WHO CARES?

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Harry Oldershaw followed, much puzzled at Joan's many quick changes
of mood. Several times during their irresponsible chatter on the
beach between dips her laughter had fallen suddenly, like a dead
bird, and she had sat for several minutes as far away from himself
and the other men as though they were cut off by a thick wall.
Yesterday, in the evening after dinner, during which her high
spirits had infected the whole table, he had walked up and down the
board path with her under the vivid white light of a full moon, and
she had whipped out one or two such savage things about life that he
had been startled. During their ride that afternoon, too, her
bubbling chatter of light stuff about people and things had several
times shifted into comments as to the conventions that were so
careless as to make him ask himself whether they could really have
come from lips so fresh and young. And why had that queer look of
almost childlike grief come into her eyes a moment ago at the sight
of ah everyday sunset? He was mightily intrigued. She was a queer
kid, he told himself, as changeable and difficult to follow as some
of the music by men with such weird names as Rachmaninoff and
Tschaikowsky that his sister was so precious fond of playing. But
she was unattached and frightfully pretty and always ready for any
fun that was going, and she liked him more than the others, and he
liked being liked, and although not hopelessly in love was ready and
willing and even anxious to be walked on if she would acknowledge
his existence in no other way. It was none of his business, he told
himself, to speculate as to what she was trying to hide away in the
back of her mind, from herself as well as from everybody else. This
was his last vacation as a Yale man, and he was all out to make the
most of it.

As soon as he was at her side she ran her hand through his arm and
fell into step. The shadow had passed, and her eyes were dancing
again. "It appears that the Hosacks turn up their exclusive noses at
the club dances," she said. "What are we going to do about it?"

"There's one to-night, isn't there? Do you want to go?"

"Of course I do. I haven't danced since away back before the great
wind. Let's sneak off after dinner for an hour without a word to a
soul and get our fill of it. There's to be a special Jazz band to-
night, I hear, and I simply can't keep away. Are you game, Harry? "

"All the way," said young Oldershaw, "and it will be the first time
in the history of the Hosacks that any members of their house
parties have put in an appearance at the club at night. No wonder
Easthampton has nicknamed the place St. James's Palace, eh?"

Joan shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, my dear boy," she said, "life's
too short for all that stuff, and there's no hobby so painful as
cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. And, after all, what's
the matter with Easthampton people? I'd go to a chauffeurs' ball if
the band was the right thing. Wouldn't you?"

"With you," said Harry. "Democracy forever!"

"Oh, I'm not worrying about democracy. I'm out for a good time under
any conditions. That's the only thing that matters. Now let's go
back and change. It's too late to bathe. I'll wear a new frock to-
night, made for fox-trotting, and if Mrs. Hosack wants to know where
we've been when we come back as innocent as spring lambs, leave it
to me. Men can't lie as well as women can."

"It won't be Mrs. Hosack who'll ask," said Harry. "Bridge will do
its best to rivet her ubiquitous mind. It's the old man who'll be
peeved. He's crazy about you, you know."

Joan laughed. "He's very nice and means awfully well and all that,"
she said, "but of course he isn't to be taken seriously. No men of
middle age ought to be. They all say the same things with the same
expressions as though they got them from the same books, and their
gambolling makes their joints creak. It's all like playing with a
fire of damp logs. I like something that can blaze and scorch. The
game counts then."

"Then you ought to like me," said Harry, doing his best to look the
very devil of a fellow. Even he had to join in Joan's huge burst of
merriment. He had humor as well as a sense of the ridiculous, and
the first made it possible for him to laugh at himself,--a rare and
disconcerting gift which would utterly prevent his ever entering the
Senate.

"You might grow a moustache and wax the tips, Harry," she said, when
she had recovered sufficiently well to be able to speak. "Curl your
hair with tongs and take dancing lessons from a tango lizard or go
in for a course of sotto voce sayings from a French portrait
painter, but you'd still remain the Nice Boy. That's why I like you.
You're as refreshing and innocuous as a lettuce salad, and you may
glare as much as you like. I hope you'll never be spoilt. Come on.
We shall be late for dinner." And she made him quicken his step
through the dry sand.

Being very young he was not quite sure that he appreciated that type
of approval. He had liked to imagine that he was distinctly one of
the bold bad boys, a regular dog and all that. He had often talked
that sort of thing in the rooms of his best chums whose mantelpieces
were covered with the photographs of little ladies, and he hoarded
in his memory two episodes at least of jealous looks from engaged
men. But, after all, with Joan, who was married, although it was
difficult to believe it, it wouldn't be wise to exert the whole
force of the danger that was in him. He would let her down lightly,
he told himself, and grinned as he said it. She was right. He was
only a nice boy, and that was because he had had the inestimable
luck to possess a mother who was one in a million.

The rather pretentious but extremely civilized house that stood
alone in all its glory between the sea and the sixth hole was
blazing with lights as they returned to it. The color had gone out
of the sky and other twinkling eyes had appeared, and the breeze,
now off the sea, had a sting to it. Toad soloists were trying their
voices for their evening concert in near-by water and crickets were
at work with all their well-known enthusiasm. Bennett, with a
sunburned nose, was tidying up the veranda, and some one with a nice
light touch was playing the rhythmic jingles of Jerome Kern on the
piano in the drawing-room.

Still with her hand on Harry Oldershaw's arm, Joan made her way
across the lofty hall, caught sight of Gilbert Palgrave coming
eagerly to meet her, and waved her hand.

"Oh, hello, Gilbert," she cried out. "Welcome to Easthampton," and
ran upstairs.

With a strange contraction of the heart, Palgrave watched her out of
sight. She was his dream come to life. All that he was and hoped to
be he had placed forever at her feet. Dignity, individualism,
egoism,--all had fallen before this young thing. She was water in
the desert, the north star to a man without a compass. He had seen
her and come into being.

Good God, it was wonderful and awful!

But who was that cursed boy?

III

Six weeks had dropped off the calendar since the night at Martin's
house.

Facing Grandmother Ludlow in the morning with her last handful of
courage Joan had told her that she had been called back to town. She
had left immediately after breakfast in spite of the protests and
entreaties of every one, including her grandfather, down whose
wrinkled cheeks the tears had fallen unashamed. With a high head and
her best wilful manner she had presented to them all in that old
house the bluff of easy-mindedness only to burst like a bubble as
soon as the car had turned the corner into the main road. She had
gone to the little house in New York, and with a numbed heart and a
constant pain in her soul, had packed some warm-weather clothes and,
leaving her maid behind, hidden herself away in the cottage, on the
outskirts of Greenwich, of an old woman who had been in the service
of her school. As a long-legged girl of twelve she had stayed there
once with her mother for several days before going home for the
holidays. She felt like a wounded animal, and her one desire was to
drag herself into a quiet place to die.

It seemed to her then, under the first stupendous shock of finding
that Marty was with that girl, that death was the next certain
thing. Day after day and night after night, cut to the quick, she
waited for it to lay its cold hand upon her and snuff her out like a
tired candle, whose little light was meaningless in a brutal world.
Marty, even Marty, was no longer a knight, and she had put him into
broadcloth.

Not in the sun, but in the shadow of a chestnut all big with bloom,
her days had passed in lonely suffering. Death was in the village,
that was certain. She had seen a little procession winding along the
road to the cemetery the morning after her arrival. She was ready.
Nothing mattered now that Marty, even Marty, had done this thing
while she had been waiting for him to come and take her across the
bridge, anxious to play the game to the very full, eager to prove to
him that she was no longer the kid that he thought her who had
coolly shown him her door. "I am here, Death," she whispered, "and I
want you. Come for me."

All her first feelings were that she ought to die, that she had
failed and that her disillusion as to Marty had been directly
brought about by herself. She saw it all honestly and made no
attempt to hedge. By day, she sat quietly, big-eyed, amazingly
childlike, waiting for her punishment, watched by the practical old
woman, every moment of whose time was filled, with growing
uneasiness and amazement. By night she lay awake as long as she
could, listening for the soft footstep of the one who would take her
away. At meals, the old woman bullied for she was of the school that
hold firmly to the belief that unless the people who partake of food
do not do so to utter repletion a personal insult is intended. At
other times she went out into the orchard and sat with Joan and,
burning with a desire to cheer her up, gave her, in the greatest
detail, the story of all the deaths, diseases and quarrels that had
ever been known to the village. And every day the good sun warmed
and encouraged the earth, drew forth the timid heads of plants and
flowers, gave beauty even to the odd corners once more and did his
allotted task with a generosity difficult to praise too highly. And
Death paid visits here and there but passed the cottage by. At the
beginning of the second week, Nature, who has no patience with any
attempt to refute her laws, especially on the part of those who are
young and vigorous, took Joan in hand. "What is all this, my girl?"
she said, "sitting here with your hands in your lap while everybody
and everything is working and making and preparing. Stir yourself,
bustle up, get busy, there's lots to be done in the springtime if
the autumn is to bear fruit. You're sound and whole for all that
you've been hurt. If you were not, Death would be here without your
calling him. Up you get, now." And, with good-natured roughness, she
laid her hand under Joan's elbow, gave a hoist and put her on her
feet.

Whereupon, in the natural order of things, Joan turned from self-
blame to find a victim who should be held responsible for the pain
that she had suffered, and found the girl with the red lips and the
white face and the hair that came out of a bottle. Ah, yes! It was
she who had caught Marty when he was hurt and disappointed. It was
she who had taken advantage of his loneliness and dragged him clown
to her own level, this girl whom she had called Fairy and who had
had the effrontery to go up to the place on the edge of the woods
that was the special property of Marty and herself. And for the rest
of the week, with the sap running eagerly in her veins once more,
she moved restlessly about the orchard and the garden, heaping coals
of fire on to the all too golden head of Tootles.

Then came the feeling of wounded pride, the last step towards
convalescence. Marty had chosen between herself and this girl.
Without giving her a real chance to put things right he had slipped
away silently and taken Tootles with him. Not she, but the girl with
the red lips and the pale face and the hair that came out of a
bottle had stripped Marty of his armor, and the truth of it was that
Marty, yes, even Marty, was not really a knight but a very ordinary
man.

Out of the orchard and the garden she went, once she had arrived at
this stage, and tramped the countryside with her ears tuned to catch
the alluring strains of the mechanical music of the Round-about. She
had not only been making a fool of herself but had been made to look
a fool, she thought. Her pain and suffering and disillusion had been
wasted. All these dull and lonely days had been wasted and thrown
away. Death must have laughed to see her sitting in the shadow of
the apple trees waiting for a visit that was undeserved. Marty could
live and enjoy himself without her. That was evident. Very well,
then, she could live and enjoy herself without Marty. The earth was
large enough for them both, and if he could find love in the person
of that small girl she coul surely find it in one or other of the
men who had whispered in her ear. Also there was Gilbert Palgrave,
who had gone down upon his knees.

And that was the end of her isolation, her voluntary retirement.
Back she went to the City of Dreadful Nonsense, bought clothes and
shoes and hats, found an invitation to join a house party at
Southampton, made no effort to see or hear from Marty, and sprang
back into her seat in the Merry-go-round. "Who Cares?" she cried
again. "Nobody," she answered. "What I do with my life matters to no
one but myself. Set the pace, my dear, laugh and flirt and play with
fire and have a good time. A short life and a merry one."

And then she joined the Hosacks, drank deep of the wine of
adulation, and when, at odd times, the sound of Marty's voice echoed
in her memory, she forced it out and laughed it away. "Who Cares?"
was his motto too,--red lips and white face and hair that came out
of a bottle!

And now here was Gilbert Palgrave with the fire of love in his eyes.

IV

When Mrs. Hosack rose from the dinner table and sailed Olympically
into the drawing-room, surrounded by graceful light craft in the
persons of Primrose and her girl friends, the men, as usual,
followed immediately. The house was bridge mad, and the tables
called every one except Joan, the nice boy, and Gilbert Palgrave.

During the preliminaries of an evening which would inevitably run
into the small hours, Joan went over to the piano and, with what was
a quite unconscious touch of irony, played one of Heller's
inimitable "Sleepless Nights," with the soft pedal down. The large
imposing room, a chaotic mixture of French and Italian furniture
with Flemish tapestries and Persian rugs, which accurately typified
the ubiquitous mind of the hostess, was discreetly lighted. The
numerous screened windows were open and the soft warm air came in
tinged with the salt of the sea.

Palgrave, refusing to cut in, stood about like a disembodied spirit,
with his eyes on Joan, from whom, since his arrival, he had received
only a few fleeting glances. He watched the cursed boy, as he had
labelled him, slip over to her, lean across the piano and talk
eagerly. He went nearer and caught, "the car in half an hour," and
"not a word to a soul." After which, with jealousy gnawing at his
vitals, he saw Harry Oldershaw moon about for a few minutes and then
make a fishlike dart out of the room. He had been prepared to find
Joan amorously surrounded by the men of the party but not on terms
of sentimental intimacy with a smooth-faced lad. In town she had
shown preference for sophistication. He went across to the piano and
waited impatiently for Joan to finish the piece which somehow fitted
into his mood. "Come out," he said, then, "I want to speak to you."

But Joan let her fingers wander into a waltz and raised her
eyebrows. "Do I look so much like Alice that you can order me
about?" she asked.

He turned on his heel with the look of a dog at which a stone had
been flung by a friend, and disappeared.

Two minutes later there was a light touch on his arm, and Joan stood
at his side on the veranda. "Well, Gilbert," she said, "it's good to
see you again."

"So good that I might be a man touting for an encyclopedia," he
answered angrily.

She sat upon the rough stone wall and crossed her little feet. Her
new frock was white and soft and very perfectly simple. It demanded
the young body of a nymph,--and was satisfied. The magic of the moon
was on her. She might have been Spring resting after a dancing day.

"If you were," she said, taking a delight in unspoiling this
immaculate man, "I'm afraid you'd never get an order from me. Of all
things the encyclopedia must be accompanied by a winning smile and
irresistible manners. I suppose you've done lots of amusing things
since I saw you last."

He went nearer so that her knees almost touched him. "No," he said.
"Only one, and that was far from amusing. It has marked me like a
blow. I've been waiting for you. Where have you been, and why
haven't you taken the trouble to write me a single letter?"

"I've been ill," she said. "Yes, I have. Quite ill. I deliberately
set out to hurt myself and succeeded. It was an experiment that I
sha'n't repeat. I don't regret it. It taught me something that I
shall never forget. Never too young to learn, eh? Isn't it lovely
here? Just smell the sea, and look at those lights bobbing up and
down out there. I never feel any interest in ships in the daytime,
but at night, when they lie at anchor, and I can see nothing but
their lonely eyes, I would give anything to be able to fly round
them like a gull and peep into their cabins. Do they affect you like
that?"

Palgrave wasn't listening to her. It was enough to look at her and
refresh his memory. She had been more than ever in his blood all
these weeks. She was like water in a desert or sunlight to a man who
comes up from a mine. He had found her again and he thanked whatever
god he recognized for that, but he was forced to realize from her
imperturbable coolness and unaffected ease that she was farther away
from him than ever. To one of his temperament and schooling this was
hard to bear with any sort of self-control. The fact that he wanted
her of all the creatures on earth, that she, alone among women, had
touched the fuse of his desire, and that, knowing this, she could
sit there a few inches from his lips and put a hundred miles between
them, maddened him, from whom nothing hitherto had been impossible.

"Have I got to begin all over again?" he asked, with a sort of
petulance.

"Begin what, Gilbert?" There was great satisfaction in playing with
one who thought that he had only to touch a bell to bring the moon
and the sun and the stars to his bidding.

"Good God," he cried out. "You're like wet sand on which a man
expects to find yesterday's footmarks. Hasn't anything of me and the
things I've said to you remained in your memory?"

"Of course," she said. "I shall never forget the night you took me
to the Brevoort, for instance, and supplied the key to all the
people with unkempt hair and comic ties."

Some one on the beach below shot out a low whistle.

A little thrill ran through Joan. In ten minutes, perhaps less, she
would be dancing once more to the lunatic medley of a Jazz band,
dancing with a boy who gave her all that she needed of him and asked
absolutely nothing of her; dancing among people who were less than
the dust in the scheme of things, so far as she was concerned,
except to give movement and animation to the room and to be steered
through. That was the right attitude towards life and its millions,
she told herself. As salt was to an egg so was the element of false
romance to this Golf Club dance. In a minute she would get rid of
Palgrave, yes, even the fastidious Gilbert Palgrave, who had never
been able quite to disguise the fact that his love for her was
something of a condescension; she would fly in the face of the
unwritten law of the pompous house on the dunes and mingle with what
Hosack had called the crowd from the hotel. It was all laughable and
petty, but it was what she wanted to do. It was all in the spirit of
"Who Cares?" that she had caught at again. Why worry as to what Mrs.
Hosack might say or Palgrave might feel? Wasn't she as free as the
air to follow her whims without a soul to make a claim upon her or
to hold out a hand to stop?

Through these racing thoughts she heard Palgrave talking and
crickets rasping and frogs croaking and a sudden burst of laughter
and talk in the drawing-room,--and the whistle come again.

"Yes," she said, because yes was as good as any other word. "Well,
Gilbert, dear, if you're not an early bird you will see me again
later,"--and jumped down from the wall.

"Where are you going?"

"Does that matter?"

"Yes, it does. I want you here. I've been waiting all these weeks."

She laughed. "It's a free country," she said, "and you have the
right to indulge in any hobby that amuses you. Au revoir, old
thing." And she spread out her arms like wings and flew to the steps
and down to the beach and away with some one who had sent out a
signal.

"That boy," said Palgrave. "I'm to be turned down for a cursed boy!
By God, we'll know about that."

And he followed, seeing red.

He saw them get into a low-lying two-seater built on racing lines,
heard a laugh flutter into the air, watched the tail light sweep
round the drive and become smaller and smaller along the road.

So that was it, was it? He had been relegated to the hangers-on,
reduced to the ranks, put into the position of any one of the number
of extraneous men who hung round this girl-child for a smile and a
word! That was the way he was to be treated, he, Gilbert Palgrave,
the connoisseur, the decorative and hitherto indifferent man who had
refused to be subjected to any form of discipline, who had never,
until Joan had come into his life, allowed any one to put him a
single inch out of his way, who had been triumphantly one-eyed and
selfish,--that was the way he was to be treated by the very girl who
had fulfilled his once wistful hope of making him stand, eager and
startled and love-sick among the chaos of individualism and
indolence, who had shaken him into the Great Emotion! Yes, by God,
he'd know about that.

Bare-headed and surging with untranslatable anger he started
walking. He was in no mood to go into the drawing-room and cut into
a game of bridge and show his teeth and talk the pleasant inanities
of polite society. All the stucco of civilization fell about him in
slabs as he made his way with long strides out of the Hosacks'
place, across the sandy road and on to the springy turf of the golf
links. It didn't matter where he went so long as he got elbow room
for his indignation, breathing space for his rage and a wide
loneliness for his blasphemy. . . .

He had stood humble and patient before this virginal girl. He had
confessed himself to her with the tremendous honesty of a man made
simple by an overwhelming love. She was married. So was he. But what
did that matter to either of them whose only laws were self-made?
The man to whom she was not even tied meant as little to her as the
girl he had foolishly married meant or would ever mean to him. He
had placed himself at her beck and call. In order to give her
amusement he had taken her to places in which he wouldn't have been
seen dead, had danced his good hours of sleep away for the pleasure
of seeing her pleased, had revolutionized his methods with women and
paid her tribute by the most scrupulous behavior and, finally,
instead of setting out to turn her head with pearls and diamonds and
carry her by storm while she was under the hypnotic influence of
priceless glittering things for bodily adornment, which render so
many women easy to take, he had recognized her as intelligent and
paid her the compliment of treating her as such, had stated his case
and waited for the time when the blaze of love would set her alight
and bring her to his arms.

There was something more than mere egotism in all this,--the natural
egotism of a man of great wealth and good looks, who had walked
through life on a metaphorical red carpet pelted with flowers by
adoring women to whom even virtue was well lost in return for his
attention. Joan, like the spirit of spring, had come upon Palgrave
at that time of his life when youth had left him and he had stood at
the great crossroads, one leading down through a morass of self-
indulgence to a hideous senility, the other leading up over the
stones of sacrifice and service to a dignified usefulness. Her fresh
young beauty and enthusiasm, her golden virginity and unself-
consciousness, her unaffected joy in being alive, her superb health
and vitality had shattered his conceit and self-obsession, broken
down his aloofness and lack of scruple and filled the empty frame
that he had hung in his best thoughts with her face and form.

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