Glitter

Front matter

Copyright, 1925, by Collegiate World Publishing Company (College Humor)Copyright, 1926, by Katharine BrushPrinted in the United States of America

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

CONTENTS

Jock

Section I

KISS me again," said Jock, because it was the thing to say.

"Won't," said Molly.

But she did. That was the trouble with women, Jock reflected drearily during the kiss. If one of them would only just once decline and stick to it, he felt that the whole status of the sex would be considerably elevated and life made much more piquant. . . .

They were seated in a limousine parked outside the Country Club. The owner of the limousine, a lady much too old to be pleasant, was parked inside the Country Club, engrossed in meditations anent the letter she was going to write to the House Committee the next morning on "what goes on at these dances!" She was fortunately unaware of what went on in her automobile; of the pressure of lip to lip under its shadows; of the cigarette ashes that had been tossed upon its velvet carpet; and of the fact that Jock would, upon leaving, filch the single perfect rosebud from the little glass cornucopia and tuck it into his coat lapel. . . .

"You going to miss me this winter, Jock?"

"Of course."

"Much?"

"Frightfully."

Molly shook her head. "You won't, though," she said sadly. "You'll forget all about me the minute you get back to college."

Jock thought that in all probability she was quite right, but he refrained from saying so. He replied instead, "Now don't be a little idiot—how could I?"

"Then you care a tiny bit about me," persisted Molly.

"Sure," said Jock. But his mind groaned. He was that slightly unhappy creature, a young man whom girls loved too easily and too well and much too long. He developed fragmentary fascinations, wearied of them soon, and then invariably found to his dismay that their objects clung on with a sort of feverish desperation. Like Molly now. "Then you care a tiny bit about me?"—why, good Lord, couldn't she tell that he didn't, any longer? Couldn't she have told weeks ago? Girls were so obtuse. Or were they merely stubborn, refusing to see anything which they preferred not to see?

"Let's go in," he suggested after a pause. "We've ditched three or four dances as it is, and that music is too mean to miss."

They went, walking slowly along the gravel driveway. Jock knew that Molly was hurt because he had terminated the tête-à-tête, knew without looking that her mouth would be pursed into that pout he had once thought so adorable, which now he longed to smack with the flat of his hand whenever he saw it. He kept his eyes straight ahead, and said nothing. Molly likewise said nothing. Doubtless she was ruminating on the faithlessness of man and the cruelty of life in general.

An arc light on the porte-cochère of the clubhouse picked them out of the darkness as they approached. By its glare, Molly was revealed as daintily blonde, and Jock2

He was tall. And he moved as some tall people do with a leisurely loose-jointed grace. You could imagine that he danced well. In fact you could imagine that he did most things well—there was a jauntiness and an assurance about him that told you so. His shapely head was set arrogantly on big shoulders, and he had sleek black hair, brown eyes, a straight, short nose, and a mouth that slanted up at one corner lopsidedly when he smiled. Everything about him fitted everything else except that mouth. It was a sensitive, artistic, dreamy sort of mouth. It belonged to the boy Jock Hamill was really, but it did not in the least belong to the boy he requested the world to believe that he was.

"Darn!" said Molly suddenly.

She had paused below the arc light and was peering at such atom of her countenance as a vanity-mirror the size of a quarter reflected. "Look at me!" she continued. "I'm a wreck. I'll have to run around to the lockers and fix up a little, Jock, or everybody'll know where I've been. You go on in and wait for me."

Inside, in the club's spacious living room, it was dim and shadowy again. There were frosted electric bulbs around the walls, but they shed no illumination; merely bit orange holes into the curtain of gloom. The dancers were a close-packed huddle, swaying now this way, now that, as if the floor were afloat on ocean waves that rocked it just a little. Jazz beat against the . . . the blood . . . everyone, everything, moved to its beating . . .

One Benny Webber, a fat youth faintly redolent of gin, came and paused beside Jock in the doorway. "What do you think of her," he demanded without preamble.

"Who?"

Benny's eyes widened. "Good goat, man, haven't you seen her? Where've you been the last half hour? Look—look over there—no, there—dancing with Bill Parks2"

"Who is she?" queried Jock in a new tone.

"Her name's Yvonne and she's from New York," said Benny. "That's all I know about her. I've cut in four times now, but every time I no more than pop off a cordial 'hello' before some fathead cuts in on me. Did you ever see a smoother job, though, no kidding?"

Jock was forced to admit that he never had. The girl was more than lovely; she was spectacular. Red hair, tight black gown ornamented solely by a diamond bar pin and the faultless figure of the wearer—she compelled the eye, seemed to dare you not to stare at her and to laugh at you because you couldn't help it. Intently he watched her progress around the room . . . so intently that he failed at first to hear the voice of the club steward at his ear. "Mr. Hamill! Message for you, Mr. Hamill!"

A scrap of paper, folded twice, and addressed to him in Molly's writing. "I've gone home, Jock," it ran, "with Alice and her husband. You were so cool to me—and on our last evening together, too—that I just couldn't stand coming back and dancing around as though nothing had happened."

Jock thrust this missive into the pocket of his dinner coat, his sole sensation one of relief. An instant later he was bearing down upon the girl named Yvonne, the girl named Molly dismissed from his mind as completely as though she had never had a place there.

"May I cut, please?"

Another instant, and he was dancing with her. "Look here," he began abruptly, "who are you, anyway?"

"Don't you read the papers?"

Jock would have reason to remember this reply in future, but at the time he judged it to be only a part of her line. "Tell me," he begged.

"My name is Yvonne Mountford. And yours is Jock Hamill, isn't it?"

"Yes, how did you know?"

He could not hear her laugh, but he could feel it—a swift exhalation of breath against his neck. "I came to this dance with Toby Jennings," she explained, "and on the way out from New York he said, 'There'll be a man here you'll like. Jock Hamill.' I said, 'Why will I like him?' and Toby said, 'Because all women do.' The minute I saw you I knew you must be the one."

If this had been intended to flatter Jock, it missed fire. He said nothing, and presently Yvonne allowed her head to droop backward so she could look up at him quizzically. "You hate that, don't you," she observed. "I'm glad you hate it. Toby said that men liked you too—does that make you feel any better?"

"Much," Jock told her truthfully. "Fellows that women like and other fellows don't are always—well, I wouldn't want to think I was one of them. You dance," he added, "just the way you look."

"And that is2?"

At this point they were interrupted by a person who whacked Jock upon the back and gathered Yvonne into his arms in one determined swoop.

Jock repaired to the wall and fumed there through an impatient interval. Then he cut in again. "You're invited to a football game."

"I accept," said Yvonne promptly. 'What football game is it?"

He told her, and then on second thought invited her to another. He would have included the autumn prom as well had it not been for Molly, whose presence at that noteworthy event he had requested in a moment of aberration weeks ago. Molly was angry tonight, but he reflected mournfully that she would not be angry by the time prom was due. Experience had taught him that girls always chirked up considerably then, like children behaving themselves just before Christmas.

He relinquished Yvonne again, this time at the plaintive behest of Benny Webber. When next he danced with her she said, after a moment, "Where are we going? Not that it matters."

"We're going out," announced Jock, who had steered her in a straight line to the nearest doorway. "I want to talk to you, and I don't want any more interruptions."

He rather expected her to protest. Most girls would have, at least a little, as a coy preliminary to giving in. But this girl did not. She accompanied him through the doorway and into the night without a murmur.

"For another thing," Jock continued, en route, "there's an arc light out here that tells no lies. I want to find out if you can possibly be as beautiful as you seem."

Under the arc light he tilted her chin with his forefinger and scrutinized her gravely and at some length. Heart-shaped face, with the firm little chin for its point and the V into which her hair grew on her forehead to form its dipping upper line. White skin, white as white flower petals, and as soft, and as fragrant. Long wise eyes, slanting. Feathery lashes. A small full mouth, open just a trifle now so that her teeth could catch the lower lip—like ivory on scarlet satin2

"You are," he concluded at last.

They chose a car from the many standing empty along the driveway and climbed into it. The car was not a limousine; certainly not the limousine. Jock had an instinctive delicacy in such matters. This was a touring car with its top down, so that they were canopied only by stars and a thin blonde eyebrow of moon.

Yvonne slid low in her seat and, locking her fingers behind her head, stared upward thoughtfully. "I'm glad you brought me out," she remarked. "I was tired of being jerked around by twenty or thirty different partners, most of them drunk. It's a hard life for a girl."

"It must be!" Jock scoffed. "No doubt you have a hell of a time of it."

"I do." She sounded entirely serious. There was a pause, after which she continued. "For instance, take the present circumstance. I came out here with you because I wanted to rest, but you brought me out because you thought you could kiss me. Didn't you?" Her slanting eyes, trained on him suddenly, were challenging.

"Maybe," said Jock, a bit nonplussed but resolved not to betray it.

"You can't."

"Why can't I?"

"Because I'm not such a fool as to let you."

"I'm not such a fool as not to try!" retorted Jock. And did try. And was increasingly charmed because he did not succeed.

"Now that we have that settled," Yvonne said after another pause, "change seats with me, will you?"

He obeyed, wonderingly, and she took his place under the steering wheel and stepped on the starter. "Suppose I can get any speed out of this?"

"Say, but it's not mine, you know! Mine's parked over there."

"Who cares whose it is? Don't be dull, Jock Hamill."

She threw the car into gear and pointed it down the drive. As they fled past the clubhouse the saxophones from within seemed to be jeering at them—"Yah-yah-yah"—like impudent urchins with their thumbs at their noses. Jock looked to see whether anyone watched their departure, but apparently did no one. Swiftly they reached the main road, swung into it with a backward spatter of gravel, and headed south.

He said, "Now it's my turn to say 'Where are we going? Not that it matters.

"Nowhere in particular," answered Yvonne. "We're just going. Don't talk, Jock Hamill. I don't like to talk when I'm riding. I like to sing, though," she added.

She had a strange voice, haunting, with a sob in it. It made you think of things. Plantation nights. Wind in pine trees. Plaint of a restless sea. Things you had lost. Things you had forgotten. Things you were groping for blindly and would never quite achieve. . . . Jock closed his eyes as he listened. Gradually he lost the world, in a sort of way, and became conscious only of breathless motion and of Yvonne, beside him, singing into the dark . . .

They rode for half an hour. Not until they were back at the club again, and the machine was resting precisely over the puddle of oil that marked its original stand, did either of them speak. Then Jock said, "Where in the world did you learn to sing like that?"

Yvonne disregarded the question. "The only kick I get out of life any more," she said, "is driving seventy miles an hour. You love it, too, don't you?" Then, as Jock nodded, "You would, of course. You're like me. Mad. All the people worth knowing are a little mad."

She thrust a hand down the front of her gown and brought forth a powder puff and an eyebrow pencil wrapped in a scented handkerchief.

"Now don't do that!" Jock commanded quickly.

"Don't do what?"

"Don't make up when someone is looking. Other girls can if they want to, but you ought not to, ever. It spoils the illusion."

"I'm not going to make up, silly! I'm going to give you my address."

She wrote it with the eyebrow pencil on Jock's cuff, well up, so that the sleeve of his coat covered it. "That's for you, remember. Not solely for the benefit of some Chinese laundryman."

"Tomorrow," said Jock, "I'm going back to college. I'll stop in New York on my way through and take you to lunch—if I may."

She said that he might.

Section II

Retrospection is here necessary:

Jock Hamill had been born on a February night in the second year of the twentieth century. He was extremely deliberate and troublesome about it, and succeeded in so terrifying his mother that he became not only the first child she ever had, but the last. His early life was quite normal. It included the drooly period, the crawly period, and the thrilling period of walkversus-tumble. It included kindergarten, mumps, the public school, Horatio Alger, stamp-collecting, measles, circuses, and a complete disregard of the rules of personal cleanliness, all in the natural juvenile order. The Santa Claus theory was duly exploded, and Jock had learned with excitement and dismay that storks do not occupy the position of exceeding importance in the world that is so often attributed to them. He became aware that gentlemen like his father might put their feet on desks if they so desired but that ladies like his mother must not, and puzzled a good deal over the reason for such unseemly partiality.

The fact that he had no brothers was a source of intense annoyance to him throughout his childhood. He observed that his friends had brothers (sisters, of course, did not count) and he desired greatly to possess a few of his own. At the age of seven, having been carefully imbued with faith in the efficacy of prayer, he besought God to send him a twin. When God neglected to comply, Jock became a rabid atheist. Into the ears of chosen contemporaries he whispered arguments against the probability of there being such a personage as God, and for a long time maintained a deep conviction that the Supreme Being was just another myth, like Santa, devised by parents for the general befuddlement of the rising generation.

When he was eight his father died. He found this very curious, and pondered at length upon it. First you were; and then all of a sudden you were not, and they put you in a box and hid you somewhere. He missed his father at first, but not for a great while. In time he recalled him only as a big man who had known a lot about baseball but who now dwelt somewhere where there would be no baseball. It hardly seemed right, but there it was.

Not very long afterward—possibly a year—there had taken place a change in his small world, a tremendous Cinderella sort of change. He and his mother moved from a little house in Pennsylvania to a great house in northern New Jersey, and had many servants to wait upon them and many motor cars in which to ride. He was young enough at the time to take this quite for granted. The things that happened to you that were not good were the things you asked questions about; the things that were good spoke for themselves. Besides, the new home came soon to be to him merely a stopping-off place between seasons. He spent his summers at a camp beside a birch-shored lake, where he lived in a tent with ten other boys, and swam three times a day, and was sunburned a dusky gold, and worshiped his counselor because he played end for Dartmouth. In the winter he attended a boarding-school in Massachusetts, quite a famous boarding-school with ivy-clad buildings and ancient traditions. Here he mingled with the sons of the great and of the merely wealthy, and through them became acquainted with divers things not mentioned in the curriculum—notably slang, Latin trots, risqué jokes, profanity, hair-slickum, salacious literature, and the hitherto quite unsuspected importance of the opposite sex.

In due time he graduated, and went to a certain University, where he spent a bewildered first year, a rather uproarious second, and a busy third . . .

Surely there had been little in these twenty-two years of living to cause Jock to differ from other young men. And unless you were a keen analyst you probably would not have perceived that he did differ, for he concealed it well under the mask he wore before the world. Out- wardly he typified Modern Youth; he was gay, unthinking, uncaring. Inwardly he was intensely emotional, visionary, an idealist. This made him ashamed. He was ashamed of the verse that he wrote sometimes in secret, and of the things he thought about, and of the things he enjoyed. He preferred Beethoven to Irving Berlin, Henry James to Ring Lardner, Leonardo da Vinci to Coles Phillips, Pavlowa to Gilda Gray—but such tastes would have earned the withering scorn of his contemporaries, and not for anything would he have acknowledged them.

Where girls were concerned his romanticism reached its apex. He had an Ideal, long cherished in his heart. She must be thus. And thus. He was forever seeking her, forever thinking briefly that he had found her, forever learning at last that he was wrong—that he had mistaken glitter for gold. It had been so with Molly, and with a long succession of previous Mollys, now relegated to that sorry corner of the memory where human beings pigeon-hole their disappointments.

Section III

At two o'clock in the morning Jock reached home. He entered through the kitchen door, having left his machine in the garage at the rear. "Company, Bennett?" he asked of the butler, whom he found in the act of loading a tray with sandwiches and bottles.

Bennett looked aggrieved. His expression said plainly, "Isn't there always company?" His lips said "Yes, sir."

"Who?"

"Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Phelps and Mr. Barbour, sir. They're playing bridge."

Jock was displeased. He wanted to talk with his mother, and he knew that if she had a bridge game on he might quite possibly have to postpone the talk for hours, late though it already was. Mrs. Hamill made a religion of bridge. She played it with a passionate intensity that amounted almost to fever, often from dinner until dawn, and she would under no circumstances allow herself to be interrupted.

"I think they'll quit soon, sir," added Bennett hopefully. "I heard Mr. Barbour say he had to go after the next rubber."

Jock scooped up a handful of sandwiches and made his way to the front of the house, munching as he went. By the door of the den he stopped and stood hesitant. He could hear the little swishing slap of thin paste-boards on a patent leather table-top; aside from that, the silence was absolute. When a sudden outbreak of voices told him that the hand was over, he sauntered in.

"But Henry, my dear!" Mrs. Hamill was expostulating. "Why on earth play the eight spot in a case like that, when you knew very well I had—" She broke off. "Hello, Jock," she said, and smiled at him. "Do sit down, my dear, and observe the peculiar maneuvers of Mr. Henry Barbour. I want you to learn from him how not to play bridge!"

Mrs. Hamill was the kind of woman who can make such remarks and, in the modern parlance, get away with them. No one ever waxed wroth at Mrs. Hamill. No man, that is. She was too altogether exquisite. She had great brown eyes, dark brows and lashes, astonishing silver hair, which she wore cut in a shingle bob, a small slim figure, and hands as soft and appealing as a baby's. Hands to be kissed, those. Hands to be caught and held in bigger hands, intensely. Hands to reach out in pretty supplication and to close tight like little white bars across what was given. . . . Her age was problematical. It seemed to vary with her gowns, with her moods, with her companions, until it ran the whole scale of the years between twenty-five and forty-five. What it actually was Jock never knew. Once, long ago, he had asked, and Madelaine Hamill had answered him almost savagely, "I have forgotten. On purpose." This served to whet his curiosity, so that thereafter he watched and wondered, and came in time to the confusing realization that his mother was young with men, middle-aged with women, and old when she was alone.

Jock sat down as she had directed, greeting the three men each in turn. They were frequent visitors to the house and he knew them all well—Saunders Lincoln, of the iron-gray hair and the still-athletic figure, so particularly well that he had called him "Uncle Link" and received from him rather breath-taking checks at Christmas almost ever since he could remember. "Uncle" was here merely a term of familiarity, however; Saunders Lincoln was not a relative. "Why don't you marry him?" Jock had demanded of his mother on a former occasion, and had learned that he was already married to, and separated from, a woman who, on account of her religion, would not agree to a divorce.

"Marriage," Mrs. Hamill had added, "is a mistake for one of my temperament, anyhow. I'm too fond of men in general." Which was quite true. Her Utopia was a world peopled solely by men, with herself a gorgeous goddess before whom all did obeisance—not too impersonally. She could not bear women and women, of course, could not bear her. She made young ones feel too young, awkward, gauche; and older ones envious and faintly antagonistic.

"When's college start up again, Jock?" asked Saunders Lincoln now.

"I'm leaving tomorrow, sorry to say."

"Not anxious to get back, eh?"

"Not at all, no."

"Jock," announced Jock's mother casually, "is a liar. He's quite wild to get back, as a matter of fact. I'll bid one no trump."

This was the signal for all conversation to cease, so Jock had no opportunity to debate the point. He sprawled in his chair, sipping at a highball that had been handed him, and followed the play languidly with his glance. Presently he took a pencil and began to scribble on the back of a bridge-score. This absorbed him for some moments, after which he left the room, taking the paper with him. It was a poem to Yvonne, a poem beginning, "Oh voice that sings a song in the night, For the wind to carry forever2"

Upstairs in his own quarters he read it aloud to himself. Then he said, "Punk!" rather sheepishly, and locked it away in a strong-box.

Later, when Mrs. Hamill ascended the stairs and tapped at his door, she found him stretched out across his bed in a fantastic green-and-black dressing-gown, reading Perfect Behavior by Donald Ogden Stewart. His reaction from exhibitions of sentiment on his own part was always humor on the part of others. "Makes me snap out of it," he would have said.

He grinned sociably at his mother. "Rover Boys gone home at last?"

"Yes, they've gone."

"Good game?"

"Excellent, except for Henry Barbour. The man is a perfect nitwit and persists in leading from the ace, despite my frenzied and perpetual protestations." She seated herself on the edge of the bed, took one of Jock's cigarettes and smoked it thoughtfully. "What's on your mind, Jocky?"

"Nothing."

"Nonsense! I knew there was something, the minute you came into the room."

Jock remained silent, and Mrs. Hamill, after a long glance at him, concluded that she must by indirections find directions out. "Have a good time at the dance?"

"Wonderful."

"How's Molly?"

"All right, I guess. She went home about ten o'clock." Jock's voice was noncommittal, but to his mother, who knew him very much better than mothers usually know their twenty-two-year-old sons, he told volumes.

"Who was there," she inquired.

"The usual mob. And—and a girl from New York."

Mrs. Hamill was quietly triumphant. "Oh, so Molly went home at ten o'clock and there was a girl from New York!" She shook her head reprovingly. "Jock dear, must I remind you that ninety-nine per cent of this world's hapless husbands are gentlemen who permitted themselves inadvertently to be caught on the rebound?"

"I'm not 'caught'," Jock protested, but without conviction.

"What's her name?"

"Yvonne Mountford."

Between Mrs. Hamill's eyes there appeared a wrinkle—promptly erased, because wrinkles are vicious things with a tendency to stay where they're put. "That name sounds familiar," she mused, "but I can't think—well, what does she look like?"

"Red hair," said Jock succinctly.

"Oh."

Jock got up, with a conclusive air of having disposed of the topic to everyone's satisfaction, and began to pack the silver-lettered bowl of his pipe with tobacco. "Now!" he said. "How 'bout my allowance for this year?"

She mentioned a generous sum. Sums in that household were always generous, "That's the berries," approved Jock, "but can you afford it?"

"I think so."

"It's a lot of money."

"I have a lot of money, Jock," said Mrs. Hamill. "More than I can spend by myself."

Jock knew that this was so. Had you asked him where the money came from he would doubtless have said, "Oil, or something," rather vaguely; but that it did come, in large quantities, he was well aware. His understanding was that investments made by his father years ago had since proved unexpectedly prosperous, putting his mother and himself on easy street. Beyond a certain gratitude and a fleeting mental tribute to his father's business acumen, he gave the matter no thought whatever.

Yvonne was not again mentioned in the conversation. But when Mrs. Hamill had gone to her own room and was seated before her dressing table, gazing at her reflection over a corps of assorted bottles and jars, she repeated the name over. "Yvonne Mountford. Now where have I heard that before?" Bye and bye she sighed, "Poor Molly!"

Mrs. Hamill had more than the usual maternal conviction that if she were younger, and if Jock were not her son, she would be violently and utterly in love with him; hence she could sigh, at times, for girls he did not love.

Section IV

He leaned his elbows on the ferry-boat's rail and contemplated New York as he approached it. He was thinking of many matters. Of Yvonne. Of college. Of that girl—young school teacher, wasn't she?—who had once slipped off the front of one such ferry as this in her car, with only ripples and a scattering of white flowers on dark Hudson waters to mark her final resting-place. "Tough," he told himself. "Tough!" Still, it had been rather an impressive way to die. . . .

The boat bumped into place at a landing, and from its capacious maw spat vehicle after vehicle into New York. Jock headed his roadster uptown. As always, the city disappointed him. When he was away fronmvit he thought only of its splendor, its magnificence, its capacity for romance and odd happenings. But when he was actually in it, as now, moving along between walls that reached upward toward infinity, the glamour was gone; and in its place there was only the stark reality of noise, and hustle, and endless faces that were never the same yet somehow always the same, hard and tired and over-painted.

Yvonne's apartment house was an imposing one on Park Avenue. Jock reached it at twelve-fifteen exactly, and having reached it, drove away again with only a momentary pause at the curb. He had decided that twelve-fifteen was too early.

Twelve-twenty-five found him at his own University Club, hailing a jovial ruddy-cheeked individual with marked enthusiasm. "Pink Davis! Lord, I'm glad to see you! How's the boy?"

The boy, it developed, was in excellent health and spirits. He and Jock shook hands with that weird complication of fingers that betokens a fraternal alliance, then retreated to a divan and called for ginger ale, not because they cared at all for ginger ale but because they cared even less for the acrid taste of bootleg whiskey au naturel.