Children of the Ritz

Chapter Two

Haines brought Mrs. Pennington and Lyle home shortly after one o’clock. They had little to say to each other, he could not help noticing, as though they had not had a very good time.

“Where did you drive the children after they left us, Haines?” Mrs. Pennington wanted to know as she got out.

“The Alabam, madam.”

“I’d better send the car back for them,” she said to Lyle, “otherwise they’ll stay there until four or five o’clock.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” advised Lyle coolly. “If they can’t come home when we do, let them take a taxi or a train. Father will expect the car on duty at eight in the morning. How can you send this man back to town at such an hour? I think it’s cruel.” The offhand way in which she said this man was appalling Haines knew he was supposed to be without ears and eyes, simply a part of the machine. He hated to have it taken for granted, though. It was a little hard to be so near all the time and yet not even be considered a living human being.

“Very well,” said her mother. She turned to him: “That will be all, then,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night,” said Haines, touching the side of his cap.

The two of them went into the house side by side. A faint, well-nigh imperceptible suggestion of perfumery hovered in the air a short while after they had gone. Then even that disappeared. Haines drove slowly to the garage, his head full of wild, pretty dreams.

Lyle went directly to her room, as her habit was. She heard her mother call up the stairs after her.

“Good night, Lyle dear.”

“Good night, Mother,” she said impatiently, and shut her door. She was bored to the point of fury, with herself and with every one around her. It had been altogether a miserable evening. She made the lights go on, then she stood there and tore the shawl from her shoulders, not violently but with every evidence of disgust. She threw it from her and it fell partly over a brocaded Louis XV chair, trailing the rest of its beautiful length on the floor and lending a touch of abandon to the otherwise immaculate room, whose floor shone like glass. The fretted hands of the pink alabaster clock on a side table, also of the Louis period, pointed to two.

Had Lyle been French she would have relieved herself by breaking things, inoffensive fragile things, in the mood she was in at present. But being an American of English ancestry she couldn’t very well do that. Instead she shut her eyes wearily. Presently she changed into a negligée that had been left on the bed in readiness for her, a thing of expensive fabric but designed rather slovenly, so that the moyen age waistline fell almost at her knees. Then she threw open the tall French window with its myriad little panes and stood looking out.

She became aware that some one was tapping at her door. Who else but her mother at this late hour? To have a chat with her under the pretense of saying good night probably. As though her nerves weren’t on edge enough already. “Damn!” she said under her breath. “Come in,” she said aloud.

It was Diane, as she had guessed instinctively. She flounced in, forgetting to shut the door in her excitement. The draught immediately swayed the two sides of the window and brought them together again, so that an edge of Lyle’s misty georgette was caught between them. She tried to wrench it out with very bad grace and it tore off.

“Mother,” she said bitterly, “you might have closed the door after you.”

Her ill humor was lost upon Mrs. Pennington. “I don’t know what to think,” she began breathlessly. “Your father isn’t in his room. I tried to tell him good night through the door a few moments ago and found out he wasn’t in there.”

“He can’t have gone out at this hour,” said Lyle incredulously.

“The bed isn’t touched. And there was this sealed envelope lying on his writing table. It’s addressed to me.”

Lyle took it from her and examined it curiously. It was his everyday stationery, nothing more. There was nothing unusual about it except the fact that it had been written at all. It had “Diane” on the outside in his handwriting.

“Oh, Lyle dear,” she whimpered pathetically, “I’ve seen this same thing happen time after time in plays, and always scoffed at it. Now I’m willing to believe that things like this do happen. I’m sure something’s wrong—”

“I’m going down to Father’s room,” said Lyle decisively, taking her by the arm, “and you’re coming with me.”

Half an hour later, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, Haines was busying himself going over the surface of the car with a dry sponge when the garage telephone rang shrilly, its summons magnified a hundredfold by the stillness of the place. He dropped the sponge into an empty pail and went to answer it, whistling contentedly under his breath. He recognized Lyle’s voice. It was broken and frightened, all the icy glitter had gone out of it.

“Haines—” She never called him by name before. “Haines—” It was almost a whisper, as though she feared being overheard.

“Yes, miss.”

“—the car. Get the children.” A sob caught in her throat. “Bring them at once. Father is — is ill.” She hung up abruptly, as though afraid to trust her own voice any longer.

Haines threw on his coat, forced the corrugated tin doors apart, got in and started the motor. The lights went on and threw a blinding diamond-white radiance on the trees and grass outside, so that every leaf stood out individually and cast its own particular shadow behind it. The greenness looked gray in the artificial glare. He swung out of the garage, crept heavily over the gravel with a crunching noise, and presently was out on the road, deserted at that hour and glistening palely under an occasional blue arc light that marked the route he would have to follow. He moderated his headlights, eased his back against the leather cushions, and was off toward New York, that lure of the young and the not so young, that folly of an entire continent.

They were not at the Alabam. It was three o’clock and more when he found that much out. A young girl there who had been in their company earlier in the evening volunteered the information that they would most likely be found at a certain negro cabaret up around One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street, in other words, quite a distance away.

“That’s if you find ’em anywhere at all,” she amended pessimistically. “I wouldn’t be too sure about it, though.”

She had trailed out to the entrance after him, evidently with an idea in her muddled mind of going with him, but he cracked the door of the car sullenly shut under her very chin and reared away. “Thanks for the trolley ride!” she called after him resentfully.

He found the place she had mentioned on the north side of the street, a little to the east of Lenox Avenue. It had an elaborate arrangement of electric lights over an entrance which was considerably below the sidewalk level, but they were out by the time he got there. He descended a flight of slippery marble steps that needed washing, running his palm along a gleaming brass hand rail, which clouded over like a mirror as it came in contact with his moist fingers and immediately cleared again as they were removed.

A tall negro with more gold lace and brass buttons than an admiral greeted him in a tiny red-lighted vestibule at the foot of the stairs. A red carpet was spread underfoot.

“Yes, sir, good evening.”

“Page Mr. and Miss Pennington,” Haines told him.

“You better go in and see if you find ’em yo’self, captain,” said the doorman, “I ain’t allowed to budge from here.”

He held open a swinging glass door, revealing a good-looking tan girl presiding over the hat check counter.

“Check your stuff,” she said absent-mindedly, without even looking to see who it was.

Haines smiled at the indifference she displayed and went on inside. The peculiar broken beat of the current dance vogue was in the air, like a whirring of wings. Two golden-orange spotlights in opposite corners of the room were focused together, forming a vivid half moon on the floor where they intersected. In this small space a pair of satin shoes, and silk stockings visible only as far as the knees, were busily twisting themselves in and out in the intricacies of the Black Bottom. People at tables could be heard beating time with their hands, just as they did on street corners when urchins performed for pennies. Finally the feet stopped, and the lights went up.

Haines gasped. It was Angela Pennington. Not only that, but she seemed to have been enjoying herself hugely. She ran back to her table without stopping to acknowledge the applause that came as a reward of her impromptu entertainment. Her brother, who was sitting there in a blind daze, tried to clap her encouragingly on the back. He missed the mark and fell off his chair. Angela laughed hilariously at this. Then all in an instant the whole expression of her face had changed and the grin froze on her lips.

“Who told you to come here?” she demanded curtly.

“Your sister sent me,” replied Haines, every bit as curt.

“What right has she got—” Angela began. She changed her mind and turned suddenly to her brother, who was almost inanimate on the floor. “Come on, get up, Gil. Let’s dance some more.” But Gilbert apparently was in no mood or condition for dancing or anything like it. He flapped a hand toward her loosely and remarked: “Show’s your Uncle Emma.”

“You better get your things,” Haines told Angela with thinly veiled disapproval; “I think they said your father’s in a serious condition.”

“There can’t be anything the matter with him?” she said. “Lyle’s trying to frighten us out of a good time, that’s all.” She looked at him as though she didn’t know whether to believe it or not.

“I don’t know, miss.”

“Something always has to spoil our fun,” she remarked sullenly, digging the prongs of a fork into the tablecloth.

Haines put Gilbert’s arm around his neck and helped him to the door. He turned around. Angela was still sitting there, staring after him defiantly. He stopped where he was and stood waiting. Two or three minutes passed. At last she pushed her chair back, got slowly to her feet, and came after him very unwillingly. He put her brother in the car and held the door open for her. She gave him a scornful look, walked deliberately around to the other side, and opened the other door for herself. It shut after her with a fierce bang.

“Bad for the latch,” remarked Haines as he took the wheel.

“Mind your own business,” she answered resentfully.

Gilbert had fallen asleep huddled in the corner. Feeling herself above such pitiful weakness Angela drew away from him and sat there in a furious smoldering silence, occasionally brushing a stray wisp of hair from her face. By the time they reached the Queensboro Bridge it was already beginning to grow light. As the five o’clock sky became paler and paler the water underneath reflected it in dove color, broken here and there by blue ripples. Street lights on both sides of the river began to go out, whole rows of them at a time. Buildings took on a mystic medieval darkness that was quickly dissipated in the face of the brightening east. They met milk trucks and quick little roadsters alive with gayly throbbing banjos going into the city, and were overtaken and left behind by newspaper vans speeding out of it.

Angela had dozed off, hugging her elbows in the soft morning wind that danced over the neurotic island from the great gray expanse of water that lay beyond it. Haines, himself sleepy and fancy-fevered, could make out her face, the color of silver, in the mirror above his fender. It was a lonely, haunting little face, the face of a child crusader of long ago, betrayed somehow, and awakening to the bitterness of disillusion. “She’s just a baby,” he thought sadly. “What does she know, after all?”

It seemed a minute later that he got out and tapped her on the shoulder. Her eyes opened slowly, still full of sleep.

“Don’t you think you’d better go in, miss?” She turned her head sideways and saw the house. She smothered a childish yawn with the grace of a kitten. “Gee, I didn’t know we were home already,” she said in her high-pitched voice.

Now, it was very early in the morning and all things under the cool contemplative blue of the sky seemed wonderful, much more wonderful than they had ever been before. The grass was spangled with dewdrops and the trees were like green ostrich feathers gently fanning the drowsy world. The long ride home had blown color under Angela’s skin, color that no rouged rabbit’s paw could approximate. That was what made Haines do it; the blue of the newborn day and the elflike way she rolled her head over and looked up at him. He was bending over her and he kissed her very softly, and didn’t linger where he had kissed, like a soldier that runs away from the scene of battle. Her big eyes widened until he was swallowed whole in their depths. Then recognition slowly crept into them, a mischievous sort of recognition. The baby look had disappeared from her face, and it was that that had counted so much in her favor. A smile parted her lips, an acted smile with a little too much conceit in it to be real.

“I knew you would soonor or later,” she murmured, “and I’m glad.”

She didn’t have to say what she was glad of; he knew without being told. Her arms tugged at his neck, like vines. He held back, wanted to draw away. Then Angela, lifting her cherub head, returned the kiss. Her voice sounded close to his ear, and there was a strange exaltation in it he had never heard in any other voice before...

“That’s why I’m glad. Oh, dearest, but I love you. Why, I’ve loved you from the moment I came out in the hall yest’day morning and saw you waiting there so sweet. Dewey...” Her voice molded the name lingeringly, like a little mound of sugar reared in a delightful world of make-believe, “Dewey, say something, can’t you?” she coaxed. “Say something I can remember, like—”

He didn’t know a thing to say, didn’t even know what to call her by, now that they were no longer as distant as they had once been. They were still so far apart.

“But An—”

“That’s right, say it! Let me hear you say it. An—?” she prompted.

“An-gela,” he managed awkwardly.

He was getting in deeper and deeper, and he had no business to, he told himself.

“Angela what?” she encouraged once again. She was playing. He couldn’t help seeing that. Playing a game of words and little caresses that went no deeper than the mood of a passing moment. “Angela what?” she repeated softly.

He remained stubbornly mute.

“Well, say it after me then, stupid. Can’t you see what you’re supposed to say?” She half closed her eyes in mimic tenderness. “An-gela, I love you,” she sighed soulfully. “I won’t go in until you say it.”

He looked over her shoulder, which was on a level with the back of the car, toward the trees that were like tufts of ostrich plumes. “An-gela, I love you.” It wasn’t quite spontaneous, though. Some little thing had clicked shut down in him, and could never open to her again the way it had a little while ago, when she was sleeping in the back of the car. And it was she herself had caused this, not knowing him or men like him.

“You weren’t even looking at me,” she said. “Never mind, though. It’s sweet enough the way it is. I couldn’t stand much more, because every little bit,” she quoted, “added to what you’ve got, means a little bit more.” And in a sudden ecstasy, ending in a kiss, “Oh, Dewey, I could die for you.”

“How well you say it,” he remarked ruefully, “almost as though you meant it.”

She took hold of her brother by the shoulder and began to shake him. “Dearest,” she said, turning adoring eyes on Haines, “once more... no, too late!”

Gilbert sat up.

“What’s’is, an earthquake?” he growled. “Leg-go my coat.”

She was so happy she could even be playful with him, her inveterate enemy until now.

“Come inside, dumb one,” she said gently; “you’ll be all stiff from sleeping in the open.” They went in arm in arm, Angela sending back soulful glances over her shoulder.

As they shut the door behind them they became aware of a faint sobbing somewhere within the house, vainly stifled by many closed doors. They hesitated.

“Is it on ’count of us, do you suppose?” breathed Angela, giving her brother an awe-stricken look.

“Naw,” he replied impatiently, “they ought to be used to us coming home like this by now.”

“That’s right, too,” she assented. “What do we do, take off our shoes again? I got a splinter in my foot that way the other morning.”

“I’ll go first,” Gil told her. “Two of us creak too much.”

She waited until the faint click of a latch somewhere above told her he was in his room. Then she started to her own room, holding a slipper by the heel in each hand. At the landing she tried to strengthen her grip on one of them and lost it altogether. It slipped through her fingers and fell with a loud thud on the polished floor.

The sudden opening of a door let a flood of amber light out on the scene, revealing Angela bending over to pick up her shoe. She immediately straightened up and endeavored to conceal it behind her.

“Uh — hello,” she said vaguely.

Lyle was standing in the doorway, in a negligée. Her face was yellow with fatigue. The lights were on in the room, although outside the sun must have been up by now. And there were people in there, Angela could hear them moving about. This was where the sobbing came from, a low intermittent sound from somewhere within the big room.

“Who is that — Mother?” whispered Angela, with a scared look.

Lyle seemed not to have heard her. “Let’s go upstairs, Angela,” she said stonily; “I want to talk to you.”

She shut the door softly behind her and went up the staircase, her head bowed abjectly over her chest. Angela, giving one look at the door of their mother’s room, followed her, completely mystified. She watched Lyle’s tannish heels slip in and out of the pink satin boudoir mules with each step she took ahead of her. They went up and up and up, the stairs had never seemed so long before.

They were in Angela’s own room at last. “Mind if I make myself comfortable first?” she asked. Lyle had thrown herself down on a chaise longue, her face hidden by one up-curved arm. She didn’t answer.

Angela went ahead and took off her dress. She wrapped herself in a heavy quilted kimono lined in marabou and turned the collar up around her ears so that her head could not be seen from the back. She kicked off her slippers with a sigh of relief. “Whew!” she said, “Many a mile—” She lit a cigarette and coiled herself up in a cushioned seat that was simply irresistible when one was once in it, lifting her gold-stockinged feet from the floor and tucking them under her so that nothing was seen of them.

She blew a long thin jet of smoke straight before her. “Now,” she said, subsiding into complete relaxation with little jerky movements that finally stopped altogether, “what’s the powwow going to be about?”

Lyle didn’t say anything for a long time, seemed not to have heard her at all. Angela, with her head of buttercup hair cut to its very roots almost, smoked her cigarette placidly, staring at a point on the opposite wall high above their heads. She was pale from excitement the long night through, wan from need of sleep, and yet there was something youthful and defiant about her. She held her chin up. She wouldn’t give in. She was proud to the point of doing whatever she wanted to simply because she wanted to. She was eighteen, and eighteen is a selfish age. But in addition to this she was Angela, and Angela would not change; at twenty-eight she would still be selfish.

Lyle lifted her head up at last and looked at her, and Angela could tell she had been crying. She shrugged her own shoulders ever so slightly. What could she do about it? “For pity’s sake, what is it?” she said, a trifle more impatiently than she had perhaps intended. “Let’s have it.” She was going to add that she was tired and wanted to get some sleep, but changed her mind, afraid it might sound a little too brutal.

“Father’s awfully sick,” said Lyle, trying to make her voice matter-of-fact. “I suppose Haines told you?”

“He didn’t say very much about it,” Angela hedged. “What seems to be the matter with Father?”

Lyle didn’t answer directly. “We got back a little after one,” she said, “Mother and I, and Mother came to me as I was getting undressed and said Father wasn’t in his room. A little while later we heard some one groaning in the bathroom next to Father’s bedroom, and we rushed in. Oh—” Her voice trailed off and her lips began to quiver.

Angela leaned forward and took hold of her by the wrists. “What is it, darling?” she said. “What is it? Tell me.”

“We found him there,” sobbed Lyle in a low voice. “His head was on the floor and all around the mouth he was burned with iodine.”

Angela gave a piercing little scream. “Oh, Lyle, don’t — don’t tell me he tried to—” Lyle bit her under lip with grief and nodded affirmatively, blinded by tears.

“Our daddy!” moaned Angela, throwing herself into her sister’s arms. “To do a thing like that — oh, good heavens!” Her shoulders worked spasmodically. She clasped her arms about Lyle’s neck, while her cigarette slowly burned itself into the deep silk wool of the rug.

For a long time neither of them moved.

“Is he — is he bad?” Angela faltered at last.

“No, dearest, he’ll be well soon.”

Angela looked at her reproachfully, her eyes suffused with melted diamonds. “Please tell me. I want to know the truth.”

“Darling, can’t you see I’m not lying to you? The poor dear wasn’t very expert at it—”

Angela shuddered and closed her eyes involuntarily.

“The doctor took him away in his own car.”

“Oh, why did you let him?” said Angela quickly.

“But, my dear! Don’t you see? He couldn’t possibly get the attention he needs if he stayed here. We’ll all be allowed to see him, if not to-morrow, then the day after. But there’s something else—”

“Oh, Lyle, don’t frighten me any more!” begged Angela.

“It’s something you’ll have to know sooner or later, and in this case I think the sooner the better. You’ll be brave about it, won’t you, dear?”

“Y-yes,” gasped Angela, clenching her fists behind her. “Go on,” she managed to say.

“Well, naturally, Father wouldn’t dream of anything like that unless he were terribly distracted or upset. He wrote Mother a letter a short time before we came and she showed it to me—”

“Explaining?”

“Yes. Angela, we’ve lost all our money.”

Angela’s strained face wore the expression of a very small child just about ready to cry but doing her best to hold it back. “But how can we?” she almost pleaded, “I don’t see how. He must be mistaken.”

“He would be the first to know,” Lyle urged gently. “He’s been worried for months and months. We’ve all noticed it. But we’ve been a pack of selfish dogs, the whole lot of us. We’ve gone ahead enjoying ourselves and let him do the thinking.”

“But, Lyle,” said Angela plaintively, “it can’t be true. Oh, Lyle, it can’t be true, it can’t be!” There was a desolation in her tones that touched Lyle to the point of tears.

“You poor dear,” she murmured half to herself, “it’s hardest on you, I know, and on Gilbert.”

Angela gave a pitiful little smile. “And I was so happy a little while ago. Poor us,” she said.

As in a dream she felt Lyle kiss her tenderly between the eyes, watched her go to the door and switch off the lights. The heavy hangings and the jealously drawn blinds kept the sun at bay.

“Try to sleep a little,” she said; “we need it, all of us.”

She went out and Angela was left alone there in the blue shadowed room, surrounded by things she no longer had a right to, saying to herself over and over again: “Only a little while ago. Such a little while ago...”