The Wishing Carpet

OLD Mrs. Jennings, who welcomed her granddaughter’s guest very cordially, wore an orchid dinner gown and an orchid complexion. Her face had at once an oddly tense and expectant look overlaid by a doll-like blankness.

Janice, catching Glen’s hastily averted glance, whispered an explanation at the first opportunity. “Grammer’s had her face lifted twice. That’s what gives her the hard-finish. Kalsomined, just like a wall. Isn’t it a scream? But if the poor old girl gets a kick out of it—” she shrugged with a good-natured tolerance. “My child, you’re a landscape! Good-looking dress. Didn’t get it here?”

“It was a present from Miss Ada.”

“Well, what do you know about that? You’d expect that poor old White Leghorn to choose polka dots and baby ribbon, wouldn’t you. But at that, I can see she’s a good egg.”

“She has been a wonderful friend to me,” Glen flushed loyally, following her hostesses into the glare and blare of the big dining room. There was a merciless blaze of light and on a shallow stage a jazz orchestra was committing musical crimes.

As soon as they were seated Janice leaned across the table and pointed frankly at one of the musicians. “Pipe the bird with the big horn—the one with a permanent wave in it? That’s Edward Harrington Du Val—you know—they gave him the gate at Harvard and papa pulled the heavy father stuff,—‘Not another penny, sir!’—you know the line, but the kid’s called his bluff and proved he can pay for his own hooch and gardenias. Don’t you love it? I’m crazy about him,” she finished calmly. He caught her eye and nodded and she shot one thin bare arm straight up beside her head in salute. “Ye ... ay, Eddie!”

“Babe!” her grandmother protested.

“What’s the big idea, Grammer? You know he’s my desert lover.” She grinned, and relapsed into coolness as a pallid youth with sleek fair hair stopped beside their table. “’Lo, Ronnie. No. I’m not stepping to-night. Company.”

“I’ll say,” he murmured, staring appreciatively at Glen.

Miss Jennings mumbled their names. “He’s a blah of purest ray serene,” she stated, almost before he was out of earshot. “The Human Lady Finger. They’re an awful mess here, except Eddie. Say, on the low down, don’t you know any boys?”

“I know Luke.” (Luke, her father’s golden lad, whom she had disappointed and denied so shabbily to-day.) She colored unhappily, the more as she found Miss Jennings’s hard little eyes upon her.

“Oh, so that’s it!” Janice pounced.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s your sweetie!”

“No. He—” She could not escape it, then. It was of no use to put on Miss Ada’s little yellow-buff crêpe de chine and come out of her cloister into the dazzle and din of the Bella Vista; the mountain of misery had come with her, moving steadily and implacably behind her, shadowing her, threatening to crush her. She was a wretched ingrate; a traitor; false to her father, and to her friend, and to herself. She got a certain comfort from putting it into determined words. “My father found Luke in the mountains, and he had the greatest faith in him. He was our nearest friend, while my father lived; he is my nearest friend now. I—some day—” she said clearly, “I will marry him.”

“Oh!” The acquaintance of her childhood considered her thoughtfully. “The plot thickens. Got it all doped out, haven’t you? Well, happy days, old thing, but I’d breeze around a little and look ’em over first! And speaking of such, did I tell you I know your boss?”

“Mr. Carey, you mean? Nancy’s father?”

“No, Peter Parker. (Sounds like ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,’ doesn’t it?) You know—his dad was old Carey’s partner, and this bird inherited his share of the mill. Met him at Pasadena last winter, and we got talking about the places we went, and when I mentioned this, he mentioned the Altonia mill.”

“His mother is a remarkable woman, in her way,” contributed Mrs. Jennings. “She is president of the Federated Clubs of the whole country, and they say she’s the best woman speaker in America. Of course, that’s all very well for women who like it and haven’t any home cares. As far as I’m concerned—” she gave a delicate pat to the curl which was gummed against her temple—“I never seemed to find time for clubs.”

“Peter’s a scream,” Janice took up the tale. “Honestly, I think he’s got the best line I ever heard in my life. You know, he was canned from four prep schools and three colleges, and——”

Her guest’s lip curled. “I hate and detest him more than anybody else in the world!”

Her young hostess laid down her ramekin fork and looked at her with bright mouth open. “Say, how do you get that way? Hate Peter? Peter Parker? Woman, it can’t be done! Besides—did you ever meet him?”

“No, but I don’t need to meet him to know all about him! I know he’s idle-born, overfed, underworked”—her father’s, vehement adjectives, these—“grinding down the mill workers—the children so he can live and travel and—loaf—in lazy luxury!” The color had drained out of her golden olive face and it looked like ivory in its frame of coppery hair. Her eyes blazed, the pupils dilated blackly. “He’s a waster, a parasite!”

“Help!” cried Babe, jovially. “Don’t blame me! Blame the Club President! She brought him up—or didn’t!”

“But, Janice, can’t you see what a cancerous growth people like that are in the life of the nation?” (The violent weekly had contributed this, but she had repeated it until she honestly thought it her own.) “They take everything; they give nothing! They——”

“Hire a hall!” the other girl cut her briskly short. “Say do you mind—Eddie always cuts one number to step with me.” She got eagerly to her feet and went into the arms of the horn player and they moved slowly away together across the polished floor.

“Babe’s a great girl,” her grandmother remarked complacently. “The boys are wild about her, everywhere she goes.” She looked curiously at Glen, still white, and shaking with her fervor. “I met the Parker boy. I think you’re mistaken about him. Maybe you’ve got him confused with somebody else. He’s—I don’t know—kind of a fascinating rascal, if you know what I mean.” Her blandly adoring eyes were following her granddaughter’s leisurely progress across the big, ornate room. “Babe can certainly dance,” she said, contentedly.

For nineteen, the scene had inevitably its zest in the tang of novelty. Glen assured herself hotly that she despised it all as a virulent manifestation of social injustice, but she had a pathetic hope of cramming her mind so full of new sensations that it would give over its unhappy ruminations for the moment. She forced her attention upon the dreadful, bedizened, pitiful old creature across the table, on the harsh lights, the endless, heavy courses of the meal; the strange, savage music with its throb and thrill and its sly, insinuating cadences, its bursts of jungle joy; the diners; the dancers; Janice Jennings and young Edward Harrington Du Val who had demonstrated that he could buy his own hooch and gardenias, moving so slowly, almost stealthily across the floor, their eyes blankly fixed on space, their mouths unsmiling, their flat and thin young bodies pressed painstakingly close together, their whole air one of calculated ecstasy. She tried to make a vehement reality of it all, and she succeeded fairly well while she was in the midst of it, but back in her bed at last the radiant mood of fifteen hours before came back to her; battered and bruised, demanding sanctuary.

There was no illumination for her through the long night; its impenetrable velvet blackness was no thicker than the bewildered misery in her mind. Why? Why? Luke, whom she had pedestaled and pinnacled for five years; whom she had almost worshiped! Luke, who deserved the best, and to whom she had given her shabby worst. The thing was a bitter mystery; one moment, as gravely, as exultantly as a child waiting for its first communion, she had waited for him to ask her to marry him, ready—oh, rapturously ready—to say yes, the yes which had been waiting for him ever since the day of her father’s death; and the next moment she had been shivering, almost shuddering, frightened, unhappy, repelled. She was so bitterly ashamed. She repeated over and over, flagellating her sore spirit, that she had failed her father and her friend and herself.

It was not until the first rooster had flung his raucous challenge at the mocking bird, singing deliriously in a magnolia tree, that the solution came to her. It was so startling, so simple, so thoroughly explanatory, that she sat bolt upright with the surprise and relief of it.

She had been perfectly happy and perfectly ready, until Luke caught her in his arms. That was it! She didn’t like being touched. Her father had been always bluffly undemonstrative, and Miss Ada’s endearments were verbal only, and she could remember, as a tiny child, her restiveness under her mother’s prolific embraces, and that Mrs. Darrow, little by little, with her sad eyes shining with tears, had given them up. “You are just like your father ...” she had said again and again.

So, that explained it! It was simply that she, like her father, was the sort of person who didn’t like kisses. Doubtless there, were many of the same mind. She laughed aloud with the jubilant release from wretchedness. If only it had come to her sooner! Now it was crystal clear; she did love Luke, with her mind, but she didn’t love him with—well, with her arms and her hands and her lips, that was all. She could explain it to him to-morrow, and tell him she was ready and willing to marry him, any day, any hour, if he would only please not touch her.

Luke would certainly understand and appreciate it; when she told him that her father, her father, who had meant so much to him—had the same peculiarity, it would justify itself with Luke.

People were different, that was all; consider Janice Jennings and the trombone player who looked like lovers and were not in the least, she felt sure; and herself, who looked up to Luke and—and idolized him, but who certainly could not dance with him in that fashion. In the few romances she had read there was a good deal of that sort of thing, to be sure, but she doubted very much if it was so popular in real life.... She exhaled a long, weary, peaceful sigh, turned her hot pillow, slipped her palm beneath her hot cheek and composed herself to sleep.... She was not a wicked ingrate, after all ... she was just ... a little peculiar ... as her father had been peculiar ... to-morrow she would tell Luke ... he would understand ... she did love him ... she just ... didn’t like ... being ... touched....