VI
"I wish now I"d been different," Mrs. Condon said, standing in the door.
Her dress was not yet on, but her underthings were fully as elaborate and shimmering as any gown could hope to be. "And above everything else, I am sorry for the kind of mother you"ve had." This was so unexpected, the other"s voice was so unhappy, that Linda was startled. She hurried across the room and laid a slim palm on her mother"s full bare arm.
"Don"t say that," Linda begged, distressed; "you"ve been the best in the world."
"You know nothing about it," the elder returned, momentarily seated, her hands clasped on her full silken lap. "But perhaps it"s not too late.
You ought to go to a good school, where you"d learn everything, but princ.i.p.ally what a bad thoughtless mama you have."
"I shouldn"t stay a second in a place where they said that," Linda declared. A new apprehension touched her. "You"re not really thinking of sending me away!" she cried. "Why, you simply could not get along. You know you couldn"t! The maids never do up your dresses right; and you"d be so lonely in the mornings you would nearly die."
"That"s true," Mrs. Condon admitted wearily. "I would expire; but I was thinking of you--you"re only beginning life; and the start you"ll get with me is all wrong. Or, anyway, most people think so."
"They are only jealous."
"Will you go into the closet, darling, and pour out a teeny little sip from my flask; mama feels a thousand years old this evening."
Returning with the silver cup of the flask half full of pale pungent brandy Linda could scarcely keep the tears from spilling over her cheeks. She had never before felt so sad. Her mother hastily drank, the stinging odor was transferred to her lips; and there was a palpable recovery of her customary spirit.
"I don"t know what gets over me," she a.s.serted. "I"m certain, from what I"ve heard of them, that you wouldn"t be a bit better off in one of those fashionable schools for girls. Woman, young and older, were never meant to be a lot together in one place. It"s unnatural. They don"t like each other, ever, and it"s all hypocritical and nasty. You will get more from life, yes, and me. I"m honest, too honest for my own good, if the truth was known."
She rose and unconsciously strayed to the mirror over the mantel where she examined her countenance in absorbed detail.
"My skin is getting soft like putty," she remarked aloud to herself.
"The thing is, I"ve had my time and don"t want to pay for it. Blondes go quicker than dark women; you ought to last a long while, Linda." Mrs.
Condon had turned, and her tone was again almost complaining, almost ill-natured. Linda considered this information with a troubled face. It was quite clear that it made her mother cross. "I"ve seen men stop and look at you right now, too, and you nothing more than a slip fourteen years old. Of course, when I was fifteen I had a proposal; but I was very forward; and somehow you"re different--so dam" serious."
She couldn"t help it, Linda thought, if she was serious; she really had a great deal to think about, their income among other things. If she didn"t watch it, pay the bills every three months when it arrived, her mother would never have a dollar in the gold mesh bag. Then, lately, the dresses the elder threatened to buy were often impossible; Linda learned this from the comments she heard after the wearing of evening affairs sent home against her earnest protests. They were, other women more discreetly gowned had agreed, ridiculous.
Linda calmly realized that in this her judgment was superior to her mother"s. In other ways, too, she felt she was really the elder; and her dismay at the possibility of going away to school had been mostly made up of the realization of how much her mother"s well-being was dependent on her.
Mrs. Condon, finishing her dressing in the bedroom, at times called out various injunctions, general or immediate. "Tell them to have a taxi at the door for seven sharp. Have you talked to that little girl in the black velvet?" Linda hadn"t and made a mental note to avoid her more pointedly in the future. "Get out mother"s carriage boots from the hall closet; no, the others--you know I don"t wear the black with coral stockings. They come off and the fur sticks to my legs. It will be very gay to-night; I hope to heaven Ross doesn"t take too much again." Linda well remembered that the last time Ross had taken too much her mother"s Directoire wrap had been completely torn in half. "There, it is all nonsense about my fading; I look as well as I ever did."
Mrs. Condon stood before her daughter like a large flame-pink tulle flower. Her bright gold hair was constrained by black gauze knotted behind, her bare shoulders were like powdered rosy marble and the floating skirts gathered in a hand showed marvelously small satin-tied carriage boots. Indeed Linda"s exclamation of delight was entirely frank. She had never seen her mother more radiant. The cunningly applied rouge, the enhanced brilliancy of her long-lashed eyes, had perfectly the illusion of unspent beauty.
"Do stay down-stairs after dinner and play," the elder begged. "And if you want to go to the theatre, ask Mr. Bendix, at the desk, to send you with that chauffeur we have had so much. I positively forbid your leaving the hotel else. It"s a comfort after all, that you are serious.
Kiss mama--"
However, she descended with her mother in the elevator; there was a more public caress; and the captain in the Chinese dining-room placed Linda at a small table against the wall. There she had clams--she adored iced clams--creamed shrimps and oysters with potatoes _bordure_, alligator-pear salad and a beautiful charlotte cream with black walnuts.
After this she sedately instructed the captain what to sign on the back of the dinner check--Linda Condon, room five hundred and seven--placed thirty-five cents beside the finger-bowl for the waiter, and made her way out to the news stand and the talkative girl who had it in charge.
Exhausting the possibilities of gossip, and deciding not to go out to the theatre--in spite of the news girl"s exciting description of a play called "The New Sin"--she was walking irresolutely through the high gilded and marble a.s.semblage s.p.a.ce when, unfortunately, she was captured by Mr. Moses Feldt.
VII
He led her to a high-backed lounge against the wall, where, seated on its extreme edge, he gazed silently at her with an expression of sentimental concern. Mr. Moses Feldt was a short round man, bald but for a fluffy rim of pale hair, and with the palest imaginable eyes in a countenance perpetually flushed by the physical necessity of accommodating his rotundity to awkward edges and conditions. As usual he was dressed with the nicest care--a band of white linen laid in the opening of his waistcoat, his scarf ornamented by a pear-shaped pearl on a diamond finished stem; his cloth-topped varnished black shoes glistened, while his short fat fingers clasped a prodigious unlighted cigar. At last, in a tone exactly suited to his gaze, he exclaimed:
"So that naughty mama has gone out again and deserted Moses and her little Linda!" In what way her mother had deserted Mr. Feldt she failed to understand. Of course he wanted to marry them--the comprehensive phrase was his own--but that didn"t include him in whatever they did.
Princ.i.p.ally it made a joke for their private entertainment. Mrs. Condon would mimic his eager manner, "Stella, let me take you both home where you"ll have the best in the land," And, "Ladies like you ought to have a loving protection." Linda would laugh in her cool bell-like manner, and her mother add a satirical comment on the chance any Moses Feldt had of marrying her.
Linda at once found him ridiculous and a being who forced a slighting warmth of liking. His appearance was preposterous, the ready emotion often too foolish for words; but underneath there was a--a goodness, a mysterious quality that stirred her heart to recognition. Certain rare things in life and experience affected her like that memory of an old happiness. She could never say what they might be, they came at the oddest times and by the most extraordinary means; but at their occurrence she would thrill for a moment as if in response to a sound of music.
It was, for example, absurd that Mr. Moses Feldt, who was a Jew, should make her feel like that, but he did. And all the while that she was disagreeable to him, or mocking him behind his back, she was as uncomfortable and "horrid" as possible. While this fact, of course, only served to make her horrider still. At present she adopted the manner of a patience that nothing could quite exhaust; she was polite and formal, relentlessly correct in position.
Mr. Moses Feldt, the cigar in his grasp, pressed a hand to the probable region of his heart. "You don"t know how I think of you," he protested, tears in his eyes; "just the idea of you exposed to anything at all in hotels keeps me awake nights. Now it"s a drunk, or a fresh feller on the elevator, or--"
"It"s nice of you," Linda said, "but you needn"t worry. No one would dare to bother us. No one ever has."
"You wouldn"t know it if they did," he replied despondently, "at your age. And then your mother is so trustful and pleasant. Take those parties where she is so much--roof frolics and cocoanut groves and submarine cafes; they don"t come to any good. Rowdy." Linda studied him coldly; if he criticized them further she would leave. He mopped a shining brow with a large colorful silk handkerchief. "It throws me into a sweat," he admitted.
"Really, Mr. Feldt, you mustn"t bother," she told him in one of her few impulses of friendliness. "You see, we are very experienced." He nodded without visible happiness at this truth. "I"m a jacka.s.s!" he cried.
"Judith tells me that all the time. If you could only see my daughters,"
he continued with a new vigor; "such lovely girls as they are. One dark like you and the other fair as a daisy. Judith and Pansy. And my home that darling mama made before she died." The handkerchief was again in evidence.
"Women and girls are funny. I can"t get you there and not for nothing will Judith make a step. It may be pride but it seems to me such nonsense. I guess I"m old-fashioned and love"s old-fashioned. Homes have gone out of style with the rest. It"s all these restaurants and roofs now, yes, and studios. I tell the girls to stay away from them and from artists and so on. I don"t encourage them at the apartment--a big lump of a feller with platinum bracelets on his wrists. What kind of a man would that be! I"d like to know who"d buy goods from him.
"Sometimes, I"m sorry I got a lot of money, but it made mama happy. When she laid there at the last sick and couldn"t live, I said, "Oh, if you only won"t leave me I"ll give you gold to eat."" He was so moved, his face so red, that Linda grew acutely embarra.s.sed. People were looking at them. She rose stiffly but, in spite of her effort to escape him, he caught both her hands in his:
"You say I"m an old idiot like Judith," he begged. This Linda declined to do. And, "Ask your mother if you won"t come to dinner with the girls and me, cozy and at home--just once."
"I"m afraid it will do no good," she admitted; "but I"ll try." She realized that he was about to kiss her and moved quickly back. "I am almost afraid of you," he told her; "you"re so distant and elegant.
Judith and Pansy would get on with you first rate. I"ll telephone tomorrow, in the afternoon. If the last flowers I sent you came I never heard of it."
She thanked him appropriately for the roses and stood, erect and impersonal, as a man in the hotel livery helped him into a coat. Mr.
Moses Feldt waved the still unlighted cigar at her and disappeared through the rotating door to the street.
She gave a half-affected sigh of relief. Couldn"t he see that her mother would never marry him. At the same time the strange thrill touched her; the sense of his absurdity vanished and she no longer remembered him perched like a painted rubber ball on the edge of the lounge.
In the somber red plush and varnished wood of the reception-room of their suite he seemed again charming. Perhaps it was because he, too, adored her mother. That wasn"t the reason. The familiar rare joy lingered. It seemed now as though she were to capture and understand it ... there was the vibration of music; and then, as always, she felt at once sad and brave. But, in spite of her old effort to the contrary, the feeling died away. Some day it would be clear to her; in the meanwhile Mr. Moses Feldt became once more only ridiculous.
VIII
In the morning she was dressed and had returned from breakfast before her mother stirred. The latter moved sharply, brought an arm up over her head, and swore. It was a long while before she got up or spoke again, and Linda never remembered her in a worse temper. When, finally, she came into the room where the breakfast-tray was laid, Linda was inexpressibly shocked--all that her mother had dreaded about her appearance had come disastrously true. Her face was hung with shadows like smudges of dirt and her eyes were netted with lines.
Examining the dishes with distaste she told Linda that positively she could slap her for letting them bring up orange-juice. "How often must I explain to you that it freezes my fingers." Linda replied that she had repeated this in the breakfast-room and perhaps they had the wrong order. Neither her mother nor she said anything more until Mrs. Condon had finished her coffee and started a second cigarette. Then Linda related something of Mr. Moses Feldt"s call on the evening before. "He cried right into his handkerchief," she said, "until I thought I should sink."
Mrs. Condon eyed her daughter speculatively. "Now if you were only four years older," she declared, "it would be a good thing. He was simply born to be a husband." Horror filled Linda at the other"s implication.
"Yes," the elder insisted; "you couldn"t do better; except, perhaps, for those girls of his. But then you"d have no trouble making them miserable. It"s time to talk to you seriously about marriage." The smoke from the cigarette eddied in a gray veil across her unrefreshed face.
"You"re old for your age, Linda; your life has made you that; and, like I said last night, it is rather better than not. Well, for you marriage, and soon as possible, is the proper thing. Mind, I have never said a word against it; only what suits one doesn"t suit another. Where it wouldn"t be anything more than an old ladies" home to me you need it early and plenty. You are too intense. That doesn"t go in the world. Men don"t like it. They want their pleasure and comfort without strings tied to them; the intensity has to be theirs.