Joan Thursday: A Novel

"Where do you live?" she persisted.

He waved a hand indifferently westward. "Over there – Ninety-sixth Street."

"Think you'll be able to walk it?"

"Oh, I'm all right now." He groaned again, and leaned forward, elbow on knee, forehead in his hand. "I feel like hell," he muttered.

"The best thing for you is to get to bed and get some sleep," said the girl, stirring restlessly.

He snapped crossly: "Wait a minute, can't you?"

She subsided.

"I guess you know I've gummed this thing all up, don't you?" he asked at length.

"Yes, I guess you have," she replied, listless.

"And, of course" – bitterly – "it's all my fault…"

To this she answered nothing.

"Well, I'm sorry," he pursued in a sullen voice. "I guess I can't say any more'n that."

She sighed: "I guess it can't be helped."

He leaned back again, explored a pocket, brought to light a roll of money, with shaking hands stripped off four bills. "Well, anyway, there's your bit."

Taking the bills, she examined them carefully. "That's a whole week," she said, surprised.

"All right; it's coming to you."

With neither thanks nor further protest, she put the money away in her pocket-book.

"You've acted like a brick to me," he continued.

"Don't let's talk about that now – "

"I don't want you should think I don't appreciate it. If it hadn't been for you, I don't know when I'd've got home – chances are, not till tomorrow night, anyway. The old woman'd've been half crazy."

Joan kept silence.

"My mother," he amended, with a sidelong glance. "There's only the two of us."

"Well," said the girl rising, "if that's so, you'd better get home to her; she won't be any too happy until she sees you – and not then."

Reluctantly he got to his feet. "She thinks I'm a great actor," he observed bitterly; "and I'm nothing but a damn' drunken – "

Joan interrupted roughly: "Ah, can that bunk: it'll keep till tomorrow – and maybe you'll mean it then."

He subsided into silence, whether offended or penitent she neither knew nor cared. She gave him his hat, avoiding his look, and without further speech they found their way out to the gate at One-hundred-and-third Street. Here Joan paused to await an Eighth Avenue car.

"You'd better walk all the way home, even if you don't feel like it," she advised Quard brusquely. "It won't do you any harm, and that mop of yours is a sight."

"All right," he assented. He moved tentatively a foot or so away, checked, turned back. "I suppose this is good-bye – ?" he said, offering his hand.

"I guess it is," she agreed without emotion. Barely touching his clammy and tremulous fingers, she hastily withdrew her own.

A southbound car was swinging down to them, not a block distant. Quard eyed it with morose disfavour.

"At that," he said suddenly, "maybe this wouldn't've happened if you hadn't been so stand-offish. I only wanted to be friends – "

In her exasperation Joan gave an excellent imitation of Miss May Dean's favourite ejaculation. "My Gawd!" she said scornfully – "if you can't think of any better excuse for being a souse than to blame it on me… Good night!"

The car pulled up for her. She climbed aboard – left him staring.

XIV

Though it was after three in the morning when Joan got home, she wasn't, as she had thought to be, the only waking person in the house. She had no sooner entered than, fagged though she was, she grasped this knowledge with a thrilling heart.

Beneath the door of the back-parlour a thin yellow line of light shone, as brilliant in the obscurity as the rim of a newly minted coin. She paused; and there came to her ears the swift staccato chattering of a typewriter.

Of a sudden she remembered how long it was since John Matthias had been anything but an abstraction in the background of her consciousness. He might have been at home for days: she had neither known nor thought of him, so wrapped up had she been with the routine of her work and the formless intrigue of emotions stimulated by the personality of Charlie Quard.

But now Charlie had eliminated himself from her life (she was quite sure that she would never see him again) while to the man labouring late, behind that closed door, she must be even more a dim reminiscence than ever before.

It stung her pride to think that Matthias had been able to forget her so easily. And she regretted bitterly that she herself had been so ready to let the image of her absent-minded benefactor fade upon the tablets of her memory.

By way of mute apology and recompense she hastened to enshrine anew in her heart her ideal of a gentleman; and it was fashioned in the likeness of John Matthias. And she resolved not to let another day pass without approaching him. She was sure he would help her if he could; and she was very anxious to make him realize her again.

But morning found her in quite another humour, one as diffident as different. And promptly she made a discovery so infinitely dismaying that it put the man altogether out of her mind for the time being. The Deans, she learned, had on the previous day received an offer for an engagement at a summer park in the Middle West, and had accepted, packed up and departed, all in an afternoon.

So she was more lonely than ever she had been since leaving home. The bedroom of the Dancing Deans, that salon where those stars of remote and lowly constellations had assembled to afford Joan her only glimpses of social life, was empty, swept and garnished. Those whom she had met there, and who had been nice to her, those scatter-brained, kind-hearted, shiftless denizens of the vaudeville half-world, were once again removed from her reach.

She spent that day and the next on the streets, trudging purposefully through the withering heat of August, once more a figure of the pageant which marches that most dolorous way, theatrical Broadway in the dog-days; one with the groups of idling actors with their bluish jowls and shabby jauntiness, one with and yet aloof from that drift of inexplicable creatures of stunted bodies and shoddy finery, less women than children, wistful of mien, with their strange, foreign faces and predatory eyes, bold and appealing to men, defiant to women…

Nothing came of it: the agencies took no more interest in her fortunes than they had before she could truthfully lay claim to stage experience. Each night she crawled home, faint with fatigue and the burden of the broiling day, to relish the bitter flavour of the truth that she would never go far without influence.

The third day she spent at home, resting and furbishing up her wardrobe to make a good appearance in the evening. Toward nightfall she bathed, did up her hair in a new and attractive way, shrewdly refrained from dressing her face with rouge and powder after the fashion the Deans had taught her, and clothed herself simply and sweetly in her best skirt and a fresh shirtwaist – both recent purchases.

In the deepening gloom of evening she mounted guard alone upon the stoop.

Circumstances could not have proved more favourable; and since her eyes were quick to distinguish the tall and slender figure of Matthias the moment he turned out of Longacre Square, the length of the block away, she had ample time to prepare herself. And yet it was with growing consternation that she watched his approach, and when at last he ran lightly up the steps, she was so hampered by embarrassment that the words she had framed to address him went unuttered, and her tentative movement to rise was barely perceptible – a start, a sinking back. So that Matthias, in his preoccupation, received only a faint impression that he had somehow disturbed the girl (whoever she might be) and lifting his hat, murmured an inarticulate word of apology and brushed past her into the vestibule. As the door of the back-parlour was noisily closed, tears of anger and mortification started to Joan's eyes. Then promptly temper overcame that which had daunted her calmer mood. Before she knew it she was knocking at Matthias's door.

He answered immediately and in person, with his coat off and his collar unfastened by way of preparation for a long night's work. Staring blankly, he said "Oh?" in a mechanical and not at all encouraging manner.

"Mr. Matthias – " Joan began with a slight, determined nod.

"Oh – good evening," he stammered.