners at all hours of the day and night. The city never seems to sleep.”
“Rather trying for those who want to sleep, I should think.”
“Decidedly. But I was generally too tired at night to be kept awake even by the eternally bouncing trucks.”
Gita turned to him squarely. She felt no repulsion toward individual men as long as they were impersonal, and Butte roused her curiosity. At the same moment Dr. Pelham was enabled to observe that she had the largest and fiercest black eyes he had ever seen and quite the most remarkable eyelashes. “Please tell me something about Butte,” she said eagerly. “I have lived in a good many places but never in a mining town. I always thought I’d like to go to Johannesburg, but I never heard of Butte until today.”
“The two cities are said to be much alike.” And he launched into a description of the stark hill, once known as Perch of the Devil, for unarguable reasons, where the inhabitants walked over copper-mines a mile in depth and sometimes found outcroppings in their back yards. He was grateful to her for introducing a subject which cost him no effort, and he had been able to see the beauty as well as the smiting ugliness of that ore-scorched region. In winter when the high valley was covered with snow it had a cold loveliness of its own, particularly under the blue dawn of Montana.
That phrase had occurred to him as he walked home before sunrise one morning after a call to The Flat to patch up a woman so severely injured in an amorous dispute that it was impossible to move her. His sentences were brief and unadorned but it seemed to Gita that she had a complete vision of that unique “camp” in the Rocky Mountains with its sinister and unsleeping life underground and its scarred and feverish surface.
“I’ll go there some day,” she said, and not merely to be polite. “It would be a new sensation to telephone to New York in a comfortable office a mile underground.” Bylant and Elsie had fallen silent and were listening, the latter with intense approval: Geoffrey was exerting himself to entertain a woman, and Gita was hanging on his words. Then she frowned. That would be too obvious. One’s darling brother and beloved friend. Old stuff. Wouldn’t do, anyhow. What Geoff needed was a good old-fashioned wife to see that he got proper food at regular hours, and soothing and sufficiently intelligent conversation when at home. Whatever else Gita might become she never would be soothing and adaptable. Eustace Bylant might manage her. But the distinguished author had not manifested the slightest interest in this transitional friend of hers.
Then she became aware that while leaning toward Geoffrey, Bylant was covertly watching Gita Carteret. There was a curious expression in his eyes . . . very curious. Not admiration; that would have been natural enough. Not even speculation—more natural still. Not dubiety. Gita, now that she had abandoned a hopeless pose, more especially when she wore soft and luminous satin and a rope of shimmering pearls, did not look in the least like a boy. She was still more handsome than beautiful, perhaps, for there was no trace of softness in her spirited features, and had it not been for her eyelashes she would have resembled too closely the eagle-like countenance of Mrs. Carteret. . . . His eyes had not even their “psychological look,” as when he was visibly admiring and inwardly impaling some elated woman. . . . No, it was—it was—Elsie almost lost her breath as the expression in Bylant’s eyes deepened to an inner certainty. Expectancy? Hope? She had watched it dawn out of a stare of keen appraisement, as if his critical faculty were determined to make no mistake.
Then she saw him shrug his shoulders, shift his gaze, and give his full attention to Geoffrey. A few moments later, to his friend’s manifest relief, he took over the burden of conversation and talked of old and abandoned mining towns he had seen in Nevada; and told stories both orthodox and unusual, that clung to them. One made even Gita laugh heartily; the tale of a man who had taken refuge in the office of his manager high up and in the side of a mountain still full of silver, which could be approached only by a narrow and precarious flight of steps—from a lady of easy virtue, who, now that he owned much of the mountain, was determined to marry him. While he was smoking a congratulatory pipe his manager, passing the entrance to the eyrie, cried out suddenly: “My God, Jim, she’s coming up the ladder with a pistol in one hand and a priest behind her!” And, corralled and at bay, the millionaire had married the lady, dowered her extravagantly, and left her to her own devices. A few years later she had attained a high and haughty position in European Society.
This time Bylant included Gita in the conversation as he did Mrs. Pelham; with equal and charming politeness, and nothing more. She went home with the sense of having had an agreeable and instructive evening, and of enjoying it more than she deserved. Far more important, she had pleased Elsie and was not compelled to anathematize herself as a boor. Topper had been ordered to call for her in a taxi, lest Elsie should insist upon her brother’s escort. Dr. Pelham, much relieved, pronounced her a sensible young woman, and looked astonished when his sister went off into a paroxysm of laughter.