MARGO DOWLING 2 страница

Right from the start Agnes said she was going to see to
it that Margo didn't throw herself away with a trashy
crowd of chorusgirls; so, although Agnes had to be at
work by nine o'clock sharp every morning, she always
came by the theater every night after late rehearsals or
evening performances to take Margo home. It was only
after Margo met Tad Whittlesea, a Yale halfback who
spent his weekends in New York once the football season
was over, that Agnes missed a single night. The nights
Tad met her, Agnes stayed home. She'd looked Tad over
carefully and had him to Sunday dinner at the apartment
and decided that for a millionaire's son he was pretty

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steady and that it was good for him to feel some responsi-
bility about Margo.

Those nights Margo would be in a hurry to give a last
pat to the blond curls under the blue velvet toque and to
slip into the furcape that wasn't silver fox but looked a
little like it at a distance, and to leave the dusty stuffy
dressingroom and the smells of curling irons and cocoa-
butter and girls' armpits and stagescenery and to run down
the flight of drafty cement stairs and past old greyfaced
Luke who was in his little glass box pulling on his over-
coat getting ready to go home himself. She'd take a deep
breath when she got out into the cold wind of the street.
She never would let Tad meet her at the theater with the
other stagedoor Johnnies. She liked to find him standing
with his wellpolished tan shoes wide apart and his coonskin
coat thrown open so that you could see his striped tie and
soft rumpled shirt, among people in eveningdress in the
lobby of the Astor.

Tad was a simple kind of redfaced boy who never had
much to say. Margo did all the talking from the minute
he handed her into the taxi to go to the nightclub. She'd
keep him laughing with stories about the other girls and
the wardrobewomen and the chorusmen. Sometimes he'd
ask her to tell him a story over again so that he could
remember it to tell his friends at college. The story about
how the chorusmen, who were most of them fairies, had
put the bitch's curse on a young fellow who was Maisie
De Mar's boyfriend, so that he'd turned into a fairy too,
scared Tad half to death. "A lot of things sure do go on
that people don't know about," he said.

Margo wrinkled up her nose. "You don't know the half
of it, dearie." "But it must be just a story." "No, honestly,
Tad, that's how it happened . . . we could hear them
yelling and oohooing like they do down in their dressing-
room. They all stood around in a circle and put the bitches'
curse on him. I tell you we were scared."

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That night they went to the Columbus Circle Childs
for some ham and eggs. "Gee, Margo," said Tad with his
mouth full as he was finishing his second order of butter-
cakes. "I don't think this is the right life for you. . . .
You're the smartest girl I ever met and damn refined
too." "Don't worry, Tad, little Margo isn't going to stay
in the chorus all her life."

On the way home in the taxi Tad started to make passes
at her. It surprised Margo because he wasn't a fresh kind
of a boy. He wasn't drunk either, he'd only had one bottle
of Canadian ale. "Gosh, Margo, you're wonderful. . . .
You won't drink and you won't cuddlecooty." She gave
him a little pecking kiss on the cheek. "You ought to un-
derstand, Tad," she said, "I've got to keep my mind on
my work."

"I guess you think I'm just a dumb cluck."

"You're a nice boy, Tad, but I like you best when you
keep your hands in your pockets."

"Oh, you're marvelous," sighed Tad, looking at her
with round eyes from out of his turnedup fuzzy collar
from his own side of the cab. "Just a woman men forget,"
she said.

Having Tad to Sunday dinner got to be a regular
thing. He'd come early to help Agnes lay the table, and
take off his coat and roll up his shirtsleeves afterwards to
help with the dishes, and then all four of them would play
hearts and each drink a glass of beefironandwine tonic
from the drugstore. Margo hated those Sunday afternoons
but Frank and Agnes seemed to love them, and Tad would
stay till the last minute before he had to rush off to meet
his father at the Metropolitan Club, saying he'd never
had such a good time in his life.

One snowy Sunday afternoon when Margo had slipped
away from the cardtable saying she had a headache and
had lain on the bed all afternoon listening to the hissing
of the steamheat almost crying from restlessness and bore-

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dom, Agnes said with her eyes shining when she came in
in her negligee after Tad was gone, "Margo, you've got to
marry him. He's the sweetest boy. He was telling us how
this place is the first time in his life he's ever had any
feeling of home. He's been brought up by servants and
ridingmasters and people like that. . . . I never thought
a millionaire could be such a dear. I just think he's a
darling."

"He's no millionaire," said Margo, pouting.

"His old man has a seat on the stockexchange," called
Frank from the other room. "You don't buy them with
cigarstore coupons, do you, dear child?"

"Well," said Margo, stretching and yawning, "I cer-
tainly wouldn't be getting a spendthrift for a husband.
. . ." Then she sat up and shook her finger at Agnes. "I
can tell you right now why he likes to come here Sundays.
He gets a free meal and it don't cost him a cent."

Jerry Herman, the yellowfaced bald shriveledup little
castingdirector, was a man all the girls were scared to
death of. When Regina Riggs said she'd seen Margo hav-
ing a meal with him at Keene's Chophouse between per-
formances, one Saturday, the girls never quit talking about
it. It made Margo sore and gave her a sick feeling in the
pit of her stomach to hear them giggling and whispering
behind her back in the dressingroom.

Regina Riggs, a broadfaced girl from Oklahoma whose
real given name was Queenie and who'd been in the Zieg-
feld choruses since the days when they had horsecars on
Broadway, took Margo's arm when they were going down
the stairs side by side after a morning rehearsal. "Look
here, kiddo," she said, "I just want to tip you off about
that guy, see? You know me, I been through the mill an'
I don't give a hoot in hell for any of 'em . . . but let me
tell you somethin'. There never been a girl got a spoken
word by givin' that fourflusher a lay. Plenty of 'em have

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tried it. Maybe I've tried it myself. You can't beat the
game with that guy an' a beautiful white body's about the
cheapest thing there is in this town. . . . You got a kinda
peart innocent look and I thought I'd put you wise."

Margo opened her blue eyes wide. "Why, the idea.
. . . What made you think I'd . . ." She began to titter
like a schoolgirl. "All right, baby, let it ride. . . . I guess
you'll hold out for the weddin'bells." They both laughed.
They were always good friends after that.

But not even Queenie knew about it when after a long
wearing rehearsal late one Saturday night of a new num-
ber that was coming in the next Monday, Margo found
herself stepping into Jerry Herman's roadster. He said
he'd drive her home, but when they reached Columbus
Circle, he said wouldn't she drive out to his farm in Con-
necticut with him and have a real rest. Margo went into
a drugstore and phoned Agnes that there'd be rehearsals
all day Sunday and that she'd stay down at Queenie
Riggs's flat that was nearer the theater. Driving out, Jerry
kept asking Margo about herself. "There's something dif-
ferent about you, little girl," he said. "I bet you don't tell
all you know. . . . You've got mystery."

All the way out Margo was telling about her early life
on a Cuban sugarplantation and her father's great town-
house in the Vedado and Cuban music and dances, and
how her father had been ruined by the sugartrust and
she'd supported the family as a child actress in Christmas
pantomimes in England and about her early unfortunate
marriage with a Spanish nobleman, and how all that life
was over now and all she cared about was her work. "Well,
that story would make great publicity," was what Jerry
Herman said about it.

When they drew up at a lighted farmhouse under a lot
of tall trees, they sat in the car a moment, shivering a little
in the chilly mist that came from a brook somewhere. He
turned to her in the dark and seemed to be trying to look

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in her face. "You know about the three monkeys, dear?"
"Sure," said Margo. "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no
evil." "Correct," he said. Then she let him kiss her.

Inside it was the prettiest farmhouse with a roaring fire
and two men in checked lumberman's shirts and a couple
of funnylooking women in Paris clothes with Park Avenue
voices who turned out to be in the decorating business. The
two men were scenic artists. Jerry cooked up ham and eggs
in the kitchen for everybody and they drank hard cider
and had quite a time, though Margo didn't quite know
how to behave. To have something to do she got hold of
a guitar that was hanging on the wall and picked out
Siboney and some other Cuban songs Tony had taught her.

When one of the women said something about how she
ought to do a Cuban specialty her heart almost stopped
beating. Blue daylight was coming through the mist out-
side of the windows before they got to bed. They all had
a fine country breakfast giggling and kidding in their
dressinggowns and Sunday afternoon Jerry drove her in
to town and let her out on the Drive near Seventyninth
Street.

Frank and Agnes were in a great stew when she got
home. Tad had been calling up all day. He'd been to the
theater and found out that there weren't any rehearsals
called. Margo said spitefully that she had been rehearsing
a little specialty and that if any young collegeboy thought
he could interfere with her career he had another think
coming. The next weekend when he called up she wouldn't
see him.

But a week later when she came out of her room about
two o'clock on Sunday afternoon just in time for Agnes's
big Sunday dinner, Tad was sitting there hanging his head,
with his hick hands dangling between his knees. On the
chair beside him was a green florist's box that she knew
when she looked at it was American Beauty roses. He
jumped up. "Oh, Margo . . . don't be sore . . . I just

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can't seem to have a good time going around without you."
"I'm not sore, Tad," she said. "I just want everybody to
understand that I won't let my life interfere with my
work."

"Sure, I get you," said Tad.

Agnes came forward all smiles and put the roses in
water. "Gosh, I forgot," said Tad and pulled a redleather
case out of his pocket. He was stuttering. "You see
D-d-dad g-g-gave me some s-s-stocks to play around with
an' I made a little killing last week and I bought these,
only we can't wear them except when we both go out to-
gether, can we?" It was a string of pearls, small and not
very well matched, but pearls all right.

"Who else would take me anyplace where I could wear
them, you mut?" said Margo. Margo'felt herself blush-
ing. "And they're not Teclas?" Tad shook his head. She
threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

"Gosh, you honestly like them," said Tad, talking fast.
"Well, there's one other thing . . . Dad's letting me have
the Antoinette, that's his boat, you know, for a two weeks'
cruise this summer with my own crowd. I want you and
Mrs. Mandeville to come. I'd ask Mr. Mandeville too
but . . ."

"Nonsense," said Agnes. "I'm sure the party will be
properly chaperoned without me. . . . I'd just get sea-
sick. . . . It used to be terrible when poor Fred used to
take me out fishing."

"That was my father," said Margo. "He loved being
out on the water . . . yachting . . . that kind of thing.
. . . I guess that's why I'm such a good sailor."

"That's great," said Tad.

At that minute Frank Mandeville came in from his
Sunday walk, dressed in his morningcoat and carrying a
silverheaded cane, and Agnes ran into the kitchenette to
dish up the roast stuffed veal and vegetables and the straw-

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berrypie from which warm spicy smells had been seeping
through the air of the small apartment for some time.

"Gosh, I like it here," said Tad, leaning back in his chair
after they'd sat down to dinner.

The rest of that spring Margo had quite a time keeping
Tad and Jerry from bumping into each other. She and
Jerry never saw each other at the theater; early in the
game she'd told him she had no intention of letting her
life interfere with her work and he'd looked sharply at
her with his shrewd boiledlooking eyes and said, "Humph
. . . I wish more of our young ladies felt like you do.
. . . I spend most of my time combing them out of my
hair."

"Too bad about you," said Margo. "The Valentino of
the castingoffice." She liked Jerry Herman well enough.
He was full of dope about the theater business. The only
trouble was that when they got confidential he began mak-
ing Margo pay her share of the check at restaurants and
showed her pictures of his wife and children in New
Rochelle. She worked hard on the Cuban songs, but noth-
ing ever came of the specialty.

In May the show went on the road. For a long time
she couldn't decide whether to go or not. Queenie Riggs
said absolutely not. It was all right for her, who didn't
have any ambition any more except to pick her off a travel-
ingman in a onehorse town and marry him before he
sobered up, but for Margo Dowling who had a career
ahead of her, nothing doing. Better be at liberty all sum-
mer than a chorine on the road.

Jerry Herman was sore as a crab when she wouldn't sign
the roadcontract. He blew up right in front of the office-
force and all the girls waiting in line and everything. "All
right, I seen it coming . . . now she's got a swelled head
and thinks she's Peggy Joyce. . . . All right, I'm
through."

Margo looked him straight in the eye. "You must have

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me confused with somebody else, Mr. Herman. I'm sure
I never started anything for you to be through with." All
the girls were tittering when she walked out, and Jerry
Herman looked at her like he wanted to choke her. It
meant no more jobs in any company where he did the
casting.

She spent the summer in the hot city hanging round
Agnes's apartment with nothing to do. And there was
Frank always waiting to make a pass at her, so that she had
to lock her door when she went to bed. She'd lie around all
day in the horrid stuffy little room with furry green wall-
paper and an unwashed window that looked out on cindery
backyards and a couple of allanthustrees and always wash-
ing hung out. Tad had gone to Canada as soon as college
was over. She spent the days reading magazines and mon-
keying with her hair and manicuring her fingernails and
dreaming about how she could get out of this miserable
sordid life. Sordid was a word she'd just picked up. It
was in her mind all the time, sordid, sordid, sordid. She
decided she was crazy about Tad Whittlesea.

When August came Tad wrote from Newport that his
mother was sick and the yachting trip was off till next
winter. Agnes cried when Margo showed her the letter.
"Well, there are other fish in the sea," said Margo.

She and Queenie, who had resigned from the roadtour
when she had a runin with the stagemanager, started mak-
ing the rounds of the castingoffices again. They rehearsed
four weeks for a show that flopped the opening night.
Then they got jobs in the Greenwich Village Follies. The
director gave Margo a chance to do her Cuban number
and Margo got a special costume made and everything
only to be cut out before the dressrehearsal because the
show was too long.

She would have felt terrible if Tad hadn't turned up
after Thanksgiving to take her out every Saturday night.
He talked a lot about the yachting trip they were going to

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take during his midwinter vacation. It all depended on
when his exams came.

After Christmas she was at liberty again. Frank was
sick in bed with kidney trouble and Margo was crazy to
get away from the stuffy apartment and nursing Frank and
doing the housekeeping for Agnes who often didn't get
home from her job till ten or eleven o'clock at night.
Frank lay in bed, his face looking drawn and yellow and
pettish, and needed attention all the time. Agnes never
complained, but Margo was so fed up with hanging around
New York she signed a contract for a job as entertainer in
a Miami cabaret, though Queenie and Agnes carried on
terrible and said it would ruin her career.

She hadn't yet settled her wrangle with the agent about
who was going to pay her transportation south when one
morning in February Agnes came in to wake her up.

Margo could see that it was something because Agnes
was beaming all over her face. It was Tad calling her on
the phone. He'd had bronchitis and was going to take a
month off from college with a tutor on his father's boat
in the West Indies. The' boat was in Jacksonville. Before
the tutor got there he'd be able to take anybody he liked
for a little cruise. Wouldn't Margo come and bring a
friend? Somebody not too gay. He wished Agnes could go,
he said, if that was impossible on account of Mr. Mande-
ville's being sick who else could she take? Margo was so
excited she could hardly breathe. "Tad, how wonderful,"
she said. "I was planning to go south this week anyway.
You must be a mindreader."

Queenie Riggs arranged to go with her though she
said she'd never been on a yacht before and was scared she
wouldn't act right. "Well, I spent a lot of time in row-
boats when I was a kid. . . . It's the same sort of thing,"
said Margo.

When they got out of the taxicab at the Penn station
there was Tad and a skinny little sleekhaired boy with

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him waiting to meet them. They were all very much ex-
cited and the boys' breaths smelled pretty strong of gin.
"You girls buy your own tickets," said Tad, taking Margo
by the arm and pushing some bills down into the pocket
of her furcoat. "The reservations are in your name, you'll
have a drawingroom and we'll have one."

"A couple of wise guys," whispered Queenie in her ear
as they stood in line at the ticketwindow.

The'other boy's name was Dick Rogers. Margo could
see right away that he thought Queenie was too old and
not refined enough. Margo was worried about their bag-
gage too. Their bags looked awful cheap beside the boys'
pigskin suitcases. She felt pretty down in the mouth when
the train pulled out of the station. Here I am pulling a
boner the first thing, she thought. And Queenie was
throwing her head back and showing her gold tooth and
yelling and shrieking already like she was at a fireman's
picnic.

The four of them settled down in the girls' stateroom
with the little table between them to drink a snifter of gin
and began to feel more relaxed. When the train came out
of the tunnel and lights began flashing by in the blackness
outside, Queenie pulled down the shade. "My, this is real
cozy," she said.

"Now the first thing I got to worry about is how to get
you girls out on the boat. Dad won't care if he thinks we
met you in Jacksonville, but if he knew we'd brought you
down from New York he'd raise Hail Columbia."

"I think we've got a chaperon all lined up in Jackson-
ville," said young Rogers. "She's a wonder. She's deaf
and blind and she can't speak English."

"I wish we had Agnes along," said Tad. "That's Mar-
go's stepmother. My, she's a good sport."

"Well, girls," said young Rogers, taking a noisy swig
from the ginbottle. "When does the necking start?"

After they'd had dinner in the diningcar, they went

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lurching back to the drawingroom and had some more gin
and young Rogers wanted them to play strip poker but
Margo said no. "Aw, be a sport," Queenie giggled.
Queenie was pretty tight already. Margo put on her fur-
coat. "I want Tad to turn in soon," she said. "He's just
out of a sickbed."

She grabbed Tad's hand and pulled him out into the
passage. "Come on, let's give the kids a break. . . . The
trouble with you collegeboys is that the minute a girl's
unconventional you think she's an easy mark.""Oh,
Margo . . ." Tad hugged her through her furcoat as they
stepped out into the cold clanging air of the observation
platform. "You're grand."

That night after they'd gotten undressed young Rogers
came in the girls' room in his bathrobe and said there was
somebody asking for Margo in the other stateroom. She
slept in the same stateroom with Tad, but she wouldn't
let him get into the bunk with her. "Honest, Tad, I like
you fine," she said, peeking from under the covers in the
upper berth, "but you know . . . Heaven won't protect
a workinggirl unless she protects herself. . . . And in my
family we get married before the loving instead of after."

Tad sighed and rolled over with his face to the wall on
the berth below. "Oh, heck . . . I'd been thinking about
that." She switched off the light. "But, Tad, aren't you
even going to kiss me goodnight?"

In the middle of the night there was a knock on the
door. Young Rogers came in looking pretty rumpled.
"Time to switch," he said. "I'm scared the conductor'll
catch us.""The conductor'll mind his own damn business,"
said Tad grumpily, but Margo had already slipped out
and gone back to her own stateroom.

Next morning at breakfast in the diningcar, Margo
wouldn't stop kidding the other two about the dark circles
under their eyes. Young Rogers ordered a plate of oysters
and they thought they'd never get over the giggles. By

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the time they got to Jacksonville Tad had taken Margo
back to the observation platform and asked her why the
hell they didn't get married anyway, he was free white
and twentyone, wasn't he? Margo began to cry and.
grinned at him through her tears and said she guessed
there were plenty reasons why not.

"By gum," said Tad when they got off the train into the
sunshine of the station, "we'll buy us an engagement ring
anyway."

First thing on the way to a hotel in a taxi they went to
a jeweler's and Tad bought her a solitaire diamond set in
platinum and paid for it with a check. "My, his old man
must be some millionaire," whispered Queenie into
Margo's ear in a voice like in church.

After they'd been to the jeweler's the boys drove the
girls to the Mayflower Hotel. They got a room there and
went upstairs to fix up a little. The girls washed their
underclothes and took hot baths and laid out their dresses
on the beds. "If you want my opinion," Queenie was say-
ing while she was helping Margo wash her hair, "those
two livewires are gettin' cold feet. . . . All my life I've
wanted to go on a yachtin' trip an' now we're not gettin' to
go any more than a rabbit. . . . Oh, Margo, I hope it
wasn't me gummed the game."

"Tad'll do anything I say," said Margo crossly.

"You wait and see," said Queenie. "But here we are
squabblin' when we ought to be enjoyin' ourselves. . . .
Isn't this the swellest room in the swellest hotel in Jack-
sonville, Florida?" Margo couldn't help laughing. "Well,
whose fault is it?" "That's right," said Queenie, flouncing
out of the shampoosteaming bathroom where they were
washing their hair, and slamming the door on Margo.
"Have the last word."

At one o'clock the boys came by for them, and made
them get all packed up and check out of the hotel. They
went down to the dock in a Lincoln car Tad had hired.

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It was a beautiful sunny day. The Antoinette was anchored
out in the St. Johns River, so they had to go out in a little
speedboat.

The sailor was a goodlooking young fellow all in white;
he touched his cap and held out his arm to help the girls
in. When Margo put her hand in his arm to step into the
boat she felt the hard muscles under the white duck sleeve
and noticed how the sun shone on the golden hairs on his
brown hand. Sitting on the darkblue soft cushion she
looked up at Tad handing the bags down to the sailor. Tad
looked pale from being sick and had that funny simple
broadfaced look, but he was a husky wellbuilt boy too.
Suddenly she wanted to hug him.

Tad steered and the speedboat went through the water
so fast it took the girls' breath away and they were scared
for fear the spray would spoil the new sportsdresses they
were wearing for the first time. "Oh, what a beauty," they
both sighed when they saw the Antoinette so big and
white with a mahogany deckhouse and a broad yellow
chimney. "Oh, I didn't know it was a steamyacht," crooned
Queenie. "Why, my lands, you could cross the ocean in it."
"It's a diesel," said Tad. "Aren't we all?" said Margo.

Tad was going so fast they crashed right in the little
mahogany stairway they had for getting on the boat, and
for a second it cracked and creaked like it would break
right off, but the sailors managed to hold on somehow.
"Hold her, Newt," cried young Rogers, giggling.
"Damn," said Tad and he looked very sore as they went
on board. The girls were glad to get up onto the beautiful
yacht and out of the tippy little speedboat where they
were afraid of getting their dresses splashed.

The yacht had goodlooking officers in white uniforms
and a table was all ready for lunch out under an awning
on deck and a Filipino butler was standing beside it with
a tray of cocktails and all kinds of little sandwiches cut
into fancy shapes. They settled down to lunch in a hurry,