IV
There was in Nautilus a country club which was the axis of what they called Society, but there was also a tribe of perhaps twelve families in the Ashford Grove section who, though they went to the country club for golf, condescended to other golfers, kept to themselves, and considered themselves as belonging more to Chicago than to Nautilus. They took turns in entertaining one another. They assumed that they were all welcome at any party given by any of them, and to none of their parties was anyone outside the Group invited except migrants from larger cities and occasional free lances like Martin. They were a tight little garrison in a heathen town.
The members of the Group were very rich, and one of them, Montgomery Mugford, knew something about his great-grandfather. They lived in Tudor manor houses and Italian villas so new that the scarred lawns had only begun to grow. They had large cars and larger cellars, though the cellars contained nothing but gin, whisky, vermouth, and a few sacred bottles of rather sweet champagne. Everyone in the Group was familiar with New York—they stayed at the St. Regis or the Plaza and went about buying clothes and discovering small smart restaurants—and five of the twelve couples had been in Europe; had spent a week in Paris, intending to go to art galleries and actually going to the more expensive fool-traps of Montmartre.
In the Group Martin and Leora found themselves welcomed as poor relations. They were invited to choric dinners, to Sunday lunches at the country club. Whatever the event, it always ended in rapidly motoring somewhere, having a number of drinks, and insisting that Martin again “give that imitation of Doc Pickerbaugh.”
Besides motoring, drinking, and dancing to the Victrola, the chief diversion of the Group was cards. Curiously, in this completely unmoral set, there were no flirtations; they talked with considerable freedom about “sex,” but they all seemed monogamic, all happily married or afraid to appear unhappily married. But when Martin knew them better he heard murmurs of husbands having “times” in Chicago, of wives picking up young men in New York hotels, and he scented furious restlessness beneath their superior sexual calm.
It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about astronomy except studying it, or Monte Mugford as the highly descended aristocrat, but he did admire the Group’s motor cars, shower baths, Fifth Avenue frocks, tweed plus-fours, and houses somewhat impersonally decorated by daffodillic young men from Chicago. He discovered sauces and old silver. He began to consider Leora’s clothes not merely as convenient coverings, but as a possible expression of charm, and irritably he realized how careless she was.
In Nautilus, alone, rarely saying much about herself, Leora had developed an intense mute little life of her own. She belonged to a bridge club, and she went solemnly by herself to the movies, but her ambition was to know France and it engrossed her. It was an old desire, mysterious in source and long held secret, but suddenly she was sighing:
“Sandy, the one thing I want to do, maybe ten years from now, is to see Touraine and Normandy and Carcassonne. Could we, do you think?”
Rarely had Leora asked for anything. He was touched and puzzled as he watched her reading books on Brittany, as he caught her, over a highly simplified French grammar, breathing “J’ay—j’aye—damn it, whatever it is!”
He crowed, “Lee, dear if you want to go to France—Listen! Some day we’ll shoot over there with a couple of knapsacks on our backs, and we’ll see that ole country from end to end!”
Gratefully yet doubtfully: “You know if you got bored, Sandy, you could go see the work at the Pasteur Institute. Oh, I would like to tramp, just once, between high plastered walls, and come to a foolish little café and watch the men with funny red sashes and floppy blue pants go by. Really, do you think maybe we could?”
Leora was strangely popular in the Ashford Grove Group, though she possessed nothing of what Martin called their “elegance.” She always had at least one button missing. Mrs. Tredgold, best natured as she was least pious of women, adopted her complete.
Nautilus had always doubted Clara Tredgold. Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh said that she “took no part in any movement for the betterment of the city.” For years she had seemed content to grow her roses, to make her startling hats, to almond-cream her lovely hands, and listen to her husband’s improper stories—and for years she had been a lonely woman. In Leora she perceived an interested casualness equal to her own. The two women spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading, doing their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting each other.
With the other women of the Group Leora was never so intimate as with Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more because she was a heretic whose vices, her smoking, her indolence, her relish of competent profanity, disturbed Mrs. Pickerbaugh and Mrs. Irving Watters. The Group rather approved all unconventionalities—except such economic unconventionalities as threatened their easy wealth. Leora had tea, or a cocktail, alone with nervous young Mrs. Monte Mugford, who had been the lightest-footed debutante in Des Moines four years before and who hated now the coming of her second baby; and it was to Leora that Mrs. Schlemihl, though publicly she was rompish and serene with her porker of a husband, burst out, “If that man would only quit pawing me—reaching for me—slobbering on me! I hate it here! I will have my winter in New York—alone!”
The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora’s old quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the Group. When she appeared with a hook unfastened or her hair like a crow’s nest, he worried, and said things about her “sloppiness” which he later regretted.
“Why can’t you take a little time to make yourself attractive? God knows you haven’t anything else to do! Great Jehoshaphat, can’t you even sew on buttons?”
But Clara Tredgold laughed, “Leora, I do think you have the sweetest back, but do you mind if I pin you up before the others come?”
It happened after a party which lasted till two, when Mrs. Schlemihl had worn the new frock from Lucile’s and Jack Brundidge (by day vice-president and sales-manager of the Maize Mealies Company) had danced what he belligerently asserted to be a Finnish polka, that when Martin and Leora were driving home in a borrowed Health Department car he snarled, “Lee, why can’t you ever take any trouble with what you wear? Here this morning—or yesterday morning—you were going to mend that blue dress, and as far as I can figure out you haven’t done a darn thing the whole day but sit around and read, and then you come out with that ratty embroidery—”
“Will you stop the car!” she cried.
He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously important a barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak reach of gravel road.
She demanded, “Do you want me to become a harem beauty? I could. I could be a floosey. But I’ve never taken the trouble. Oh, Sandy, I won’t go on fighting with you. Either I’m the foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I’m nothing. What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara Tredgold, or do you want me, that don’t care a hang where we go or what we do as long as we stand by each other? You do such a lot of worrying. I’m tired of it. Come on now. What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything but you. But can’t you understand—I’m not just a climber—I want us both to be equal to anything we run into. I certainly don’t see why we should be inferior to this bunch, in anything. Darling, except for Clara, maybe, they’re nothing but rich bookkeepers! But we’re real soldiers of fortune. Your France that you love so much—some day we’ll go there, and the French President will be at the N.P. depot to meet us! Why should we let anybody do anything better than we can? Technique!”
They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the poisonous lines of barbed wire.
Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged, with the wistfulness of youth, “Oh, Dr. Martin, aren’t you ever coming to the house again?” he kissed her so briskly, so cheerfully, that even a flapper could perceive that she was unimportant.