WHO CARES?

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"Who are they all?" asked Joan, beating time with a finger to the
lilting tune which the little band had just begun, with obvious
enjoyment. "Adventurers, mostly, I imagine," replied Palgrave, not
unpleased to play Baedeker to a girl who was becoming more and more
attractive to him. "I mean people who live by their wits--writers,
illustrators, actors, newspaper men, with a smattering of Wall
Street brokers seeking a little mild diversion as we are, and
foreigners to whom this place has a sentimental interest because it
reminds them of home. Sophisticated children, most of them,
optimists with moments of hideous pessimism, enthusiasts at various
stages of Parnassus, the peak of which is lighted with a huge dollar
sign. A friendly, kindly lot, hard-working and temperamental, with
some brilliance and a rather high level of cleverness--slaves of the
magazine, probably, and therefore not able to throw stones farther
into the future than the end of the month. This is not a country in
which literature and art can ever grow big; the cost of living is
too high. The modern Chatterton detests garrets and must drive
something with an engine in it, whatever the name it goes by."

There was one electrical moment during the next hour which shook the
complacency of every one in the larger room and forced the thoughts,
even of those who deliberately turned their backs to the drama of
Europe, out across the waters which they fondly and fatuously hoped
cut off the United States from ever being singed by the blaze. The
little band was playing one of those rather feeble descriptive
pieces which begin with soft, peaceful music with the suggestion of
the life of a farmyard, and the sound of church bells, swing into
the approach of armed men with shrill bugle calls, become chaotic
with the rush of fearful women and children, and the commencement of
heavy artillery, and wind up with the broad triumphant strains of a
national anthem. It happened, naturally enough, that the particular
national anthem chosen by the energetic and patriotic man who led
the band at the piano was "The Marseillaise."

The incessant chatter and laughter went on as usual. The music had
no more effect upon the closely filled room than a hackneyed
ragtime. Suddenly, as the first few notes of that immortal air rang
out, a little old white-haired man, dining in a corner with a much-
bosomed, elderly woman, sprang to his feet and in a voice vibrating
with the fervor of emotion screamed "Vive la France--vive la
patrie!" again and again.

Instantly, from here and there, other men, stout and middle-aged,
lifted out of their chairs by this intense and beautiful burst of
feeling, joined in that old heart-cry, and for two or three
shattering minutes the air was rent with hoarse shouts of "Vive
Joffre," "Vive la France," "Vive la patrie," to the louder and
louder undercurrent of music. Indifference, complacency, neutrality,
gave way. There was a general uprising and uproar; and America, as
represented by that olla podrida of the professions, including the
one which is the oldest in the world, paid homage and tribute and
yelled sympathy to those few Frenchmen among them whose passionate
love of country found almost hysterical vent at the sound of the
hymn which had stirred all France to a height of bravery and
sacrifice never before reached in the history of nations.

There were one or two hisses and several scoffing laughs, but these
were instantly drowned by vigorous hand-clapping. The next moment
the room resumed its normal appearance.

When Palgrave, who had been surprised to find himself on his feet,
sat down again, he saw that Joan's lips were trembling and that
there were tears in her eyes. He gave a little laugh, but before he
could say any thing, her hand was on his arm. "No, don't," she said.
"Let it go without a single word. It was too good for sarcasm."

"Oddly enough, I had no sarcasm ready," replied Palgrave. "When our
time comes, I wonder whether we shall have an eightieth part of that
enthusiasm for our little old tune. What do you think?"

"Our time? What time?"

"The time when we have to get into this melee or become the pariah
dog among countries. I don't profess to any knowledge of
international affairs, but any fool can see that our sham neutrality
will be the most costly piece of political blundering ever
perpetrated in history. Here we are in 1915. The war's nine months
old. For every day we stand aside we shall eventually pay a year's
bill."

"That's all too deep for me," said Joan. "And anyway, I shan't be
asked to pay anything. What shall we do now?"

"What would you like to do? Go on to the Ritz and dance?" He had a
sudden desire to hold this girl in his arms.

"Why not? I'm on the verge of getting fed up with this place. Let's
give civilization a turn."

"I think so." He beckoned to his waiter." The check," he said.
"Sharp's the word, please."

The Crystal Room was not content with one band. Even musicians must
sometimes pause for breath, and anything like a break in the jangle
and noise might bring depression to the diners who had crowded in to
dance. As soon, therefore, as the left band was exhausted, the one
on the right sprang in with renewed and feverish energy. Whatever
melody there might have been in the incessant ragtime and fox trots
was lost beneath the bang and clang of drum and cymbals, to which
had been added other more ingenious ear tortures in the shape of
rattles and whistles. Broken-collared men and faded women struggled
for elbow room like a mass of flies caught on sticky paper. There
was something both heathenish and pathetic in the whole thing. The
place was reekingly hot.

"Come on," said Joan, her blood stirred by the movement and sound.

Palgrave held her close and edged his way into the crowd between
pointed bare elbows and tightly clasped hands.

"They call this dancing!" he said.

"What do you call it?"

"A bullfight in Hades." And he laughed and put his cheek against her
hair and held her young slim body against his own. What did he care
what it was or where they were? He had all the excuse that he needed
to get the sense and scent of her. His utter distaste of being
bruised and bumped, and of adding himself to a heterogeneous
collection of people with no more individuality than sheep, who
followed each other from place to place in flocks after the manner
of sheep, left him. This girl was something more than a young, naive
creature from the country, childishly keen to do everything and go
everywhere at fever heat--something more than the very epitome of
triumphant youth as clean and sweet as apple blossoms, with whom to
flirt and pose as being the blase man of the world, the Mr. Know-All
of civilization, a wild flower in a hot house. Attracted at once by
her exquisite coloring and delicious profile, and amused by her
imperative manner and intolerant point of view, he had now begun to
be piqued and intrigued by her insurgent way of treating marriage
and of ignoring her husband--by her assumption of sexlessness and
the fact that she was unmoved by his compliments and looked at him
with eyes in which there was no remote suggestion of physical
interest.

And it was this attitude, new to him hitherto on his easy way, that
began to challenge him, to stir in him a desire to bring her down to
his own level, to make her fall in love and become what he called
human. He had given her several evenings, and had put himself out to
cater to her eager demand to see life and burn the night away in
crowds and noise. He had treated her, this young, new thing, as he
was in the habit of treating any beautiful woman with whom he was on
the verge of an affair and who realized the art of give and take.
But more than ever she conveyed the impression of sex detachment to
which he was wholly unaccustomed. He might have been any
inarticulate lad of her own age, useful as a companion, to be
ordered to fetch and carry, dance or walk, go or come. At that
moment there was no woman in the city for whom he would undergo the
boredom and the bruising and the dementia of such a place as the one
to which she had drawn him. He was not a provincial who imagined
that it was the smart thing to attend this dull orgy and struggle on
a polished floor packed as in a sardine tin. Years ago he had
outgrown cabaret mania and recovered from the fascination of
syncopation. And yet here he was, once more, against all his
fastidiousness, playing the out-of-town lad to a girl who took
everything and gave nothing in return. It was absurd, fantastic. He
was Gilbert Palgrave, the man who picked and chose, for whose
attentions many women would give their ears, who stood in satirical
aloofness from the general ruck; and as he held Joan in his arms and
made sporadic efforts to dance whenever there was a few inches of
room in which to do so, using all his ingenuity to dodge the menace
of the elbows and feet of people who pushed and forced as though
they were in a subway crush, he told himself that he would make it
his business from that moment onward to lay siege to Joan, apply to
her all his well-proved gifts of attraction and eventually make her
pay his price for services rendered.

He had just arrived at this cold-blooded determination when, to his
complete astonishment and annoyance, a strong, muscular form thrust
itself roughly between himself and Joan and swept her away.

III

"Marty!" cried Joan.

There was a curious glint in Martin's gray eyes, like the flash of
steel in front of a window. His jaw was set, and his face strangely
white.

"You said you were going to bed."

"I was going to bed, Marty dear."

"What are you doing here, then?"

"I changed my mind, old boy, and went out to dinner."

"Chucked me in favor of Palgrave."

"No, I didn't."

"What then?"

"He rang up after you'd gone; and going to bed like an old crock
seemed silly and feeble, and so I dressed and went out."

"Why with that rotter Palgrave? "

"Why not? And why rotter?"

"You don't answer my question!"

"Have I got to answer your question?"

"You're my wife, although you don't seem to know it; and I object to
Pargrave."

"I can't help that, Marty. I like him, you see, and humble little
person as I am, I can't be expected to turn my back on every one
except the men you choose for me."

"I don't choose any men for you. I want you for myself."

"Dear old Marty, but you've got me forever!"

"No, I haven't. You're less mine now than you were when I only saw
you in dreams. But all the same you're my wife, and I tell you now,
you sha'n't be handled by a man like Palgrave."

They were in the middle of the floor. There were people all round
them, thickly. They were obliged to keep going in that lunatic
movement or be run down. What a way and in what a place to bare a
bleeding heart!

For the first time since he had answered to her call and found her
standing clean-cut against the sky, Martin held Joan in his arms.
His joy in doing so was mixed with rage and jealousy. It had been
worse than a blow in the mouth suddenly to see her, of whom he had
thought as fast asleep in what was only the mere husk of home,
dancing with a man like Palgrave.

And her nearness maddened him. All the starved and pent-up passion
that was in him flamed and blazed. It blinded him and buzzed in his
ears. He held her so tight and so hungrily that she could hardly
breathe. She was his, this girl. She had called him, and he had
answered, and she was his wife. He had the right to her by law and
nature. He adored her and had let her off and tried to be patient
and win his way to her by love and gentleness. But with his lips
within an inch of her sweet, impertinent face, and the scent of her
hair in his brain, and the wound that she had opened again sapping
his blood, he held her to his heart and charged the crowd to the
beat of the music, like a man intoxicated, like a man heedless of
his surroundings. He didn't give a curse who overheard what he said,
or saw the look in his eyes. She had turned him down, this half-
wife, on the plea of weariness; and as soon as he had left the house
to go and eat his heart out in the hub of that swarming lonely city,
she had darted out with this doll-man whom he wouldn't have her
touch with the end of a pole. There was a limit to all things, and
he had come to it.

"You're coming home," he said.

"Marty, but I can't. Gilbert Palgrave--"

"Gilbert Palgrave be damned. You're coming home, I tell you, if I
have to carry you out."

She laughed. This was a new Marty, a high-handed, fiery Marty--one
who must not be encouraged. "Are you often like this?" she asked.

"Be careful. I've had enough, and if you don't want me to smash this
place up and cause a riot, you'll do what I tell you."

Her eyes flashed back at him, and two angry spots of color came into
her cheeks. He was out of control. She realized that. She had never
in her life seen any one so out of control--unaccountable as she
found it. That he would smash up the place and cause a riot she knew
instinctively. She put up no further opposition. If anything were to
be avoided, it was a scene, and in her mind's eye she could see
herself being carried out by this plunging boy, with a yard of
stocking showing and the laughter of every one ringing in her ears.
No, no, not that! She began to look for Palgrave, with her mind all
alert and full of a mischievous desire to turn the tables on Martin.
He must be shown quickly that if any one gave orders, she did.

He danced her to the edge of the floor, led her panting through the
tables to the foot of the stairs and with his hand grasping her arm
like a vice, guided her up to the place where ladies left their
wraps.

"We're going home," he said, "to have things out. I'll wait here."
Then he called a boy and told him to get his hat and coat and gave
him his check.

Five minutes later, in pulsating silence, both of them angry and
inarticulate, they stood in the street waiting for a taxi. The soft
air touched their hot faces with a refreshing finger. Hardly any one
who saw that slip of a girl and that square-shouldered boy with his
unlined face would have imagined that they could be anything but
brother and sister. The marriage of babies! Was there no single
apostle of common sense in all the country--a country so gloriously
free that it granted licenses to every foolishness without a qualm?

Palgrave was standing on the curb, scowling. His car moved up, and
the porter went forward to open the door. As quick as lightning,
Joan saw her chance to put Martin into his place and evade an
argument. Wasn't she out of that old country cage at last? Couldn't
she revel in free flight without being called to order and treated
like a school-girl, at last? What fun to use Palgrave to show Martin
her spirit!

She touched him on the arm and looked up at him with dancing eyes
and a teasing smile. "Not this time, Marty," she said, and was
across the sidewalk in a bound. "Quick," she said to Palgrave.
"Quick!" And he, catching the idea with something more than
amusement, sprang into the car after her, and away they went.

A duet of laughter hung briefly in the air.

With all the blood in his head, Martin, coming out of utter
surprise, made a dash for the retreating car, collided with the
porter and stood ruefully and self-consciously over the burly figure
that had gone down with a crash upon the pavement.

It was no use. Joan had been one too many for him. What, in any
case, was the good of trying to follow? She preferred Palgrave. She
had no use, at that moment, for home. She was bored at the mere idea
of talking things over. She was not serious. She refused to be faced
up with seriousness. She was like a precocious child who snapped her
fingers at authority and pursued the policy of the eel at the
approach of discipline. What had she cried out that night in the
dark with her chin tilted up and her arms thrown out? "I shall go
joy-riding in that huge round-about. If I can get anybody to pay my
score, good. If not, I'll pay it myself, whatever it costs. My
motto's going to be 'A good time as long as I can get it, and who
cares for the price!'"

Martin helped the porter to his feet, stanched his flow of County
Kerry reproaches with a ten-dollar bill and went back into the
Crystal Room. He had gone there half an hour ago with a party of
young people to kill loneliness and forget a bad hour of despair.
His friend, Howard Oldershaw, who had breezed him out of the reading
room of the Yale Club, was one of the party. He was in the first
flush of speed-breaking and knew the town and its midnight haunts.
He had offered to show Martin the way to get rid of depression.
Right! He should be put to the test. Two could play the "Who cares?"
game; and Martin, cut to the quick, angry and resisted, would enter
his name. Not again would he put himself in the way of being laughed
at and ridiculed and turned down, teased and tantalized and made a
fool of.

Patience and gentleness--to what end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp;
he had married a butterfly. Why continue to play the martyr and
follow the fruitless path of rectitude? Hadn't she said, "I can only
live once, and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to
go?" He could only live once, and if life was not to spin with her,
let it spin without her. "Who cares?" he said to himself. "Who the
devil cares?" He gave up his coat and hat, and went back into that
room of false joy and syncopation.

It was one o'clock when he stood in the street once more, hot and
wined and careless. "Let's hit it up," he said to Oldershaw as the
car moved away with the sisters and cousins of the other two men. "I
haven't started yet."

The red-haired, roistering Oldershaw, newly injected with the virus
of the Great White Way, clapped him on the back. "Bully for you, old
son," he said. "I'm in the mood to paint the little old town. I left
my car round the corner in charge of a down-at-heel night-bird. Come
on. Let's go and see if he's pinched it."

It was one of those Italian semi-racing cars with a body which gave
it the naked appearance of a muscular Russian dancer dressed in a
skin and a pair of bangles. The night-bird, one of the large army of
city gypsies who hang on to life by the skin of their teeth, was
sitting on the running board with his arms folded across his
shirtless chest, smoking a salvaged cigar, dreaming, probably, of
hot sausages and coffee. He afforded a striking illustration of the
under dog cringing contentedly at the knees of wealth.

"Good man," said Oldershaw, paying him generously. "Slip aboard,
Martin, and I'll introduce you to one of the choicest dives I know."

But the introduction was not to be effected that night, at any rate.
Driving the car as though it were a monoplane in a clear sky, with
an open throttle that awoke the echoes, Oldershaw charged into Fifth
Avenue and caught the bonnet of a taxicab that was going uptown.
There was a crash, a scream, a rending of metal. And when Martin
picked himself up with a bruised elbow and a curious sensation of
having stopped a punching bag with his face, he saw Oldershaw
bending over the crumpled body of the taxi driver and heard a girl
with red lips and a small white hat calling on Heaven for
retribution.

"Some men oughtn't to be trusted with machinery," said Oldershaw
with his inevitable grin. "If I can yank my little pet out of this
buckled-up lump of stuff, I'll drive that poor chap to the nearest
hospital. Look after the angel, Martin, and give my name and address
to the policeman. As this is my third attempt to kill myself this
month, things ought to settle down into humdrum monotony for a bit
now."

Martin went over to the girl. "I hope you're not hurt?" he asked.

"Hurt?" she cried out hysterically, feeling herself all over. "Of
course I'm hurt. I'm crippled for life. My backbone's broken; I
shall have water on both knees, a glass eye and a mouth full of
store teeth. But you don't care, you Hun. You like it."

And on she went, at the top of her voice, in an endless flow of
farce and tragedy, crying and laughing, examining herself with eager
hands, disbelieving more and more in the fact that she was still in
the only world that mattered to her.

Having succeeded in backing his dented car out of the debris,
Oldershaw leaped out. His face had been cut by the glass of the
broken windshield. Blood was trickling down his fat, good-natured
face. His hat was smashed and looked like that of the tramp cyclist
of the vaudeville stage. "All my fault, old man," he said in his
best irrepressible manner, as a policeman bore down upon him. "Help
me to hike our prostrate friend into my car, and I'll whip him off
to a hospital. He's only had the stuffing knocked out of him. It's
no worse than that. . . . That's fine. Big chap, isn't he--weighs a
ton. I'll get off right away, and my friend there will give you all
you want to know. So long." And off he went, one of his front wheels
wabbling foolishly.

The policeman was not Irish or German-American. He was therefore
neither loud nor browbeating. He was dry, quiet and accurate, and it
seemed to Martin that either he didn't enjoy being dressed in a
little brief authority or was a misanthrope, eager to return to his
noiseless and solitary tramp under the April stars. Martin gave him
Oldershaw's full name and address and his own; and the girl, still
shrill and shattered, gave hers, after protesting that all
automobiles ought to be put in a gigantic pile and scrapped, that
all harum-scarum young men should be clapped in bed at ten o'clock
and that all policemen should be locked up in their stations to play
dominoes. "If it'll do you any good to know it," she said finally,
"it's Susie Capper, commonly called 'Tootles.' And I tell you what
it is. If you come snooping round my place to get me before the
beak, I'll scream and kick, so help me Bob, I will." There was an
English cockney twang in her voice.

The policeman left her in the middle of a paean, with the wounded
taxi and Martin, and the light of a lamp-post throwing up the
unnatural red of her lips on a pretty little white face. He had
probably gone to call up the taxicab company.

Then she turned to Martin. "The decent thing for you to do, Mr. Nut,
is to see me home," she said. "I'm blowed if I'm going to face any
more attempts at murder alone. My word, what a life!"

"Come along, then," said Martin, and he put his hand under her
elbow. That amazing avenue, which had the appearance of a great,
deep cut down the middle of an uneven mountain, was almost deserted.
From the long line of street lamps intermittent patches of light
were reflected as though in glass. The night and the absence of
thickly crawling motors and swarming crowds gave it dignity. A
strange, incongruous Oriental note was struck by the deep red of
velvet hangings thrown up by the lights in a furniture dealer's shop
on the second floor of a white building.

"Look for a row of women's ugly wooden heads painted by some one
suffering from delirium tremens," said Miss Susie Capper as they
turned down West Forty-sixth Street. "It's a dressmaker's, although
you might think it was an asylum for dope fiends. I've got a
bedroom, sitter and bath on the top floor. The house is a rabbit
warren of bedrooms, sitters and baths, and in every one of them
there's some poor devil trying to squeeze a little kindness out of
fate. That wretched taxi driver! He may have a wife waiting for him.
Do you think that red-haired feller's got to the hospital yet? He
had a nice cut on his own silly face--and serve him right! I hope
it'll teach him that he hasn't bought the blooming world--but of
course it won't. He's the sort that never gets taught anything,
worse luck! Nobody spanked him when he was young and soft. Come on
up, and you shall taste my scrambled eggs. I'll show you what a
forgiving little soul I am."

She laughed, ran her eyes quickly over Martin, and opened the door
with a latchkey. Half a dozen small letter boxes were fastened to
the wall, with cards in their slots.

"Who the devil cares?" said Martin to himself, and he followed the
girl up the narrow, ill-lighted staircase covered with shabby
carpet. Two or three inches of white stockings gleamed above the
drab uppers of her high-heeled boots. Outside the open door of a
room on the first floor there was a line of milk bottles, and Martin
sighted a man in shirt sleeves, cooking sausages on a small gas jet
in a cubby-hole. He looked up, and a cheery smile broke out on his
clean-shaven face. There was brown grease paint on his collar.
"Hello, Tootles," he called out.

"Hello, Laddy," she said. "How'd it go to-night?"

"Fine. Best second night in the history of the theater. Come in and
have a bite."

"Can't. Got company."

And up they went, the aroma following.

A young woman in a sky-blue peignoir scuttled across the next
landing, carrying a bottle of beer in each hand. There was a smell
of onions and hot cheese. "What ho, Tootles," she said.

"What ho, Irene. Is it true they've put your notice up?"

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