Ernest and the Social Game

AY, Ern!” It was Tug Warburton on the telephone. “Come into Boston on the one-five train, will you? Meet me at the Colonial Theatre. I've got tickets for Daisy Deene in 'On Again, Off Again.' Front row, aisle seats—pretty rotten, what? Say, and afterward I'll take you behind to meet her—she's a friend of mine, you know. And we'll go to the Touraine for tea. How about it?”

“Sure, I'll be there,” Ernest answered with alacrity. He hung up the receiver and raced to his room. He tumbled out of his old suit and into his best one with more than his usual speed; chiffonier drawers slammed open and closet doors slammed shut. This promised to be the most dazzling social event in which he had ever participated. For if there was anything Ernest Martin loved, it was the theatre. As a rule, however, the legitimate drama knew him not; vaudeville was his specialty. It was a great blow to him when the most important vaudeville-house in Boston sheared its program down from a three-session to a two-session affair. Until then, twice a month, it had been Ernest's habit to arrive promptly at opening time, Saturday mornings, to stay, with the assistance of a sandwich or two, until six. Once, with the connivance of his mother, he sat through an entire performance stretching from ten to ten. This was bliss; for he saw many turns three times and the “chasers” at least four.

But to meet a real star, to go “behind”—that took the curse off the stingy three hours of matinée measure. Indeed, the program spelled magic in every number—except that meeting Miss Deene involved talking to her. It was as if a fine ice-cold stream played suddenly over Ernest's mental exhilaration. For a moment he slackened his preparations, a frown playing between his thick brows. And then a new thought raised his spirits again. Why, Daisy Deene had always been on the stage. At least, Ernest could not remember when he had not heard of her. He had not seen her, but he could guess exactly what she would be like. Forty-five at the youngest—Ernest knew all about these stage-women and their meretricious effect of youth. If she was middle-aged—a smile took the place of the frown.

This woman-question was becoming a serious thing with Ernest. One way of describing his psychological condition is to say that he had reached the point where he made general statements about the sex. For years, he had summed up his opinion in the single pregnant sentence, “Girls are no fun.” But, latterly, he had gone far afield. Gems like the following adorned his speech:

“Girls are the greatest things for screaming at nothing. Look at the way they act when there's a mouse in the room.”

“Say, a girl can't throw a ball for sour apples, can she? Ever watch one?”

“Girls are the limit about what they think is pretty. Now, when my sister says a girl is good-looking, I know just what to expect.”

“Did you ever notice how a girl sharpens a pencil? Isn't it a scream?”

“Gee! Girls are something fierce when it comes to being stuck on themselves. If a girl happens to sit in front of a mirror, she looks at herself every other minute.”

Undoubtedly, if Ernest kept on the way he pointed, it was only a question of time before he would emit such brilliant aphorisms as “Women have no sense of humor” and “A woman's place is in the home.”

It looked on the face of it as if he threw off these remarks as he brushed past—the “Notes of an Unprejudiced Male, Traveling through an Unexplored Feminine World.” On the contrary the height of Ernest's scorn measured the depth of Ernest's interest. In short, Ernest was taking this method to square himself with himself. For he no longer looked on girls with indifference. Had he only known it in time, that indifference indicated safety—nay, sanctuary. The humiliating truth was that girls interested him. But he would not, could not, admit that.

Ernest had never stopped to consider how, when and where this condition manifested itself. Had he been capable of self-analysis, he would have seen that its inception trailed the arrival, two years before, of Fay Faxon in Maywood. The Fay Faxon incident was closed. Ernest himself sneered in self-disgust when he looked back upon it. But it had left a certain scar. He could never come upon a girl with black curly hair without experiencing a queer feeling at his heart—a sudden sense of suction, as if the blood had been pumped back from the arteries.

Fay Faxon was the entering wedge. But, thereafter, propinquity had done its fatal worst. Ernest had been driven to dancing-school. Dancing-school was flooded with girls. Phoebe was the kind of person that attracted her own sex. The rising tide of femininity actually invaded his home. Ernest stumbled over a girl in every corner. In the circumstances, he must make conversation. He had discovered all kinds of perturbing things about them.

For instance: Alike in that they were an accursed lot, they were unlike in everything else. ITEM, you could never tell whether they were serious or not. ITEM, they loved to “jolly.” ITEM, they were wizards at cornering you against your will and compelling you to a tête-à-tête. ITEM, they were capable of sustaining a conversation in which, perfectly amicable, they appeared to defer to your judgment with that humility which is the earmark of ideal womanhood. And then they would knock you to beat the cars to the next fellow they met.

All this allied itself to the major problem of Ernest Martin's existence, to wit: when was he ever going to learn the art of talking to girls?

“My goodness, Ern,” Phoebe remarked at intervals, “I'd like to know what you think you're doing! When you're alone with a girl, it's up to you to entertain her. You can't sit there like a bump on a log and let her do every bit of the work. You don't even try to talk.”

“You don't even try to talk.” That was the unkindest jab of all. Perhaps it was just as well for Ernest's peace of mind that Phoebe did not suspect the hideous truth.

For at present the effect of girl-proximity was disaster.

In the first place, his tongue began to swell. When he started to speak, it glued itself to the roof of his mouth. Nothing short of an athletic struggle, humiliatingly visible, would free it. The lingual rebellion over, he could not find a word anywhere. And when he overcame this difficulty, he had absolutely nothing to say. And all the time, there sat the girl—the evil spirit who had cast this malign spell—her mischievous blue eyes or her sarcastic gray eyes or her malicious brown eyes coining joy from his misery.

When treed, Ernest always fell back on two stock remarks.

NUMBER I: “Say, have you ever read 'Lorna Doone'? Crackerjack story, isn't it?”

NUMBER II: “Say, which would you rather do: go up in the air in a flying-machine or down under the sea in a submarine?”

These were invaluable social assets. They had never failed him. Once, at a dance, the Lorna Doone question proved good for a whole intermission. The summer before, his partner—a little, awkward, plain, sullen-looking girl—had made a trip through the Exmoor country. It set her going at once. Ernest did not have to open his mouth. How he loved that girl!

As to the second question, it all but saved his social neck the time Tug took him out to Wellesley Float. Tug introduced him to fifteen hundred girls in fifteen minutes. Blind, deaf, dumb, blankly despairing, Ernest put Question Number II to every one of them. Of course he never knew that under the sobriquets of “The Flying-Machine” or “The Submarine” he bobbed a merry part through the college chatter of that entire year.

Ever since the fatal moment when Ernest had discovered that girls were not alike, that, moreover, some of them actually evaded analysis, he had given a great deal of thought to the differences between them. In a vague, tentative way, he made a chart of the Maywood girls and their effect on him. Notes of his observations would have run something like this:

MOLLY TATE. A cinch! Bully girl. Bud Donovan thinks she's pretty, but I don't like a little turn-up nose like that. Plays a corking game of tennis. Feel as much at home with her as with Phoebe. Don't have to chew the rag unless I want to. Always talk about school and tennis. In fact, never think of her at all. Dance every dance I can get with her, you bet.

FLORENCE MARSH. A snap. Next easiest after Molly. Not pretty. Pie-face. Too fat. Don't chin with her much, for she never seems to want to. Would forget she was about, if she didn't look at me so much. Pretty good girl, though.

GOULD TWINS. Not so worse. Never can tell one from another. And they're always pretending they're the other one, which is a low-down trick to play on a fellow. Hot-air artists. Can always get them going because I always see them together. Besides they both want to talk all the time. Awful pretty.

GUSSIE PUGH. Nothing doing! Doesn't she give me a pain! Too darned fresh. Thinks she knows it all. Always putting on airs. Always quoting German. Homely as the deuce.

MRS. VENTRY. Something fierce! A pippin, though. Liked her and didn't like her. I always wiggled when she looked at me. Always joshing me—made me feel like a kid. Always nervous when she was about, except when she let me drive her automobile. The best sport for a woman I ever met.

SYLVIA GORDON. The limit! Can't make up my mind whether she's pretty or not. A whole lot of little curls hanging off her head—looks as if she never combed her hair. Eyes half-shut most of the time like a kitten. But when she opens them wide and looks at a fellow, whew! I feel like the way you do when you're drinking ginger ale and it backs up into your nose.

The extraordinary part of it all was that no other fellow whom Ernest knew seemed to experience embarrassed sensations in the presence of girls. Untold millions would not have tempted him to open the subject with his friends, yet carefully and furtively he studied their conversational methods. The result of this supplementary series of observations would have been embodied thus:

RED TATE. Red's system was simplicity itself. He walked through life in apparent oblivion to the alien sex. His manner with girls was the acme of indifference. He never saw them unless forced into their company. Then if there was any conversation, they made it. He responded in grunts or not at all.

BUD DONOVAN. Bud's method was a gentle translation of the game he employed with Ginnies, Swedes, Chinamen, muckers and pedlars. It was,in brief, to harry—to do anything, from the jerking of pigtails to the imposition of elaborate practical jokes, that would provoke remonstrance, contradiction, wrath. Ernest observed in dismay that Bud was a general favorite with the inconsistent sex.

SIGISMUND LATHROP. In private, Ernest knew Sig to be—well, Mrs. Flaherty, the Lathrop washerwoman, never called him anything but “that hellion.” Yet both Mrs. Martin and Phoebe looked upon him as a cross between an angel and a genius. And why? Simply because Sig played the piano. As far as that went, Sig had nobody but himself to blame. He would talk music with those two by the hour. Ernest came to the conclusion that if you were interested in some fool woman- thing like music or books or pictures, you had a natural pull with the sex. Ernest himself could depend on no such artificial prop.

TUG WARBURTON. Tug was a puzzle. He did not ignore females, like Red, nor tease them, like Bud, nor confide in them, like Sig. Or was it that he did all these things? It seemed to Ernest that he treated them exactly as if they were boys. Ernest had his private exasperations with a fellow who considered a girl a human being.

And what was the result? Of all the boys in Maywood, Tug was the most in social demand. Why, even human outcasts, like teachers, adored him. And yet Tug was far from handsome. His round, irregularly featured face began under a mat of brown curls, bowed out into full-moon curves, and ended in a chin so square that it looked as if it had been planed. His look seemed to be lighted equally by the gleam of his big, round, gold-rimmed spectacles and the grin of his big, square, flashing teeth. No, he was not beautiful. But he certainly had a way with him.

Now, in Ernest's case, only girls of his own age gummed his game, as he expressed it. That was the curious fact. Only when he went up against the dimple and the twinkle did he court certain failure. With children and with women of his mother's age he was triumphantly successful.

Of all these things Ernest thought as he boarded the train for Boston. Indeed, his peace of mind was constantly riddled by such thoughts nowadays. For something was always happening to dash him to social shipwreck on the rocks of conversation. It happened that day.

He had just seated himself when he felt a touch on his shoulder. He turned. It was the majestic Mrs. Marsh, mother of Florence.

“Oh, Mr. Martin,” she intoned in her presiding-office accents, “I am indeed glad to see you. Come over and sit with us. I have the sweetest girl with me—Fonnie's friend, Matty Jerrold, a Bryn Mahr girl. You two will prove congenial spirits, I know. She's a perfect beauty and such correct manners.”

Ernest arose. Ernest followed her. It was to his doom, and he knew it. “Let me introduce you to Miss Jerrold, Mr. Martin,” said his executioner. “Mr. Martin, Miss Jerrold.”

Ernest saw in the first sickened glance that Miss Jerrold was the type which most easily terrorized him. Tall, tailored, statuesquely blonde, glacially beautiful, she was the kind of girl who expected a fellow to do all the talking. Ernest dropped into the turned-over seat which faced the ladies. The symptoms started in full force. Then suddenly they stopped. Ernest realized with paeans of praise to the unknown god who manages such things that nobody else could talk in Mrs. Marsh's presence. He listened with an interest, little short of rapture, to a prolix account of a recent difficulty with a chauffeur. Listened—but one alert sense was counting the stations which separated him from Boston—and escape. One, two, three, four—and still, stately, solemn, formal, Mrs. Marsh rippled on. The Argyle station, only two more now! And then, like a bolt from the blue, ruin fell upon him.

“Why, there's Mrs. Wilmot,” Mrs. Marsh exclaimed. “You two young people must excuse me for a few minutes. There's some Club business I've got to talk over with her.” She rose, sailed majestically down the aisle, and disappeared in the scarlet mist which rapidly obscured Ernest's vision.

Between Argyle and Boston there were strung ten minutes according to the time-table. Ernest had never before realized the elastic quality of time. The ten minutes of his tête-à-tête with Miss Jerrold were each an hour long.

He had read his companion aright—she undoubtedly expected a fellow to do the entertaining. Calmly receptive, unresponsive, she looked straight ahead for the first three minutes which followed the exodus of Mrs. Marsh. Then, as the oppressive silence continued to maintain itself, she transferred her frigid, long-lashed gaze to the whirling landscape. She might have been a piece of marble sculpture in the process of transportation for all the notice she took of Ernest. Five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes went by. And still Ernest was searching his soul for words. The Boston station gloomed above them. Ernest roused himself with a Titanic effort. “Say, Miss Jerrold,” he stammered, “which would you rather do, go up in the air in a submarine”—Ernest felt that something had tangled here, but he floundered on—“or down under the ocean in a flying-machine?”

In the theatre the cloud lifted immediately. No mental fog could resist the effect of “On Again, Off Again.” It packed the stage to the bursting-point with pretty girls. It crammed three acts to the exploding-point with hummable songs. It charged the dialogue to the cracking-point with jokes. It permitted two Dutch comedians, who had evidently swallowed a bushel of assorted syllables, to take their own method of putting them together. Last of all, it gave Daisy Deene a wonderful entrance in a flower-filled automobile. It afforded her plenty of chance to talk in her childish treble, to sing in her astounding contralto, to change her costume in season and out, to display, in the most twinkling of dances, the tiniest feet on the American stage.

Miss Deene discovered Tug on her first entrance. Occasionally thereafter she passed him a surreptitious signal—to the public embarrassment and secret elation of the two lads. At the close of the first act, an usher brought a note to Tug which requested him to come “behind” at the close of the performance and to bring his friend. Ernest enjoyed the show enormously. And yet he half wanted it to end. The desire ached in the back of his head to wipe out the Matty Jerrold episode. He wanted to prove again to himself what conversational miracles he could work with forty-and-over. The curtain went down finally in a whirlwind of dance and song, of showered confetti and thrown paper streamers.

Eagerly, Ernest followed Tug's lordly, accustomed stride through a door at the right of the lower box. On the stage, the substantial château and garden set of the last act, broken into many flat painted surfaces, was running smoothly off into the wings. At one side, a flight of shaky wooden stairs ran upward. At the top—a wonderful doll which sparkled and shimmered and moved and talked—stood Daisy Deene.

Tug ran, three steps at a time, up to her side. Ernest knew that Tug said things. He knew that he himself said things. But all he heard were the pretty intonations of Miss Deene's charming speaking-voice.

“Hullo, Tug. If you aren't the candy kid! Some class to this show! S. R. O.—nothing but! Oh, how do you do, Mr. Martin. Why, of course, Ernest Martin. I've always heard of Ern. Harvard? Yes? Ah, I see, Prep. No? Oh, High School. Say, he looks older'n you, Tug. You're just what I need in that football scene, Mr. Martin. I'd like to be able to look at somebody with shoulders on him. Did you notice Furniss in that sweater? Isn't he gentle-looking? Say, those sloping shoulders of his get on my nerves so I can't see straight. Don't want a job, do you, Mr. Martin?”

Could he talk to forty-and-over? Conversation came with a rush. “Sure!” Ernest said. “I'd take any job to be with you. You ought to hear me sing—I've got a voice like carriage-wheels going over snow. And as for buck and wing—the Maywood Hospital does a rushing business on the cripples I send there after every dance.”

Miss Deene laughed. “He qualifies all right, Tug, doesn't he? What is your batting-average, Mr. Martin?”

“Sure! I don't introduce anything but the Ancient and Honorable Order of True Peruvians to you, Daisy,” Tug responded.

Obedient to command, Ernest sat down. In the mental whirl, inevitable to so gala an event, he was conscious superficially of a blur of detail, the disorder of the tiny slit of a room, the rouge-and-powder messiness of the make-up table, the mirror set in electric bulbs, the moving figure of a gaunt, black maid, the owl-like bigness of Miss Deene's eyes, like blue diamonds, sunk in a pit of paint, the terrifying liquid bloom of her lips, the ghastly whiteness of her neck and arms. But he was more conscious of his inner sense of triumph. What mattered the episode of Matty Jerrold now?

“Say, Daisy,” Tug was saying, “I'd have got you a bunch of blooms, if I'd had the price. But can't you come to the Touraine with us and have some tea?”

“Touraine?” Miss Deene responded blithely. “Surest thing you know. Tea? Easiest thing I do. I guess I'll have to make it dinner. I don't have so very much time between the two shows. Only a bite for me, though. And say, Tug, I know what a college man is like. All this expensiveness can't be off you. I've got a bean or two in my clothes. What? All right. Ruin yourself, if you will, muh lad, but never say that Daisy Deene, your childhood's friend, did not try to help you. Hurry up there, Cold Molasses. Put out the best wad of clothes I've got. And now, angel-boys, I prithee, beat it! Daisy Deene begs to have her boudoir to herself. I'll be dressed in one jiff.”

Ernest followed Tug to the dark and dismantled stage.

“Isn't she a grand piece of work?” Tug demanded enthusiastically.

“She's the goods,” Ernest agreed warmly. The excitement which brought the smile to his lips and the sparkle to his eyes did not arise from this romantic situation. Rather it was part of that sense of a large social freedom which always came when he talked easily and well. While he waited, the trains of thought, started by the vivacious Miss Deene, continued to run; he composed what he characterized to himself as a “nifty bunch of hot air.”

“Say, Miss Deene,” he said, when she emerged from the dressing-room, “how'd you ever get by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children?”

Ernest could ask that question with a clear conscience. For if Miss Deene looked not more than fifteen on the stage, she looked only twelve off it. She had removed every atom of make-up. Her blue eyes shone as if they had been polished, her cheeks had the tint of wild roses and the texture of velvet from their recent rubbing. Her little mice teeth seemed to have almost an electric sparkle in the midst of this color.

She grew serious immediately. “Oh, don't speak of it,” she said with what Ernest considered an admirable bit of acting. “They made my life a perfect misery. As for the Gerry Society—they nearly put me out of business. They simply would not believe mommer when she told them my age. I guess nobody in the profession ever prayed so hard for Father Time to get a move on as I did.”

She would, would she? “Me,” Ernest told himself, he could “josh back until the cows came home.” “I don't blame them at all,” he asserted audaciously. “If I'd been a member of that society I'd have tied you up in a kindergarten where you belong. I bet you dollars to doughnuts that fifteen years ago you were saying, 'Thumbs and fingers say, “Good morning.”'”

“That's what I was,” Miss Deene responded. And immediately she squeaked in a high, baby voice, “First and middle, ring-receiver, least of all, “Good morning.”'” She pattered about the stage in a child's gait, crooning, “'Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning.'” She shook hands with both boys. “Good morning to all.” She concluded with a wonderful curtsy.

Ernest was enchanted. Why could not real girls be like this? All the way to the Touraine, he laughed and joked with the lady about her foolish youthfulness.

In the dining-room, they were the target for all glances. Everybody recognized Daisy Deene at once—how, Ernest privately wondered. For, until she took it off, her long sealskin coat made Stygian darkness of her from chin to toe. And her hat scooped all about her, leaving only one section of her profile open to observation. But, apparently, one section of her profile was all that was necessary. Everybody except Daisy Deene herself continued to be very conscious of her presence. You would have thought Tug the most popular man in college. A party of Harvard men at a big table in the corner went out of their way to bestow the most punctilious of salutes upon him. At intervals, one or more of their number filed past on perfectly transparent errands to the cigar-counter. Even a middle-aged man in the corner, whom Ernest recognized as a broker-friend of Tug's father, smiled with almost a cloying sweetness every time he met Tug's eye.

Their trio grew gayer and gayer. Ernest was absolutely happy. It came to him that if he had not found the ideal combination—the girl with the middle-aged point of view—he had come across the next best thing, middle age that could look like a girl. He could have larked with Daisy Deene until the sun rose. After a while, he cut Tug quite out of the conversation. That young gentleman pretended alternately to gleam and gloom. One moment, he beamed because he had brought together two who were manifestly made for each other; the next, he sulked morosely because, as he expressed it, he had been fool enough “to introduce his Dinah to a pal.”

“Oh, I'm having such a nice time!” Miss Deene sighed once. “You know I'm pretty hard-working and I'm on the job most of the time.” She stopped for an instant and some of her radiant child-quality seemed to melt away. When she spoke again, it was in a diction quite clear of slang. Ernest liked that. Not that she was not perfect. Only he was glad to know that she had another vocabulary. To be ideal, a woman should.

“You see, I started at the bottom of the ladder—in Shakespeare. Then I arose to the dizzy heights of musical comedy. The natural development of my career would be the high-brow realms of vaudeville next. Yet, goose that I am, I'm working and reading and studying and nearly killing myself generally to get back into the legitimate. I'll do it yet.” She stopped, brooded, sighed, smiled. “I don't have a lark like this once in a blue moon.”

It was dark when they left the Touraine. The lady decided to walk to her hotel for the nap which she always took between afternoon and evening performances. Impelled by his sense of triumph, Ernest drew her arm through his. They walked, hooked thus, across the Common, the Public Garden and up Commonwealth Avenue. When they left her, she lifted her face to Tug's kiss as naturally as if he had been her brother.

“You, too,” she said frankly, turning to Ernest. “I'm going to adopt you for a brother.” And Ernest kissed her with the fraternal nonchalance which he would have exercised in the case of Phoebe.

“Isn't she a wonder?” Tug reiterated proudly as they made toward Boylston Street, the point of separation.

“She sure is,” Ernest responded warmly.

“And say,” Tug went on, “you were good! You were great! Gee, I didn't know you were such a jollier, Ern. That's the way to do it every time. Rush them. Beat them to it. They all fall for it. They eat it up. I could see you made all kinds of a hit with her. And I'm glad of it. For Daisy Deene is pure gold beside being a comer all right. I've known her all my life. Her mother and my mother went to boarding-school together. That wasn't press about her age either. It's all on the level. She went on first at fifteen—the youngest Juliet in America. She's twenty now. I know because she's always been two years younger than me. Well, there's a Harvard Square. Over the hot sands!”

Mechanically, Ernest climbed into his car. Mechanically, he sat down. Mechanically, he paid his fare. Those were the only three motions he made until he reached the South Station. But, inside, he was an embodied anarchy. First the blood congealed in his veins. Then it melted and burst spontaneously into flame. Memories of the last two hours recurred and scorched. Coming out, he had calmly linked her arm to his—his gaze took on a glassy fixity. On the walk, he had patted the tiny white-gloved hand that lay on his sleeve—retrospective shivers ran down his spine. At parting he had kissed her—an icy perspiration jetted from every pore.

The change from the Elevated to the railroad broke off these meditations. Then as if his consciousness, unwitting, had caught and held Tug's last words, it now rehearsed them.

“That's the way to do it every time,” it repeated. “Rush them. Beat them to it. They all fall for it. They eat it up.”

Ernest came out of his reverie and glanced about the car.

His eyes fell on a girl sitting alone, a little ahead of him. Her back was toward him, but he would have known Miss Jerrold anywhere by the haughty pose of her head, by the great rolls of hair of a coldly sparkling gold. For a moment, Ernest sat perfectly still, staring. It seemed a long time since the morning train when he had tried to talk with her.

Suddenly he squared his shoulders with a vigorous jerk of his body. He shut his mouth to lines, iron-stiff with decision. His eyes sparkled. He arose and swung leisurely down the aisle until he stood at her side.

Miss Jerrold looked up. “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Martin,” she said in the uncordial tones of her faultless breeding.

“I've just been to see Daisy Deene in 'On Again, Off Again,'” Ernest began easily, sitting down. “Say, you don't want to miss that show whatever you do. It's a peacherine. Afterward, I went behind to Miss Deene's dressing-room and was introduced. Oh, but she's a pippin! Cutest little thing you ever saw in your life. At fifteen, she went on the stage, the youngest Juliet in America. Now she's only twenty. Afterwards we went to the Touraine together. She's really prettier and younger off the stage than on. And how she can dance! I don't see how she can give two performances in one day—she's on almost every moment.”

The bell rang—the train started. The whistle blew—the train stopped. People got off—people got on. The bell rang—the train started. Miss Jerrold had made some futile gasps, preliminary to a self-defensive interruption. They reached the Argyle Station. But Ernest Martin was still talking.