HOSMER COLLAMORE looked distressed as he sat in Susan’s sitting room a few days later. For one thing Tripod was standing in his lap and licking his face affectionately, and the dog’s pointed wooden leg was embarrassingly situated. It was evident that Hosmer was at a loss to know what to do. He also didn’t know why he’d been summoned upstairs by Susan. Perhaps Susan had begun to suspect that he had been comparing her to Ida Conquest, and that Susan had been found wanting, which was true. A young lady with black hair and slim hips and a broken leg, after all, was no match for a splendid creature with extensive curves, bright blond hair, and a style of dress that put one in mind of shop windows at Christmastime. Since he had seen little of her in the past month, perhaps he now sat waiting to be chastised for his neglect.
Susan had no intention of chastising him, but she needed a favor.
“Hosmer,” said Susan. “I wonder if you would do something for me?”
“Anything I can,” Hosmer murmured unconvincingly.
“Do you know about Mr. Beaumont’s new invention?”
Hosmer looked up with astonishment. “What invention?”
“His improvement for moving-picture cameras,” explained Susan.
Hosmer laughed derisively, and Susan decided that she really did not care at all for this man. In fact, she began rather to hope that Ida would marry him. A man who laughed at Jack Beaumont’s soul-work deserved a woman like Ida Conquest.
“Well,” Susan persisted, holding her anger in check, “do you know the invention I’m talking about?”
“I know it exists—at least—in his head,” said Hosmer. “I doubt it will ever exist in a camera.”
“I’ve no doubt that Mr. Beaumont will be able to perfect the mechanism, given enough time—and freedom from worry.”
“Oh, to be sure,” said Hosmer, in the unpleasant way that Ida Conquest said those very words. Oh, to be sure.
“The problem, I think,” Susan said, “is that Jack spends so much of his time in doing small repairs that he—”
“Jack Beaumont does not spend his time doing small repairs,” interrupted Hosmer. “I took him my alarm clock three weeks ago and asked him to reconnect the bell, and he hasn’t found the time to do that little piece of tinkering. And I even offered to pay. Now I not only have no alarm to wake me up in the morning, but when I do wake up, I don’t know what time it is.”
Hosmer was the sort, Susan saw for the first time, who harbored small grudges as if they were large ones.
Susan took a deep breath, fighting the urge to say something unpleasant. “I’d like you to help me make it possible for Jack to have the time he needs to complete his camera device—and to repair your alarm clock, of course.”
Hosmer looked at her suspiciously, and finally pushed Tripod off on to the floor. He crossed his legs and put his hands into his lap in case the terrier made another leap. “And just how do you propose we help him?”
“By giving him a sum of money that would allow him to work solely on his invention.”
“I don’t have a nickel to spare,” said Hosmer, so quickly that it sounded miserly rather than penurious.
“Well I do,” said Susan, “but I don’t think Jack would accept the money from me. So I’d like you to offer it to him as a loan, and I will provide the money. I recently came into a small inheritance,” she lied unblushingly, to explain the apparently sudden turn in her finances. “Will you help me in this? It is a very innocent stratagem, Hosmer. You can even stipulate that before he does any work on his camera invention, he repair your alarm clock.”
Hosmer considered her proposition for a few moments. “If Jack Beaumont wanted money,” he said at last, “why doesn’t he just ask his rich lady friend?”
“What rich lady friend?” demanded Susan sharply.
“The ‘Young Lady in High Society,’” said Hosmer, and Susan instantly colored. Hosmer did a bad job of suppressing an unpleasant little grin; he evidently thought she was jealous. “The one who writes all the stories for Mr. Fane. His lady friend up on Fifth Avenue. Mr. Fane told Miss Conquest that this lady was crazy for Jack, and that she was not only rich in her own right, but that her father owned two gold mines, three railroads, and half a dozen banks in Kansas and Illinois. If Jack Beaumont needs money, he should ask her. That’s why he can’t get his work done, because he’s always traipsing back and forth from Fifth Avenue down to the studio with scenarios.”
For some time Susan had wondered how much Hosmer knew about her “alter ego.” Gossip at the Cosmic Film Company was obviously rampant. Hosmer’s jealousy of Jack’s supposed intimacy with the “rich daughter of the industrial magnate” on Fifth Avenue was as pitiful as it was obvious, and probably had been the cause of Hosmer’s new antipathy toward Jack. “It’s not a simple matter to borrow money of the very rich, Hosmer. And it’s certainly not easy for a man to take money from a woman, even though she may have it to spare and he may need it very badly. That shouldn’t be so, but it is the way things are. For whatever reason, Jack has not borrowed any money from the young lady on Fifth Avenue, and that is why I would like to lend it to him myself.”
“How much money?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
Hosmer blinked. “Must have been a tidy little inheritance.”
“It was. Will you help me?”
Susan had already considered the extent of her foolishness in this. Even though, strictly speaking, the five hundred dollars was hers. It would be just her luck to have Mr. Jay Austin appear with the signed receipt demanding a full accounting just as Jack was accepting the money. But she didn’t really think that was going to happen.
It was also a foolish thing to give Jack the whole amount, but anything less would have been a half-measure. Even though the gesture was to be anonymous, she wanted the thing done right. What Susan wanted was for Jack Beaumont to feel financially secure. For Jack, Susan suspected, was the sort of man who would never marry till he felt himself in that happy state.
Hosmer arrived again at Susan’s apartment about the same time the following evening. He threw himself down in Susan’s chair, kept an overly affectionate Tripod at bay with a rolled-up magazine, and said, “I talked to him.”
“And?”
“No,” said Hosmer, shaking his head. “Most definitely no.”
Susan turned away in frustration. Out the window she could see the windows of a dozen other apartments. What sorts of problems did those anonymous creatures have? she wondered.
“But he will sell me something for it,” said Hosmer.
Susan turned back.
“What? What does Jack have that’s worth selling?”
“A half-interest in the patent,” said Hosmer. “Which is worth about twenty-two cents, by my estimation.”
“Did you say yes?”
“I said I’d think about it.”
“Go back and tell him yes.”
“I don’t want half-interest in a piece of worthless machinery.”
“Hosmer, stop being such a dunce,” said Susan. “He’ll assign half the rights to you, and then you’ll sign them over to me, and then Jack will get his five hundred dollars.”
“Why don’t you just stick the money into an envelope and shove it under his door?” asked Hosmer. “Wouldn’t that be simpler?”
“No,” said Susan. “This way it’s not just a loan, and Jack won’t feel obligated to you or to anyone.” She did not add, And he may well take a wife on the basis of that five hundred dollars.
The business was concluded the next day. When Jack was out of the building, Susan clomped down the stairs, went around to the bank and closed out her account, rather to the annoyance of the officials of that establishment. In their considered opinion, women were tedious, indecisive creatures, and if they couldn’t handle such simple finances as keeping money in the bank, well then it was no wonder they’d never received the vote. And they wouldn’t, either.
The bank’s appraisal of women was not enough to dampen Susan’s spirits, however, and she returned home in as good cheer as she had left. She had bought envelopes from a stationery store, and placed nine fifty-dollar bills in one of them. She made up the final fifty dollars with ten of the five-dollar bills she’d earned selling scenarios.
That evening, Hosmer knocked quietly at her door. She opened the door, and Hosmer nodded conspiratorially. He placed a piece of folded paper in her hands, and withdrew with a finger to his lips. As he crept quietly down the stairs, Susan glanced at the paper.
I, Hosmer Collamore, resident of the Fenwick Apartments, West Sixtieth Street, New York City in the state of New York, hereby assign to Susan Bright one-half speculative interest in Mr. J. Beaumont’s device for improving the moving-picture camera.
Hosmer T. Collamore
March 9th, 1913
Only a few moments later, Jack raced up the stairs. His tread was quicker and harder than usual, and Susan would have heard him even without Tripod’s barking. Jack’s excitement seemed to have communicated itself to the dog, for Tripod wouldn’t stop throwing himself at the panels, and it was with difficulty that Susan hooked a leash through his collar and dragged him into the bedroom.
Jack was breathless. “No cold meat tonight,” he blurted. “No bottled beer. No sliced bread. Tonight I’m taking you to a restaurant. But first we’re going to the theater—no nickelodeon, either. And I am paying.”
In another moment, and without explanation or a word from Susan, he was gone, leaving her to dress. She went into the bedroom, and looked with despair at her wardrobe. It had not been added to for many months now. At last she chose a long woolen skirt with enormous black and white checks, a simple white silk blouse (her best), and a six-inch wide red lacquered belt. She stood against the hallway door and looked at herself in the reflection of the sitting-room windows—a faulty mirror at best—and then tried to see how she looked when she walked.
Not pitiful any more, just a bit awkward. She wasn’t so awkward when she used only one of her crutches, but no woman ever looked really fashionable with a broken leg.
Damn Jay Austin.
Then she thought again. No, don’t damn him. Because it might just be Mr. Austin’s five hundred dollars that would allow the man she loved to have enough self-respect to propose to her.
The play they saw was the second night’s performance of Charles Frohman’s The Sunshine Girl, with Vernon and Irene Castle. Susan was enchanted, not only with the dancing and the music, which were heavenly, but with Irene Castle herself—an almost boyish figure, with her hair cut boyishly short, wearing no jewelry and the slightest of slight pastel frocks. She made every other woman in New York look heavy and overdressed. Once she got her cast off, Susan knew what she was going to do with her wardrobe. By the intermission, she had decided what she was going to do with her hair.
After the theater, Susan expected that Jack would take her to one of the small restaurants in the area, but instead they climbed into a second cab and headed south from Forty-second Street. They got out on Sixth Avenue, just below Twenty-eighth Street and Susan was astonished to find that the awning above the door bore the name Mouquin’s in flowing script. It was a place she’d only heard about, but she knew it was the oldest and best French restaurant in the city.
Jack had found a suit of clothes that did not look as if they’d been patched to death, but Susan was nervous about his passing muster in such a sophisticated and well heeled a crowd as would most certainly be found in such a place as this. So she was actually glad, as the waiter led them to a table, that those who stared, stared not at Jack’s worn suit, but rather at her crutch and the strange bulge the cast made beneath her skirt.
They were certainly not being mistaken for out-of-town Mellons or Huntingtons.
But once they were seated, and the waiter had hidden Susan’s crutch behind a potted palm and, incidentally, quite out of her reach, Susan was astonished to find that Jack had no difficulty in deciphering the menu. And to his evident amazement, neither did she—though she had only a few remnants of high school French left at her command.
Susan had consommé printanier, roast teal duck, chicory salad, and crème en mousse. Jack had oysters, pilaf of chicken à la Creole, haricots verts à l’Anglaise, barbe de Capucin salad, and charlotte russe. The bill came to more than eighteen dollars, an amount greater than Susan generally spent on food over the period of three weeks.
It was a wonderful sensation, to be in the midst of such fashion and elegance, and to feel almost as if she and Jack truly belonged there. Even if the money Jack was spending was borrowed, even if at the end of the evening they would have to return to cheap lodgings on West Sixtieth Street, even if it might be a very long time before they were able to reproduce the extravagance of these happy hours, when they two, struck with poverty, lived as the rich perpetually lived, Susan was deliriously happy.
Jack had saved his good news for dinner, and Susan pretended to be full of wonder at Hosmer’s generosity. She did not think that Jack saw that her surprise was feigned, for she was, after all, an actress. They toasted the cameraman’s perspicacity with champagne. They further toasted Hosmer’s uncle who had lent Hosmer the money for this obviously wise investment. They toasted Mr. Fane’s sound aesthetic and business judgment in purchasing so many scenarios from the Young Lady in High Society. Jack would have ordered another bottle of champagne with full expectation of finding other persons worthy of commemoration, but Susan declined.
They went home in a third taxi, and tonight, Jack kissed Susan in her sitting room.
But he did not ask her to marry him.