Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 3/Chapter 1
THE endless processions of automobiles, with black tops shiny in an autumnal drizzle, filled the long avenues of Manhattan, and, creeping busily between quivering halts, were like armies of beetles on the march through gloomy ruts in wet stone. Not unlike detached smaller beetles upright and gesticulating to the greater were the traffic directors in gleaming black oilskin, while other imperious coleoptera stood at the awning entrances to apartment houses, and, as the electric lights came on in the late afternoon, outlined themselves in dark wet glitterings that became flashingly active when automobiles drew to the curb. At such times there seemed to be a deposit of larvae; the hard and darkly shining sides of the cars opened, emitting plastic beings to be taken in charge, apparently, by the attendant beetles at the awning ends, and, upon the fashionable avenues, the larvae were of a superior, tenderer kind;—delicate things, exquisitely swathed, they were handled sweetly and hygienically with deferential white gloves.
This is not to say that the deference was anything more than a hopeful sale of so much manner for proportionate pourboire. The giant beetle at the awning of the Abercrombie Apartments on Park Avenue had in his heart no true deference for the larvae deposited with him, though they were among the most richly and softly wrapped in all that thoroughfare. "Tea!" he said mockingly to an official friend, who paused beside him in a relaxed interval. "They call it 'tea'! If you'd see 'em comin' away from all these 'teas,' about an hour or so from now, you'd like to get hold of a little of that kind of 'tea' yourself, Charlie."
The policeman laughed admiringly. "Cost about eight dollars a quart from a bootlegger, wouldn't it?"
"Yes, and more. It's a shame," the doorman said bitterly. "You'd be surprised how much of it they get away with. Yes, and even young girls! It's the worst waste we've ever had in this country. Now before prohibition" But here he interrupted himself; a French automobile drew out of the traffic to halt by the awning; he stepped forward cordially and opened the door. "Yes'm," he said, not replying to any inquiry. "It's a nasty afternoon. Very nasty, indeed, ma'am, and it looks like a nasty evening, too. Yes, ma'am, indeed it does so!"
The policeman glanced with a favourable interest at the emerging figure; for he knew that his friend spoke so freely of the weather to only those whom he regarded as important clients. This one, moreover, had every appearance of being such a client; she presented to view the slender elegance, completed, not immature, of a gracefully experienced young lady of the world, and, better still, she was to be distinguished from previously arriving clients by something even more ingratiating than her superior comeliness. Most of the others, too much like larvae, came out of their cars in a dead-eyed coma; apparently they had to be passed inside the building and relieved of their swathings before being roused to complete consciousness;—this one was already brilliantly alive; her blue eyes were twinklingly aware of everything and took note of both the doorman and the policeman as fellow-beings worthy of cognizance.
"Mr. Winge tells me he thinks it may be the climate, William," she said to the former. "Mr. Winge is almost sure the climate has something to do with the weather."
The policeman was charmed with her. "They ought to make more like that one," he said, when she had gone briskly into the great, lighted doorway. "Who was she talkin' about? Her husband?"
"No; she ain't married. This Winge is only a dumb-bell lives here her and I joke about. He ain't got no chance with her at all."
"I hope not," the policeman said. "You'd hate to think of one like that marryin' a dumb-bell. About how old is she, you think?"
"Miss Ambler?" the doorman returned thoughtfully. "Well—prob'ly somewhere around where either they marry a young feller or else don't, and wait a while and marry a man that's lost his wife."
"Is she so?" his friend said, amused. "I expect from her looks, though, she don't feel no great call to be troublin' her head over that!"
But his surmise was not at all a correct one: Miss Ambler had been troubling her head about that a great deal of late. In fact, at this very moment, in the elevator of the Abercrombie, she was almost acutely troubling her head about it and she had some special promptings to painful thought upon the subject. The least pressing of them, it may be explained, as a key to her present state of mind, was the fact that a previously patient suitor had delivered an ultimatum: he was to have a favourable answer by nightfall of to-day or he would henceforth treat her as a stranger, none of her proposed middle-grounds being possible for him. She found herself able to endure the prospect of his alienation; but a more serious matter was involved: she was twenty-four, which is bearable;—what began to take her breath was the imminent approach of her birthday. She had only a fortnight left; then she would be twenty-five.
Here was a disturbing numeral. For a girl the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five has a disproportionate importance. In certain uncomfortable suggestions it may be equal to the difference made by a whole decade in the life of a young man: for her, the difference between twenty-four and twenty-five may be what the difference between twenty-five and thirty-five is for him. In Claire's mind, at twenty-four, there was a Rubicon before her; and to cross over, unwed and even unbetrothed, into twenty-five, was almost crossing over into a definite spinsterhood. Or, if it were not crossing into a spinsterhood so definite as to be absolute and permanent, it was crossing into that period of limbo wherein a maiden waits, ageing, until perchance she marries the relict widower of a former girl-friend and brings up children not her own. The doorman had defined Claire's age shrewdly enough.
She had shivered a little upon leaving twenty-three for twenty-four, as if at the touch of an October breeze in August; yet autumnal gayety was easily possible for twenty-four. Twenty-four was not so bad of itself; its sinister quality resided in its border, and, as she approached nearer and nearer that border, she more and more often incredulously murmured the dread numeral to herself, wondering and dismayed to find it upon her lips.
"Twenty-five!" she thus whispered in the elevator. "Twenty-five!"
The elevator man did not hear her. What he said was only a coincidence; her apartment was upon the eighteenth floor. "Eighteen, Miss Ambler?"
"Twenty, Henry, please."
He nodded affably. "Mrs. Allyngton's, I expect. She seems to be having quite a tea this afternoon. Quite a tea at Mrs. Allyngton's this afternoon, Miss Ambler." And he added, in an admiring tone, though his purpose was merely to make a little more conversation with this favoured resident: "I was pretty sure you wouldn't miss it, Miss Ambler. I told Joe; I said 'She'll be back here in time for it,' I said. 'You'll see,' I said. 'She ain't goin' to let 'em leave her out when there's anything going on!' I told him, 'Not Miss Ambler!' I told him."
His passenger made the appreciative murmur of laughter required by genial manners; but as she stepped out upon the twentieth floor she was less pleased than she appeared. "Twenty-five!" she whispered again. But it seemed that even before twenty-five was actually reached, a girl had to exert herself to keep people from leaving her out. Her exertions must be somewhat noticeable since they roused the admiration of the elevator man.