CHAPTER XIV

Just about the hour of that historic day when Kedzie was running away from her father and mother Prissy Atterbury was springing his great story about Jim Dyckman and Charity.

Prissy had gone on to his destination, the home of the Winnsboros in Greenwich, but he arrived late, and the house guests were too profoundly absorbed in their games of auction to make a fit audience for such a story. So Prissy saved it for a correct moment, though he nearly burst with it. He slept ill that night from indigestion due to retention of gossip.

The next forenoon he watched as the week-end prisoners dawdled down from their gorgeous cells, to a living-room as big and as full of seats as a hotel lobby. They threw themselves, on lounges and huge chairs and every form of encouragement to indolence. They threw themselves also on the mercy and the ingenuity of their hostess. But Mrs. Winnsboro expected her guests to bring their own plans and take care of themselves. They were marooned.

When the last malingerer arrived with yawns still unfinished, Prissy seized upon a temporary hush and began to laugh. Pet Bettany, who was always sullen before luncheon, grumbled:

"What ails you, Priss? Just seeing some joke you heard last night?"

Priss snapped, "I was thinking."

"You flatter yourself," said Pet. "But I suppose you've got to get it off your chest. I'll be the goat. What is it?"

Prissy would have liked to punish the cat by not telling her a single word of it, but he could not withhold the scandal another moment.

"Well, I'll tell you the oddest thing you ever heard in all your life."

Pretending to tell it to Pet, he was reaching out with voice and eyes to muster the rest. He longed for a megaphone and cursed such big rooms.

"I was pa.s.sing through the Grand Central to take my train up here, you understand, and who should I see walk in from an incoming express, you understand, but--who, I say, should I see but--oh, you never would guess--you simply never would guess. Nev-vir-ir!"

"Who cares who you saw," said Pet, and viciously started to change the subject, so that Prissy had to jump the prelude.

"It was Jim Dyckman. Well, in he comes from the train, you understand, and looks about among the crowd of people waiting for the train--to meet people, you understand."

Pet broke in, frantically: "Yes, I understand! But if you say 'understand' once more I'll scream and chew up the furniture!"

Prissy regarded her with patient pity and went on:

"Jim didn't see me, you un--you see--and--but just as I was about to say h.e.l.lo to him he turns around and begins to stare into the crowd of other people getting off the same train that he got off, you underst--Well, I had plenty of time for my train, so I waited--not to see what was up, you un--I do say it a lot, don't I? Well, I waited, and who should come along but--well, this you never would guess--not in a month of Sundays."

A couple of flanneled oaves impatient for the tennis-court stole away, and Pet said,

"Speed it up, Priss; they're walking out on you."

"Well, they won't walk out when they know who the woman was. Jim was waiting for--he was waiting for--"

He paused a moment. n.o.body seemed interested, and so he hastened to explode the name of the woman.

"Charity Coe! It was Charity Coe Jim was waiting for! They had come in on the same train, you understand, and yet they didn't come up the platform together. Why? I ask you. Why didn't they come up the platform together? Why did Jim come along first and wait? Was it to see if the coast was clear? Now, I ask you!"

There was respect enough paid to Prissy's narrative now. In fact, the name of Charity in such a story made the blood of everybody run cold--not unpleasantly--yet not altogether pleasantly.

Some of the guests scouted Prissy's theory. Mrs. Neff was there, and she liked Charity. She puffed contempt and cigarette-smoke at Atterbury, and murmured, sweetly, "Prissy, you're a dirty little liar, and your long tongue ought to be cut out and nailed up on a wall."

Prissy nearly wept at the injustice of such skepticism. It was Pet Bettany, of all people, who came to his rescue with credulity. She was sincerely convinced. A voluptuary and intrigante herself, she believed that her own ideas of happiness and her own impulses were shared by everybody, and that people who frowned on vice were either hypocrites or cowards.

She could not imagine how small a part and how momentary a part evil ambitions play in the lives of clean, busy souls like Charity. In fact, Pet flattered herself as to her own wickedness, and pretended to be worse than she was, in order to establish a reputation for candor.

Vice has its hypocrisies as well as virtue.

Pet had long been impatient of the celebration of Charity Coe's saintly attributes, and it had irked her to see so desirable a catch as Jim Dyckman squandering his time on a woman who was already married and liked it. He might have been interested in Pet if Charity had let him alone.

Pet also was stirred with the detestation of sin in orderly people that actuates disorderly people. She broke out with surprising earnestness.

"Well, I thought as much! So Charity Coe is human, after all, the sly devil! She's fooling even that foxy husband of hers. She's playing the same game, too--and a sweet little foursome it makes."

She laughed so abominably that Mrs. Neff threw away her cigarette and growled:

"Oh, shut up, Pet; you make me sick! Let's go out in the air."

Mrs. Neff was old enough to say such things, and Pet dampered her noise a trifle. But she held Prissy back and made him recount his adventure again. They had a good laugh over it--Prissy giggling and hugging one knee, Pet whooping with that peasant mirth of hers.

The same night, at just about the hour when Kedzie Thropp was falling asleep in Crotona Park and Jim Dyckman was sulking alone in his home and Charity was brooding alone in hers, Prissy Atterbury was delighted to see a party of raiders from another house-party motor up to the Winnsboros' and demand a drink.

Prissy was a trifle glorious by this time. He had been frequenting a bowl of punch subtly liquored, but too much sweetened. He leaned heavily on a new-comer as he began his story. The new-comer pushed Prissy aside with scant courtesy.

"Ah, tell us a new one!" he said. "That's ancient history!"

"What-what-what," Prissy stammered. "Who told you s'mush?"

"Pet Bet. telephoned it to us this morning. I heard it from three other people to-day."

"Well, ain't that abslooshly abdominable."

Prissy began to cry softly. He knew the pangs of an author circ.u.mvented by a plagiarist.

The next morning his head ached and he rang up an eye-opener or two.

The valet found him in violet pajamas, holding his jangling head and moaning:

"There was too much sugar in the punch."

He remembered Pet's treachery, and he groaned that there was too much vinegar in life. But he determined to fight for his story, and he did.

Long after Pet had turned her attention to other reputations, Prissy was still peddling his yarn.

The story went circlewise outward and onward like the influence of a pebble thrown into a pool. Two people who had heard the story and doubted it met; one told it to the other; the other said she had heard it before; and they parted mutually supported and definitely convinced that the rumor was fact. Repet.i.tion is confirmation, and history is made up of just such self-propelled lies--fact founded on fiction.

We create for ourselves a Nero or a Cleopatra, a Washington or a Molly Pitcher, from the gossip of enemies or friends or imaginers, and we can be sure of only one thing--that we do not know the true truth.

But we also do wrong to hold gossip in too much discredit. It gives life fascination, makes the most stupid neighbors interesting. It keeps up the love of the great art of fiction and the industry of character-a.n.a.lysis. A small wonder that human beings are addicted to it, when we are so emphatically a.s.sured that heaven itself is devoted to it, and that we are under the incessant espionage of our Deity, while the angels are eavesdroppers and reporters carrying note-books in which they write with indelible ink the least things we do or say or think.

CHAPTER XV