Psyche (30 page)

Turning quickly, she went back the way she had come.

For a time she stood against the fence of the park on the opposite side of the street from the Shelter. Then, disliking the curious glances she was beginning to attract, and realizing that she could continue to keep her vigil from inside the park itself, she moved to the bench on which she was still sitting when Bel sat down beside her.

Bel was always interested in people. They were, in effect, her business. At first sight she had taken Psyche for one of the art students who, coming to the art gallery on the north side of the park, introduced an element otherwise out of place in that district. However, as she seated herself, her quick dark eyes told her that this original estimate was a mistaken one. Appraising the
simple but good clothes, the old suitcase, and the clean decided profile, she was both curious and puzzled.

“Hot, isn't it?” she remarked casually.

Psyche looked around, but her eyes scarcely focused on the woman in red before swinging back to the only centre of vision which at the moment meant anything to her. “Yes,” she said, and no more.

Startled by the open desperation in the blue eyes which had met hers so briefly, Bel did not immediately speak again. She was by nature sympathetic, but she had grown up in a hard school, and minding her own business as she expected others to mind theirs was a basic principle of her existence. Looking up at a sky striated with clouds fast turning from rose to grey, she knew that it was almost time to return to an establishment which, belonging to her, required her presence after nightfall. Yet, compelled by something in the taut figure beside her, she lingered where she was, hesitating between a renewed attempt at conversation, and, as she phrased it to herself, letting well enough alone. Just why she should have given way to an impulse of which she disapproved she could not have said.

Opening a black purse, she pulled out a package of cigarettes and held it out. “Smoke?”

Looking at Bel again, this time Psyche did not turn away, and, in failing to do so, admitted that a hope which had been at best apocryphal was now no hope at all. If the taxi-driver had intended to come back, he would have done it before this.

Butch had once told her that a condemned man was always granted a last wish.

She had asked, “Would a person care? Would they want anythin'?”

“They cares, all right,” Butch had said heavily. “Nearly always they wants a cigarette.”

There seemed to her now to be something symbolical in Bel's offer, coming as it did at the darkening close of the darkest day of her life, and she understood Butch's reply to her long-ago question as she had not understood it at the time. She should by rights have wanted food, a shoulder to weep on, many things, but all
she wanted was a cigarette. And this she wanted very badly. Yet so great was the apathy of her hopelessness that she did not at once make any move toward accepting it.

Bel's red lips hardened. “You thinking Mrs. Astor should of introduced us?”

“I wasn't thinking anything—except that you are kind.”

“Then for the love of Mike take one! My arm's getting tired.”

Giving her a light, Bell did not miss the quick, deep inhalation which gave her away as a smoker who would not have been without cigarettes if she had had any choice in the matter.

“You from out of town?”

“Yes,” Psyche said.

“Ever been in this burg before?”

“Yes.”

Bel could usually place people with astonishing accuracy, and it bothered her that she should be unable to bracket Psyche anywhere within her wide experience. What's the matter with the kid that she can't say anything but ‘yes', she wondered. And what's the matter with me that I stay here talking to her? I'm getting the hell on home before I talk myself into something.

Snapping the clasp of her purse, she got up abruptly. “Well, I've got to be going. Nice to have known you, baby. Happy landings.”

“Good-bye,” Psyche said, and she essayed a smile which did not reach her eyes.

She had not expected Bel to stay, to mean anything to her beyond that brief encounter, and so was not disappointed when she went. She did not even watch her go, but unconsciously she listened to the sound of high heels, picking their way over loose gravel, until they could no longer be heard.

Remotely she considered moving on herself, but with nowhere to go it seemed an illogical thing to do, so she simply stayed where she was in the centre of a vacuum in which outside sights and sounds, though recorded by her eyes and ears, had no significance for her.

She saw the street lights come on, sudden pools of yellow light accentuating the darkness outside their individual orbits; saw the
men who had loafed in the park get up and drift away, one by one: saw a tall, blue-uniformed figure begin a measured circuit of the now deserted paths. She heard a dog barking; was aware of car doors slamming, of car horns blaring; heard a woman's voice calling a child in to bed; heard the distant strains of a radio playing a popular tune that tried to be gay, and was not; heard the soft rustle of leaves above her head, stirred by a breeze that promised to relieve the heavy heat, and then died before fulfilling its promise.

Bel, standing by the open casement of one of the two bay windows in the large, ornately furnished living-room of her second-storey apartment, saw and heard these same things. A prey to memories she had thought buried for good, unable to dismiss a mental image of the face that brought these memories to the surface of her mind, she had been standing there since she came in.

Now, speaking over her shoulder, she said, “The cop's doing his rounds.”

Kathie, looking up from a book, considered it fortunate she should be the sole witness to a state of nervous indecision entirely at variance with Bel's normal, and necessarily tough realism. During the four years she had been at Bel's place she had never seen her other than decisive and sure of herself.

She laid aside her book. “Why are you so concerned about this particular girl, Bel?”

“I don't know,” Bel said evasively. “There was something about her that got me, that's all.”

“She's probably gone by now.”

“Maybe. But I don't think she has. The kid's got no place to go, that's my guess.”

Kathie did not like the trend of this conversation. She, more than any of the other girls, stood to lose too much if Bel did anything foolish. “She'll be all right,” she said evenly. “You said yourself that she was well dressed. You're letting your imagination run away with you.”

Bel scarcely seemed to hear her. “It can be kind of a turning point in a girl's life—having no place to go.”

Kathie, by virtue of the extraordinary combination of professions
that she practised, exercised a freedom of speech that no one else in Bel's house would have dared to imitate. “Pull yourself together, Bel,” she said quietly. “You're being sentimental, and you can't afford to be.”

She's right, Bel thought, I'm being a damned fool. And just because that kid reminds me of somebody, I'm going to be an even bigger damned fool.

She looked all of her forty-seven years as she swung round to face the girl behind her. “I'm going to take her in,” she said, and her tone was warning that she would brook no argument. “Gîo on out to the park, and bring her back with you.”

Kathie rose to her feet. “Are you sure you'll be doing her a favour?”

Bel's expression was grim. “I said I was taking her in, not taking her on. There'll be no mistake about that.”

Shrugging, Kathie gave up. “All right. I'll get her.”

“Go quickly, will you? That cop isn't going to leave her be if she stays there much longer. He'll have the wrong idea about her.”

Kathie's smile was as cynical as her parting thrust. “Don't blame him. At this rate he won't be much ahead of events.”

When Kathie said she would do a thing, she did it. She had no sympathy with the errand on which she had been dispatched, but she went swiftly, even though it meant adding an additional hazard to the precarious tight-rope of her own Jekyll and Hyde existence.

She saw Psyche as soon as she entered the park, a motionless, fair-haired statuette in the pale periphery of light cast by a street lamp outside the iron fencing. A figure which, in spite of its immobility, conveyed no feeling of relaxation.

“Damn,” she murmured under her breath. But when she approached Psyche, and spoke to her, there was no hostility in her manner.

“Bel sent me. If you have nowhere to go to-night, you can come back to her place with me.”

Looking up, Psyche saw a plain, dark girl in a plain, dark dress; a thin girl of twenty-eight or nine, with a straight fall of dark
hair, and a white triangular face saved from mediocrity by enormous eyes and a bitterly beautiful mouth.

“I don't know anyone called Bel,” she said tonelessly.

Kathie was unmoved by beauty, and she was not old enough herself for youth to have any appeal for her, but intellect, even in its feeblest manifestations, never failed to command her interest. Recognizing in Psyche the possibility of real intelligence, she curbed a rising impatience, and said quietly, “Bel sat beside you, and talked to you, here, earlier this evening.”

The woman in red who had given her a cigarette. Now she was offering her a refuge. It was too completely unexpected, this lifeline held out to her without any reason that she could fathom. “She—Bel, is sure she wants me?”

“She is,” Kathie replied briefly.

“I would be foolish not to go, wouldn't I?”

Kathie's expression was enigmatic. “That's for you to judge.”

“I'll come,” Psyche said, but she did not move.

“Do you expect me to carry you, or are you going to get up and walk?” Kathie asked ironically. Then, her voice sharpening, she said, “Come on. Get up now, will you. The law is bearing down on us, and I, for one, have no desire to stay and converse with it.”

This time Psyche really saw the policeman approaching, and, suddenly free of the lethargy that had bound her, grasped some of the factual implications of her situation. Rational as she had not been since discovering that she had lost her money, she realized that a prison cell on a vagrancy charge would have been her fate rather than any gradual, anonymous annihilation.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I've been a bit confused. Let's go.”

2

A
LTHOUGH
Psyche was not entirely ignorant, she was still in many ways an innocent, and it was two or three days before she fully understood the purpose and nature of bel's establishment.

One of the chief reasons for Bel's success was her refusal to allow anyone at any time to place any particular emphasis on the one factor in her business without which it would have ceased to exist. A very shrewd woman, she took a leaf from the book of the preceding century, and operated on the principle that a good time was an intangible, some of whose many facets must, of necessity, reflect a social and communal base. Working carefully over a long period of time, she had created a façade so apparently blameless that she had never at any time had any trouble with the police; and, within her four walls, an atmosphere so comfortably gay that many of the men who came there almost forgot their original reason for coming. With infinite patience, always taking the long view, she had built up a steady rather than a casual clientele, looking for more than a well-lined purse before she granted the freedom of her premises.

She was well rewarded for her pains, and not only with money. Six evenings a week the big living-room, with its rose-shaded lamps and well-cushioned furniture, had the aura of a pleasantly informal club.

The club, although fully licensed in certain respects, nevertheless had a few strictly enforced ground rules. The girls were allowed to accept presents, over and above their proper share in
the membership fees, but never cash as such. Bel had two reasons for this, both of them good: large sums of money, if they were ever unfortunate enough to be visited by the police, would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain satisfactorily; secondly, she had the acumen to see that the kind of illusions she worked to achieve would not stand up for long before the harsh wind of a too obvious commercialism. That the presents that some of the girls, particularly May, managed to extract from their admirers, were extremely valuable, did not matter to her.

The rules that governed behaviour were never expressed in so many words. They simply became obvious, and, supported by custom, were observed without protest.

The club opened around eight o'clock, and closed ostensibly at two-thirty. Between eleven and twelve o'clock the serving of whiskey was discontinued, strong coffee being provided in its place; and food, too attractive to be ignored, was on hand at all times. Thus, steering clear of specific individual pressures, Bel avoided any awkwardness that drinking might have precipitated.

Her greatest strategic triumph, however, was in her handling of the poker game that was in session every evening and all evening. A less clever woman might have been tempted to make this a personally lucrative side-line. Not Bel. The game was always absolutely on the level, and the players could sit in or drop out on their own terms.

An evening at Bel's was much like going to a private party, with the minor difference that one could, from the start, be honest with oneself about one's intentions.

During the daytime Bel's place resembled nothing so much as a well-furnished girls' boarding-house—an impression strengthened by the fact that all the girls left the house for a number of hours every day, their times of departure determined by the part-time, outside jobs without which Bel would not accept them.

As she explained to Psyche later, “I can't have the responsibility of keeping them when they go off, and I wouldn't have the heart to turn them out on the street. I tell them they got to have something to fall back on, and besides you can't expect anybody
to have any respect for a girl who lies around all day doing nothing.”