Joan Thursday: A Novel

"I wish you wouldn't ask me, Joan."

"But I've got no one to advise me… If you don't think it wise, I wish you'd say so. I thought perhaps it was a chance…"

Matthias shrugged, excessively irritated by her persistence. "I can only say that I wouldn't advise any woman to look to Marbridge for anything honourable," he said reluctantly.

"Oh!" the girl said in a startled tone.

"But – I'm sorry you made me say that. It's none of my affair. Please forget I said it."

"But you make it so hard for me."

"I?" he cried indignantly – "I make it hard for you!"

"Well, I come to you for advice – friendly advice – and you close in my very face the only door I can see to any sort of work. It's – it's pretty hard. I can act, I know I can act! I guess I proved that when I was with Charlie – Mr. Quard – the star of 'The Lie,' you know. I couldn't've stuck as long as I did if I hadn't had talent… But back here in New York, all that doesn't seem to count. Here I've been going around for two months, and all they offer me is a chorus job with some road company. But Arlington … he employs more girls than anybody in the business. I know he'd give me a chance to show what I can do, if I could only get to him. And then you tell me not to try to get to him the only way I know."

Abruptly Joan ceased, breathing heavily after that long and, even to her, unexpected speech. But it had been well delivered: she could feel that. She clenched her hands at her sides in a gesture plagiarized from a soubrette star in one of her infrequent scenes of stage excitement; and stood regarding Matthias with wide, accusing eyes.

His own were blank…

He was trying to account to himself for the fact that this girl seemed to have the knack of making him feel a heartless scoundrel, even when his stand was morally impregnable, even though it were unassailable.

Here was this girl, evidently convinced that he had not dealt squarely with her, believing that he deliberately withheld – out of pique, perhaps – aid in his power to offer her…

He passed a hand wearily across his eyes, and turned back toward his work-chair.

"You'd better sit down," he said quietly, "while I think this out."

Without a word the girl returned to the arm-chair and perched herself gingerly upon the edge of it, ready to rise and flee (she seemed) whenever it should pardonably suggest itself to Matthias that the only right and reasonable thing for him to do was to rise up and murder her…

On his part, sitting, he rested elbows upon the litter of manuscript, and held his head in his hands.

He was sorry now that he had yielded to the temptation to be plain-spoken about Arlington and Marbridge. But she had driven him to it; and she was an empty-headed little thing and ought really to be kept out of that galley. On the other hand, he was afraid that if he allowed himself to be persuaded to help her find a new engagement, she would misunderstand his motives one way or another – most probably the one. He couldn't afford to have her run away with the notion that his affection for her had been merely hibernating. He had not only himself, he had Venetia to think of, now. To her he had dedicated his life, to a dumb, quixotic passion. Some day she might need him; some day, it seemed certain, she would need him. She was presently to have a child; and Marbridge was going on from bad to worse; things could not forever endure as they were between those two. And then she would be friendless, a woman with a child fighting for the right to live in solitary decency…

But Joan!.. If she were headed that way, toward the Arlington wheel within the wheel of the stage, even at risk of blame and misunderstanding Matthias felt that he ought to do what could be done to set her back upon the right road. It was too bad, really. And it was none of his business. The girl had given herself to the theatre of her own volition, after all. Or had she? Had the right of choice been accorded her? Or was it simply that she had been designed by Nature especially for that business, to which women of her calibre seemed so essential? Was she, after all, simply life-stuff manufactured hastily and carelessly in an old, worn mould, because destined solely to be fed wholesale into the insatiable maw of the stage?

He shook his head in weary doubt, and sighed.

"Probably," he said, fumbling with a pen and avoiding her eyes – "I presume – you'd better come back in a day or two – say Tuesday. That will give me time to look round and see what I can scare up for you. Or perhaps Wednesday would be even better…"

He dropped the pen and rose, his manner inviting her to leave.

"Wednesday?" she repeated, reluctantly getting up again.

"At four, if that's convenient."

"Yes, indeed, it is. And … thank you so much … Jack."

"No, no," Matthias expostulated wearily.

"No, I mean it," she insisted. "You're awf'ly sweet not to be – unkind to me."

"Believe me, I could never be that."

"Then – g'dafternoon."

"Good afternoon, Joan."

But as he moved to open the door, his eyes were caught by the flash from a facet of the diamond; and the thought came to him that its presence there assorted ill with his latest assurance to the girl. Catching it up, he offered it to Joan as she was about to go.

"And this," he said, smiling – "don't forget it, please."

Automatically her hand moved out to take it, but was stayed. Her eyes widened with true consternation, and she gasped faintly.

"You – you don't mean it?"

"Oh, yes, I do. Please take it. I've really no use for it, Joan, and – well, you and I know what professional life means." He grinned awry. "It might be of service to you some day."

With a cry of gratitude that was half a sob, but with no other acknowledgment, the girl accepted the gift, stumbled through the door in a daze, and so from the house.

XXXI

So it seemed that all men were much alike. Joan knew but two types, the man who lived by his brains and the man who lived by his wits, but had no more hesitation in generalizing from these upon masculine society as a whole than a scientist has in constructing a thesis upon the habits of prehistoric mammalia from the skull of a pterodactyl and the thigh-bone of an ichthyosaurus…

They were all much alike: if you knew how to get round one kind, you knew how to win over the other; there was a merely negligible difference in the mode of attack. You appealed to their sympathies, or to their sentiments, or their appetites, and if these failed you appealed to their pride in their self-assumed rôle of the protectors.

It was no great trick, once you had made yourself mistress of it.

By this route Joan achieved the feat of looking down on Matthias; and that was not wholesome for the girl, leaving her world destitute of a single human soul that commanded her respect.

She had needed only to stir up his jealousy of Marbridge and his innate chivalry…

As if she didn't know what Arlington's companies were like! The facts were notorious; nobody troubled to blink them; Arlington's employees least of all. It wasn't their business to blink the facts; a girl without following had as little chance of securing a place in one of his choruses as a girl without a pretty figure.

But, of course, a handsome girl with a good figure…

Joan glanced in a shop window, en passant; but she saw nothing of the display of wares. The plate glass made a darkling mirror for the passers-by: Joan could see that her refurbished travelling suit fitted her becomingly, even though it was a trifle passé.

She hurried home and changed it, and hurried forth again to keep an appointment with Hubert Fowey.

They dined at a pretentious hotel, in an "Orange Garden" whose false moonlight and tinkling, artificial fountain manufactured an alluring simulacrum of romantic night, despite the incessant activities of a ragtime-bitten orchestra and the inability of the ventilating system to infuse a hint of coolness into the heavy, superheated air.

Joan had little appetite – the day had been too over-poweringly hot – but she was very thirsty; and Fowey provided a brand of champagne less sweet and heady than she would have chosen, and consequently more insinuative.

During the meal Billy Salute appeared at a table across the room and invisible to Fowey, whose back was toward it, but still not far enough removed to prevent Joan from recognizing that look in the dancer's eyes which she resented so angrily. She didn't once look at the man; but she never quite lost sight of him, and was well aware that he was ridiculing Fowey to his companion – an actor, by many an indication, but a stranger to Joan.

Provoked, she demonstrated her contempt of Salute by flirting outrageously with Fowey. Unconscious of her motive, that aspiring little dramatic author lost his head to some extent. Now and again his voice trembled when he spoke to her, and once he mumbled something about marriage, but checked at discretion, and let his words trail off inarticulately.

Joan was not to be denied.