Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “I don’t know what has become of her. Her friend was a jockey who sometimes rides in England. I imagine they went back.”

  “Nobody to notice you in a crowd. I’ve reasons for wanting to inspire local confidence. I’m going to open the drive myself with fifty thousand. You need only show up in time to hear the addresses and mingle with the crowd a little afterward, at the refreshment booths. It will be a crush, almost identical with the fête at Aix two years ago.…”

  “I’ll need a gardenish sort of dress.”

  “Get it.”

  Get it! Never the proffered wherewithal to make the getting of it a less laborious scouting about for remnant mill-ends, or odds and ends of material to be put together by ingenuity. Why, the cost of that gray chinchilla-trimmed wrap thrown across the bar of Richard’s Kurt-Sussex that day, was three times the cost of her entire wardrobe. The thought evoked a rattle of chilly laughter off her lips.

  “If you don’t want to come—if it is asking too much—”

  “Don’t be silly, darling. I was just thinking a dotted mull makes up pretty, and I notice they are dyeing them tan nowadays, just by dipping the material in coffee. Tan-dotted mull with brown ribbon velvet …”

  “Want you to take notice of a John Estabrooke. President of Exmoor. He and his wife will be there. Tall white-haired fellow, Yankee as Uncle Sam. She is one of these white-skinned, red-haired women. Quite lame. I’ll be having something to talk over with you about him in a few days. Also Hale Davis is sure to be there. Want your judgment on that fellow. He has me guessing.”

  “You know what I already think of him from the way he tried to double-cross you in the Spiegel Trusteeship.”

  “I’ve taken your advice on that, but just the same, want you to see him. Funny thing, dear, what it does for me to have you tied to the old apron string. I need the feeling of you around. Don’t let me down, Ray.”

  “I’m not letting you down, darling; only, where we take such elaborate precautions as a general rule, it does seem—”

  “Let me do the worrying about precautions.”

  And yet something happened on that particular occasion which, while it had no quality of definiteness, was to riddle her with dreads.

  The afternoon preceding the evening of the fête, there were thundershowers, and, looking out between her lace curtains onto the busy little thoroughfare, she noted with relief, even with the coffee-colored mull spread out on a chair and waiting, that the gutters were running fast waters and the rain came down against awnings and onto automobile-tops with a loud hitting sound.

  “It is a straight rain, that means it will be steady and they will have to postpone it,” she thought, with a surge of indefinable relief. But along about four o’clock, a hot July sun came pouring through dissolving clouds, and it became one of those sultry evenings, quickly dried, that can follow in the wake of a day that has not been cooled by its storm.

  The beautiful clipped lawns of the Selfridge estates were quite dry underfoot, and, except for the red and blue of the buntings having run crazily into the white, there was little evidence of recent and deluging rains.

  It was true, the tall nondescript woman in neutral tans attracted little, if any, notice, in the large milling crowds. There were cars parked for a mile and a half down the road, bearing Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Vermont license tags. Fords. Hispano-Suizas. And an assortment of family sedans mixed in with Pierce-Arrows, Rolls-Royces, and Kurt-Sussexes.

  It was not every day that the general public had the opportunity to inspect the sunken gardens of the twin Selfridge estates.

  Once there, Ray felt glad she had come. A watery moon flattened and made gray the lawns, baring them for the laying-on of eccentric shadows cast by tree and building. It was a night the color of a gray moth, with spotted wings. Japanese lanterns strung from tree to tree were the spots. The immense Tudor castle of the senior Selfridge was gray in the moon-wash too, and cast a geometric shadow, black as ink.

  There was a large woman, the size of eternity, and in a gray shroud, walking somewhere through this night, and on her shoulder was the gray moth with the orange spots made of Japanese lanterns. Well, anyway, smitten with the beauty, that was the way fantasy had its way with Ray. And the thought smote her further, “I am that gray woman, the color of the background.”

  It was while she was standing toward the rear of the camp-chairs that had been ranged in rows before the platform, securely tucked into the overflow of standees, that the something happened which gave her once more that indescribable sensation of someone’s having caught her heart in his hand on its frightened rebound.

  Richard was there. She had spied him earlier in the evening, dancing with one of the young girls who moved among the throng, winsomely hawking the cardboard bricks.

  He was in flannels and the light flowed vainly to pierce the heavy black brilliance of his hair; and it seemed to Ray, standing tiptoe behind the fringe of onlookers, that the night was a delusion and that presently she must find herself standing beside a hansom cab at the curbstone of the C. H. and D., looking into the gray eyes of a larger, squarer, handsomer Walter, who was somehow his own son. It did not do to linger more than an instant, but it was the closest she had ever beheld Richard, and, moving on, she actually needed the reassurance of a glimpse of Walter himself, standing beside a sundial, talking to a man she immediately recognized, from his descriptions, to be John Estabrooke, to brush the curious web out of her mind. The stouter, slightly bald, slightly paunchy Walter was hers.…

  Then, preceding his father’s address, during some astonishingly expert banjo-playing, she could see the young Walter (no, no, the young Richard, of course!) through an aperture formed by two heads, standing in one of the side aisles, his indolent but welded young polo-player’s body relaxed against a tree, his attention focused upon the fingers of the entertainer as they flashed across the banjo-face.

  Once, in the very early years, she had half tried to express to Walter her desire not to try to prevent issue, and had never forgotten the recoil of something in him that was more than fear. Well, whatever the cause of his withdrawal (she believed it to be into the kernel of race), just the same, she might have had to show, for a lifetime of single-track adherence, something as miraculous as that straight young man in the moonlight. She might even—she might even—The thought ran away with her, as she stood in the crowd, and caused her to begin to tremble.

  It was then that she saw Irma, who was in white, with small pearls in the scarcely perceptible threat of crease in her white neck, push her way to the side of her brother. A basket of paper bricks hung by ribbons from her left shoulder; and her lightish hair, Corinne the girl’s all over again, curly to a threat of kinkiness, was tipped with moonlight.

  It happened just as obviously as you would hold up A-B-C on the linen page of a baby book. There was not a second of it which, out of the tail of her eye, Ray did not see happening. The plump white hand, with a bracelet of seed pearls on it that she had helped Walter select, placed on her brother’s elbow. His listening, inclined ear, then startled face. The impulse to turn; the white hand with the bracelet of seed pearls, restraining. The interval of waiting, while the head that had been told not to turn too obviously, holds eager pause, and then the face of Walter’s son, swinging to find hers.

  It was a face that, even in moonlight, darkened, as it gazed, with a flush that made it look as if it had been slapped. It was, if you can conceive the look when a body feels itself being crushed by a taxicab or run over by a train, the face of someone in the act of being hurt.

  That was all, because without a second glance, without waiting for Walter, explaining it to him later on the plea of sudden illness, she slipped through the crowd and out to the station taxi, that was waiting with its flag down.

  Never a word, all the remainder of that summer, of the fear that from that day on was nesting high and higher in her heart; but, except to take the Babe for his early and late walks, or to go to
town when a chance for a few days with Walter presented itself, she did not leave her rooms again until the end of July.

  On that date, some five days after the Olympic had sailed, bearing “Mr. and Mrs. Walter D. Saxel, chauffeur, and maid,” a Mrs. Ray Schmidt, destination Cherbourg, embarked on the Saxonia.

  41

  “Let me go as your maid,” people were always saying to Ray when they heard of these periodic trips of hers abroad. “Oh, don’t you want someone to carry your luggage or comb the dog?”

  That was well and good from the outside, looking in. Actually, these trips (there had been six of them in all by now) amounted to little in the way of travel. Once, because she had never seen London, she had gone over alone for a few days from Paris, during a six-week stay there at the tiny pension-hotel in the rue Cambon, near the Crillon. Another year, while Corinne and Walter visited the Frankfurt-am-Main Friedlanders, she had taken a Cook’s tour of the larger cities of the Continent; but in the main her European trips were largely no more than a matter of changing quarters from the New York flat to a European hotel or pension within easy reach of the large hostelries patronized by the Saxels.

  Paris, seen visit after visit, if glimpsed only from an occasional day’s tour when she knew that Walter was to be out of the reckoning, or from hotel rooms that looked on a court, and which she failed to leave most of the day for fear of not being in when her guest called, was not the bewitching city of café, gallery, shops, bridges, tower, Madeleine, Louvre, Montmarte, escargots, Halles, Saint-Cloud, Seine, Sauterne, Champs-Elysées, boulevard, and Bois.

  Not the Paris that she, Ray, would so have loved: the Paris of terraces and cafés, rue de la Paix, Ritz Bar, dancing at Les Acacias, dining at Château Madrid, vagabonding among the “bars” and hotels, restaurants and brasseries, of the town and the Bois. The American’s Paris, of couturiere, Longchamps, Luigi’s, and Harry’s, never so much as showed her its face, except from street glimpses or, occasionally, as she sat down at a sidewalk terrace, sipping her crème de menthe and watching the ebb and flow of a magic city whose language she did not speak, nor scarcely understood.

  At Aix-les-Bains, Walter’s favorite spa of all Europe, it was better. The Hotel Bernasçon, perched on its hill overlooking the town and spread of valley, gave one a sense of there being two distinct townships, an upper and lower, although the little community offered practically none of that larger privacy of Paris. But the pretty French spa, within sight of the first towering heads of the Alps, and in many ways as Italian in flavor as in the days before it was ceded to French soil, seemed, once you set foot on its curative soil, to reduce to minimum, fears, dreads, old nervousness. A false security about that, though; because, much more so than in Paris, Nice, or New York, here the centrifugal life of the place emanated from the nucleus of the Casino, the bathhouses, the park in the public square which contained the drinking-springs.

  Mornings, at eleven, during the season, there were band concerts in this square, and it was part of the prescribed routine for the whole of the visiting population, from the large hotels as well as from the smaller hostelries and pensions, to foregather for the purpose of sipping the waters and strolling or sitting among the pleasant trees, while, gaily as a fountain, the band concert splashed into the bright morning serenity.

  “Aix-les-Bains,” Walter was fond of saying, “rests me body and soul. Quiet enough to get your fingernails out of your palms; not so quiet that it gives you the jimjams.”

  “There is something in that, if you live the life of the spa as it should be lived,” Ray had once ventured to reply, but the remark did not make its dent.

  Afternoons at four, the bright performance of music, parasols, foregatherings of groups for tea and dancing at the Hotel Splendide, Bernasçon, or Europa, helped conceal the creature-fact that many of the men and women, so seemingly carefree over tea or cocktail, were racked to the bone with infirmities, or the threat of them. Aches-and-Pains was the persiflage-name for Aix-les-Bains. The mode was to flout at your gout and conceal the rheumatic twinge behind good patter. In addition to the English and Americans, there were always, to Ray’s endless and insular amazement, maharajas in the most rigueur European clothes, South American magnates, Mohammedan princes, and once, during her sojourn, a queen of Greece.

  Evenings, even the hint of infirmity disappeared entirely, and the hundreds who in forenoon had hobbled to their baths or been borne in the mystery of shrouded sedan-chairs through the streets of the Thermal Establishment, seemed to burst mysteriously through the restraints of the flesh, and fling themselves into the burning night life of the Casino.

  Oh, there was no use talking, no use denying it to herself, solitude, the quiet reaches of the long, long days she had learned to spend passively within hotel rooms, had not succeeded in downing within her a love of the light, the movement, the gaming, the dining, the wining in the public or semipublic resort. A private party had come to be a bit intimidating to her, but the paradoxical privacy of the hotel dining room, the casino foyer, the racetrack grandstand, where one might see, be seen, was wine of a bouquet more perfect to her than any that had ever passed her lips.

  Evenings, from her rooms in a small hotel in a small street that ran directly beneath the hill that held, like a magnificent pack, atop its back, the Hotel Bernasçon, she would begin to see, while the lovely pearly-blue sky that was half Italian was still tinged with sunset, the first reflection of the lights of the Casino.

  In another few hours, the big hotels and the neighboring villas would begin their disgorge, and, before midnight, thick crusts of jeweled humanity would form around the strange seductive crater of the gaming-table.

  Set in gardens, scented by hills over which Attila had marched, frescoed, shaking its light from the prisms of rows of huge crystal chandeliers as a spaniel shakes its sides of water, there was something about the spectacle of the Casino, sending its luminosity against the sky, that was a clutch of excitement through her very being.

  Well and good to remain discreetly at her distance from the bandstand, or to see to it that her strolls through the town and along the upper reaches were carefully away from the direction of the Bernasçon, or were timed to the siesta, bridge, or meal hours of the hotel folk; but there was something about the Casino after dark, when, seated in her room, the Babe asleep at her feet, she could see that glow spring against the heavens, which set her feet tapping of a nervousness of desire to be part of that scene of baccarat and dance, best-dressed cocottes in the world, women with faces cut from polished almonds and lit with the kind of precious jewels you saw in the show windows along the rue de la Paix.

  American women, with sleek short hair and rows of blazing bracelets that formed a rigid cuff to the elbow, slim and sheathed in the brief gowns of the period, that, when they sat, revealed the pampered flesh of their bare legs above their web stockings. Men with bands of ribbon across their shirtfronts sat night after night in the platinum-and-diamond crust of the craters: Mohammedan princes, who fed out francs by the thousands to hovering cocottes, American businessmen, British diplomats and consorts, citizens, ambassadors—youth, middle age, and senility of more countries than Ray had been able to retain in memory from her Woodward High School days.

  It was one thing to just avoid the public square and popular tea-haunts where you might encounter Corinne or one of her children; it was another deliberately to deny yourself the diversion, sometimes the profit, and always the pleasurable excitement of the Casino.

  At Monte Carlo, where the gardens, cafés, gambling-rooms, lounges, foyers, were so varied that the Casino itself was almost a small city, it had all been much simpler. Here at Aix-les-Bains, on those evenings when she knew Corinne to be present, she never ventured into the rooms where the larger stakes were being played, but remained content to take her smaller hazards at the polyglot tables where the croupiers dealt in the pea-shot sums of the pension and boardinghouse crowds.

  Townspeople were not admitted to the Casino; but nightl
y, during the season, there poured from the boardinghouses and pensions conducted by the excluded townspeople, a procession of the transient small fry who were eager to lay their five-franc spots in the outer rooms, adjoining those where such kingly stakes as fifty thousand francs were placed upon a single deal of baccarat.

  Hours on end, fascinated, Ray would stand in the heavy fringe of onlookers surrounding these high tables, watching with bright magnetized eyes the spectacle of chance as it held the circles around the green baize in attitudes of strain, expectation, hope, frustration, excitement, suspense, until it amounted to something like indecent exposure to permit these faces, forever being hauled at by croupiers, to reveal themselves to even one another.

  The girls on the fringe of these men and women who played and won and lost, in terms of hundreds of thousands of francs, were liked rouged little ghouls of these nightly occasions, hovering at the elbows of the men whose stacks of chips or notes or coins were highest. It was almost an ethic that the male winner must feed into their greedy little jeweled talons the spume of his gains. Cocottes of one country or another, the notorious women of famous men, manikins, prosperous prostitutes, morganatic wives, hung on the outskirts of these gaming tables night after night. One’s head reeled with their perfumes, their jeweled arms reaching over shoulders to place bets, their softly breathed profanities, their obscene whispered prayers, their soft hissing-noise of despair and success you could feel in their actual breathings against your ear if, like Ray, you were packed into the table fringe. Spangled birds of paradise pecking at spangled offal. Sometimes, if winnings ran high in her particular segment of the fringe, a stray five-hundred-franc note or a handful of chips flung over a shoulder, often without the head that had motivated the hand troubled to swing, would find itself in Ray’s hand.

  At first, this had come as a shock; but gradually, as it became apparent that even the smug married women, who to Ray were criteria for all things, plucked at these backward-flung notes as nimbly as the “girls,” it all became part of the evening’s high pitch.