THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE (15 page)

She was clever. She did not press her point. She led him to a great, deep velvet chair beside the table with the mirrored yellow roses.

“You’re perfectly stunning there, you know,” she declared, looking at him as though he were a picture she had just purchased, and then she suddenly stooped and kissed him again, this time on his forehead just where the crisp hair fell over the whiteness of the flesh.

He took that caress also as though it had been buckshot rattling off from his coat of armor, as if it were not worth noticing. But something inside clicked. He knew he did not like that either. Not now anyway. Not so soon. Not until he had asked for it.

Was he perhaps old-fashioned? Did women give themselves freely now at their will before they knew that they were desired?

But Alice sensed his mood. She sat down quietly, opposite him, sat so her lovely profile was turned toward him, just the sweet curve of her back with the folds of satin, so like her soft skin, showing gently against the velvet draperies of a great arched window of leaded glass. Sat with a sudden sweetness upon her and a quiver of her delicate chin while she told in hushed sentences, with downcast eyes, of the sorrows that had been hers since last he saw her. Told it as one confides only to the dearest and nearest, a hint here, a frank word there, a dignified reserve at a climax where far more is implied than is told. A little, well-trained tear or two stole out and down her soft cheek like dew on a rose petal and trembled there without doing much damage to her makeup.

Sterling sat and watched her, his heart warming to her. Ah! This was the real Alice! This was the Alice that he had always dreamed his mother would discover in his girl someday! And this dear, sorrowing girl had kissed him twice when he came in! Why had he taken it so coolly? His senses stirred as he watched her now in her sweet gentleness. If she were to come and kiss him now, he would receive her with open arms. He would like to go and sit over there beside her, put his arm around her, draw her head down on his shoulder, and tell her how his heart ached for her. Brutes, those men had been who had married her and made her suffer so. Brutes indeed, and she was well rid of them! Little, delicate, lovely Alice Blair! To think that men would dare to marry her and put her through so much!

Dinner was announced while they were talking, and the subdued mood seemed to last. She seated him opposite her with a quaint dignity and a gentle deference that put him within an atmosphere of intimacy. More and more as the meal went on and he looked into her eyes as she raised them meaningfully to his, he was thrilled with the fact that he was sitting here with Alice, dining with her, just as if they belonged together, as if they had always belonged together.

Once when the waitress had been sent from the room, she passed him the dish of bonbons across the table, and their fingers touched and lingered. Ah! Had he perhaps come home, really home to something real at last?

He tried to put out of his mind that she was a twice-divorced woman, and that it was against all his traditions to marry a woman under those conditions. There were condoning circumstances. There would be some way out for his conscience. His heart grew tender as he watched her.

But the quiet, intimate dinner was over at last, and almost at once a caller was announced. An older man with baggy pouches under his eyes. He who answered to the name of “Mortie” greeted her with outstretched hands and patted her cheek, called her “Blair, dear,” and dared to kiss her fingers. Greg distrusted him from the moment he saw him, hated him, registered a vow to stick around and protect Alice from his attentions.

Then others began to drop in, blasé men who eyed Greg indifferently, noisy girls in abnormal outfits, an artist or two, and a musician who had already been drinking.

Alice introduced them in a group as “the gang” and called Greg “an old sweetheart of mine.” They stared at him briefly, and all began clamoring for drinks.

Greg settled down sternly in a corner to watch this new development, took up a book of modern prints, and looked them over without seeing them. When he looked up again, Alice, his delicate, lovely Alice, was sitting beside that obnoxious Mortie on the couch, lighting a cigarette from his, then puffing away and exhaling from her delicate nostrils. He could see the vivid red of her lips, the flashing of her white teeth. Everybody was drinking, and Alice was drinking, too. The light trill of her laughter rose foolishly above the chatter. She seemed to have forgotten him. She wasn’t the same woman who had sat through that lovely, intimate dinner with him. His soul turned sick within him. What was the matter with everything? Was the matter perhaps with him? Had he stayed too long in the wilderness? He was the only one in the room who was not drinking. Alice noticed him at last and called across the room to him.

“Greg dolling, aren’t you having anything to drink? Oh, I forgot, you used to have principles, didn’t you? But they weren’t your own, you know, they were just your mother’s handed down. Where’ve you been in this age of the world that you haven’t got over them before this? You’ll have to, you know, now that you’re back in the world! Better begin tonight!”

Greg answered nothing, and presently discovering that for a person who had been used to setting his bedtime by star time, it was growing late, he arose and looked around him.

No one seemed to be paying the lightest attention to him. Why should he not go? Someone had turned on the Victrola, and they were beginning to dance. They were all as alien to him as if he had been a great rock out on his own desert.

But Alice perhaps divined his thought and, waving her hand, called, “Come, folks, we’re going out to find a nice place to spend the evening!” and she floated over to Greg and nestled up beside him.

“You’re going to take me!” she confided to him with almost the sweet and gracious air she had worn at dinner, conferring her greatest favor upon him.

Something stirred within Greg again, the old attraction. He knew he didn’t belong to this crowd. Yet he did not seem able to resist that look in Alice’s eyes. After all, why blame her so? She had lived in Paris. She had lived with men who did these things. Perhaps she was not so much to blame after all. Surely a face so lovely, so tragic in some of its moods, must have great good in it. He hesitated.

And while he hesitated, the man named Mortie came over to her with the white fur wrap her maid had brought.

“Come on then, Blair, dear!” he said possessively, holding out her wrap and folding it intimately around her shoulders.

Alice let him put the wrap around her, but she lifted her azure eyes to Greg’s face.

“You may put on my wrap, Mortie precious,” she said languidly, “but I’m going with my old sweetheart, Gregory Sterling!” and she slipped a little jeweled hand inside Greg’s arm. “Come on, folks,” she called. “We’re going out to find a nightclub.”

M
argaret had sat in her obscure corner of the inner waiting room embattled by her thoughts for perhaps an hour before any sort of order came out of the chaos.

It was as if that awful head nurse had followed her here and was saying over and over all that she had said to her a little while before. All the contumely and scorn were heaped upon her head, the sharp words of rebuke went deep into her soul again, and she just sat there and took it like one caught under fire.

To think that she had allowed herself to be put into such a situation! Occupying one of the best private rooms at the expense of a stranger who had told her lies to keep her satisfied! And it would appear from what the head nurse had said that he hadn’t even paid the expense, only pretended he was going to so that the nurses and the doctor would allow him to put her there! How terrible! How she had been deceived in that man! He had seemed so genuine, just as if God had sent him to her in her distress! Never again would she trust any human being whom she did not know. Her judgment was all at fault. What could possibly have been his object? Did he for some reason want to get her under his power? She shuddered at the thought.

Well, it had not been her fault in the first place. She was unconscious when he picked her up. Her only crime had been in trusting their word when they told her the room was a memorial gift for just such strangers as herself.

That nice, kind nurse, too! She must have been in on the conspiracy, if it was a conspiracy. Or perhaps the young man had deceived her also. She had certainly been on his side.

But presently the shame and humiliation of having been ordered out of a hospital on the ground of no-respectability cleared away like smoke from a battleground after the shooting is over, and she began to see more clearly.

It wasn’t her fault anyway. Sometime if she succeeded in business she might go back and pay every cent she owed that hospital. Pretty soon when she got on her feet again and was earning money enough to buy some decent stationery, she would write that head nurse a note and tell her so, or perhaps it would be better to write to the hospital and explain the whole thing. That was it—she could write and explain it all, and they would understand that she was a respectable girl and had not been to blame.

The idea seemed to ease the pain and humiliation of the whole affair and to give her back her ordinary common sense.

Now she must put it utterly out of her mind. She obviously couldn’t do anything about it just now. Her first need was to get a job and provide against the immediate future.

Nobody, of course, would pay her right away, and she would have to get along somehow till the end of the week, but how was she going to work unless she could eat? Could she get her new employer, provided there was such a person in existence, to pay her a little at the end of the day, just to tide her over a few days? She could live on very little. Some milk and crackers, a bowl of soup now and then, or an orange or banana. She had had large experience in finding out cheap meals that would last. As for a place to stay, she could spend one night at least here in this station. If she came in late in the evening, no one would notice her. She could move in the middle of the night when she might be supposed to be going to a train, from the big outer room to this one. She could even perhaps get a chance to lie down on that big couch over in the opposite corner for an hour or two, at least until the attendant asked her to move on. Yes, she could very well get comfortably through a night or two in this station. And there was another station in the other part of town. Perhaps she could change to that when it became noticeable that she was hanging around here.

Of course, when she got a real job, she would have to hunt a room, but it would have to be a very small, cheap one, and she resolved that she would never go back to Rodman Street to stay again with that old virago. She wouldn’t even go back for her things until she had the money to pay what she owed. For, of course, if that young man had been a liar, all that story about paying her room rent for her had been a lie also. What a fool she had been not to see that. As if anybody would be so silly as to pay back rent for an utter stranger who had no claim upon him! She certainly had been gullible. And how she had prided herself upon her ability to take care of herself in a big city! Well, she would be cautious enough hereafter! And she wouldn’t go near Rodman Street for sometime yet, not till she felt safe. The young man knew that had been her home. If he wanted to annoy her further, he might go there, and she might have difficulty in reading him. She could get along somehow without her things. She reflected that there were pitifully few of them left anyway. Most of the wardrobe with which she had come to the city was now represented by a few pawn tickets hidden away in a little box in her suitcase, and it would be a long time before she could hope to redeem them. But she would get alone. She must. She could not fail! God wouldn’t let that happen with those two dear old people up in Vermont utterly dependent upon her!

Then Necessity arose familiarly and stung her into action. She must not sit here another minute wasting precious time in useless thought. The day was slipping fast away, and she must get a job.

So she clutched her thin pocketbook in her hands and started up, trying not to realize how weak she felt, how her knees shook under her and her feet felt like lead when she walked. She simply must not give way to this feeling. She must get a job and go to work at once, and how could one work feeling like an invalid?

“Oh God, help me!” she breathed. Then she took a deep breath, tried to set a pleasant assured expression upon her face, and went forward.

She didn’t notice which way she was going. All ways were alike, so they did not lead in the direction of the hospital from which she had fled. She tried to remember how fortunate it was that she had finished her breakfast, or at least nearly finished it, before that terrible nurse had flung open the door and begun to rail at her. There had been one lovely last bite of toast and egg and one more swallow of coffee, she remembered, but she must not think of that or she would begin to get hungry before night, and night was the first time she dared hope to eat again. Even then it might be impossible.

So she shut her lips firmly, pleasantly, and started out.

She found herself headed into a street that she did not know, a street of small, dirty shops; printers; stencilers; grimy wholesale places where they kept electric fixtures in little dark discouraged rooms, and where their windows seemed never to have been washed. That was an idea: how would it be to go into some of those places and ask them if they didn’t want their windows washed? She could wash windows beautifully. Yet she couldn’t wash windows in the only decent clothes she had. One day would put them beyond hunting for a more lucrative job. Besides, she was too shaky for such strenuous work. She probably couldn’t last out a day at it. That would be foolishness, unless there really was nothing else.

Then just across the street she saw a window where a man was leaning over putting a large white lettered card close to the glass. Even at that distance, she could dimly make out the words G
irl
W
anted
, and with wondering relief, she turned and sped across the street. What marvelous luck to be the first to see it. No, not luck. God was surely being good to her! Yet perhaps it was some kind of skilled work needed that she could not do.