The Gay Cockade Part 1

The Gay c.o.c.kade.

by Temple Bailey.

From the moment that Jimmie Harding came into the office, he created an atmosphere. We were a tired lot. Most of us had been in the government service for years, and had been ground fine in the mills of departmental monotony.

But Jimmie was young, and he wore his youth like a gay c.o.c.kade. He flaunted it in our faces, and because we were so tired of our dull and desiccated selves, we borrowed of him, remorselessly, color and brightness until, gradually, in the light of his reflected glory, we seemed a little younger, a little less tired, a little less petrified.

In his gay and gallant youth there was, however, a quality which partook of earlier times. He should, we felt, have worn a feather in his cap--and a cloak instead of his Norfolk coat. He walked with a little swagger, and stood with his hand on his hip, as if his palm pressed the hilt of his sword. If he ever fell in love, we told one another, he would, without a doubt, sing serenades and apostrophize the moon.

He did fall in love before he had been with us a year. His love-affair was a romance for the whole office. He came among us every morning glorified; he left us in the afternoon as a knight enters upon a quest.

He told us about the girl. We pictured her perfectly before we saw her, as a little thing, with a mop of curled brown hair; an oval face, pearl-tinted; wide, blue eyes. He dwelt on all her small perfections--the brows that swept across her forehead in a thin black line, the transparency of her slender hands, the straight set of her head on her shoulders, the slight halt in her speech like that of an enchanting child.

Yet she was not in the least a child. "She holds me up to my best, Miss Standish," Jimmie told me; "she says I can write."

We knew that Jimmie had written a few things, gay little poems that he showed us now and then in the magazines. But we had not taken them at all seriously. Indeed, Jimmie had not taken them seriously himself.

But now he took them seriously. "Elise says that I can do great things.

That I must get out of the Department."

To the rest of us, getting out of the government service would have seemed a mad adventure. None of us would have had the courage to consider it. But it seemed a natural thing that Jimmie should fare forth on the broad highway--a modern D'Artagnan, a youthful Quixote, an Alan Breck--!

We hated to have him leave. But he had consolation. "Of course you'll come and see us. We're going back to my old house in Albemarle. It's a rotten shack, but Elise says it will be a corking place for me to write.

And you'll all come down for week-ends."

We felt, I am sure, that it was good of him to ask us, but none of us expected that we should ever go. We had a premonition that Elise wouldn't want the deadwood of Jimmie's former Division. I know that for myself, I was content to think of Jimmie happy in his old house. But I never really expected to see it. I had reached the point of expecting nothing except the day's work, my dinner at the end, a night's sleep, and the same thing over again in the morning.

Yet Jimmie got all of us down, not long after he was married, to what he called a housewarming. He had inherited a few pleasant acres in Virginia, and the house was two hundred years old. He had never lived in it until he came with Elise. It was in rather shocking condition, but Elise had managed to make it habitable by getting it scrubbed very clean, and by taking out everything that was not in keeping with the oldness and quaintness. The resulting effect was bare but beautiful.

There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany sideboards and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in branched candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went down in June poppies were blowing in the wide gra.s.s s.p.a.ces, and honeysuckle rioting over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we had pa.s.sed through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did, because this was the kind of thing of which I had dreamed, and there had been a time when I, too, had wanted to write.

The room in which Jimmie wrote was in a little detached house, which had once been the office of his doctor grandfather. He had his typewriter out there, and a big desk, and from the window in front of his desk he could look out on green slopes and the distant blue of mountain ridges.

We envied him and told him so.

"Well, I don't know," Jimmie said. "Of course I'll get a lot of work done. But I'll miss your darling old heads bending over the other desks."

"You couldn't work, Jimmie," Elise reminded him, "with other people in the room."

"Perhaps not. Did I tell you old dears that I am going to write a play?"

That was, it seems, what Elise had had in mind for him from the beginning--a great play!

"She wouldn't even, have a honeymoon"--Jimmie's arm was around her; "she brought me here, and got this room ready the first thing."

"Well, he mustn't be wasting time," said Elise, "must he? Jimmie's rather wonderful, isn't he?"

They seemed a pair of babies as they stood there together. Elise had on a childish one-piece pink frock, with sleeves above the elbow, and an organdie sash. Yet, intuitively, the truth came to me--she was ages older than Jimmie in spite of her twenty years to his twenty-four. Here was no Juliet, flaming to the moon--no mistress whose steed would gallop by wind-swept roads to midnight trysts. Here was, rather, the cool blood that had sacrificed a honeymoon--_and, oh, to honeymoon with Jimmie Harding_!--for the sake of an ambitious future.

She was telling us about it "We can always have a honeymoon, Jimmie and I. Some day, when he is famous, we'll have it. But now we must not."

"I picked out the place"--Jimmie was eager--"a dip in the hills, and big pines--And then Elise wouldn't."

We went in to lunch after that. The table was lovely and the food delicious. There was batter-bread, I remember, and an omelette, and peas from the garden.

Duncan Street and I talked all the way home of Jimmie and his wife. He didn't agree with me in the least about Elise. "She'll be the making of him. Such wives always are."

But I held that he would lose something,--that he would not be the same Jimmie.

Jimmie wrote plays and plays. In between he wrote pot-boiling books. The pot-boilers were needed, because none of his plays were accepted. He used to stop in our office and joke about it.

"If it wasn't for Elise's faith in me, Miss Standish, I should think myself a poor stick. Of course, I can make money enough with my books and short stuff to keep things going, but it isn't just money that either of us is after."

Except when Jimmie came into the office we saw very little of him. Elise gathered about her the men and women who would count in Jimmie's future.

The week-ends in the still old house drew not a few famous folk who loathed the commonplaceness of convivial atmospheres. Elise had old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers in her garden, delectable food, a library of old books. It was a heavenly change for those who were tired of c.o.c.ktail parties, bridge-madness, illicit love-making. I could never be quite sure whether Elise really loved dignified living for its own sake, or whether she was sufficiently discriminating to recognize the kind of bait which would lure the fine souls whose presence gave to her hospitality the stamp of exclusiveness.

They had a small car, and it was when Jimmie motored up to Was.h.i.+ngton that we saw him. He had a fas.h.i.+on of taking us out to lunch, two at a time. When he asked me, he usually asked Duncan Street. Duncan and I have worked side by side for twenty-five years. There is nothing in the least romantic about our friends.h.i.+p, but I should miss him if he were to die or to resign from office. I have little fear of the latter contingency. Only death, I feel, will part us.

In our moments of reunion Jimmie always talked a great deal about himself. The big play was, he said, in the back of his mind. "Elise says that I can do it," he told us one day over our oysters, "and I am beginning to think that I can. I say, why can't you old dears in the office come down for Christmas, and I'll read you what I've written."

We were glad to go. There were to be no other guests, and I found out afterward that Elise rarely invited any of their fas.h.i.+onable friends down in winter. The place showed off better in summer with the garden, and the vines hiding all deficiencies.

We arrived in a snow-storm on Christmas Eve, and when we entered the house there was a roaring fire on the hearth. I hadn't seen a fire like that for thirty years. You may know how I felt when I knelt down in front of it and warmed my hands.

The candles in sconces furnished the only other illumination. Elise, moving about the shadowy room, seemed to draw light to herself. She wore a flame-colored velvet frock and her curly hair was tucked into a golden net. I think that she had planned the medieval effect deliberately, and it was a great success. As she flitted about like a brilliant bird, our eyes followed her. My eyes, indeed, drank of her, like new wine. I have always loved color, and my life has been drab.

I spoke of her frock when she showed me my room.

"Oh, do you like it?" she asked. "Jimmie hates to see me in dark things.

He says that when I wear this he can see his heroine."

"Is she like you?"

"Not a bit. She is rather untamed. Jimmie does her very well. She positively gallops through the play."

"And do you never gallop?"

She shook her head. "It's a good thing that I don't. If I did, Jimmie would never write. He says that I keep his nose to the grindstone. It isn't that, but I love him too much to let him squander his talent. If he had no talent, I should love him without it. But, having it, I must hold him up to it."

She was very sure of herself, very sure of the rightness of her att.i.tude toward Jimmie. "I know how great he is," she said, as we went down, "and other people don't. So I've got to prove it."

It was at dinner that I first noticed a change in Jimmie. It was a change which was hard to define. Yet I missed something in him--the enthusiasm, the buoyancy, the almost breathless radiance with which he had rekindled our dying fires. Yet he looked young enough and happy enough as he sat at the table in his velvet studio coat, with his crisp, burnt-gold hair catching the light of the candles. He and his wife were a handsome pair. His manner to her was perfect. There could be no question of his adoration.

After dinner we had the tree. It was a young pine set up at one end of the long dining-room, and lighted in the old fas.h.i.+on by red wax candles.