“Oh, no, no, no! Wait a minute, let me tell you. It went on for three weeks and I honestly wanted to kill myself, Jake. Life wasn’t worth while unless I could have him. And one night we got in a car by accident alone and he just caught me and made me tell him I loved him. He knew—he couldn’t help knowing.”
“It just—swept over you,” said Jacob steadily. “I see.”
“Oh, I knew you’d understand, Jake! You understand everything. You’re the best person in the world, Jake, and don’t I know it?”
“You’re going to marry him?”
Slowly she nodded her head. “I said I’d have to come East first and see you.” As her fear lessened, the extent of his grief became more apparent to her and her eyes filled with tears. “It only comes once, Jake, like that. That’s what kept in my mind all those weeks I didn’t hardly speak to him—if you lose it once, it’ll never come like that again and then what do you want to live for? He was directing the picture—he was the same about me.”
“I see.”
As once before, her eyes held his like hands. “Oh, Ja-a-ake!” In that sudden croon of compassion, all-comprehending and deep as a song, the first force of the shock passed off. Jacob’s teeth came together again and he struggled to conceal his misery. Mustering his features into an expression of irony, he called for the check. It seemed an hour later they were in a taxi going toward the Plaza Hotel.
She clung to him. “Oh, Jake, say it’s all right! Say you understand! Darling Jake, my best friend, my only friend, say you understand!”
“Of course I do, Jenny.” His hand patted her back automatically.
“Oh-h-h, Jake, you feel just awful, don’t you?”
“I’ll survive.”
“Oh-h-h, Jake!”
They reached the hotel. Before they got out Jenny glanced at her face in her vanity mirror and turned up the collar of her fur cape. In the lobby, Jacob ran into several people and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” in a strained, unconvincing voice. The elevator waited. Jenny, her face distraught and tearful, stepped in and held out her hand toward him with the fist clenched helplessly.
“Jake,” she said once more.
“Good night, Jenny.”
She turned her face to the wire wall of the cage. The gate clanged.
“Hold on!” he almost said. “Do you realize what you’re doing, starting that car like that?”
He turned and went out the door blindly. “I’ve lost her,” he whispered to himself, awed and frightened. “I’ve lost her!”
He walked over Fifty-ninth Street to Columbus Circle and then down Broadway. There were no cigarettes in his pocket—he had left them at the restaurant—so he went into a tobacco store. There was some confusion about the change and someone in the store laughed.
When he came out he stood for a moment puzzled. Then the heavy tide of realization swept over him and beyond him, leaving him stunned and exhausted. It swept back upon him and over him again. As one rereads a tragic story with the defiant hope that it will end differently, so he went back to the morning, to the beginning, to the previous year. But the tide came thundering back with the certainty that she was cut off from him forever in a high room at the Plaza Hotel.
He walked down Broadway. In great block letters over the porte-cochere of the Capitol Theater five words glittered out into the night: “Carl Barbour and Jenny Prince.”
The name startled him, as if a passer-by had spoken it. He stopped and stared. Other eyes rose to that sign, people hurried by him and turned in.
Jenny Prince.
Now that she no longer belonged to him, the name assumed a significance entirely its own.
It hung there, cool and impervious, in the night, a challenge, a defiance.
Jenny Prince.
“Come and rest upon my loveliness,” it said. “Fulfill your secret dreams in wedding me for an hour.”
JENNY PRINCE.
It was untrue—she was back at the Plaza Hotel, in love with somebody. But the name, with its bright insistence, rode high upon the night.
“I love my dear public. They are all so sweet to me.”
The wave appeared far off, sent up whitecaps, rolled toward him with the might of pain, washed over him. “Never any more. Never any more.” The wave beat upon him, drove him down, pounding with hammers of agony on his ears. Proud and impervious, the name on high challenged the night.
JENNY PRINCE.
She was there! All of her, the best of her—the effort, the power, the triumph, the beauty.
Jacob moved forward with a group and bought a ticket at the window.
Confused, he stared around the great lobby. Then he saw an entrance and walking in, found himself a place in the vast-throbbing darkness.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post magazine (20 August 1927).
