What Will People Say? A Novel 4 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 4Chapter 4
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Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 4
Chapter 4
HughesEnglish
Nothing can be lonelier than a room in even a best hotel when one is lonesome and when one's window looks out upon crowds. Forbes had pitched his tent at the Knickerbocker, and his view was of Longacre Square.
The Times Building stood aloft, a huddled giraffe of a building. A fierce wind spiraled round it and played havoc with dignity. It was an ill-mannered bumpkin wind from out of town with a rural sense of humor. Women pressed forward into the gale, bending double and struggling with their tormented hats and writhing skirts. Some of the men seemed to find them an attractive spectacle till they felt their own hats caught up and kited to the level of the fourth and fifth windows.
A flock of newsboys, as brisk as sparrows, drove a hustling trade in recovering hats for men who were ashamed of bare heads as of a nakedness. The gamins darted among the street-cars and automobiles, risking their lives for dimes as sparrows for corn, and escaping death as miraculously.
At the western end of Forty-second Street stood a space of sunset like a scarlet canvas on exhibition. Then swift clouds erased it, and gusts of rain went across the town in volleys of shrapnel, clearing the streets of a mob. Everybody made for the nearest shelter.
The onset ended as quickly as it began. The stars were in the sky as suddenly as if some one had turned on an electric switch. On the pavements, black with wet and night, the reflected electric lights trickled. All the pavements had a look of patent leather.
Forbes sat in the dark room in an arm-chair and muffled his bathrobe about him, watching the electric signs working like solemn acrobats--the girl that skipped the rope, the baby that laughed and cried, the woman that danced on the wire, the skidless tire in the rain, the great sibyl face that winked and advised chewing-gum as a panacea, the kitten that tangled itself in thread, the siphons that filled the glasses--all the automatic electric voices shouting words of light.
Forbes wanted to be among the crowds again. He could not tolerate solitude. He resolved to go forth. It inspired him with pride to put on his evening clothes. While he dressed he sent his silk hat to be ironed by the hotel valet. It came back an ebon crown.
He set it on his head, tapped the top of it smartly, swaggered to the elevator, bowed to the matronly floor clerk as to a queen, went down to the main dining-room, and tried to look at least a duke. He was glad to be in full dress, for the other people were. The head waiter greeted him with respect and handed him the bill of fare with expectation.
He ordered more than he had appetite for, and tried not to blanch at the prices.
The flowers, the shaded candles, the tapestries, the china and the glass and silver, the impassioned violinist leading the sonorous orchestra, all gave him that sense of royalty from which money is most easily wooed. But the cordiality of the thing was fascinating. The whole city seemed to be attending a great reception. New York was giving a party.
And now, indeed, he was in New York again--in it, yet not of it; a poor relation at the wedding feast. He lingered at his solitary banquet like a boy sent away from the table and forced to eat by himself. His extrusion seemed to be a punishment for not being rich. But while his funds held out to burn he would pretend.
The room emptied rapidly as the hour for opera and theater arrived. But he lingered, not knowing where to go. He pretended to be in no hurry. He had, indeed, more leisure than he enjoyed. Still he sat smoking and protracting his coffee, and haughtily playing that he was not starving for companionship.
When almost the last couple was gone he realized that he faced an evening of dismal solitude. He realized also that a number of kind-thoughted gentlemen had erected large structures for the entertainment of lonely people and had engaged numbers of gifted persons to enact stories for their diversion.
He called for his account, paid it with a large bill, and ignored the residue with a ruinous lifting of the brows as he accepted a light for his exotic cigar.
He helped to put false ideas in the hat-boy's head with the price he paid for the brief storage of his hat and coat and stick. He sauntered to the news-stand with the gracious stateliness of a czarevitch incognito, and asked the Tyson agent:
"What's a good play to see?"
The man named over the reigning successes, and some of their titles fell strangely pat with Forbes' humor:
"Romance," "The Poor Little Rich Girl," "Oh, Oh, Delphine!" "Peg o' My Heart," "The Lady of the Slipper," "The Sunshine Girl."
"They're mostly about girls," Forbes smiled.
"They mostly always are," the agent grinned. "But there's others: 'Within the Law,' 'The Argyle Case,' 'The Five Frankfurters,' 'Years of Discretion.'"
"I reckon I'd better see 'Within the Law.' I've heard a good deal about that."
"I guess you have. It's been a sell-out for months."
"Can't I get in?"
"I'm afraid not. How many are you?"
"One."
"One? Let me see. Here's a pair ordered by a party that hasn't called for them. Could you use them both?"
"I could put my overcoat in one seat," Forbes groaned, at this added irony in his loneliness and penuriousness.
"I'd split the pair, but it's too late to sell the other one."
"I'll take both." Forbes sighed and waved a handsome five-dollar bill farewell.
The boy who twirled the squirrel-cage door told him that the theater was just down the street, and received a lavish fee for the information. Forbes was soon in the lobby, but the first act was almost finished. Rather than disturb the people already seated, he stood at the back, leaning over the rail. He thrilled instantly to the speech of the shop-girl sentenced to the penitentiary for a theft she was not guilty of, and warning the proprietor that she would amply revenge herself when she came back down the river. At the height of the outcry of militant innocence Forbes heard the susurrus of robes and turned to see a small group of later comers than himself.
At the head went something that he judged to be a woman, though all he saw was a towering head-dress, a heap of elaborately coiffed hair, a wreath of mist, an indescribably exquisite opera-cloak shimmering down to an under-cascade of satin.
This tower of fabrics went along as if it were carried on a pole, and Forbes could see no semblance of human shape or stride inside it. But he judged that it contained a personality, for it paused to listen to something another pile of fabrics said to it, and from both came a snicker--or was it only a frou-frou of garments? In any case, it angered the part of the audience adjacent. The group went down the side-aisle, up a few steps to the little space behind the box.
From where he stood Forbes could see the usher helping them lay off their wraps. They showed no anxiety to catch the remainder of the act, but stood gossiping while the frantic usher waited, not daring to reprimand them, yet dreading the noise of their incursion.
Forbes watched one of the clothes-horses stripped of its encumbrances.
From somewhere in the chaos two long-gloved arms came up; they were strangely shapely; they made motions like swan's necks dipping into water-lilies. A garland of fog came away, and a head on a throat appeared, a bust set upon a heap of drapery. Then the opera-cloak slipped off into the usher's hands. And now design emerged, a woman stood revealed. The head and throat were seen to be attached to a scroll of shoulders, and a figure like a column rose from the floor--strangely columnar it was, and so slender that there was merely the slightest inslope of waist, merely the slightest entasis at the hips.
In other periods only portions of the human outline have been followed by the costume. The natural lines have been broken, perverted, and caricatured by balloon sleeves, huge farthingales, or paniers like a jennet's pack-saddles, the incredible Botocudo ideal of the bustle, corsets like hour-glasses, concentric hoops about the legs, with pantalets coquetting inanely at the ankles--the almost impossible facts of fashion.
Just then the costume was hardly more of a disguise than the gold or bronze powder smeared on by those who pose as statues at the vaudevilles. Inside their outer wraps women were rather wall-papering themselves than draping their forms. It was saner so, and decenter, too, perhaps.
And yet Forbes stared at this woman as Adam must have stared at Eve when the scales were off his eyes. Even her hair was almost all her own, and it was coiled and parted with simple grace. Her head-dress was something bizarre--not a tiara of diamonds, but a black crest with a pearl or two studding it--the iridescent breast of a lyre-bird it was, though he did not know. A cord of pearls was flung around her throat. At the peak of each shoulder her gown began, but the two elements did not conjoin till just in time above the breast, and just a little too late at the back.
The fabric clung lovingly to the loins, thighs, and calves, so closely that an inverted V must be cut between the ankles to make walking possible at all. There was a train of a fish-tail sort, a little twitching afterthought. And so this woman-shape came forth from a shapelessness as Aphrodite from the sea-foam.
Forbes was so startled that he felt all the chagrin of one who is caught staring at a woman just returned from the surf in a wet bathing-suit. He shifted his eyes from her. When he looked back she had vanished into the crimson cavern of the box.
The other women followed her, and the men them. They seated themselves just as the curtain fell.
And now Forbes felt at liberty to go to his own seat, found an usher to pilot him down the aisle. He bowed and murmured "Beg pardon" and "Thank you" to each of those who shoved back awkwardly and wonderingly to let him in. He felt like explaining to them that he had not just arrived, and that he really was not so foolish or so dilatory as he looked. He put his overcoat in his extra seat and studied his program.
A voice that should have reminded him of the landaulet, but did not, caught his ear and led his eyes to the box. He was not far from the late arrivals.
They were attracting a deal of attention from the audience, and paying it none. The loudness of their speech and their laughter would have shocked him in a crowd of farmers. Coming from people of evident wealth and familiarity with town customs, it astounded him.
He had not yet seen the face of the woman of whom he had seen so much else. She was talking to a man in the interior of the box. Her back was turned to the house.
It never occurred to Forbes that it might be the same back he had followed up the Avenue. How could he have told?
That back was clothed and cloaked, and even that famous left arm was sleeved. These shoulder-sheaths, not blades, were so astoundingly bare that he felt ashamed to look at them. Their proprietress was evidently not ashamed to submit them for public inspection. One might not approve her boldness, but one could hardly fail to approve her shoulders. When she moved or shrugged or laughed or turned to speak, their exquisite integument creased and rippled like shaken cream.
At length the footlights went up, the curtain went up. The three women aligned themselves in profile along the rail as if they were seated on unseen horses. The men were mere silhouettes in the background.
The bulk of the audience was in darkness; but the people in the boxes were illumined with a light reflected from the scenery, and it warmed them like a dawn glowing upon peaks of snow.
And now, at last, Forbes saw the face he had watched for with such impatience. It did not disappoint him. At first she gave him only the profile; but that magic light of stage-craft was upon it, and once she turned her head and cast a slow, vague look along the shadowy valley of the audience. She could not have seen him, but he saw her and found her so beautiful, so bewitchingly beautiful and desirable, that he caught his breath with a stitch of pain, an ache of admiration.
Just a moment her eyes dreamed across the gloom, and she turned back to watch the stage. It was like a parting after a tryst. Then she broke the spell with a sudden throe of laughter. The little shoplifter and blackmailer on the stage was describing her efforts to learn the ways of society, the technique of pouring tea and pretending to like it. She swore, and the audience roared. Formerly an actor could always get a laugh by saying "damn." Now it must be a woman that swears.
Jarred back to reasonableness by the shock of laughter, Forbes looked again to the box to see what manner of women this woman went with. One of them was tiny but quite perfect. She had the face of a debutante under the white hair of a matron. If her age were betrayed by her neck, the dog-collar of pearls concealed the ravage. She sat exceedingly erect and seemed to be cold and haughty till another splurge of slang from the shoplifter provoked her to a laugh that was like a child's.
The other woman laughed, too, laughed large and wide. She was beautiful, too, a Rubens ideal, drawn in liberal rotundities--cheeks, chin, throat, bust, hips. No Cubist could have painted her, for she was like a cluster of soap-bubbles. Her face was a great baby's.
The men were almost invisible, mere cut-outs in black and white.
None of them had the jaded look of boredom that Forbes supposed to be the chief characteristic of New York wealth. They were as eager and irrepressible as a box-load of children fighting over a bag of peanuts at a circus.
One of the men leaned forward and whispered something; all the women turned to hear. They forgot the play, though the situation was critical. They chattered and laughed so audibly that the audience grew restive; the people on the stage looked to be distressed.
Forbes was astonished at such bad manners from such beautiful people. He wondered how the play could go on. He had heard of actors stepping out of the picture to rebuke such disturbers of the peace. He expected such an encounter now.
Then somebody in the audience hissed. Somebody called distinctly, "Shut up!" The group turned in surprise, and received another hiss in the face. Silence and shame quieted it instanter. The women blushed like grown girls threatened with a spanking. Tremendous blushes ran all down their crimson backs.
Forbes could see that they wanted to run. A kind of pluck held them. They pretended to toss their heads with contempt, but the mob had cowed them so completely that Forbes felt sorry for them--especially for her. She was too pretty for a public humiliation.
When the curtain fell on the second act Forbes saw one of the men in the box rise and leave along the side-aisle. Forbes knew the man. His name was Ten Eyck--Murray Ten Eyck.
Forbes dreaded to repeat that voyage through the strait between knees and seat-backs; but he had seen at last a man he knew. And the man he knew knew the woman he wanted to know.
