CHAPTER II
Helpless to pursue her with more than his gaze, Forbes watched from his
lofty perch how swiftly she fled northward. He could follow her car as
it thridded the unpoliced traffic by that dwindling bird-of-paradise
plume, that sphinxic riddle of a feathery question-mark.
He mused indulgently upon her as she vanished: "She breaks the law like
all the rest when no one is there to stop her. She wheedles the police
with a smile, but behind their backs she burns up the road."
Evidently there were narrow escapes from disaster. One or two
pedestrians leaped like kangaroos to escape her wheels. Once or twice
collisions with other cars were avoided by sharp swerves or abrupt
stops.
The plume went very respectably across the Plaza, for policemen were
there on fixed post; but, once beyond, the feather diminished into
nothingness with the uncanny speed of a shooting-star.
She was gone. And now he wondered whither she sped, and why. To what
tryst was she hastening at such dreadful pace, with such rash desire? He
felt almost a jealousy, at least an envy, of the one who waited at the
rendezvous.
And then he felt alarm for her. Already she might have met disaster. Her
car might have crashed into some other--into a great steel-girder truck
like that that crossed the Avenue. She might even now be lying all
crumpled and shattered in a tangle of wreckage.
That taunting white question-feather might be dabbled with red. The face
might be upturned to any man's view and every man's horror. He was
almost afraid to follow farther lest his curiosity be more than sated.
His irresolution was solved for him. The stage was turning out of Fifth
Avenue, to cross over to Broadway and Riverside Drive. Forbes was not
done with this lane. He rose to leave the bus. It lurched and threw him
from bench to bench. He negotiated with difficulty the perilous descent,
clutched the hand-rail in time to save himself from pitching head first
to the street, clambered down the little stairway with ludicrous
awkwardness, stepped on solid asphalt with relief, and walked south.
The press gradually thickened, and before long it was dense and viscid,
as if theater audiences were debouching at every corner.
The stream was still almost entirely woman: beautiful woman at the side
of beautiful woman, or treading on her high heels; chains of womankind
like strings of beaded pearls, hordes of women, dressed in infinite
variations of the prevailing mode. They strode or dawdled, laughing,
smiling, bowing, whispering, or gazing into the windows of the shops.
The panorama of windows was nearly as beautiful as the army of women.
The great show-cases, dressed with all expertness, were silently
proffering wares that would tempt an empress to extravagance.
A few haberdashers displayed articles of strange gorgeousness for
men--shirt-patterns and scarves, bathrobes, waistcoats that rivaled
Joseph's; but mainly the bazars appealed to women or to the men who buy
things for women.
The windows seemed to say: "How can you carry your beloved past my
riches, or go home to her without some of my delights?" "How fine she
would look in my folds!" "How well my diamonds would bedeck her hair or
her bosom! If you love her, get me for her!" "It is shameful of you to
pretend not to see me, or to confess to poverty! Couldn't you borrow
money somewhere to buy me? Couldn't you postpone the rent or some other
debt awhile? Perhaps I could be bought on credit."
Show-windows and show-women were the whole cry. The women seemed to be
wearing the spoils of yesterday's pillage, and yet to yearn for
to-morrow's. Women gowned like manikins from one window gazed like
hungry paupers at another window's manikins.
The richness of their apparel, the frankness of their allure were almost
frightful. They seemed themselves to be shop-windows offering their
graces for purchase or haughtily labeling themselves "sold." Young or
antique, they appeared to be setting themselves forth at their best,
their one business a traffic in admiration.
"Look at me! Look at me!" they seemed to challenge, one after another.
"My face is old, but so is my family." "My body is fat, but so is my
husband's purse!" "I am not expensively gowned, but do I not wear my
clothes well?" "I am young and beautiful and superbly garbed, and I have
a rich husband." "I am only a little school-girl, but I am ready to be
admired, and my father buys me everything I want." "I am leading a life
of sin, but is not the result worth while?" "My husband is slaving
down-town to pay the bills for these togs, but are you not glad that I
did not wait till he could afford to dress me like this?"
Lieutenant Forbes had been so long away from a metropolis, and had lived
in such rough countries, that he perhaps mistook the motives of the
women of New York, and their standards, underrated their virtues. Vice
may go unkempt and shabby, and a saint may take thought of her
appearance. Perhaps what he rated as boldness was only the calm of
innocence; what he read as a command to admire may have been only a
laudable ambition to make the best of one's gifts.
But to Forbes there was an overpowering fleshliness in the display. It
reminded him of the alleged festivals of Babylon, where all the women
piously offered themselves to every passer-by and rated their success
with heaven by their prosperity with strangers.
It seemed to him that the women of other places than New York must have
dressed as beautifully, but in an innocenter way. Here the women looked
not so much feminine as female. They appeared to be thinking amorous
thoughts. They deployed their bosoms with meaning; their very backs
conveyed messages. Their clothes were not garments, but banners.
He had dwelt for years among half-clad barbarians, unashamed Igorrotes;
but these women looked nakeder than those. The more studiously they were
robed, the less they had on.
A cynicism unusual to his warm and woman-worshiping soul crept into
Forbes' mind. He went along philosophizing:
"All these women are paid for by men. For everything that every one of
these women wears some man has paid. Fathers, husbands, guardians,
keepers, dead or alive, have earned the price of all this pomp.
"The men who pay for these things are not here: they are in their
offices or shops or at their tasks somewhere, building, producing; or in
their graves resting from their labors, while the spendthrift sex gads
abroad squandering and flaunting what it has wheedled.
"What do the women give in return? They must pay something. What do they
pay?"