American Adventures Part 49

"Oh, no, thanks," says the guest. "I don't care for docks--not, that is, unless we can go boating."

"I'm afraid we can't do that," says Miss Jacksonville. "We don't use the river much for pleasure. I can't say just why, unless it is that every one is too busy.... But please eat something more, and do have something to drink. There's plenty for every one."

"I must be running along," says the visitor. "I've been invited to call at some other houses down the block. By the way, what is the name of your neighbor next door?"

"St. Augustine," says Jacksonville, with a little reluctance. "She is of Spanish descent and sets great store by it. If you call there she'll show you a lot of interesting old relics she has, but I a.s.sure you that when it comes to commercial success her family isn't one-two-three with papa."

"Thanks," says the visitor, "but just at the moment commerce doesn't appeal to me. Who lives beyond her?"

Miss Jacksonville sighs. "There are some pleasant, rather attractive people named Ormonde, beyond," she says, "and a lively family named Daytona next door to them. Neither family is in business, like papa.

They just play all the time. Then come a number of modest places, and after them, in the big yellow and white house with the palm trees all around it--but I'd advise you to keep away from there! Yes, you'd better go by that house. On the other side of it, in another lovely house, live some nicer, simpler people named Miami. Or if you like fis.h.i.+ng, you might drop in on Mrs. Long-Key--she's wholesome and sweet, and goes out every day to catch tarpon. Or, again, you might--"

"What's the matter with the people in the big yellow and white house surrounded by palm trees? Why shouldn't I go there?" asks the guest.

"A young widow lives there," says Miss Jacksonville primly. "I don't know much about her history, but she looks to me as though she had been on the stage. She's frightfully frivolous--not at all one of our representative people."

"Ah!" says the visitor. "Is she pretty?"

"Well," admits Miss Jacksonville, "I suppose she _is_--in a fast way.

But she's all rouged and she overdresses. Her bathing suits are too short at the bottom and her evening gowns are too short at the top. Yes, and even at that, she has a trick of letting the shoulder straps slip off and pretending she doesn't know it has happened."

"What's her name?"

"Mrs. Palm-Beach."

"Oh," says the visitor. "I've heard of her. She's always getting into the papers. Tell me more."

Miss Jacksonville purses her lips and raises her eyebrows. "Really," she says, "I don't like to talk scandal."

"Oh, come on! Do!" pleads the visitor. "Is she bad--bad and beautiful and alluring?"

"Judge for yourself," says Miss Jacksonville sharply. "She keeps that enormous place of hers shut up except for about two months or so in the winter, when she comes down gorgeously dressed, with more jewelry than is worn by the rest of the neighborhood put together. Few Southerners go to her house. It's full of rich people from all over the North."

"Is she rich?"

"You'd think so to look at her--especially if you didn't know where she got her money. But she really hasn't much of her own. She's a grafter."

"How does she manage it?"

"Men give her money."

"But why?"

"Because she knows how to please the rich. She understands them. She makes herself beautiful for them. She plays, and drinks, and gambles, and dances with them, and goes riding with them in wheel chairs by moonlight, and sits with them by the sea, and holds their hands, and gets them sentimental. There's some scent she uses that is very seductive--none of the rest of us have been able to find out exactly what it is."

"But how does she get their money?"

"She never tells a hard-luck story--you can't get money out of the kind she goes with, that way. She takes the other tack. She whispers to them, and laughs with them, and fondles them, and makes them love her, and when they love her she says: 'But dearie, be reasonable! Think how many people love me! I like to have you here, you fat old darling with the gold jingling in your pockets! but I can't let you sit with me unless you pay. Yes, I'm expensive, I admit. But don't you love this scent I wear? Don't you adore my tropical winter sea, my gardens, my palm trees, my moonlight, and my music? They are all for you, dearie--so why shouldn't you pay? Don't I take you from the northern cold and slush?

Haven't I built a siding for your private car, and made an anchorage for your yacht? Don't I let you do as you please? Don't I keep you amused?

Don't you love to look at me? Don't I put my warm red lips to yours?

Well, then, dearie, what is all your money for?' ... That is her way of talking to them! That is the sort of creature that she is!"

"Shocking!" says the visitor, rising and looking for his hat "You say hers is the third large house from here?"

"Yes. Remember, she's as mercenary as can be!"

"Thanks. I can take care of myself. If she's amusing that suits me.

Good-by."

In the vestibule he pauses to count his money.

"Jacksonville seems to be a nice girl," he says to himself as he hastens down the block. "I imagine she might make a good wife and mother, and that she'd help her husband on in business. However, I'm not thinking of getting married and settling down in Florida. I'm out for some fun. I think I'll run in and call upon Mrs. Palm-Beach."

CHAPTER LIII

Pa.s.sIONATE PALM BEACH

A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing and unthinking time.

--DRYDEN.

Like all places in which idlers try to avoid finding out that they are idle, Palm Beach has very definite customs as to where to go, and at what time to go there. Excepting in its hours for going to bed and getting up, it runs on schedule. The official day begins with the bathing hour--half past eleven to half past twelve--when the two or three thousand people from the pair of vast hotels a.s.semble before the casino on the beach. Golfers will, of course, be upon the links before this hour; fishermen will be casting from the pier or will be out in boats searching the sail fish--that being the "fas.h.i.+onable" fish at the present time; ladies of excessive circ.u.mference will be panting rapidly along the walks, their eyes holding that look of dreamy determination which painters put into the eyes of martyrs, and which a fixed intention to lose twenty pounds puts into the eyes of banting women. So, too, certain gentlemen of swarthy skin make their way to the casino sun parlor, where they disrobe and bake until the bathing hour. The object of this practice is to acquire, as nearly as a white man may, the complexion of a mulatto, and it is surprising to see how closely the skins of some more ardent members of the "Browning Club," as this group is called, match those of their chair boys. The underlying theory of the "Browning Club" is that a triple-plated coat of tan, taken north in March, advertises the wearer as having been at Palm Beach during the entire winter, thus establis.h.i.+ng him as a man not merely of means, but of great endurance.

The women of Palm Beach seem to be divided into two distinct schools of thought on the subject of tanning. While none of them compete with the radicals of the "Browning Club," one may nevertheless observe that, in evening dress, many young ladies reveal upon their necks, shoulders, and arms, stenciled outlines of the upper margins of their bathing suits.

Ladies of the opposing school, upon the contrary, guard the whiteness of their skins as jealously as the men of the "Browning Club" guard their blackness. Rather than be touched with tan, many ladies of the latter group deny themselves the pleasures of the surf. The parasols beneath which they arrive upon the sands are not lowered until they are safely seated beneath the green and blue striped canvas tops of their beach chairs, and it may be observed that even then they are additionally fortified against the light, by wide black hats and thick dark veils draped to mask their faces up to the eyes; "harem" veils, they call them--the name, however, signifying nothing polygamous.

A pleasant diversion at the beginning of the bathing hour occurs when some mere one-horse millionaire from a Middle-Western town appears on the beach with his family. He is newly arrived and is under the fond delusion that he is as good as anybody else and that his money is as good as any other person's money. Seeing the inviting rows of beach chairs, he and his family plump into several of them. They are hardly settled, however, when the man who attends to the beach chairs comes and asks them to get out, saying that the chairs are reserved.

The other thinks the man is lying like a head waiter, and demands to know for whom the chairs are reserved.

In reply the beach-chair man mentions, with suitable deference, the name of Mrs. Hopkinson Skipkinson Jumpkinson-Jones.

"Well," cries the Middle-Westerner, "Mrs. Jones isn't here yet, is she?

She can't use the chairs _now_, can she, if she isn't here?"

Even without this evidence that he does not grasp at all, the seriousness of the beach-chair situation, the fact that the uncouth stranger has referred to Mrs. H.S. Jumpkinson-Jones merely as "Mrs.

Jones," brands him among the Palm Beach "regulars" who have overheard him, as a barbarian of the barbarians. People in neighboring chairs at once turn their backs upon him and glance at each other knowingly with raised eyebrows. At this juncture, let us hope, the daughter of the intruder manages to pry him loose; let us hope also that she takes him aside and tells him what everybody ought to know: namely, that Mrs. H.S.

Jumpkinson-Jones has been a society leader ever since the "Journal"

published the full-page Sunday story about her having gold fillings put in her Boston terrier's teeth. That was away back in 1913, just before she was allowed to get her divorce from Royal Tewksbury Johnson III of Paris, Newport, and New York. The day after the divorce she married her present husband, and up to last year, when the respective wives of a munitions millionaire and a moving-picture millionaire began to cut in on her, no one thought of denying her claim to be the most wasteful woman in Palm Beach.

True, she may not come down to the beach to-day, but in that case it is obviously proper that her chairs--including those of her dog and her husband--remain magnificently vacant throughout the bathing hour.

The lady is, however, likely to appear. She will be wearing one of the seventy hats which, we have learned by the papers, she brought with her, and a pint or so of her lesser pearls. Her dog--which is sometimes served beside her at table at the Beach Club, and whose diet is the same as her own, even to strawberries and cream followed by a demi ta.s.se--will be in attendance; and her husband, whose diet is even richer, may also appear if he has recovered from his matutinal headache.

Here she will sit through the hour, gossiping with her friends, watching the antics of several beautiful, dubious women, camp followers of the rich, who add undoubted interest to the place; calling languidly to her dog: "_Viens, Tou-tou! Viens vite!_" above all waiting patiently, with crossed knees, for news-service photographers to come and take her picture--a picture which, when we see it presently in "Vogue," "Vanity Fair," or a Sunday newspaper, will present indisputable proof that Mrs.

H.S. Jumpkinson-Jones and the ladies sitting near her (also with legs crossed) refrained from wearing bathing suits neither through excessive modesty nor for fear of revealing deformity of limb.