Joan Thursday: A Novel

Abruptly Joan ceased, breathing heavily after that long and, even to her, unexpected speech. But it had been well delivered: she could feel that. She clenched her hands at her sides in a gesture plagiarized from a soubrette star in one of her infrequent scenes of stage excitement; and stood regarding Matthias with wide, accusing eyes.

His own were blank…

He was trying to account to himself for the fact that this girl seemed to have the knack of making him feel a heartless scoundrel, even when his stand was morally impregnable, even though it were unassailable.

Here was this girl, evidently convinced that he had not dealt squarely with her, believing that he deliberately withheld – out of pique, perhaps – aid in his power to offer her…

He passed a hand wearily across his eyes, and turned back toward his work-chair.

"You'd better sit down," he said quietly, "while I think this out."

Without a word the girl returned to the arm-chair and perched herself gingerly upon the edge of it, ready to rise and flee (she seemed) whenever it should pardonably suggest itself to Matthias that the only right and reasonable thing for him to do was to rise up and murder her…

On his part, sitting, he rested elbows upon the litter of manuscript, and held his head in his hands.

He was sorry now that he had yielded to the temptation to be plain-spoken about Arlington and Marbridge. But she had driven him to it; and she was an empty-headed little thing and ought really to be kept out of that galley. On the other hand, he was afraid that if he allowed himself to be persuaded to help her find a new engagement, she would misunderstand his motives one way or another – most probably the one. He couldn't afford to have her run away with the notion that his affection for her had been merely hibernating. He had not only himself, he had Venetia to think of, now. To her he had dedicated his life, to a dumb, quixotic passion. Some day she might need him; some day, it seemed certain, she would need him. She was presently to have a child; and Marbridge was going on from bad to worse; things could not forever endure as they were between those two. And then she would be friendless, a woman with a child fighting for the right to live in solitary decency…

But Joan!.. If she were headed that way, toward the Arlington wheel within the wheel of the stage, even at risk of blame and misunderstanding Matthias felt that he ought to do what could be done to set her back upon the right road. It was too bad, really. And it was none of his business. The girl had given herself to the theatre of her own volition, after all. Or had she? Had the right of choice been accorded her? Or was it simply that she had been designed by Nature especially for that business, to which women of her calibre seemed so essential? Was she, after all, simply life-stuff manufactured hastily and carelessly in an old, worn mould, because destined solely to be fed wholesale into the insatiable maw of the stage?

He shook his head in weary doubt, and sighed.

"Probably," he said, fumbling with a pen and avoiding her eyes – "I presume – you'd better come back in a day or two – say Tuesday. That will give me time to look round and see what I can scare up for you. Or perhaps Wednesday would be even better…"

He dropped the pen and rose, his manner inviting her to leave.

"Wednesday?" she repeated, reluctantly getting up again.

"At four, if that's convenient."

"Yes, indeed, it is. And … thank you so much … Jack."

"No, no," Matthias expostulated wearily.

"No, I mean it," she insisted. "You're awf'ly sweet not to be – unkind to me."

"Believe me, I could never be that."

"Then – g'dafternoon."

"Good afternoon, Joan."

But as he moved to open the door, his eyes were caught by the flash from a facet of the diamond; and the thought came to him that its presence there assorted ill with his latest assurance to the girl. Catching it up, he offered it to Joan as she was about to go.

"And this," he said, smiling – "don't forget it, please."

Automatically her hand moved out to take it, but was stayed. Her eyes widened with true consternation, and she gasped faintly.

"You – you don't mean it?"

"Oh, yes, I do. Please take it. I've really no use for it, Joan, and – well, you and I know what professional life means." He grinned awry. "It might be of service to you some day."

With a cry of gratitude that was half a sob, but with no other acknowledgment, the girl accepted the gift, stumbled through the door in a daze, and so from the house.

XXXI

So it seemed that all men were much alike. Joan knew but two types, the man who lived by his brains and the man who lived by his wits, but had no more hesitation in generalizing from these upon masculine society as a whole than a scientist has in constructing a thesis upon the habits of prehistoric mammalia from the skull of a pterodactyl and the thigh-bone of an ichthyosaurus…

They were all much alike: if you knew how to get round one kind, you knew how to win over the other; there was a merely negligible difference in the mode of attack. You appealed to their sympathies, or to their sentiments, or their appetites, and if these failed you appealed to their pride in their self-assumed rôle of the protectors.

It was no great trick, once you had made yourself mistress of it.

By this route Joan achieved the feat of looking down on Matthias; and that was not wholesome for the girl, leaving her world destitute of a single human soul that commanded her respect.

She had needed only to stir up his jealousy of Marbridge and his innate chivalry…

As if she didn't know what Arlington's companies were like! The facts were notorious; nobody troubled to blink them; Arlington's employees least of all. It wasn't their business to blink the facts; a girl without following had as little chance of securing a place in one of his choruses as a girl without a pretty figure.

But, of course, a handsome girl with a good figure…

Joan glanced in a shop window, en passant; but she saw nothing of the display of wares. The plate glass made a darkling mirror for the passers-by: Joan could see that her refurbished travelling suit fitted her becomingly, even though it was a trifle passé.

She hurried home and changed it, and hurried forth again to keep an appointment with Hubert Fowey.

They dined at a pretentious hotel, in an "Orange Garden" whose false moonlight and tinkling, artificial fountain manufactured an alluring simulacrum of romantic night, despite the incessant activities of a ragtime-bitten orchestra and the inability of the ventilating system to infuse a hint of coolness into the heavy, superheated air.

Joan had little appetite – the day had been too over-poweringly hot – but she was very thirsty; and Fowey provided a brand of champagne less sweet and heady than she would have chosen, and consequently more insinuative.

During the meal Billy Salute appeared at a table across the room and invisible to Fowey, whose back was toward it, but still not far enough removed to prevent Joan from recognizing that look in the dancer's eyes which she resented so angrily. She didn't once look at the man; but she never quite lost sight of him, and was well aware that he was ridiculing Fowey to his companion – an actor, by many an indication, but a stranger to Joan.

Provoked, she demonstrated her contempt of Salute by flirting outrageously with Fowey. Unconscious of her motive, that aspiring little dramatic author lost his head to some extent. Now and again his voice trembled when he spoke to her, and once he mumbled something about marriage, but checked at discretion, and let his words trail off inarticulately.

Joan was not to be denied.

"What did you say?" she demanded, with her most distracting smile.

"Oh, nothing of any importance," muttered Fowey, his face reddening.

"But you did say something. I only caught part of it. Hubert, I want to know!"

It was the first time she had used his given name.

"I – I only wondered if you were married," he stammered. "You talk so cursed little about yourself!"

"Does it matter?" she parried, surrender in her eyes.

He choked and gulped on his champagne.

"But you're not, are you?" he persisted.

"What's that to you?"

He hesitated and changed the subject, fearful lest his tongue compromise him.

"What shall we do now? Don't say a roof garden. Let's get out of this infernal smother. I vote for a taxi ride to Manhattan Beach."

Joan assented.

Leaving, they passed Salute's table. Joan gave the dancer a distant and chilling greeting, and swept haughtily past, ignoring his offer to rise. The insolent irony of his eyes was incredibly offensive to her. They said: "I am waiting, I am patient, I make no effort, I am inevitable."

She swore in her soul that she would prove them wrong.

In the taxicab Fowey made some slighting reference to the dancer.

"He's the devil!" Joan declared with profound conviction.

But she wouldn't explain her reasons for so naming him.

When occasion offered, in the more shadowed stretches of their course to the sea, Fowey attempted to kiss her. But she would have none of him then, fending him off by main strength and raillery; and she was pleased with the discovery that she was stronger than he. Yet another evidence of the inferiority of man!

At the beach, Fowey ordered a claret cup. Joan demanded an ice and drank sparingly; but when again in the motor-car, homeward-bound, she was abruptly smitten with amazement to find herself in Fowey's arms, submitting to his kisses if not returning them.

For a time she remained so and let him talk love to her.

It was pleasant, to be – wanted…

Arrived at the little flat, she had to prevent Fowey's following her in, again by main strength, slamming the door in his face.

Bolting the door, she turned to a mirror "to see what a fright she must have looked." But it seemed a radiant vision that smiled back at her.

She thought hazily of Hubert Fowey.

"That kid!" she murmured, not altogether in contempt, but almost compassionately.

It was a shame to tease him so…

Not until the next day, that dawned upon her consciousness amid the thunders of a splitting headache, did she appreciate how far the affair had gone.

Penitent, she vowed reformation. She wasn't going to let any man think he could make a fool of her, much less that conceited little whippersnapper.

As it happened, she didn't see the amateur dramatist again for some days. He, too, had vowed reformation, and on much the same moral grounds.

Her appointment with Matthias, for Wednesday at four, Joan failed to keep. And since that was her own affair, and since she had not left him her address, Matthias kept to himself the word that he had for her and, in accordance with his original intention, boarded the Bar Harbor Express that same evening, and forgot New York for upwards of ten weeks.

It had rained all day Tuesday, and Wednesday was overcast but dry and, by contrast with what had been, cool. Dressing for her interview with Matthias, Joan donned a summery gown of lawn, liberally inset with lacework over her shoulders and bosom: a frock for the country-house or the seashore, never for the Broadway pavements. None the less it was quite too pretty to be wasted on Matthias alone. She set out to keep her appointment with an hour to spare, purposing to employ the interval by running, at leisure, the gauntlet of masculine admiration on Broadway as far south as Thirty-eighth Street. For this expedition she would have preferred company; but Hattie, having looked her over, announced that she couldn't dress up to Joan's style, didn't mean to try, and didn't care to be used as a foil; furthermore, it was much more sensible to loaf round the flat in little or no clothing at all, and read up on Pinero.

From the Astor Theatre corner Joan struck across Broadway to the eastern sidewalk, chiefly to avoid the throng of loungers in front of the Bryant Building: it is good to be admired, but Joan had little taste for the form of admiration that becomes vocal at once intimately and publicly.

Half-way down the New York Theatre Building block, she turned abruptly and scuttled like a frightened quail into the lobby, from the back of which, turning, she was able to see, without being seen by, Quard.

Brief as the term of their dissociation was, in mere point of elapsed time, Joan had so completely divorced herself from her husband that she was actually beginning to forget him; physically no less than mentally she was beginning to forget him. An outcast from her life, he no longer had any real existence in her world. By some curious freak of sophistry she had even managed to persuade herself she was never to see him again. Thus it seemed the most staggering shock she had ever experienced, to recognize the man's head and shoulders looming above the throng before the entrance to the moving-picture show, just south of the lobby to the New York Theatre proper.

But Quard hadn't seen her. He was with companions, a brace of vaudeville actors whom Joan knew through him. But while she waited for them to pass, two other friends accosted the three, directly before the lobby entrance, and they paused to exchange greetings. Quard slapped both newcomers on their shoulders, and kept his hand on the last he slapped, bending forward and engaging their interest with some intimate bit of ribaldry. He had been drinking – Joan saw that much at a glance – not heavily, but enough to render his good-fellowship boisterous.

Otherwise he looked well. He was hardly to be identified with that sodden wreck which had been brought from the Barbary Coast back to the woman he had insulted and abused. His colour was good, his poise assured. He was wearing new clothing – a loud shepherd's-plaid effect which Joan couldn't possibly have forgotten. No one could possibly have forgotten it. And he had acquired a dashing Panama hat which at least looked genuine at that slight distance. Useless to have wasted pity on the man: he had fallen, but not far, and he had fallen on his feet.

Joan eyed him with fear, despair, and loathing.

Had he come to render New York too small to contain them both?

She skulked in the farthest corner of the lobby, in shadows, not quite round the corner of the elevator shaft – where she could just see and ran least risk of being seen – and waited. But the group on the sidewalk seemed to have settled down to a protracted session. When Quard had finished talking, and the laughter had quieted down, another fixed the attention of the group with a second anecdote, of what nature Joan could well surmise.

Of course, it was only a question of time before Quard would propose a drink.

Then she would be free to proceed to her appointment.

But through some oversight the suggestion remained temporarily in abeyance; and Joan was unlucky in that none of the policemen appeared, who are assigned to the business of keeping actors moving in that neighbourhood.

After a minute or two Quard shifted his position so that he could, by simply lifting his eyes, have looked directly into the lobby.

At this Joan turned in desperation and entered the cage of an elevator, which happened just then to be waiting with an open gate.

There were several theatrical enterprises with offices on one of the upper floors: no reason why Joan shouldn't wait in one of these until it would be safe to venture forth again. There was Arlington's, for instance.

Joan's was no strange figure there. She had long since made several attempts to see Arlington or one of his lieutenants; but her professional cards, borne in to them by a disillusioned office-boy, had educed no other response than "Mist' Arlington says they's nothin' doin' just' present."

But it was as good a place as any for Joan's purpose, and there could be no harm trying again.

The same world-weary boy received her card when she entered the suite of offices. He considered it, and Joan as well, dispassionately.

"Whoja wanna see?" he mumbled with patent effort.

Joan's prettiest smile was apparently wasted upon the temperament of an anchorite.

"Mr. Arlington, please."

The boy offered to return the card: "He ain't in."

"That's what you always tell me."

"He ain't never in."

"Very well," said Joan sweetly: "I'll wait."

The boy started to say something pointed, hesitated, regarded her with dull suspicion, and suddenly enquired:

"Whaja wanna see 'm 'bout?"

"A matter of private business."

"Ah," drawled the boy with infinite disgust, "tha's what they all say!" An embittered grimace shaped upon his soiled face. "Lis'n!" he said, almost affably – "if yuh'll think up a good one, I'll fetch this inta his sec't'ry. Now cud anythin' be fairer 'n that?"

"I'll go you," Joan retorted, falling in with his spirit. "Tell him a friend of Mr. Marbridge's wants to see him."

She esteemed this a rather brilliant bit of diplomacy, and at the same time considered herself stupid not to have thought of it before. But it failed to move the office-boy. His head signalled a negative.

"Havta do better'n that," he announced. "If I fell for ev'ry wren what claims she's a nintimate frien' of Mista Marbridge – "

"But I am a friend of his – truly I am!" Joan insisted warmly.

The boy rammed a hand into a trouser's-pocket. "Betcha – " he began; but reconsidered. "Yuh never can tell 'bout a skirt," he reminded himself audibly. "But, jus' to prove I'm a sport, I'll go yuh."

Motioning Joan through the door of the reception room, he shambled off with an air of questioning his own sanity.

The reception room was perhaps thirty feet long by fifteen wide: an interior room, lighted, and none too well, by electricity, ventilated, when at all, through the doorways of adjoining offices. A row of cane-seated chairs was aligned against the inner wall. In the middle of the floor stood a broad and substantial table of oak; it was absolutely bare. Here and there a few unhappy lithographs, yellowing "life-size" photographs of dead or otherwise extinguished stars, and a framed play-bill or two of Arlington's earlier ventures, decorated the dingy drab wall. There was no floor-covering of any description.

In this room herded some two-score people of the stage, waiting hopefully for interviews that were, as a rule, granted to not more than one applicant in ten: a heterogeneous assemblage, owning a single characteristic in common: whenever, at the far end of the room, the door opened leading to the offices of the management, every head turned that way, and every voice was hushed in reverence.

Yet it was seldom that the door disclosed anything more unique than a second office-boy, even more dejected than the first, who, peering through, would, after examining the card in his hand for the name of the applicant, painfully recite some stereotyped phrase worn smooth – "Mista Brown? Y'ur party says t' come back next week!" "Miss Holman? Y'ur party's went out 'n' won't be back th'safternoon!" "Miss Em'rson? Mista Arlington says ever'thin's full up just'present. Call 'n ag'in!" or more infrequently: "Mista Grayson's t' step in, please…"

Joan found a vacant chair.

She had no hope whatever of being admitted to the Presence, despite the unexpected condescension of the office-boy. Marbridge's name might prove the Open Sesame; but she doubted that vaguely: "it wouldn't be her if that happened!"

The atmosphere was stifling with heat complicated by stale human breath and the reek of perfumery, all stratified with layers of tobacco smoke which entered over the transoms of the communicating offices. Above the muted murmurings of the unemployed's apprehensive voices could be heard the brisk chattering of two or three type-writing machines; and telephone bells rang incessantly, near and far, one taking up the tune as soon as another ended. The throng of applicants shuffled their feet uneasily, expectantly, morosely.

Joan was so uncomfortable and oppressed that she was tempted to rise and go without waiting for the discounted answer. Only dread of encountering Quard restrained her. The longer she delayed, the slighter the chance of finding him still in front of the theatre…

Her thoughts drifted into reverie dully coloured with misgivings. She thought of Charlie Quard as a bird of ill-omen whose appearance could presage nothing but suffering and disaster; ignoring altogether the truth, that through his good offices alone, however tainted with self-interest, she had been suffered to enter into the profession whose ranks she had elected to adorn; with that other truth, that she owed him for the clothing she wore, the food she ate, the very roof that sheltered her – and meant never to repay…

The voice of the second office-boy chanted her name twice before she heard it.

"Miss Thursd'y?.. Miss Joan Thursd'y?"

Joan started to her feet.

"Yes – ?"

"Th' party you ast for says please t' step this way!"

XXXII

Between gratification and misgivings, Joan followed her guide in a flutter of emotion. When intending nothing more than to provide an excuse for using the anteroom as a temporary refuge, she hadn't for an instant questioned her right to use Marbridge's name. But now that it appeared she was to gain thereby the boon of an audience with Arlington, she was torn by doubts.

After all, her acquaintance with Marbridge had been one of the most tenuous description. True, the man had seemed attracted by her at the time; but that was many months ago; and only recently he had looked her fair in the face without knowing her. She had really gained her advantage through false pretences. And when Marbridge learned of this, would he not resent it? Had she not, through her presumption, put herself in the way of defeating her own ends?

She brought up before a closed door in a state of nervousness not natural with her.

"You're to wait a minute," her guide advised.

She was thankful he wasn't the guardian of the outer defences: just at present she was in no fit mood to bandy persiflage successfully.

But she was uncomfortably conscious that this present boy eyed her curiously as he threw open the office door.

She entered, and he closed it after her.

The room was untenanted, but a haze of cigar smoke in the air indicated that it had been only recently vacated. It was handsomely furnished, carpeted and decorated. The broad, flat-topped desk in one corner boasted an elaborate display of ornate desk hardware. In the middle of the blotting-pad a sheaf of letters lay beneath a bronze paperweight of unique design. All in all, an office owning little in common with the generality of those to which Joan had theretofore penetrated…

She sat herself down uneasily.

A door communicating with the adjoining office, though a solid door of oak, was an inch or so ajar. Through it penetrated sounds of masculine voices in conversation – but nothing distinguishable.

Five minutes passed. Then the conference in the next room broke up amid laughter; the doorknob rattled; and Joan rose automatically.

Marbridge entered.

For a moment, in her surprise and consternation, Joan could only stare and stammer. But obvious though her agitation was, Marbridge ignored it gracefully. Shutting the door tight, he advanced with an outstretched hand and a smile there was no resisting – with, in short, every normal evidence of friendly pleasure in their meeting.

"Well, Miss Thursday!" he said, gratification in his carefully modulated voice. "This is public-spirited of you!"

Joan shook hands limply, her face crimson beneath his pardonably admiring stare.

"I – thank you – but – "

"Really," he went on smoothly, "I consider it mighty nice of you to look me up. Fancy your remembering me! Do sit down. We must have a chat. Fortunately, you've caught me in an off-hour."

Retaining her hand coolly enough, he introduced the girl to a capacious lounge-chair beside the desk, then settled himself behind it.

Joan shook her wits together.

"You're awf'ly kind – "

"I – kind?" Marbridge denied the implication with an indulgent smile. "My dear Miss Thursday, if you get to know me well – and I sincerely hope you will some day – you'll find there's not a spark of human generosity in my system. I think only of my own pleasure. How can there be kindness to you in my seizing this chance to improve our acquaintance? I declare, I thought you'd forgotten me!"