Joan Thursday: A Novel

"Real-ly!" she affirmed. "What're you doing there, shut up all alone by yourself in that stupid club, Hubert?"

Prefaced by a brief but intelligible pause, the man's response came briskly: "Where are you now, anyway?"

"That doesn't matter," she retorted. She had meant to ask him to meet her at the hotel, but reconsidered, fearing lest Marbridge might chance to see them. "What really matters is that this is my birthday and I'm going to give a party. Have you got anything better to do?"

"No – "

"Then meet me in half an hour on the southbound platform of the Sixth Avenue L at Battery Place."

"Battery Place! What in thunder – "

"Never mind – tell you all about it when we meet. Will you come?"

"Will I! Well, rawther!"

"Half an hour, then – "

"I'll be there, with bells on!"

"Then good-bye for a little – Hubert."

"Good-bye."

Fowey reached the point of assignation only one train later than Joan.

As he hurried down the platform, almost stumbling in his impatience to join her, the girl surveyed with sudden dislike and regret his slight, dandified figure fitted with finical precision into clothing so ultra-English in fashion that it might have belonged to his younger brother. And the confident smile that lighted up his pinched, eager countenance seemed little short of offensive. She was sorry now that she had yielded to the temptation to make use of him: he was so insignificant in every way, so violently the opposite in all things of the man who now filled all her thoughts – Marbridge; and so transparent that even she could read his mind: he entertained not the least tangible doubt that now, after the manner in which they had last parted, she had at length wakened to appreciation of his irresistible charms, that her requesting him to meet her was but the preface to surrender.

But she permitted nothing of her thoughts to become legible in her manner. After all, she had only wanted an escort for the evening, an excuse to postpone that unavoidable return to the company of the girl she had betrayed; and Fowey had seemed the most convenient and the least dangerous man she could think of. If in the inflation of his insufferable conceit he dreamed for an instant another thing… Well, Joan promised herself, he'd soon find out his mistake!..

Keeping up the fiction of her imaginary birthday, she outlined her plans: they would take one of the Iron Steamboat Company's boats from Pier 1, North River – a short walk from the station – to Coney Island. When that resort palled, they would drive to Manhattan Beach and dine, perhaps "take in" Pain's Fireworks; and return to New York by the same route.

Fowey's objections were instant and sincere and well-grounded: the boats would be crowded beyond endurance with an unwashed rabble liberally sown with drunks and screaming children. If she would only let him, he'd get a taxicab – or even a touring-car.

Quietly but firmly Joan overruled him. It must be her party or no party, as she proposed or not at all.

He yielded in the end, but the event proved him right in all he had foretold. Joan was very soon made sorry she hadn't suffered herself to be gainsaid.

They had half an hour to wait for the boat, and the waiting-room upon the second-storey of the pier was like an oven, packed with a milling, sweating mob exactly fulfilling Fowey's prediction. They were elbowed, shouldered, walked upon, and at one time openly ridiculed by a gang of hooligans, any one of whom would have made short work of Fowey had he dared show any resentment.

Upon the boat, when at length it turned up tardily to receive them, conditions were little better, save that the open air was an indescribable relief after the reeking atmosphere of the pier. Fowey managed to secure two uncomfortable folding stools, upon which they perched, crowded against the rail of the upper deck; a wretched "orchestra" wrung infamous parodies of popular songs from several tortured instruments; children scuffled and howled; burly ruffians in unclean aprons thrust themselves bodily through the throng, balancing dripping trays laden with glasses of lukewarm beer and "soft drinks" and bawling in every ear their seductive refrain – "Here's the waiter! Want the waiter? Who wants the waiter?" – and an alcoholic, planting his chair next to Joan's, promptly went to sleep, snoring atrociously, and threatened every instant to topple over and rest his head in her lap.

A single circumstance modified in a way Joan's regret that she hadn't heeded Fowey's protests.

As the boat swung away from the pier, a larger steamship of one of the coastwise lines, outward bound from its dock farther up the North River, passed with leeway so scant that the dress and features of those upon its decks were clearly to be discerned. And at the moment when the two vessels were nearest, Joan discovered one who stood just outside an open cabin door, leaning upon the rail with an impressively nonchalant pose, and smoking a heavy cigar. He wore clothing of a conspicuous shepherd's-plaid, and his pose was an arrested dramatic gesture.

In a moment a woman emerged from the open door behind him and joined him at the rail, placing an intimate hand on his forearm and saying something which won from him a laugh and a look of tender admiration: a handsome, able-bodied woman, expensively but loudly dressed, her connection with the stage as unquestionable as was his.

Joan dissembled the odd emotion with which she recognized the man, and turned to Fowey.

"What boat is that, do you know, Hubert?"

Fowey raked her with an indifferent glance, fore and aft. "Belongs to the New Bedford Line," he announced – "can't make out her name – connects at New Bedford for the boats to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Ever been up that way?"

"No. What's it like?"

"Pretty islands. Don't know Martha's Vineyard very well, but Nantucket's my old stamping-ground. Go up there in the middle of the summer – about now – and you'll find every actor and actress you ever heard of, and then some. Great place. Wish we were going there."

"Don't be silly…"

The boats were drawing apart. Joan looked back for the last sight she was ever to have of her husband.

Though she couldn't have known this, she sighed a little, in strange depression.

Perplexed, she tried vainly to analyze her emotion: was it regret – or jealousy?

Of a sudden, in the heart of that immense crowd, with Fowey attentive at her elbow, she was conscious of a feeling of intense loneliness.

XXXV

When, after a long and tedious voyage over a sea as flat as a plate and unflawed by a single cooling drift of air, the steamboat was made fast to the end of that long iron pier which juts out from the flat, low coast of Coney Island, its passengers rose en masse and crowded toward the gangways. Joan and Fowey, attempting to hang back until the crowd had thinned out sufficiently to enable them to go ashore in comfort, were caught in the swirl of it and swept along willy-nilly.

Once on the pier-head the multitude had more elbow room and spread out, the main body streaming headlong shorewards, keen-set for the delights promised by the two great amusement parks which had grown up in the heart of that frontier settlement of gin-mills, dance-halls, side-shows, eating-houses, and dives unspeakable.

Joan and Fowey followed more at their leisure, constraint and silence between them like a wall. The girl was deeply disappointed with the expedition, as far as it had gone, doubting whether anything better would follow, and still labouring under that unaccountable depression which had settled down upon her spirits at sight of Quard on the New Bedford boat. Fowey, no less disgusted, was puzzled by his companion's attitude, at once tolerant and aloof, keenly watchful for an opening through which to pursue his conquest, and wondering how it would end. If she were simply bent on tantalizing him again, for her own amusement…

He swore angrily but inaudibly.

Near the shore end of the pier they delayed to watch the antics of the hundreds of bathers churning the shallows in front of huge and hideous bathing establishments. In countless numbers, they dotted the sea like flies and darkened the sun-baked, unclean sands, into which their feet had trodden the wreckage of ten thousand lunches.

Fowey said something inexpressively cynical about the resemblance of the scene below to a congregation of bacilli crawling upon a slide beneath a microscope.

Joan heard without response, either vocal or mental. She resented bitterly the superior attitude adopted by her companion. For her part, she would have asked nothing better than to mingle with the throng and taste those crude pleasures so dear to its simple heart and, had she but dared admit it, to her own. But she had Fowey to live up to.

Very heartily she regretted the impulse which had dictated her invitation. She had been far happier alone – though it would have been strange had she been suffered to remain long alone.

By the time they left the pier, the evening was so far advanced that the myriad lights of the tawdry town were flashing into being. They debouched into a roaring mob which filled the wide avenue from curb to curb, packed so densely, though in constant motion, that trolley cars and automobiles forced a way through it only at a snail's pace and with great difficulty. Encouraged by the excessive heat which rendered Town intolerable to all who had the means to escape it, the week-end swarming had begun in all sincerity. In spite of the terrific congestion which already obtained in all the streets and avenues and beaches, piers, amusement parks, catch-penny shows, saloons, and restaurants, scarcely a minute passed without the arrival at some one of the trolley terminals of a car packed to the guards with more visitors.

A good-natured if rowdy mob, for the most part, with only a minimum element of the downright vicious in its composition, it was none the less bent on amusement in its cheapest form, that is to say, at somebody else's expense. It gathered thickest round the places of free entertainment, where acrobats performed on open-air stages or crawled upon high, invisible wires, or where slides were supplied gratis for public diversion: grinning always, but howling with delight when treated to real misadventure, as when some girl, negotiating a bamboo slide upon a grass mat, her skirts wrapped tight about her, would lose balance and shoot headlong, sprawling, to the level; the greater the exposure, the greater the diversion…

Nor was Fowey permitted to escape unteased: his conspicuous clothing, and the broad black ribbons dangling from his horn-rimmed glasses were too tempting to be resisted. Once his Panama was smashed down over his eyes; and his glasses were so frequently jerked by their moorings from his nose that he was fain at length to pocket them and poke owlishly along at Joan's guidance.

Dazzled to blindness by those ten million glaring bulbs which lifted up tier upon tier against the blank purple skies; deafened by an indescribable cacophony of bands, organs, bells, horns, human tongues incessantly clattering; suffering acutely from the collective heat of the multitude added to that of the still and muggy night; buffeted and borne hither and yon at the will of the mass: they contrived in the end to engage an open, horse-drawn vehicle, of the type colloquially known in those days as "low-neck hack," and ordered themselves driven to the Manhattan Beach Hotel.

When presently they had gained the darkling peace of a long road between marsh-lands, Fowey resumed with his glasses his hateful cynicism.

"That was considerable treat, all right," he said pensively.

"Glad you liked it," Joan replied with the curtness of chagrin.