Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

SUPPER WITH NATICA

By Robert E. MacAlarney

It isn’t at all pleasant to burn one’s fingers, but it’s worth while burning them now and then, if you have to be scorched to be near a particularly attractive fire; at least I’ve found it that way. All of which leads me to Natica Drayton – Melsford that was.

I think I’m the only one of the crew she dragged at her heels who hasn’t forgot about things and gone off after other game; some of them have been lashed to the burning stake of pretty uncomfortable domesticity, too. As for me – well, I’ve simply gone on caring, and I think I shall always go on.

Does she know it? Of course she knows it; always has known it, ever since that first summer at Sacandaga. Not that I’ve been ass enough to say anything after the first time. I’m only an ordinary sort of chap when it comes to intuition, but somehow I’ve never plucked up the cheek to do any talking about my own miserable self; not since she let me down as gently as she could, while I paddled her back from Birch Point to the canoe house, with Elephant Mountain ragged-backed in the moon-haze. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was she said. There was the drip of water from the paddle as I lifted it, stroke after stroke; the tiny hiss of smother at the prow, and twisted through it all, like a gathering string, Natica Melsford’s voice, letting me down easy – as easily as she could.

After I had made fast, I remember feeling that somehow the moonlight had turned things extremely cold; and I reached for my sweater that lay in the stern. I also laughed a great deal too much around the logs at the bungalow fire, and then drank a deal more than too much at the clubhouse before turning in. Maybe it was cowardly to sneak back to town a couple of days later, “on business,” of course – a shabby excuse for a chap that doesn’t dabble in business more than I do. But I honestly needed to go to get back my equilibrium. I got it, though, and I’ve kept it pretty continuously. And this much is enough for that. Natica Melsford is the only interesting bit about this story, and let’s get back to her.

That winter she married Jack Drayton. The afternoon we rehearsed for the wedding I looked at her, before we pranced down the aisle and endured the endless silly giggles of the bridesmaids, and the usher louts who would fall out of step, and grew more peevish by the minute. I looked her over then, and I said to myself: “You feeble paranoiac, imagine that girl tying up with you.” Well, I couldn’t very well imagine it, although I tried. But I was extremely noisy, and I heard two or three of the bridesmaids, to say nothing of the maid of honor and the bridegroom’s mamma, tapping their gentle hammers, at my expense, at the breakfast. It was a year afterward that I began to fag regularly for the Drayton establishment.

Jack Drayton, by rights, ought to have been poisoned. He’d be the first to acknowledge it now. Perhaps if he’d married a girl who insisted on having things out the moment they began, the things wouldn’t have happened. But Natica Melsford wasn’t that sort. She was the kind that simply looked scorn into and clear through you, when she thought you were acting low down. This, with a man strung like Jack was, simply put the fat into the fire. It would have been different with me. I’d – well – I’d have made an abject crawl, to be sure. You see, her knowing this was the thing that must have always queered me with her. A woman prefers a man she can get furious at and who’ll stick it out a bit, to one who caves in at the first sign of a frown. But Jack carried things too far.

No, he didn’t mind my frequenting the house. He liked me and I liked him. But, all the same, I knew he didn’t regard me as a foeman worthy of his steel. And, although the knowledge made me raw now and then, when he’s come in with his easy, careless way, still I swallowed the mean feeling because it gave me a chance to see her. And don’t imagine I went around hunting for trouble. It was at the club one night – I’d just come from the Draytons, and Jack hadn’t been home to dinner – that I heard Rawlins Richardson and Horace Trevano chattering about Maisie Hartopp. The “Jo-Jo” song had made the biggest kind of a hit that winter at the Gaiety, and the hit had been made by the Hartopp singing it to a stage box which the Johnnies scrambled to bid in nightly.

It seemed like small game for Jack Drayton to be trailing along with the ruck – the ruck meaning Tony Criswold and the rest of that just-out-of-college crew – but I didn’t need signed affidavits, after five minutes of club chatter, to know that he was pretty well tied to an avenue window at Cherry’s after the show. The Ruinart, too, that kept spouting from the bucket beside it, was a pet vintage of the Hartopp.

There was a lot of that silly chuckle, and I recalled reading somewhere that there was a husband belonging to the Hartopp, a medium good welterweight, who picked up a living flooring easy marks for private clubs at Paterson, N. J., and the like, and occasionally serving as a punching bag for the good uns before a championship mill. What the devil was there to do? I couldn’t answer the riddle.

It sounds like old women’s chatter, the meddlesome way I scribble this down. It would take a real thing in the line of literature to paint me right, anyway, I fancy. When a third party keeps mixing in with husband and wife, he deserves all the slanging that’s coming to him; which same is my last squeal for mercy.

A month went by – two of them. Natica Drayton wasn’t the strain that needs spectacles to see through things. Then, too, I guessed the loving friend sympathy racket was being worked by some of the bridge whist aggregation which met up with her every fortnight. She laughed more than she ought to have done. This was a bad sign with her. Once or twice, when the three of us dined together, and she was almost noisy over the benedictine, I could have choked Jack Drayton, for he didn’t see. It’s not a pretty thing for an outsider to sit à trois, and see things in a wife’s manner that the husband doesn’t or won’t see; and worse than that, to know that the wife knows you see it and that he doesn’t. Speak to Jack? I wouldn’t have done it for worlds. As I said, I’m willing to burn my fingers and even cuddle the hurt; but I don’t meddle with giant firecrackers except on the Fourth of July, and that didn’t come until afterward.

I was to take her to the opera one night – Drayton had the habit of dropping in for an act or two and then disappearing – but on her own doorstep she tossed off her carriage wrap and sent Martin back to the stables.

“Let’s talk, instead,” she said, and she made me coffee in the library, with one of those French pots that gurgle conveniently when you don’t exactly know what to say. That pot did a heap of gurgling before we began to talk. When she spoke, what she said almost took me off my chair.

“Percy, have you seen the show at the Gaiety?” she asked.

I had seen it more than once, and I said so.

“They tell me there’s a song there – ” she went on.

“There are a lot of songs,” said I.

“There’s one in particular.”

There wasn’t any use in fencing, so I answered: “You mean the ‘Jo-Jo’ song. It’s a silly little ditty, and it’s sung by – ”

“A girl named Hartopp – Maisie Hartopp.” She was speaking as if she were trying to remember where she’d heard the name.

Of course, me for the clumsy speech. “She’s a winner,” I cut in.

She got up at that, and walked over to the fireplace. “She seems to be,” she said, picking at a bit of bronze, a wedding present, I think. Then she came over to where I was sitting and put a hand on my shoulder. I’d have got to my feet if I hadn’t been afraid to face her. “Percy – ” she began, and I felt the fingers on my shoulder quiver. I don’t think the Apaches handed out anything much worse in the torture line than the quiver of a woman’s ringers upon your shoulder, when you know that those fingers aren’t quivering on your account. Maybe that occurred to her, for a second later she took her hand away. “You once said something foolish to me, Percy,” she said.

I nodded my head, my eyes upon an edge of the Royal Bokhara. “It was in a canoe, wasn’t it?” I replied. “There was a moon, of course, and the paddle blades went drip, drip.”

“You meant what you said then, didn’t you?”

My gaze was wavering from the rug by now. Little wonder, was it? “I meant it all right,” I got out after a while. “Do you want to hear me say my little speech over again?” Was it possible that, after all, Natica Drayton had really decided to toss Jack over, and take on a fag, warranted kind and gentle, able to be driven by any lady? But I forgot that foolish notion pretty nearly right off.

“There is a husband,” she went on, as if taking account of stock.

“There always is,” I rejoined. “Some of ’em are good and the others are bad.” I chuckled despite me, as I put in my mean little hack.

“I mean the Hartopp’s husband,” she explained.

“There is,” I said. “‘Boiler-plate’ Hartopp. His given name is James, and he prize-fights fair to middling.” All this wasn’t quite good billiards, but we’d begun wrong that night, and we might as well keep it up, thought I.

Natica Drayton was tapping her foot upon the fender. “H’m,” she mused. “Some of those horrid names sound interesting.” Then she turned to me abruptly. “I think, perhaps, you ought to go now,” she suggested.

“I think so, too,” I agreed, rising very hastily, and taking my leave.

“Have you Friday evening disengaged?” She flung this after me before I had got to the hall.

“Yes,” said I, all unthinking.

“Then we’ll do it Friday,” she said.

“We’ll do what?” I asked, coming back to her. For once I felt rebellious, and showed it, whereat she smiled.

“Supper after the theater at Cherry’s.”

“Oh, well, I don’t mind that,” I volunteered.

“With ‘Boiler-plate’ Hartopp,” she added.

The searchlight dawned upon me. It swung around the room once or twice, and that was enough. I knew in the flood of sudden illumination that the girl had planned this thing in advance, with the daring of despair – and a wife’s despair, a very young wife’s despair, is a more desperate thing than the anger of any other woman. Natica had planned it all in advance; had figured it, and the chances of it. And in the balance she had confidently thrown the asset of my assisting her.

The right sort of a man, I suppose, would have become enraged because of her taking things for granted. But I – I had been chained to her chariot too long a time to experience the mild sensation of resentment.

Natica wished to face her husband in a crowded restaurant after the play. More than that, she wished to face him in company with a man not of her sort, even as he – Drayton – was escorting a woman whose lane of living did not rightly cross his. The coincidence of Natica’s means-to-an-end being the Hartopp’s husband, was simply a gift of fate; an opportunity of administering poetic justice, which could not be denied. Had the Hartopp not possessed a convenient husband, Natica would have arranged for another companion. But even she had not dared to plan her coup alone, with her chosen instrument of wifely retaliation. Through it all, she had confidently counted on me, a discreet background, a pliant puppet.

She could not know what Drayton might do, after they had eyed one another from different tables. She did not much care. But she would at least have the painful joy of the Brahmin woman’s hope, who trusts by some fresh incantation to secure a blessing, formerly vouchsafed her by the gods, but which now old-time petitions fail to renew. It seemed cold-blooded, the entire arrangement, and yet I knew it was not. She was far braver than I could have been, even to win her caring. But I understood.

I must have been rough as I took her hand. “Look here,” I said. “It’s a desperate game, Natica. You wouldn’t have dared to say that to any other man than me. You’ve got used to seeing me fag for you. And I’m going to do it this time, too. But if you weaken, by Heaven, you’ll deserve to lose for good. It’s crazy, it’s the act of a pair of paretics, but I’m going to see it through.”

She was crying when I left her. “Percy, my dear,” she said; then she began to laugh – that after dinner benedictine laugh of hers. “If there weren’t Jack, that speech of yours just now might make me want to kiss you.”

On the sidewalk I tried to figure out if there had been knockout drops in the coffee Natica had brewed for me. In any one of the forty-eight hours ensuing, I might have rung up the Draytons’ on the telephone, and told her that I had come to my senses. But I didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, I hunted up a newspaper chap I knew, and he put me next to “Boiler-plate” Hartopp at the Metropole.

The bruiser wasn’t as bad sort as I had fancied him. He was an Englishman all right – a cut below middle class; you could tell that by the way he clipped his initial h’s off and on. I tried the ice at first – it’s always best when you don’t know the exact thickness of your frozen water. The way I tried it was to toss a flower or two at Maisie Hartopp and her “Jo-Jo” song.

He rose sure enough, and it didn’t take me a quarter hour to see that the pug was really bowled out by the parcel of stage skirts who wore his name on the Gaiety bills. This made it a warmer game than it might have been otherwise, but I was in for it now, and I made the date.

No, I didn’t mention Natica. Even a broken-to-harness shawl carrier has a shred of cautious decency about him. But I gabbled lightly about a certain feminine party who was keen on exemplars of the genuine thing in the line of the manly art. Whereupon “Boilerplate” acquired a pouter-pigeon chest, which fairly bulged over the bar railing, and gave me his word of honor he’d be waiting at Forty-fourth Street about eleven on Friday. He intimated, ere I left, that he’d bring his festive accouterments with him. And he did.