Linda Condon Part 5

"What you must get through your head is that love--whatever it is--and marriage are two different things, and if you are going to be successful they must be kept separate. You can't do anything with a man if you love him; but then you can't do anything with him if he doesn't love you.

That's the whole thing in a breath. I am not crying down love, either; only I don't want you to think it is the bread and b.u.t.ter while it's nothing more than those little sweet cakes at Henri's.

"Now any girl who marries a poor man or for love--they are the same thing--is a fool and deserves what she gets. No one thanks her for it, him least of all; because if she does love him it is only to make them miserable. She's always at him--where did he go and why did he stay so long, and no matter what he says she knows it's a lie. More times than not she's right, too. I can't tell you too often--men don't want to be loved, they like to be flattered and flattered and then flattered again.

You'd never believe how childish they are.

"Make them think they're it and don't give too much--that's the secret.

Above all else don't be easy on them. Don't say 'all right, darling, next spring will do as well for a new suit.' Get it then and let him worry about paying for it, if worry he must. If they don't give it to you some one smarter will wear it. But I started to talk about getting married.

"Choose a Moses Feldt, who will always be grateful to you, and keep him at it. They are so easy to land it's a kind of shame, too. Perhaps I am telling you this too soon, but I don't want any mistakes. Well, pick out your Moses--and mama will help you there--and suddenly, at the right time, show him that you can be affectionate; surprise him with it and you so staid and particular generally. Don't overdo it, promise more than you ever give--

"In the closet, dearie, just a little. That's a good girl. Mama's so dry." She rose, the silver cup of the flask in her hand, and moved inevitably to the mirror. "My hair's a sight," she remarked; "all strings. I believe I'll get a permanent wave. They say it lasts for six months or more, till the ends grow out. Makes a lot of it, too, and holds the front together. If you've ever had dye in your hair, I hear, it will break off like gra.s.s."

Linda pondered over what she had been told of love and marriage; on the whole the exposition had been unsatisfactory. The latter she was able to grasp, but her mother had admitted an inability exactly to fix love.

One fact, apparently, was clear--it was a nuisance and a hindrance to happiness, or rather to success. Love upset things. Still she had the strongest objection possible to living forever with a man like Mr.

Moses Feldt. At once all that she had hoped for from life grew flat and uninteresting. She had no doubt of her mother's correctness and wisdom; the world was like that; she must make the best of it.

There was some telephoning, inquiries, and she heard the elder make an appointment with a hair-dresser for three that afternoon. She wondered what it would be like to have your hair permanently waved and hoped that she would see it done. This, too, she realized, was a part of the necessity of always considering men--they liked your hair to be wavy.

Hers was as straight and stupid as possible. She, in turn, examined herself in a mirror: the black bang fell exactly to her eyebrows, her face had no color other than the carnation of her lips and her deep blue eyes. She moved away and critically studied her figure; inches and inches too thin, she decided. Undoubtedly her mother was right, and she must marry at the first opportunity--if she could find a man, a rich man, who was willing.

Her thoughts returned vaguely to the mystery, the nuisance, of love.

Surely she had heard something before, immensely important, about it, and totally different from all her mother had said. Her mind was filled with the fantastic image of a forest, of dangers, and a fat china figure with curled plumes, a nodding head, that brushed her with fear and disgust. A shuddering panic took possession of her, flashes burned before her eyes, and she ran gasping to the perfumed soft rea.s.surances of her mother.

IX

In a recurrence of her surprising concern of the day before Mrs. Condon declined to leave her dearest Linda alone; and, their arms caught together in a surging affection, they walked down Fifth Avenue toward the hairdresser's. There was a diffused gray sparkle of sunlight--it was early for the throngs--through which they pa.s.sed rapidly to the accompaniment of a rapid eager chatter. Linda wore a deep smooth camel's hair cape, over which her intense black hair poured like ink, and her face was shaded by a dipping green velvet hat. Her mother, in one of the tightly cut suits she affected, had never been more like a perfect companion.

They saw, in the window of a store for men, a set of violent purple wool underwear, and barely escaped hysterics at the thought of Mr. Moses Feldt in such a garb. They giggled idiotically at the spectacle of a countryman fearfully making the sharp descent from the top of a lurching omnibus. And then, when they had reached the place of Mrs. Condon's appointment, stopped at the show of elaborately waved hair on wax heads and chose which, probably, would resemble the elder and which, in a very short while now, Linda.

There was an impressive interior, furnished in gray panels and silvery wood; and the young woman at the desk was more surprisingly waved than anything they had yet seen. M. Joseph would be ready almost immediately; and in the meanwhile Mrs. Condon could lay aside her things in preparation for the hair to be washed. She did this while Linda followed every movement with the deepest interest.

At the back of the long room was a succession of small alcoves, each with an important-looking chair and mirror and shelves, a white basin, water-taps and rubber tubes. Settled, in comfort, Mrs. Condon's hair was spread out in a bright metal tray fastened to the back of the chair, and the attendant, a moist tired girl in a careless waist, sprayed the short thick gold-colored strands.

"My," she observed, "what some wouldn't give for your shade! Never been touched, I can see, either. A lady comes in with real t.i.tian, but yours is more select. It positively is Lillian Russell." While she talked her hands sped with incredible rapidity and skill. "The gentlemen don't notice it; of course not; oh, no! There was a girl here, a true blonde, but she didn't stay long--her own car, yes, indeed. Married her right out of the establishment. There wasn't any nonsense to her.

"So this is your little girl! I'd never have believed it. Not that she hasn't a great deal of style, a great deal--almost, you might say, like an Egyptian. In the movies last night; her all over. It's a type that will need studying. Bertha Kalich. But for me--"

Already, Linda saw, this part of the operation was done. The girl wheeled into position a case that had a fan and ring of blue flickering flames, and a cupped tube through which hot air was poured over her mother's head. M. Joseph strutted in, a small carefully dressed man with a diminutive pointed gray beard and formal curled mustache. He spoke with what Linda supposed was a French accent, and his manners, at least to them, were beautiful. But because the girl had not put out the blue flames quickly enough he turned to her with a voice of quivering rage.

It was so unexpected, in the middle of his bowing and smooth a.s.surances, that Linda was startled, and had to think about him all over. The result of this was a surprising dislike; she hated, even, to see him touch her mother, as he unnecessarily did in directing them into the enclosure for the permanent wave.

The place itself filled her with the faint horror of instruments and the unknown. Above the chair where Mrs. Condon now sat there was a circle in the ceiling like the base of a chandelier and hanging down from it on twisted green wires were a great number of the strangest things imaginable: they were as thick as her wrist, but round, longer and hollow, white china inside and covered with brown wrapping. The wires of each, she discovered, led over a little wheel and down again to a swinging clock-like weight. In addition to this there were strange depressing handles on the wall by a dial with a jiggling needle and clearly marked numbers.

The skill of the girl who had washed her mother's hair, however, was slight compared with M. Joseph's dexterity. The comb flashed in his white narrow hands; in no time at all every knot was urged out into a s.h.i.+ning smoothness. "Just the front?" he inquired. Not waiting for Mrs. Condon's reply, he detached a strand from the ma.s.s over her brow, impaled it on a hairpin, while he picked up what might have been a thick steel knitting-needle with one end fastened in the middle of a silver quarter. The latter, it developed, had a hole in it, through which he drew the strand of hair, and then wrapped it with an angry tightness about the long projection.

At this exact moment a new girl, but tired and moist, appeared, took a hank of white threads from a dressing-table, and tied that separate lock firmly. This, Linda counted, was repeated fifteen times; and when it was accomplished she was unable to repress a nervous laughter. Really, her mother looked too queer for words: the long rigid projections stood out all over her head like--like a huge pincus.h.i.+on; no, it was a porcupine.

Mrs. Condon smiled in uncertain recognition of her daughter's mirth.

Then Linda's attention followed M. Joseph to a table against a part.i.tion, where he secured a white cotton strip from a film of them soaking in a shallow tray, took up some white powder on the blade of a dessert knife and transferred it to the strip. This he wrapped and wrapped about the hair fastened on a spindle, tied it in turn, and dragged down one of the brown objects on wires, which, to Linda's great astonishment, fitted precisely over the cotton-bound hair. Again, fifteen times, M. Joseph did this, fastening each connection with the turn of a screw. When so much was accomplished her mother's hair, it seemed, had grown fast to the ceiling in a tangle of green ends. It was the most terrifying spectacle Linda had ever witnessed. Obscure thoughts of torture, of criminals executed by electricity, froze her in a set apprehension.

The hair-dresser stepped over to the dials on the wall, and, with a sharp comprehensive glance at his apparatus, moved a handle as far as it would go. Nothing immediately happened, and Linda gave a relaxing sigh of relief. M. Joseph, however, became full of a painful attention.

X

He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper at its end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold air against her head. "How do you feel?" he asked, with, Linda noticed, a startling loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt well enough.

Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of the fifteen imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinary vigor; not only did they steam, like teapots, but drops of water formed and slowly slid over her mother's face. If the process appeared weird at the beginning, now it was utterly fantastic.

The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's dripping countenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually it resembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. "How are you?" M.

Joseph demanded nervously. "Is it hot anywhere?" With a sudden gesture she replied in a shaking voice, "Here."

Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air against her scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at his watch, and Mrs. Condon managed to ask, "How long?"

"Twenty minutes."

Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened, and Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity and interest. A curtain hung across the door to the rest of the establishment, but it had been brushed partly aside; and she could see, in the compartment they had vacated, another man bending with waving irons over the liberated ma.s.s of a woman's hair. He was very much like M. Joseph, but he was younger and had only a dark sc.r.a.p of mustache. As he caught up the hair with a quick double twist he leaned very close to the woman's face, whispering with an expression that never changed, an expression like that of the wax heads in the show-case. He bent so low that Linda was certain their cheeks had touched. She pondered at length over this, gazing now at the man beyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the cold-air tube about her mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she would like a hair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The idea didn't shock her, the woman in the other s.p.a.ce plainly liked it; still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she told herself, would be nicer.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor--the odor of scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at an agonized cry from her mother.

"It's burning me terribly," the latter cried. "Oh, I can't stand it.

Stop! Stop!"

M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed the handle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face now streaming with actual tears; but before she could escape the man threw himself on her shoulders.

"You mustn't move," he whispered desperately, "you'll tear your hair out. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please, please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There are others in the establishment. Stop!" he shook her viciously.

Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving plucking hands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. "My head, my head," she repeated. "I a.s.sure you"--the man motioned to a pallid girl to hold her in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw, lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock of hair; releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in a complete corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face.

"Do you see!" he demanded. "Perfect. I give you my word they'll all be like that. The cursed heat ran up on me," he added in a swift aside to his a.s.sistant. "Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in the place? Here, loose that binding ... thank G.o.d, that one is all right, too."

Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growing fringe of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn and dabbled face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all, nothing frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear again tightened about her heart at the perturbed expression that overtook the hair-dresser.

He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps. She caught enigmatic words--"the borax, crystallized ... solid. It would take a plumber ...

have to go."

The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condon implored M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could be done; he admitted it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseled off; in the end he tried to force a release and the strand, with a renewal of Mrs.

Condon's agony--now, in the interest of her appearance, heroically withstood--snapped short in the container.

Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M. Joseph and his permanent waving establishment--Linda had never before heard her mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor use such heated unpleasant words, and the girl was flooded with a wretched shame. Still another lock, it was revealed, had been ruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its owner's fingers.

"The law will provide for you," she promised.

"Your hair was dyed," the proprietor returned vindictively. "The girl who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against the permanent if their hair has been colored. So it was at your own risk."