II
After that fall, things were different. George stayed on at school, but this time as a boarder, and visited Dolly in New York on Christmas and Easter. The following summer she came back to the Coast and opened up the house for a month’s rest, but she was committed to another season in the East and George went back with her to attend a tutoring school for Yale.
Sense and Sensibility was made after all, but with Phyllis, not Bette Davis, in the part of Marianne. George saw Phyllis only once during that year—when Jim Jerome, who sometimes took him to his ranch for week-ends, told him one Sunday they’d do anything George wanted. George suggested a call on Phyllis.
“Do you remember when you told me about ‘une grande cliente?’”
“You mean I said that about Phyllis?”
“No, about Dolly.”
Phyllis was no fun that day, surrounded and engulfed by men; after his departure for the East, George found other girls and was a personage for having known Phyllis and for what was, in his honest recollection, a superflirtation.
The next June, after examinations, Dolly came down to the liner to see Hennen and George off to Europe; she was coming herself when the show closed—and by transatlantic plane.
“I’d like to wait and do that with you,” George offered.
“You’re eighteen—you have a long and questionable life before you.”
“You’re just twenty-seven.”
“You’ve got to stick to the boys you’re traveling with.”
Hennen was going first-class; George was going tourist. At the tourist gangplank there were so many girls from Bryn Mawr and Smith and the finishing schools that Dolly warned him.
“Don’t sit up all night drinking beer with them. And if the pressure gets too bad slip over into first-class, and let Hennen calm you.”
Hennen was very calm and depressed about the parting.
“I shall go down to tourist,” he said desperately. “And meet those beautiful girls.”
“It would make you a heavy,” she warned him, “like Ivan Lebedeff in a picture.”
Hennen and George talked between upper and lower deck as the ship steamed through the narrows.
“I feel great contempt for you down in the slums,” said Hennen. “I hope no one sees me speaking to you.”
“This is the cream of the passenger list. They call us tycoon-skins. Speaking of furs, are you going after one of those barges in a mink coat?”
“No—I still expect Dolly to turn up in my stateroom. And, actually, I have cabled her not to cross by plane.”
“She’ll do what she likes.”
“Will you come up and dine with me tonight—after washing your ears?”
There was only one girl of George’s tone of voice on the boat and someone wolfed her away—so he wished Hennen would invite him up to dinner every night, but after the first time it was only for luncheon and Hennen mooned and moped.
“I go to my cabin every night at six,” he said, “and have dinner in bed. I cable Dolly and I think her press agent answers.”
The day before arriving at Southampton, the girl whom George liked quarreled with her admirer over the length of her fingernails or the Munich pact or both—and George stepped out, once more, into tourist class society.
He began, as was fitting, with the ironic touch.
“You and Princeton amused yourself pretty well,” he remarked. “Now you come back to me.”
“It was this way,” explained Martha. “I thought you were conceited about your aunt being Dolly Bordon and having lived in Hollywood—”
“Where did you two disappear to?” he interrupted. “It was a great act while it lasted.”
“Nothing to it,” Martha said briskly. “And if you’re going to be like that—”
Resigning himself to the past, George was presently rewarded.
“As a matter of fact I’ll show you,” she said. “We’ll do what we used to do—before he criticized me as an ignoramus. Good gracious! As if going to Princeton meant anything! My own father went there!”
George followed her, rather excited, through an iron door marked “Private,” upstairs, along a corridor, and up to another door that said “First-Class Passengers Only.”
He was disappointed.
“Is this all? I’ve been up in first-class before.”
“Wait!”
She opened the door cautiously, and they rounded a lifeboat overlooking a fenced-in square of deck.
There was nothing to see—the flash of an officer’s face glancing seaward over a still higher deck, another mink coat in a deck chair; he even peered into the lifeboat to see if they had discovered a stowaway.
“And I found out things that are going to help me later,” Martha muttered as if to herself. “How they work it—if I ever go in for it I’ll certainly know the technique.”
“Of what?”
“Look at the deck chair, stupe.”
Even as George gazed, a long-remembered face emerged in its individuality from behind the huge dark of the figure in the mink coat. And at the moment he recognized Phyllis Burns he saw that Hennen was sitting beside her.
“Watch how she works,” Martha murmured. “Even if you can’t hear you’ll realize you’re looking at a preview.”
George had not been seasick so far, but now only the fear of being seen made him control his impulse as Hennen shifted from his chair to the foot of hers and took her hand. After a moment, Phyllis leaned forward, touching his arm gently in exactly the way George remembered; in her eyes was an ineffable sympathy.
From somewhere the mess call shrilled from a bugle—George seized Martha’s hand and pulled her back along the way they had come.
“But they like it!” Martha protested. “She lives in the public eye. I’d like to cable Winchell right away.”
All George heard was the word “cable.” Within half an hour he had written in an indecipherable code:
HE DIDN’T COME DOWN TOURIST AS DIDN’T NEED TO BECAUSE SENSE AND SENSIBILITY STOP ADVISE SAIL IMMEDIATELY
GEORGE (COLLECT)
Either Dolly didn’t understand or just waited for the clipper anyhow, while George bicycled uneasily through Belgium, timing his arrival in Paris to coincide with hers. She must have been forewarned by his letter, but there was nothing to prove it, as she and Hennen and George rode from Le Bourget into Paris. It was the next morning before the cat jumped nimbly out of the bag, and it had become a sizable cat by afternoon when George walked into the situation. To get there he had to pass a stringy crowd extending from one hotel to another, for word had drifted about that two big stars were in the neighborhood.
“Come in, George,” Dolly called. “You know Phyllis—she’s just leaving for Aix-les-Bains. She’s lucky—either Hennen or I will have to take up residence, depending on who’s going to sue whom. I suggest Hennen sues me—on the charge I made him a poodle dog.”
She was in a reckless mood, for there were secretaries within hearing—and press agents outside and waiters who dashed in from time to time. Phyllis was very composed behind the attitude of “please leave me out of it.” George was damp, bewildered, sad.
“Shall I be difficult, George?” Dolly asked him. “Or shall I play it like a character part—just suited to my sweet nature. Or shall I be primitive? Jim Jerome or Frank Capra could tell me. Have you got good judgment, George, or don’t they teach that till college?”
“Frankly—” said Phyllis getting up, “frankly, it’s as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I didn’t know Hennen would be on the boat any more than he did me.”
At least George had learned at tutoring school how to be rude. He made noxious sounds—and faced Hennen who got to his feet.
“Don’t irritate me!” George was trembling a little with anger. “You’ve always been nice till now but you’re twice my age and I don’t want to tear you in two.”
Dolly sat him down; Phyllis went out and they heard her emphatic “Not now! Not now!” echo in the corridor.
“You and I could take a trip somewhere,” said Hennen unhappily.
Dolly shook her head.
“I know about those solutions. I’ve been confidential friend in some of these things. You go away and take it with you. Silence falls— nobody has any lines. Silence—trying to guess behind the silence— then imitating how it was—and more silence—and great wrinkles in the heart.”
“I can only say I am very sorry,” said Hennen.
“Don’t be. I’ll go along on George’s bicycle trip if he’ll have me. And you take your new chippie up to Pont-a-Dieu to meet your family. I’m alive, Hennen—though I admit I’m not enjoying it. Evidently you’ve been dead some time and I didn’t know it.”
She told George afterward that she was grateful to Hennen for not appealing to the maternal instinct. She had done all her violent suffering on the plane, in an economical way she had. Even being a saint requires a certain power of organization, and Dolly was pretty near to a saint to those close to her—even to the occasional loss of temper.
But all the next two months George never saw Dolly’s eyes gleam silvery blue in the morning; and often, when his hotel room was near hers, he would lie awake and listen while she moved about whimpering softly in the night.
But by breakfast time she was always a “grande cliente.” George knew exactly what that meant now.
In September, Dolly, her secretary and her maid, and George moved into a bungalow of a Beverly Hills hotel—a bungalow crowded with flowers that went to the hospitals almost as fast as they came in. Around them again was the twilight privacy of pictures against a jealous and intrusive world; inside, the telephones, agent, producers, and friends.
Dolly went about, talking possibilities, turning down offers, encouraging
