Honey Child

Honey Child came from the South, where the beautiful things grow. Her hair was still full of its sunbeams; she could never get it in order, and no matter how hard she tried to comb it, it was bound to be fuzzy-wuzzy just the same. She came from New Orleans, which is as close, they say, when the orange trees begin to flower, as anyone will ever get to paradise. No one could ever remember her right name and no one ever wanted to. She was just Honey Child, more to be prized than a thing of spun glass.

Honey Child knew the right from the wrong. She knew the right way to act at a football game, and never to ask questions when the ball was on the five yard line and there were only two and a half minutes to go. She knew the right way to wear a coonskin coat and have the collar slip down to her waist, and the right way to wave a pennant without putting someone’s eye out. She knew the right way to cock her little feathered hat so that it hid one eyebrow. An inch more and you looked inebriated, an inch less and you looked commonplace.

Honey Child came North one year with a colored maid named Lillian and a great many empty trunks which she expected to fill with a great many precious, perishable things. She stopped with her aunt Mary and she didn’t have any time to go chaperoning. Claire, who was called Mary Claire Incorporated because she owned fifteen tea rooms where they burned candles at four in the afternoon and charged you fifty cents for a cup of orange pekoe. But Claire was really not her last name, it was her middle name.

Now, Mary Claire Incorporated was a cliff dweller in one of the luxurious beehives on Riverside Drive, where most drones and queen bees live. And she didn’t have any time to go shopping, and she didn’t have any time to go partying, and she didn’t have any time to go chaperoning. So she said: “Go have a good time, Honey Child. You can have the red car and the blue car. But take Lillian with you wherever you go.” And she kept the green and the orange and the yellow cars for her own use, taking out a certain color on Tuesday and another color on Wednesday and so on, to match her hats and shoes mostly.

In the meantime Honey Child was having the time of her life, because all Mary Claire Incorporated’s friends were wonderful to her. And she loved New York. She liked the mauve and emerald spotlights thrown against the rhinestone backdrop of the Music Box Revue. She even liked the Subways, but not to ride in. She went to twelve parties in seven nights. On the eighth night, that’s the story.

Honey Child met a boy named Billy. All her life she had been meeting boys named Billy (or Tom or Dick or Harry or something), but this one was different. And how! In the first place, she called him a boy because she liked to think of all her little playmates as boys, and she called him Billy in the bargain, but she found out afterwards that she was daringly irreverent, because to everyone else he was Lieutenant William Easton, U.S.N., second in command on a big silver gray submarine that was lying off Ninety-sixth Street. The uniform seemed to have been grafted onto his skin, it fitted so perfectly. And he had that Caribbean complexion, not to mention that Norfolk haircut and that Annapolis physique.

“Oh, murder!” moaned Honey Child when she had taken her first look at him. They met at the thirteenth party, but Honey Child was not superstitious.

She made her appearance with Lillian when the party was fading fast. She was like an electric fan in a hot stuffy room, she was like that dash of something in the cocktail cup that makes it go. The party took on new life immediately.

“Who’s that who just came in with the darky?” murmured Lieutenant Bill Easton to the girl sharing his window seat with him.

She looked at him unbelievingly. “Don’t you know? That’s Honey Child. She’s been here a week.”

“Back me up, Lillian,” muttered Honey Child, experiencing stage fright she had never known before, “he’s coming this way.”

“Be severe with him, honeh,” counseled Lillian, relieving her of the tasseled cigarette case that dangled from her ice cold wrist.

Greek met Greek. “Honey Child, what brought you here so late? This is Lieutenant Bill Easton.”

“I stopped in to see the flea circus at a side show,” said Honey Child, ignoring the introduction. “I wanted to buy them, but Lillian abs’lutely threatened to quit me and you know, I can’t go back without her.”

“I’ll get you an anisette cocktail.”

“Please let me,” said Lieutenant Bill Easton, speaking for the first time. His voice was at once rated one hundred per cent.

“No, let her do it,” remarked Honey Child, “it won’t kill her.”

He laughed. His teeth drew another hundred. But Honey Child was getting tired of pricing him, she felt it was time to punish him a little for being so darned all-around likable.

“Is that yours?” she said. “That funny thing sticking out of the Hudson in front of my window? I’ve been trying to make out what it is the livelong week. It gets on my nerves. I wish you’d have it removed.”

He didn’t seem in the least put out. He rather liked it, to judge by the expression on his face. As a matter of fact, he had fallen in love with her.

“I’ll have it painted over, if it suits you,” he said; “I’ll blow it up, if you’ll only ask me to. If you’ll only ask me to.”

“Can I depend on that?” said Honey Child. “Here, Lillian,” she said, “remove these earrings, I’m getting a swelled head.”

But while Lillian’s caramel-colored fingers were busy about her tangled hair, two hero worshipers intruded themselves upon the three of them.

“I brought you over to show you the lieutenant’s gold tooth,” said one of them. “Really he has one. I discovered it earlier in the evening,” she added convincingly.

“This anisette is too perfectly delicious,” said the other, “you’ll have to finish it for me.” And she leaned over until her ten inch cigarette holder swayed beneath his nose. Honey Child was watching her like a lynx.

“Thank you,” he answered politely, accepting the glass. Honey Child swore at Lillian with her eyes.

The lieutenant obligingly lifted his head and finished the anisette.

“There! Did you see it? Isn’t it a nifty?” gloated the one interested in dentistry.

“Was that a gold tooth?” her friend asked doubtfully.

“If it isn’t, I’m out seventy-five dollars,” he sighed.

“Wouldn’t you like to look at his hoofs too, girls?” remarked Honey Child sweetly.

The lieutenant said: “I thought the war was over.”

“It is,” she told him; “that’s why you’re a back number as far as I’m concerned.”

And the party went on all around them, bigger and better than ever.

“Why did she have to come here!” gnashed the hero worshipers.

“I hope she’s satisfied now that she’s withdrawn the lieutenant from circulation.”

“She may be Honey Child to her dad, but she’s poison ivy to me.”

“I wish I owned a hotel with a thousand bedrooms—”

“I know that one already,” interrupted her friend morosely.

At two o’clock it was Lillian who finally separated them. Lillian had principles. “It’s bad form to stay too late,” was one of her favorite mottoes. By two o’clock she had reached the limit of her endurance, and anyway there weren’t any frosted almonds left by that time. So Honey Child’s mandarin coat, with the lining held outward, came slowly across the room to where she sat.

“What’s up?” said Honey Child, letting go the lieutenant’s left hand but holding on to his right.

“Put this around you, honeh,” said Lillian. “Time to go now.”

“Hooray!” rejoiced the hero worshipers. “There is a Santy Claus!”

Bill put his wrist watch back an hour and then showed it to her. “What — you’re not going so soon? It’s early yet.”

“I saw yuh do that!” remarked Lillian ominously.

“It’s one o’clock,” he told her.

“It’s two o’clock.”

“Lillian,” said Honey Child, “haven’t I told you not to argue with people?”

“I ain’t arguing,” replied Lillian so that everyone in the room could hear her. “I’m just telling him the right time.”

“It’s one o’clock,” he insisted stubbornly, “run along like a good little girl—”

“Ding!” said a big electric clock on a steeple somewhere outside. “Ding!”

“Huh!” said Lillian scornfully. “Didn’t I know it wasn’t one o’clock!”

“Ding!” concluded the big clock soulfully.

“Haw!” said Bill. “Didn’t I know it wasn’t two o’clock!”

“It’s three,” gasped Honey Child, “and I have an appointment to go swimming at the Shelton at nine.” She jumped up and put the coat around her, with its dragons and chrysanthemums and storks, and looked like Mae Murray playing Ming Toy.

“Please let me see you home,” said Bill, now that the battle was lost.

“I have Lillian and the chauffeur,” she said with great firmness, but something in her eyes told him that she wished she didn’t have Lillian and the chauffeur.

“You might get a ticket.”

“Not while cops are Irish.”

“Suppose you skid and go into a tree?”

“I love that, it makes your head go round and round, like two anisette cocktails full of sparks.”

They had left the party behind somehow. Somehow they were downstairs under the electric lighted canopy. A car drew up in front of them, noiseless as glass. She stood on the edge of the running board somehow, with the tips of her toes peeping over the edge. Lillian was sitting in front next to a chauffeur immaculate as a collar advertisement, who got ten mash notes a day but never answered more than five of them.

“Goo’bye,” said Honey Child demurely, veiling her eyes with silvery lashes. “It’s nice to have known one another.” And she held out four fingers.

“Then you’ll let me show you over the boat some time?” he said, taking ten.

“Love to.”

“Tomorrow? The day after?”

“When you see me,” said Honey Child, “you’ll know I’m there.” And the tail light of her car went flashing up the street like a little red jewel, leaving him standing there, a prisoner bound with golden chains.

Inside of two weeks they had seen one another fifteen times, and the “lute” as she called him, had definitely fallen. Every morning he sent her flowers enough to choke an ox, and the ash cans in the rear of her place were always full of them, dying by inches. Finally she had to send him a little note saying, “Please omit flowers,” and the next day there were no flowers of any kind, but instead a gallon of cologne and dozens of pounds of chocolates.

“The silly thing!” remarked Honey Child. Lillian, however, took the candy seriously. She was sick for thirty-six hours.

Through it all, Honey Child remained absolute mistress of her own actions and emotions. She bought her ticket to go back to New Orleans. On the day she was to leave, Lillian and she went down to the submarine to say goodbye to him.

“I’m afraid he takes me too seriously,” said Honey Child, picking her way along the gangplank on the arm of an obliging sailor.

“Um-hum,” said Lillian, who was no Little Eva when it came to gangplanks. They climbed down through the conning tower, Lillian remarking that she didn’t see why they couldn’t have said goodbye at the Biltmore instead.

“Because I wanted to see the boat,” said Honey Child, “and don’t you dare go back on me.”

Everything was white and hygienic and metallic. All the electric lights were on (all three of them) although it was still early in the afternoon. “How cute!” cooed Honey Child. “Just like a doll house.”

“’Cept it’s so different,” added Lillian, who was not a person to be cajoled.

They found him sitting at a desk which had a real telephone and a real blotter and a hooded light and every other appointment. Honey Child’s photograph held the place of honor. He was sitting there not doing much of anything except to stare at it.

“Boo!” said Honey Child, and in spite of her best efforts to frighten him, it came out sweet as a violin note.

“Gee, I’m glad,” he said bashfully. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming out? I would have had a brass band and confetti and fireworks.”

Wherever she went that afternoon a faint trace of Houbigant’s Ideal remained behind, while Lillian left thumbmarks on all the brasswork. Honey Child kept wondering how she was going to break the news to him that she expected to leave New York before nightfall. Now she loved him, and now she didn’t. Coward-like, she kept putting it off from one moment to the next, while Lillian gave her frequent pokes in the ribs by way of encouragement. Finally she had to turn around and tell her to mind her own business in a fierce undertone.

His personal quarters were adorable. He had a shelf of books and a little portable gramophone with a couple of oldish records lying around — Rose Marie and Spanish Shawl — and in addition there was a rug and a bed light in there. They actually had tea, with lady fingers and crabapple jelly. “Marvelous!” said Honey Child. “Slick!”

At half past four she felt Lillian reach over and touch the tip of her foot under the table. She gave a little sigh of regret, and handed him back her teacup.

“I’ve had a lovely time,” she said with a soupçon of formality covering her nervousness. “I’m afraid I’ll have to go now. You see, the train leaves at five.”

“The train?” he echoed. “What train?”

“I’m going home,” she said guiltily, looking down into her lap. Lillian was egging her on with energetic thumb motions which she didn’t see, and wouldn’t have paid any attention to even if she had.

“I’ve been here three weeks,” she explained, quickening her voice but still lacking the courage to look up at him. “I’ve bought more clothes than a movie queen has a right to wear, I’ve seen every show twice, I’ve worn off pounds of wax on night club floors. I guess it’s time I go.”

His teaspoon upset with a great clatter. Honey Child jumped nervously. And still she didn’t want to face him.

“Pardon me a moment,” he said, and left the room.

“Better get ready, honeh,” said Lillian.

“What’s your hurry?” replied Honey Child sulkily, now that the damage was done. “You’re always bossing me.”

They waited one minute, two minutes, three minutes, five minutes. Honey Child began to get her things together. She was piqued. “I hope he didn’t jump overboard,” she remarked.

“Such a dirty river, that Hudson,” added Lillian thoughtfully.

“Come on, Lillian, we won’t wait any longer. He’s very rude.”

On her way out she stopped so suddenly that Lillian collided with her. “I can’t get the door open,” she said, “it’s stuck. Maybe on ’count of the dampness. Here, you try it.”

Lillian tried, grunting like a hippopotamus. She tried again, until her hat was all lopsided. “Stuck nothing!” she said. “It’s locked, that’s what it is.”

“The fool!” cried Honey Child savagely, and she began to kick at it, until she remembered that she had expensive shoes on. All of a sudden she said, “I feel dizzy. Don’t you?”

“Me too,” remarked Lillian.

“It’s the boat,” said Honey Child in alarm, “it’s moving. Can’t you feel it?”

“Oh, Moses,” said Lillian, “don’t tell me that! I’m tryin’ to hang on to my se’f-control.”

“You’re not much good in an emergency,” Honey Child told her. “I can see that plainly.”

“What are you talking about,” moaned Lillian. “This is no ’mergency, this is a catastrophe.”

“Hit it with something,” said Honey Child, and she picked up a shoe tree from under the bed.

In the face of this threat the door opened and he came in. He stood with his back against it, and looked very well pleased with himself.

“Take that silly grin off your face and explain yourself,” said Honey Child roughly. “Do you realize you’ve made me miss my train?”

“Good,” he said, “and now will you marry me?”

“Not if you lived to be a hundred!” she said. “You’re not a gentleman. I don’t ever want you to speak to me again.”

He laughed. “But you can’t leave the boat,” he told her, “we’re under way. We’re headed down the river.”

“Hoo-hoo-hoo, my goodness me,” said Lillian tragically.

“And just where,” inquired Honey Child regally, “do you think you’re taking us?” And she gave him a disdainful look that should have killed him.

“Havana.”

“Owoo,” wailed Lillian, “I can’t. I have a husband in New Orleans.”

“Will you keep still!” snapped Honey Child.

“It makes it very hard,” said Bill, “to have to do my proposing in front of a third party, but won’t you reconsider—”

She promptly turned her back on him.

“Well,” he said genially, “I’ll see you later.”

She heard the door close, and did a quick right-about-face.

“Oh no, you won’t,” she said under her breath. “See if he locked it this time,” she told Lillian. Lillian tried it and found it open. “Put the key on the inside and keep it there,” directed Honey Child. “As long as we have to stay on this boat he can do his sleeping in the engine room.”

“Ain’t there some way we can get off?” asked Lillian nervously.

“Don’t be erratic,” said Honey Child, “you never yet heard of a girl walking back from one of these things, did you?”

At six o’clock he came back and knocked at the panel.

“Chase yourself!” called Honey Child angrily.

“I just wanted to let you know we’re passing Sandy Hook.”

“I’m not interested in real estate,” she replied.

“Have you changed your mind yet?” he wanted to know.

“In reference to what?”

“Reference to what I asked you — ’member?”

“Wha’d I say last time?”

“You said ‘no.’”

“Well, this time it’s ‘never.’”

“Oh,” he said.

“Never, never, never, never, never!”

“I got you the first time,” he remarked dispiritedly. “You don’t need to rub it in.”

Honey Child lay on the bed with her golden hair all over her eyes. She was not crying, she hadn’t been crying, she didn’t intend to cry. In any case, not while Lillian stayed in the room, no matter how badly she felt like it. But she felt exceedingly put out at him, just the same.

“How will Mary Claire Incorporated feel?” she said. “She’ll think I went away without saying a word to her.”

“Yes, indeedy,” said Lillian, shaking her head and selecting a lady finger that had been left over among the tea things.

“Put on the electric fan,” sighed Honey Child, “I’m going to sleep if it kills me.” She closed her eyes dreamily. “If he comes back tell him the answer is ‘never.’”

He did come back, and wanted to know if they cared for anything to eat.

“The ansuh is ‘nevah,’” whispered Lillian through the door.

When Honey Child awoke, she and Lillian took counsel together. Honey Child sat in front of a shaving mirror combing her tangled hair. “Seriously,” said Honey Child, “he shouldn’t be so susceptible, should he, Lillian?”

“’Course not,” said Lillian, that serpent of sagacity.

“Let’s look this place over,” said Honey Child. Then she discovered his clothes bag and started pulling things out of it one by one.

“Look,” she remarked, “a pair of pants.”

“Whee!” said Lillian.

“A sailor’s middy.” Honey Child had an idea, and a rather good one at that. “Be sure the door’s locked,” she commanded. “Now I want you to come here and help me with a couple of these things.”

“My stars!” gasped the astonished Lillian.

About an hour later a member of the crew who was off duty approached Bill with a look of grave concern on his face.

“They was a feller wand’rin’ all over the engine room with a cigarette in his mush.”

“Who was it?”

“Nobody I know. He was a little shorty and when I tried to speak to him about it, he beat it up a ladder. But one of his heels came off. Look. I’d like to know what kind of a crew we have anyway.”

Bill held the heel in the palm of his hand and felt his ears slowly roasting. It was a baby French heel, in black satin, with a blue forget-me-not. He knew whom it belonged to, all right. All down the passageway he could detect a faint unaccustomed pungency in the air that came from musk and burnt paper. He knocked decisively on their door.

“Back again?” said a sweet voice.

“Open the door!” he barked.

To his surprise he heard her tell Lillian to unlock it. He hadn’t expected such an easy victory. The door opened and he stepped in. Lillian’s sides were shaking with laughter. Honey Child was perched on the edge of the table in seaman’s togs, smoking a brown cigarette. She had drawn a mustache on her upper lip with an eyebrow pencil and had a black stocking cap pulled down over her ears.

“I’ve been all over your old boat,” she announced imperturbably, “and it isn’t worth a cent. You ought to scrap it and buy yourself a Ford.”

“You cut out that smoking in here,” he warned her. “There’s no smoking on a boat like this.”

One eyebrow went up. “No? Who says so?”

“I say so.”

“Well, just for that I’ll keep on until my lips catch fire,” she threatened furiously.

He took the cigarette out of her mouth and stamped it out. “As your future husband,” he said, “I forbid you to use so many of these things—”

“Ooh!” she cried exasperatedly. She flew into a rage. She tore the cap from her head and threw it at him. “You are not my future husband! I wouldn’t have you!”

“You may not know it yet, but I am,” he assured her, “and when you make up your mind to it, I’ll put you ashore — not before.”

When he had gone she bit her lips, not in anger, not with worry nor with envy, but to hide away a smile.

“He’s the freshest I met in my life!” she sighed comfortably.

“And I don’t mean most likely,” agreed Lillian.

They were a funny looking pair, the colored woman in elaborate silk stockings and a gorgeous hat with pansies, Honey Child in messy seaman’s clothes with a wilderness of platinum-gold hair about her ears. Lillian began to croon an old Creole song that brought back to mind strange nights, exotic beasts and birds and flowers, moon-scented jasmine, fireflies, castanets, New Orleans in the old French and Spanish days. She folded her hands about her knees and swayed from side to side, singing of orange blossoms and sugar cane and youth that vanishes into the ground like cool rain. Honey Child’s lips were parted, she swung her foot back and forth. She was just Honey Child, just Honey Child. She was thinking the world was meant for two, never for one.

When Lieutenant Bill Easton, U. S. N., came to their door for what he thought was the last time, it banged open like a rocket. Bill ducked instinctively and tried to get out of the way. Something was hanging around his neck.

“Lights!” he cried in alarm.

“I changed the answer,” said a voice in his ear. “It’s not ‘never’ any more. It’s — but you’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

“How far to Havana?” called Lillian from inside. Lillian was nothing if not matter of fact when it came to these little things.

“Come here,” said Bill to the girl in his arms, “I want to show you something.”

He had her look into the little mirror at the base of the periscope.

“What do you see there?”

“Lights. Why, I thought we were out at sea!”

“We’ve moved down from Ninety-sixth to Seventy-ninth. Neat? Get rigged up and we’ll step ashore for a celebration, it’s only a little after eleven.”

Her eyes were like big swimming emeralds.

“I can hear them playing, in all the places I went to last week. But, oh, my dear, now I know what it means.

“Happy?” he murmured.

“Yes,” she said, “I only wanted to be happy,” she threw her arms around that Annapolis physique of his, “and I yam happy.”