FLAMING YOUTH
PART I
CHAPTER I
The room was vital with air and fresh with the scent of many flowers. It was a happy room, a loved room, even a petted room. There was about it a sense of stir, of life, of habitual holiday. Some rooms retain these echoes. People say of them that they have character or express individuality. But this one's character was composite, possessing attributes of the many who had come and gone and laughed and played and perhaps loved there, at the behest of its mistress. A captious critic might have complained that it was over-crowded. The same critic might have said the same of Mona Fentriss's life.
Though a chiefly contributory part of the room's atmosphere, Mona Fentriss's personality was not fully reflected in her immediate environment. The room was not a married room. It suggested none of the staidness, the habitude, the even acceptances of conjugal life. The bed stood outside, on the sleeping porch. It was a single bed. Unfriendly commentators upon the Fentriss ménage had been known to express the conviction that marriage was not a specially important element in Mrs. Fentriss's joyous existence. Nevertheless there were the three children, all girls. There was also Fentriss.
The mistress of the room lolled on a cushioned chaise longue near the side window. She was a golden-brown, strong, delicately rounded woman, glowing with an effect
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of triumphant and imperishable youth. Not one of her features but was faulty by strict artistic tenets; even the lustrous eyes were set at slightly different levels. Yet the total effect was that of loveliness; yes, more, of compelling charm. One would have guessed her to be still short of thirty.
"This is final, is it?" she asked evenly of a man who was standing near the door.
"It's final enough," he answered.
He shambled across the room to her side, moving like a bear. Like a bear's his exterior was rough, shaggy, and seemed not to fit him well. His face was irregularly square, homely, thoughtful, and humorous. "Want to cry?" he asked.
"No. I want to swear."
"Go ahead."
Downstairs a door opened and closed. There followed the rhythmic crepitation of ice against metal.
"There's Ralph home," interpreted the wife. "Call down and tell him to shake up one for me."
"Better not."
"Oh, you be damned!" she retorted, twinkling at him. "You've finished your day's job as a physician. I need one."
As he obediently went out she mused, with the instinct of the competent housekeeper:
"Gin's gone to twenty-five dollars a gallon. That'll rasp poor old Ralph. I wonder how much this will jar him." By "this" she meant the news which she had just forced from the reluctant lips of Dr. Robert Osterhout. She pursued her line of thought. "Who'll take over the house? The girls know nothing about running it. Perhaps he'll marry again. He's very young for fifty."
The two men entered, Fentriss carrying the shaker.
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He set it down, crossed the room and kissed his wife. There was an effect of habitual and well-bred gallantry in the act. He was a slender, alert, companionable looking man with a quizzical expression. Dr. Osterhout poured out a cocktail which he offered to Mrs. Fentriss. She regarded it contemptuously.
"Bob, you devil! That's only half a drink."
"It's more than you ought to have."
"Pour me a real one. At once! Ralph; you do it. Come on."
With a shrug and a deprecatory smile at the physician, Ralph Fentriss filled the glass to the brim. The Fentriss cocktails were famous far beyond the suburban limits of Dorrisdale for length as well as flavour.
"Here's to Prohibition," said their concoctor in his suave voice, before drinking; "and to your better health, my dear."
"A toi," she responded carelessly. "Leave the shaker, will you, Ralph? Bob and I are talking."
Fentriss nodded and went. A moment later the concert grand in the big living room below stairs responded to a touch at once delicate, strong and distinctive.
"How I used to love his music!" said Mona Fentriss half to herself; "and still do," she added. "Bob." She turned upon her physician with laughing reproach in her eyes. "Don't you know better, after all these years, than to try to keep me from doing anything I want to do? I always get what I want."
"If you don't, it's not for lack of trying."
"I don't even have to try very hard. Life has been a generous godfather to me. But I've always wanted more. Like Oliver Twist, wasn't it? Or Jephthah's daughter?"
Dr. Osterhout grinned. "It was the horse leech's daughters that were always crying 'Give! Give!'"
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"Why cry for it? Reach out and help yourself," she said gaily. "Them's my principles. And now the fairy godfather is going to cut me off with a shilling. Or a year. Or less."
"Unless you obey orders it'll be considerably less."
"Let it! I'd rather do as I please while it lasts.
"'I've taken my fun where I found it,
I've rogued and I've ranged in my time,'"
sang Ralph Fentriss at the piano below to music of his own composing.
"So have I," murmured his wife. Her eyes grew brilliant, craving, excited as they wandered to the flower-decked mantel upon which stood half a dozen photographs. All were of men. Though they varied in age and indications of character, they presented a typical similarity in being well-groomed and attractive. They might all have belonged to the same club. "Bob, do many women confess to their doctors?"
"Lots."
"To you?"
"No. I don't let 'em."
"Why not? I should think it would be interesting."
"It's only a trick to gratify the senses through recollection," said the blunt physician. "Reflected lechery."
"You know too much, Bob. Then you won't be my father confessor?"
"I doubt if you could tell me much," he said slowly.
A smile, unabashed and mischievous, played upon her lips. "That's an ambiguous sort of answer. Sometimes I suspect that very little gets past you."
"I'm trained to observation," he remarked.
"And to silence. So you're safe. I think it would do
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me good to confess to you." She grew still and pensive. "Bob, if I'd been a Roman Catholic do you suppose I'd have been—different?"
"Doubted. Would you want to be?"
"I don't really know that I would. Anyway I'm what I had to be. We all are."
"Fatalism is a convenient excuse."
"No; but I am," she insisted. "It's temperament. Temperament is fate. For a woman, anyway," she added with a flash of insight. "You don't blame me, do you? I couldn't help it, could I?"
He smiled down at her, tolerant but uncompromising.
"Oh, don't stand there looking like God," she fretted. "Do you know what I'd resolved to do? Will you laugh at me if I tell you?"
"Probably. Therefore tell me."
"I was going to be a pattern of all the proprieties after I turned forty."
"Too early," he pronounced judicially.
"Why? What do you mean?"
"Make it fifty."
She knit her smooth forehead. "Because I wouldn't be pretty then?"
"Oh, you'd charm and attract men at seventy. But you wouldn't have such a—well, such an urgent temperament. That passes, usually."
"Bob! You beast!" But she laughed. "You're very much the medical man, aren't you?"
"It's my business in life."
"Well, the whole discussion is what you call an academic question, anyhow. If you and your hateful medical science are right, I'll never see thirty-eight, let alone forty. I don't feel thirty-seven. There's so much life in me. Too much, I suppose."
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"No. Not too much."
"No more flutters for pretty Mona," she mused. "At least she's had her share. Do you think Ralph cares?"
"You're the one to know that."
"If he does, he's never given any sign. But then, it's years since he's been true to me."
Her companion made a slight, uninterpretable gesture.
"Shall I tell him? Your verdict, I mean."
"Great Judas, no! Why stir him up? It's going to be hard enough on him anyway."
"Is it?" she said wistfully. "He'll miss me in a way, won't he? I am fond of him, too, you know."
"Yes. I understand that."
"But you don't understand why I've gone trouble-hunting, out of bounds."
"Yes. I understand that, too."
"Perhaps you do. You understand lots more than one would think from your dear, old, stupid face." She paused. "Tell me something, honestly, Bob. Has there been much talk about me?"
"Oh, there's always talk and always will be about anyone as brilliant and vivid as you."
"Don't evade. Some of the older crowd look at me as if they thought I was the Scarlet Woman come back to life. I'm not the Scarlet Woman, Bob. Only a dash of pink."
He smiled indulgently.
"It's strange," she mused, "how the tradition of behaviour clings in the blood, in that set. Your set, Bob. Ah, well! Discretion is the better part of virtue, as someone said. And I haven't been discreet, even if I have been virtuous. You believe I've been, don't you, Bob?"
"What, discreet?"
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Again she laughed, showing little, even, animal-like teeth.
"No; the other thing."
"I believe whatever you want me to."
"Meaning that you reserve your own opinion. But you're a staunch friend, anyway.... The trouble with me is that I was born too soon. I really belong with this wild young age that's coming on the stage just as I'm going off; with the girls. Listen!"
Below stairs Fentriss, still at the piano, had swung into the rhythms of the Second Rhapsody, wild and broken as white water seething through a rock-beset gorge.
"That's the measure they dance to, the new generation. Doesn't it get into your torpid blood, Bob? Don't you wish you were young again? To be a desperado of twenty! They're all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins; the girls as well as the boys; maybe more than the boys. Even Connie with her eyes of a vestal. Ah!"
A new note had merged with the music, a hoarse, childish croon, following the mad measure with an interwoven recitative.
"That's Patricia. She's dancing to it."
"How can you tell?" asked the physician.
"By the way she's singing. Little devil! I wonder what it'll be like by the time she's grown up," mused the mother.
"Which won't be so long, now."
"So it won't. I keep forgetting that. She seems such a baby. What a queer little creature it is, Bob!"
"She's a terror. But there's something lovable about her, too. A touch of you in her, Mona."
"Of me? She's no more like me than I'm like my namesake of the well-known Lisa family. Nor like the older
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girls, either. Well, why shouldn't she be different from them? Coming five years after I'd supposed all that sort of thing was over. She was pure accident. How I tried to get out of having her! Perhaps that's why she's such a strange little elf. But Ralph's crazy about her—as much as he can be crazy about anything. I thought for a time she'd bring us together again."
"But you found variety more amusing than pure domesticity," suggested the physician.
"I? It wasn't I that began it; it was Ralph. You know I never went in for even the mildest flirtation until long after Pat was born; until I began to get bored with the sameness of life."
"Boredom leads more women astray than passion," pronounced the other oracularly; "in our set, anyway."
"Oh, astray," she fretted. "Don't use mid-Victorian pulpit language."
"I was only philosophising about our lot in general."
"We're a pretty rotten lot, aren't we! Though I suppose the people you don't know, the people that nobody knows, are just as rotten. Ah, well, so long as one preserves appearances! And Ralph has no kick coming. He'd gone on the loose before I ever looked sidewise at any other man. They say he's got a Floozie now, tucked away in a cozy corner somewhere."
"Do they?"
"Has he?"
"Ask him."
"Too good a sport," she retorted. "I shouldn't be asking you if I thought you'd tell me. Very likely you don't know. He hasn't been boring you with confessions, I'll bet! Men don't, do they?"
"Only of their symptoms."
"But they confess to women."
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"The more fools they!"
"Can't I wring a confession out of you?" she teased. "Why haven't you ever made love to me, Bob?"
"Too much afraid of losing what little I've got of you," he returned sombrely.
"How do you know you wouldn't have got more? How do you know that I wouldn't have given you—everything?"
"Everything you could give wouldn't be enough."
"Pig! You don't want much, do you!"
"Have you ever really cared for any of your partners in flirtation?"
"You speak as if I'd had dozens," she pouted.
"It isn't a question of the quantity but of the quality of your attachments. If I'd ever asked anything of you it would have been—well, romance." He laughed quietly at himself. "Something you haven't got to give. You see, I'm a romantic and you're not. You've sought excitement, admiration, change. But not 'the light that never was on land or sea.' You're adventurous and passionate, but not romantic. It's quite a different order of thing."
"And you're brutal. Besides, you're wrong; quite wrong."
"Am I?" His glance ranged the faces on the mantel. "Which one?"
She gave him a swift smile. "He isn't there. You never saw him. His name was Cary Scott."
"Was? Is he dead?"
"He's out of my life; or almost. He's married. He was hardly more than a boy when I knew him. Nine years ago in Paris. He was studying at the Polytechnique, doing his post-graduate work and doing it brilliantly, I believe. He went mad over me. My fault; I meant him
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to; it amused me. I was attracted, too. There was a vividness of youth about him. I didn't realise how much I was going to miss him out of my life, though, until we came back. I did miss him. Like hell!"
"He was the one to whom you really gave?"
"Hardly so much as a kiss. I wanted to keep it that way, and he was slave to me. He was an innocent sort of soul, I think. Every year he sends me a card on my birthday—that was the date of our first meeting—to remind me that sometime we are to take up our friendship again. I never answer but I never quite forget."
"Ah, that's the sort of thing that I'd have asked but never expected of you."
"No; you never could have had it. That's the sort of thing that one gives but once." Suddenly she shot out her white, strong hand and gripped his wrist. "If you'd ever been really in love with me," she said fiercely, "you wouldn't let me die. You'd find some way to save me."
His rugged face softened with pain. "My dear," he said, "don't you know that if there were any way in the world, any sacrifice——"
"Yes; I know; I know! I'm sorry. That was a rotten thing to say."
"You've taken it all like such a good sport."
"I'm trying. Let's not talk of it any more. Let's talk of the girls. Bob, how much is there to heredity?"
"Oh, Lord! Ask me to square the circle. Or make the fifth hole in one. Or something easy."
"I was just thinking. Who's going to look after them? Ralph won't be of much use. He's too detached."
"Well, the family physician can be of service in some ways," he said slowly. "Particularly if he chances to be a family friend, too."
"Would you?" she cried eagerly. "They'll be a
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handful. Any modern girl is. But I'd rest easier, knowing you were on the job. Speaking of resting, I had rather a rotten night last night."
"What were you doing in the evening?"
"We had a little poker party here in the room."
He shrugged his heavy shoulders. "If you won't pay any heed to your doctor's orders——"
"You know I won't."
"Then you've got to pay the piper."
"Haven't you got anything that will make me sleep?"
"Were the pains bad?"
"Pretty stiff. Will they get worse?"
"I'm afraid so, my dear."
"More dope, then, please."
"Dangerous."
"Well?" She smiled up into his face, pleadingly, temptingly. "Well, Bob?" Her voice dropped. "What's the difference? Since it's a hopeless case. Don't be an inquisitor and sentence me to torture in the name of your god, Science," she whispered.
He yielded. "All right. But you'll stand it as long as you can?"
"Good old Bob!" she murmured. She reached for his hand, twined her fingers around it, nestled it into her firm and rounded neck. Then she laughed.
"Well?" he queried.
"Association of ideas," she answered. "I was thinking of Cary Scott."
He winced and drew his hand away. "What of Cary Scott?"
"If he doesn't come back pretty soon, what a joke it will be on him!"
