“If you mean the way we live, it doesn’t seem quite tactful to reproach me about that.”
“I don’t mean that.” Josephine hesitated; then without premeditation took a sudden plunge into blackmail: “I should think you’d rather not have me soil my hands by discussing——”
Mrs. Perry’s footsteps sounded in the hall, and Josephine rose quickly. The car rolled up the drive.
“I hope you’ll go to bed early,” her mother said.
“Lillian and some kids are coming over.”
Josephine and her father exchanged a short, hostile glance before the machine drove off.
It was a harvest night, bright enough to read by. Josephine sat on the veranda steps listening to the tossing of sleepless birds, the rattle of a last dish in the kitchen, the sad siren of the Chicago-Milwaukee train. Composed and tranquil, she sat waiting for the telephone; he could not see her there, so she saw herself for him—it was almost the same.
She considered the immediate future in all its gorgeous possibilities—the first night, with the audience whispering: “Do you realize that’s the Perry girl?” With the final curtain, tumultuous applause and herself, with arms full of flowers, leading forth a tall, shy man who would say: “I owe it all to her.” And Mrs. McRae’s furious face in the audience, and the remorseful face of Miss Brereton, of the Brereton School, who happened to be in town. “Had I but known her genius, I wouldn’t have acted as I did.” Comments jubilant and uproarious from every side: “The greatest young actress on the American stage!”
Then the move to a larger theater; great, staring, electric letters, JOSEPHINE PERRY IN RACE RIOT. “No, father, I’m not going back to school. This is my education and my debut.” And her father’s answer:
“Well, little girl, I’ll have to admit it was a lucky speculation for me to put up that money.”
If the figure of John Bailey became a little dim during the latter part of this reverie, it was because the reverie itself opened out to vaguer and vaguer horizons, to return always to that opening night from which it started once more.
Lillian, Travis and Ed came, but she was hardly aware of them, listening for the telephone. They sat, as they had so often, in a row on the steps, surrounded, engulfed, drowned in summer. But they were growing up and the pattern was breaking; they were absorbed in secret destinies of their own, no matter how friendly their voices or how familiar their laughter in the silence. Josephine’s boredom with a discussion of the tournament turned to irascibility; she told Travis de Coppet that he smelled of onions.
“I won’t eat any onions when we rehearse for the vaudeville,” he said.
“You won’t be rehearsing with me, because I’m not being in it. I’ve got a little tired of ‘Here come the jolly golfing girls. Hurray!’”
The phone rang and she excused herself.
“Are you alone?”
“There’re some people here—that I’ve known all my life.”
“Don’t kiss anybody. I don’t mean that—go kiss anybody you want to.”
“I don’t want to.” She felt her own lips’ warmth in the mouthpiece of the phone.
“I’m out in a pay station. She came up to my room in a crazy humor and I got out.”
Josephine didn’t answer; something went out of her when he spoke of his wife.
When she went back on the porch her guests, sensing her abstraction, were on their feet.
“No. We want to go. You bore us too.”
Her parents’ car pursued Ed’s around the circular drive. Her father motioned that he wanted to see her alone.
“I didn’t quite understand about my spending my money. Is this a Socialist bunch?”
“I told you that mother knew some of the——”
“But who is it you know? The fellow who wrote the play?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Just around.”
“He asked you to raise the money?”
“No.”
“I’d certainly like to have a talk with him before you go into this any further. Invite him out to luncheon Saturday?”
“All right,” she agreed unwillingly. “If you don’t taunt him about his poverty and his ragged clothes.”
“What a thing to accuse me of!”
It was with a deep uneasiness that, next Saturday, Josephine drove her roadster to the station. She was relieved to see that he had had a haircut, and he looked very big and powerful and distinguished among the tennis crowd as he got off the train. But finding him nervous, she drove around Lake Forest for half an hour.
“Whose house is that?” he kept asking. “Who are these two people you just spoke to?”
“Oh, I don’t know; just somebody. There’ll be nobody at lunch, but the family and a boy named Howard Page I’ve known for years.”
“These boys you’ve known for years,” he sighed. “Why wasn’t I one?”
“But you don’t want to be that. You want to be the best writer in the world.”
In the Perrys’ living room John Bailey stared at a photograph of bridesmaids at her sister’s wedding the previous summer. Then Howard Page, a junior at New Haven, arrived and they talked of the tennis: Mrs. McRae’s nephew had done brilliantly and was conceded a chance in the finals this afternoon. When Mrs. Perry came downstairs, just before luncheon, John Bailey could not help turning his back on her suddenly and walking up and down to pretend he was at home. He knew in his heart he was better than these people, and he couldn’t bear that they should not know it.
The maid called him to the telephone, and Josephine overheard him say, “I can’t help it. You have no right to call me here.” It was because of the existence of his wife that she had not let him kiss her, but had fitted him, instead, into her platonic reverie, which should endure until Providence set him free.
At luncheon she was relieved to see John Bailey and her father take a liking to each other. John was expert and illuminating about the race riots, and she saw how thin and meager Howard Page was beside him.
Again John Bailey was summoned to the phone; this time he left the room with an exclamation, said three words into the mouthpiece and hung up with a sharp click.
Back at table, he whispered to Josephine: “Will you tell the maid to say I’m gone if she calls again?”
Josephine was in argument with her mother: “I don’t see the use of coming out if I could be an actress instead.”
“Why should she come out?” her father agreed. “Hasn’t she done enough rushing around?”
“But certainly she’s to finish school. There’s a course in dramatic art and every year they give a play.”
“What do they give?” demanded Josephine scornfully. “Shakspere or something like that! Do you realize there are at least a dozen poets right here in Chicago that are better than Shakspere?”
John Bailey demurred with a laugh. “Oh, no. One maybe.”
“I think a dozen,” insisted the eager convert.
“In Billy Phelps’ course at Yale——” began Howard Page, but Josephine said vehemently:
“Anyhow, I don’t think you ought to wait till people are dead before you recognize them. Like mother does.”
“I do no such thing,” objected Mrs. Perry. “Did I say that, Howard?”
“In Billy Phelps’ course at Yale——” began Howard again, but this time Mr. Perry interrupted:
“We’re getting off the point. This young man wants my daughter in his play. If there’s nothing disgraceful in the play I don’t object.”
“In Billy——”
“But I don’t want Josephine in anything sordid.”
“Sordid!” Josephine glared at him. “Don’t you think there are plenty of sordid things right here in Lake Forest, for instance?”
“But they don’t touch you,” her father said.
“Don’t they, though?”
“No,” he said firmly. “Nothing sordid touches you. If it does, then it’s your own fault.” He turned to John Bailey. “I understand you need money.”
John flushed. “We do. But don’t think——”
“That’s all right. We’ve stood behind the opera here for many years and I’m not afraid of things simply because they’re new. We know some women on your committee and I don’t suppose they’d stand for any nonsense. How much do you need?”
“About two thousand dollars.”
“Well, you raise half and I’ll raise half—on two conditions: First, my name kept entirely out of it and my daughter’s name not played up in any way; second, you assure me personally that she doesn’t play any questionable part or have any speeches to make that might offend her mother.”
John Bailey considered. “That last is a large order,” he said. “I don’t know what would offend her mother. There wouldn’t be any cursing to do, for instance. There’s not a bit in the whole damn play.”
He flushed slowly at their laughter.
“Nothing sordid is going to touch Josephine unless she steps into it herself,” said Mr. Perry.
“I see your point,” John Bailey said.
Lunch was over. For some moments Mrs. Perry had been glancing toward the hall, where some loud argument was taking place.
“Shall we——”
They had scarcely crossed the threshold of the living room when the maid appeared, followed by a local personage in a vague uniform of executive blue.
“Hello, Mr. Kelly. You going to take us into custody?”
Kelly hesitated awkwardly. “Is there a Mr. Bailey?”
John, who had wandered off, swung about sharply. “What?”
“There’s an important message for you. They’ve been trying to get you here, but they couldn’t, so they telephoned the constable—that’s me.” He beckoned him, and then, talking to him, tried at the same time to urge him, with nods of his head, toward the privacy of outdoors; his voice, though lowered, was perfectly audible to everybody in the room.
“The St. Anthony’s Hospital—your wife slashed both her wrists and turned the gas on—they want you as soon as you
