Joan Thursday: A Novel

A semi-exhausted and apathetic operator looked up reluctantly as Joan approached, with one glance appraising her from head to heels. At any other time the dainty perfection of Joan's toilet would have roused antagonism in the woman; today she found energy only sufficient for a perfunctory mumble.

"What numba, please?"

Joan hesitated, feeling herself suddenly upon the verge of dangerous indiscretion, but stung by the operator's look of jaded disdain, took her courage in hand and pursued her original intention.

"One Bryant," she said.

The operator jammed a plug into one of the rows of sockets before her and iterated the number mechanically.

In another moment she nodded, indicating the rank of booths.

"Numba five – One Bryant," she said.

Joan shut herself in with the sliding door and took up the receiver.

"Hello – Lambs' Club?" she enquired… "Is Mr. Fowey in the club?.. Will you page him, please… Miss Thursday… Yes, I'll hold the wire."

The booth was hermetically sealed. Perspiration was starting out all over her body. And somewhere in that airless box, probably at her feet, lurked a long unburied cigar. She thrust the door ajar, but only to close it immediately as Fowey's voice saluted her.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Hubert," Joan drawled, with a little touch of laughing mockery in her accents.

"Is that you, Joan – really?" the voice demanded excitedly.

"Real-ly!" she affirmed. "What're you doing there, shut up all alone by yourself in that stupid club, Hubert?"

Prefaced by a brief but intelligible pause, the man's response came briskly: "Where are you now, anyway?"

"That doesn't matter," she retorted. She had meant to ask him to meet her at the hotel, but reconsidered, fearing lest Marbridge might chance to see them. "What really matters is that this is my birthday and I'm going to give a party. Have you got anything better to do?"

"No – "

"Then meet me in half an hour on the southbound platform of the Sixth Avenue L at Battery Place."

"Battery Place! What in thunder – "

"Never mind – tell you all about it when we meet. Will you come?"

"Will I! Well, rawther!"

"Half an hour, then – "

"I'll be there, with bells on!"

"Then good-bye for a little – Hubert."

"Good-bye."

Fowey reached the point of assignation only one train later than Joan.

As he hurried down the platform, almost stumbling in his impatience to join her, the girl surveyed with sudden dislike and regret his slight, dandified figure fitted with finical precision into clothing so ultra-English in fashion that it might have belonged to his younger brother. And the confident smile that lighted up his pinched, eager countenance seemed little short of offensive. She was sorry now that she had yielded to the temptation to make use of him: he was so insignificant in every way, so violently the opposite in all things of the man who now filled all her thoughts – Marbridge; and so transparent that even she could read his mind: he entertained not the least tangible doubt that now, after the manner in which they had last parted, she had at length wakened to appreciation of his irresistible charms, that her requesting him to meet her was but the preface to surrender.

But she permitted nothing of her thoughts to become legible in her manner. After all, she had only wanted an escort for the evening, an excuse to postpone that unavoidable return to the company of the girl she had betrayed; and Fowey had seemed the most convenient and the least dangerous man she could think of. If in the inflation of his insufferable conceit he dreamed for an instant another thing… Well, Joan promised herself, he'd soon find out his mistake!..

Keeping up the fiction of her imaginary birthday, she outlined her plans: they would take one of the Iron Steamboat Company's boats from Pier 1, North River – a short walk from the station – to Coney Island. When that resort palled, they would drive to Manhattan Beach and dine, perhaps "take in" Pain's Fireworks; and return to New York by the same route.

Fowey's objections were instant and sincere and well-grounded: the boats would be crowded beyond endurance with an unwashed rabble liberally sown with drunks and screaming children. If she would only let him, he'd get a taxicab – or even a touring-car.

Quietly but firmly Joan overruled him. It must be her party or no party, as she proposed or not at all.

He yielded in the end, but the event proved him right in all he had foretold. Joan was very soon made sorry she hadn't suffered herself to be gainsaid.

They had half an hour to wait for the boat, and the waiting-room upon the second-storey of the pier was like an oven, packed with a milling, sweating mob exactly fulfilling Fowey's prediction. They were elbowed, shouldered, walked upon, and at one time openly ridiculed by a gang of hooligans, any one of whom would have made short work of Fowey had he dared show any resentment.

Upon the boat, when at length it turned up tardily to receive them, conditions were little better, save that the open air was an indescribable relief after the reeking atmosphere of the pier. Fowey managed to secure two uncomfortable folding stools, upon which they perched, crowded against the rail of the upper deck; a wretched "orchestra" wrung infamous parodies of popular songs from several tortured instruments; children scuffled and howled; burly ruffians in unclean aprons thrust themselves bodily through the throng, balancing dripping trays laden with glasses of lukewarm beer and "soft drinks" and bawling in every ear their seductive refrain – "Here's the waiter! Want the waiter? Who wants the waiter?" – and an alcoholic, planting his chair next to Joan's, promptly went to sleep, snoring atrociously, and threatened every instant to topple over and rest his head in her lap.

A single circumstance modified in a way Joan's regret that she hadn't heeded Fowey's protests.

As the boat swung away from the pier, a larger steamship of one of the coastwise lines, outward bound from its dock farther up the North River, passed with leeway so scant that the dress and features of those upon its decks were clearly to be discerned. And at the moment when the two vessels were nearest, Joan discovered one who stood just outside an open cabin door, leaning upon the rail with an impressively nonchalant pose, and smoking a heavy cigar. He wore clothing of a conspicuous shepherd's-plaid, and his pose was an arrested dramatic gesture.

In a moment a woman emerged from the open door behind him and joined him at the rail, placing an intimate hand on his forearm and saying something which won from him a laugh and a look of tender admiration: a handsome, able-bodied woman, expensively but loudly dressed, her connection with the stage as unquestionable as was his.

Joan dissembled the odd emotion with which she recognized the man, and turned to Fowey.

"What boat is that, do you know, Hubert?"

Fowey raked her with an indifferent glance, fore and aft. "Belongs to the New Bedford Line," he announced – "can't make out her name – connects at New Bedford for the boats to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Ever been up that way?"

"No. What's it like?"

"Pretty islands. Don't know Martha's Vineyard very well, but Nantucket's my old stamping-ground. Go up there in the middle of the summer – about now – and you'll find every actor and actress you ever heard of, and then some. Great place. Wish we were going there."

"Don't be silly…"

The boats were drawing apart. Joan looked back for the last sight she was ever to have of her husband.

Though she couldn't have known this, she sighed a little, in strange depression.

Perplexed, she tried vainly to analyze her emotion: was it regret – or jealousy?

Of a sudden, in the heart of that immense crowd, with Fowey attentive at her elbow, she was conscious of a feeling of intense loneliness.

XXXV

When, after a long and tedious voyage over a sea as flat as a plate and unflawed by a single cooling drift of air, the steamboat was made fast to the end of that long iron pier which juts out from the flat, low coast of Coney Island, its passengers rose en masse and crowded toward the gangways. Joan and Fowey, attempting to hang back until the crowd had thinned out sufficiently to enable them to go ashore in comfort, were caught in the swirl of it and swept along willy-nilly.

Once on the pier-head the multitude had more elbow room and spread out, the main body streaming headlong shorewards, keen-set for the delights promised by the two great amusement parks which had grown up in the heart of that frontier settlement of gin-mills, dance-halls, side-shows, eating-houses, and dives unspeakable.

Joan and Fowey followed more at their leisure, constraint and silence between them like a wall. The girl was deeply disappointed with the expedition, as far as it had gone, doubting whether anything better would follow, and still labouring under that unaccountable depression which had settled down upon her spirits at sight of Quard on the New Bedford boat. Fowey, no less disgusted, was puzzled by his companion's attitude, at once tolerant and aloof, keenly watchful for an opening through which to pursue his conquest, and wondering how it would end. If she were simply bent on tantalizing him again, for her own amusement…

He swore angrily but inaudibly.

Near the shore end of the pier they delayed to watch the antics of the hundreds of bathers churning the shallows in front of huge and hideous bathing establishments. In countless numbers, they dotted the sea like flies and darkened the sun-baked, unclean sands, into which their feet had trodden the wreckage of ten thousand lunches.

Fowey said something inexpressively cynical about the resemblance of the scene below to a congregation of bacilli crawling upon a slide beneath a microscope.

Joan heard without response, either vocal or mental. She resented bitterly the superior attitude adopted by her companion. For her part, she would have asked nothing better than to mingle with the throng and taste those crude pleasures so dear to its simple heart and, had she but dared admit it, to her own. But she had Fowey to live up to.

Very heartily she regretted the impulse which had dictated her invitation. She had been far happier alone – though it would have been strange had she been suffered to remain long alone.

By the time they left the pier, the evening was so far advanced that the myriad lights of the tawdry town were flashing into being. They debouched into a roaring mob which filled the wide avenue from curb to curb, packed so densely, though in constant motion, that trolley cars and automobiles forced a way through it only at a snail's pace and with great difficulty. Encouraged by the excessive heat which rendered Town intolerable to all who had the means to escape it, the week-end swarming had begun in all sincerity. In spite of the terrific congestion which already obtained in all the streets and avenues and beaches, piers, amusement parks, catch-penny shows, saloons, and restaurants, scarcely a minute passed without the arrival at some one of the trolley terminals of a car packed to the guards with more visitors.

A good-natured if rowdy mob, for the most part, with only a minimum element of the downright vicious in its composition, it was none the less bent on amusement in its cheapest form, that is to say, at somebody else's expense. It gathered thickest round the places of free entertainment, where acrobats performed on open-air stages or crawled upon high, invisible wires, or where slides were supplied gratis for public diversion: grinning always, but howling with delight when treated to real misadventure, as when some girl, negotiating a bamboo slide upon a grass mat, her skirts wrapped tight about her, would lose balance and shoot headlong, sprawling, to the level; the greater the exposure, the greater the diversion…

Nor was Fowey permitted to escape unteased: his conspicuous clothing, and the broad black ribbons dangling from his horn-rimmed glasses were too tempting to be resisted. Once his Panama was smashed down over his eyes; and his glasses were so frequently jerked by their moorings from his nose that he was fain at length to pocket them and poke owlishly along at Joan's guidance.

Dazzled to blindness by those ten million glaring bulbs which lifted up tier upon tier against the blank purple skies; deafened by an indescribable cacophony of bands, organs, bells, horns, human tongues incessantly clattering; suffering acutely from the collective heat of the multitude added to that of the still and muggy night; buffeted and borne hither and yon at the will of the mass: they contrived in the end to engage an open, horse-drawn vehicle, of the type colloquially known in those days as "low-neck hack," and ordered themselves driven to the Manhattan Beach Hotel.

When presently they had gained the darkling peace of a long road between marsh-lands, Fowey resumed with his glasses his hateful cynicism.

"That was considerable treat, all right," he said pensively.

"Glad you liked it," Joan replied with the curtness of chagrin.

"We'll go back and have some more after dinner," he suggested.

"Thanks – I've had plenty."

"No, but really!" he insisted. "We haven't seen half of it – "

"Oh, shut up!"

Her anger was real; and when he would have mollified the girl with soft words and an arm that sought to steal round her waist, she repeated her injunction with added coarseness and struck his hand away with a force that he felt.

In spite of this, he schooled himself to patience.

Dinner, served perfunctorily by a weary waiter and consumed upon the verandah of the hotel at a table, the best they could command, far removed from the comparative coolness and ease of those beside the railing, did little if anything to modify Joan's temper.

She, who had set out, believing herself the happiest of mortals, to spend an evening of real enjoyment, felt utterly wretched and forlorn.

Moment by moment her distaste for Fowey was gaining strength. She was put to it to listen to his bragging and to make response civilly. She did not relish her food, her company, or her surroundings; and in utter ennui tried to stimulate herself with her favourite brand of sweet champagne, insisting on another bottle when they had emptied one between them. It served only to stimulate a fictitious gaiety in her, one swift to wane.

For all this, she was reluctant to contemplate going home. Anything were preferable to that – at least until she could feel reasonably sure of finding Hattie abed and asleep.

They finished their meal at an hour too late to make it worth while to patronize one of the open-air entertainments with which she had promised herself diversion; and since she would neither go home nor, at Fowey's mischievous suggestion, return to Coney Island, they moved to another table, nearer the railing, and whiled away one more hour listening to the band music over their cigarettes and liqueurs.

Toward eleven o'clock, Joan suddenly announced that she was sick of it all and ready to go. Fowey revived his preference for a motor-car, and got his way against scanty opposition. In a saner humour, Joan would have stuck to her original plan. As it was, she accepted the motor ride with neither gratitude nor graciousness.

Curiously enough, once established in the car, her hat off, the swift rush of night air cooling her moist brows, her head resting back against the cushions, she permitted Fowey to repeat his ardent love-making which had made their previous ride together memorable. Her dislike of him was no less thorough-paced, but had passed from an active to a passive stage; she was at once too indifferent to resist him and so bored that she welcomed anything that promised excitement. She suffered his kisses, confident in her power to control him, and drew a certain satisfaction from reminding him, now and again forcibly, that there were limits to her toleration. But for the most part she lay in his arms in passive languor, her eyes half closed, and tried to forget him, or rather to believe him someone else, one whose embraces she could have welcomed…

When they came to lighted streets, she bade Fowey "behave," and would not permit him even so slight a lapse from decorum as that of "holding hands."

She sat up, rearranging the disorder of her hair, adjusted her hat, surreptitiously restored the brilliance of her lips with a stick of rouge.

The man drew back sullenly into his corner, fuming…

At her door, dismissing the car, he followed her up to the stoop.

"Joan – " he began angrily.

She turned back from using her latch-key, with a wondering, child-like stare.

"Yes, Hubert?" she enquired with hidden malice.

"You're not – you're not going to send me off like this?"

"Why not?" she demanded with fine assumption of simplicity. "It's awful' late."

Fowey seized her wrist.

"Now, listen to me!"

Joan broke his grasp with little or no effort.

"Silly boy!" she said. "Do you really want to come in and visit a while before you say good night?"

Her look was false with a winning softness. Fowey stammered.

"You – you know – "

"Then come along!" she said, with a laugh; and turning fled lightly before him up the darkened stairway.

She had opened the door to the tiny private hallway of the flat when he overtook her, panting. She paused, with a warning finger to her lips.

"S-sh!" she warned. "Don't wake Hattie!"

He swore viciously, discountenanced; and she laughed and, leaving the door wide, went on into the small sitting-dining-room, meanly exulting in the discomfiture she had planned, knowing quite well that he had either forgotten Hattie or believed her to be spending this week-end out of Town, as before.

In the act of lighting the gas, she heard the door close and saw Fowey come, white and shaken, into the room.

"Hush!" she said gaily. "I'll make sure she isn't awake – "

Removing her hat, she passed on into the adjoining bedroom, and stopped short with a sensation of sinking dismay. The room was empty, the bed she shared with Hattie untouched. So much was visible in the faint light entering through windows that opened on a well.

Wondering, Joan struck a light. Its first glimmer revealed to her the fact that Hattie's trunk was gone. The flare of the gas-jet disclosed greater changes in the aspect of the room, due to the disappearance of Hattie's toilet articles and knick-knacks.

Hattie had left, bag and baggage – had gone for good!

But why?

Had she discovered Joan's treachery? Or what had happened?

And in her surprise and perplexity, the girl was conscious anew of that sense of loneliness. She had been afraid to return to the one whom she had betrayed so lightly; but now she was afraid to be without her.

Going back to the adjoining room, she found Fowey standing beside the table and with a slight smile examining a sheet of paper.

"I found this lying here," he announced, handing it over – "didn't realize it was anything until I'd read half of it."

His smile was again confident, bright with premature pride of conquest. But Joan didn't heed it. She was reading rapidly what had been written, swiftly and in a sprawling hand, upon the half sheet of note-paper.

"By rights I ought to stay until you come back, whenever you have the cheek to, and tell you what I think of you – I saw B. E. this evening and he told me all about it – but I want never to see you again – the rent's paid up till next Wednesday – then you can stick or get out – I don't care which – and I wish you joy of your bargain! – H. M."

"You've been scrapping with Hattie, eh?" Joan heard Fowey say in an amused voice.

Without answering, she let the sheet of paper fall to the table, and stood with head bowed in thought, suffering acutely the humiliation inspired by Hattie's contemptuous dismissal.

"What was the trouble?" Fowey pursued. "Not that I'm sorry – "

"Oh, nothing much," Joan interrupted. "We just had a difference of opinion, and she had to fly off the handle like this. It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," Fowey announced significantly.

Now Joan looked up, for the first time appreciating her position.

"Oh …" she said blankly.

Fowey was advancing, with extended arms. She raised a hand to fend him off.

"Don't!" she begged. "Please don't. I can't… You must go, now – of course. I'm sorry. Good night."

He paused, and she saw his face pale and working with passion; his small eyes blazing behind their thick lenses; his hands clenched by his sides, but not tightly, the fingers twitching nervously; his whole body trembling and shaken beyond control.

She was conscious of an incongruous, unnatural, inexplicable feeling of pity for him.

"Please be a good boy," she pleaded, "and go away."

"No, I'm damned if I do. You asked me up here – I know now – just to tease me. But that's no good. I won't go!" He advanced another pace, his tone and manner changing. "O Joan, Joan!" he begged – "don't treat me so cruelly! You know I'm mad about you. Doesn't that mean anything to you, more than a chance to torment me? My God! what kind of a woman are you? I can't stand this. Flesh and blood couldn't. I'm only human. All this week I've kept away from you simply because I realized what you were – "

"What am I?" Joan cut in quickly.

Fowey choked again, with a gesture of impotent exasperation.

"You," he almost shouted – "you're the woman I love and who's driving me mad – mad I tell you!"

"Hubert! You mean that? You really love me?"

"You know I do. You know I'm crazy about you. Haven't you seen it from the first?"

Hesitating, Joan experienced a sense of one in deep waters. There was a sound as that of distant surf in her ears. All through her body pulses were throbbing madly.

She struggled still a little, instinctively; but Fowey advantaged himself of that instant of indecision. He held her in his arms, now; her face was stinging beneath his kisses.

Almost unconsciously, she lifted her arms and clasped them round his neck, drawing his face to hers.

"You poor kid!" she murmured fondly, her eyes closed… "You poor kid…"

XXXVI

Without knowing how she had come there, Joan found herself standing beside the outer doorway, in the narrow hall; one hand hugging about her the kimono she must have snatched up by instinct, while yet not fully wakened, the other hand fumbling with the lock; sleep clouding her brain like a fog, fatigue weighting her eyelids and chaining her limbs, panic hammering in her bosom.

Overhead the doorbell was ringing imperatively, without interruption, even as it must have been ringing for many minutes before she was consciously awake.

Dimly she felt that this alarm by night must portend something strange and terrible.

And still she held her hand, wondering. Who could it be? Not Quard: for she had seen him leave New York. Never Marbridge: that were unthinkable! Hattie Morrison, perhaps… And that meant…

The bell ground on implacably.

At length she found courage to adjust the chain-bolt and open the door to the limit permitted by that guard.

In the outer hallway a gas-jet burned, turned low, diffusing just enough illumination to show her the figure, somehow indefinitely familiar in spite of its style, of a man in a chauffeur's uniform: a young and wiry man clothed in khaki coat and breeches and leather leggins, and wearing a cap with visor shadowing heavily his narrow, sharp-featured countenance.

As the door opened he removed his finger from the bell-push, and drove home recognition with his voice.

"Miss Thursby live here? I got a message for her."

Joan gasped: "Butch!"

"It's me, all right," her brother admitted crisply in his well-remembered tone of irony. "You certainly are one sincere little sleeper. I been ringing here – "

"How did you get in?"

"Rang up the janitor – if that matters. Lis'n: you betta hustle into your clothes quick 's you can if you wanta get home in time to say good-bye to the old woman."

"Mother!" Joan shrilled. "What – what's the matter – ?"

"Dyin'," Butch told her briefly and without emotion. "She said she wanted to see you. So get a move on. My car's waitin', and I dassent leave it alone. Hustle – y' understand?"

"Yes, yes!" Joan promised with a sob. "I'll hurry, Butch – "