“One girl at school knows Clark Gable,” she said, switching the subject. “Do you know him, Mr. Harrison?”
“No,” Mr. Harrison said in such a funny way that both father and daughter looked at him. His face had turned gray.
“I wonder if I could ask for a cup of coffee.”
The host stepped on the bell.
“Do you want to lie down, Ed?”
“No, thanks. I brought a brief case of work to do on the train and the strain on the eyes always seems to affect the old pump.”
Being one of those who had made an unwelcome breakfast of chlorine gas eighteen years before, Bryan understood that Mr. Harrison could never be quite sure. As the other man drank his coffee, the world was still swimming and he felt the need of telling this pretty little girl something—before the tablecloth got darker.
“Were you offended at what I said about Peppy Velance? You were. I saw you wondering how an old man like me would dare even talk about her.”
“Honestly——”
He waved her silent with a feeling that his own time was short.
“I didn’t want to give you the idea that all actresses are as superficial as Peppy. It’s a fine career. Lots of intelligent women go into it now.”
What was it that he wanted to tell her? There was something in that eager little face that he longed to help.
He shook his head from side to side when Bryan asked him once more if he would like to lie down.
“Of course, it’s better to do things than to talk about them,” he said, catching his breath with an effort.
He choked on the coffee. “Nobody wants a lot of bad actresses. But it would be nice if all girls were to do something.”
As his weakness increased he felt that, perhaps, it was this pretty little girl’s face he was fighting. Then he fainted.
Afterwards he was on his feet with Bryan’s arm supporting him.
“No… Here on Gwen’s sofa … till I can get the doctor… Gently… There you are… Gwen, I want you to stay in the room a minute.”
She was thinking:
“Jason will be here any time now.” She wished her father would hurry at the phone. Growing up during her mother’s illness had inevitably made her callous about such things.
Their doctor lived almost across the street. When he arrived, she and her father retired to his study.
“What do you think, daddy? Will Mr. Harrison have to go to a hospital?”
“I don’t know whether they’ll want to move him.”
“What about Jason then?”
Abstracted, he only half heard her. “I hope it’s nothing serious about Mr. Harrison, but did you notice the color of his face?”
The doctor came into the study and held a quiet conversation with him, from which Gwen caught the words “trained nurse,” and “I’ll call the drugstore.”
As Bryan started into the other room, she said:
“Daddy, if Jason and I went out——”
She broke off as he turned.
“You and Jason aren’t going out. I told you that.”
“But if Mr. Harrison’s got to stay in the guest room right next door, where you can hear every word——”
She stopped again at the expression in her father’s face when what she was saying dawned on him.
“Call Jason right away and tell him not to come,” he said. He shook his head from side to side: “Good Lord! Whose little girl are you?”
III
Six days later Gwen came home, propelling herself as if she were about to dive into a ditch just ahead. She wore a sort of hat that evidently heaven had sent down upon her. It had lit as an ornament on her left temple, and when she raised her hand to her head, it slid—the impression being that it was held by an invisible elastic, which might snap at any moment and send it, with a zip, back into space.
“Where did you get it?” the cook asked enviously as she came in through the pantry entrance.
“Get what?”
“Where did you get it?” her father asked as she came into his study.
“This?” Gwen asked incredulously.
“It’s all right with me.”
The maid had followed her in, and he said, in answer to her question:
“We’ll have the same diet ordered for Mr. Harrison. Wait a minute—if Gwen’s hat floats out the window, take a shotgun out of the closet—and see if you can bring it down, like a duck.”
In her room, Gwen removed the article of discussion, putting it delicately on her dresser for present admiration. Then she went to pay her daily visit to Mr. Harrison.
He was so much better that he was on the point of getting up. When Gwen came in, he sent the nurse for some water and lay back momentarily. To Gwen he looked more formidable as he got better. His hair, from lack of cutting, wasn’t like the smooth coiffures of her friends. She wished her father knew handsomer people.
“I’m about to get up and make my arrangements to go back to New York to work. Before I go, though, I want to tell you something.”
“All right, Mr. Harrison. I’m listening.”
“It’s seldom you find beauty and intelligence in the same person. When you do they have to spend the first part of their life terribly afraid of a flame that they will have to put out someday——”
“Yes, Mr. Harrison——”
“——and sometimes they spend the rest of their life trying to wake up that same flame. Then it’s like a kid trying to make a bonfire out of two sticks, only this time one of the sticks is the beauty they have lost and the other stick is the intelligence they haven’t cultivated—and the two sticks won’t make a bonfire—and they just think that life has done them a dirty trick, when the truth is these two sticks would never set fire to each other. And now go call the nurse for me, Gwen.” As she left the room he called after her, “Don’t be too hard on your father.”
She turned around from the door—“What do you mean, don’t be hard on father?”
“He loved somebody who was beautiful, like you.”
“You mean mummy?”
“You do look like her. Nobody could ever actually be like her.” He broke off to write a check for the nurse, and as if he was impelled by something outside himself he added, “So did many other men.” He brought himself up sharply and asked the nurse, “Do I owe anything more to the night nurse?” Then once again to Gwen:
“I want to tell you about your father,” he said. “He never got over your mother’s death, never will. If he is hard on you, it is because he loves you.”
“He’s never hard on me,” she lied.
“Yes, he is. He is unjust sometimes, but your mother——” He broke off and said to the nurse, “Where’s my tie?”
“Here it is, Mr. Harrison.”
After he had left the house in a flurry of telephoning, Gwen took her bath, weighted her fresh, damp hair with curlers, and drew herself a mouth with the last remnant from a set of varicolored lipsticks that had belonged to her mother. Encountering her father in the hall she looked at him closely in the light of what Mr. Harrison had said, but she only saw the father she had always known.
“Daddy, I want to ask you once more. Jason has invited me to go to the movies with him tonight. I thought you wouldn’t mind—if there were four of us. I’m not absolutely sure Dizzy can come, but I think so. Since Mr. Harrison’s been here I haven’t been able to have any company.”
“Don’t do anything about it until you’ve had your dinner,” Bryan said. “What’s the use of having an admirer if you can’t dangle him a little?”
“Dangle how, what do you mean?”
“Well, I just meant make him wait.”
“But, daddy, how could I make him wait when he’s the most important boy in town?”
“What is this all about?” he demanded. “Seems to be a question of whether this prep-school hero has his wicked way with you or whether I have mine. And anyhow, it’s just possible that something more amusing will turn up.”
Gwen seemed to have no luck that night—on the phone Dizzy said:
“I’m almost sure I can go, but I don’t know absolutely.”
“You call me back whatever happens.”
“You call me. Mother thinks I can go, but she doesn’t think she can do anything now, ’cause there’s something under the sink and father hasn’t come home.”
“The sink!”
“We don’t know exactly what it is; it may be a water main or something. That’s why everybody’s afraid to go downstairs. I can’t tell you anything definite until father comes home.”
“Dizzy! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re so upset out here too. I’ll explain when I see you. Anyhow, mother’s telling me to put the phone down”—there was a momentary interruption—“so they can get to the plumber.”
Then the phone hung up with an impact that suggested that all the plumbers in the world were arriving in gross.
Immediately the phone rang again. It was Jason.
“Well, how about it, can we go to the movies?”
“I don’t know. I just finished talking to Dizzy. The water main’s busted and she has to have a plumber.”
“Can’t you go to the picture whether she can or not? I’ve got the car and our chauffeur.”
“No, I can’t go alone and Dizzy’s got this thing.”
The impression in Gwen’s voice was that plague was raging in the suburbs.
“What?”
“Never mind, never mind. I don’t understand it myself. If you want to know more about it call up Dizzy.”
“But Peppy Velance is in Night Train at the Eleanora Duse Theater—you know, the little place just about two blocks from where you live.”
There
