Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

They sat facing each other at luncheon a day or two later, and Georgia unaccountably dropped her hand to her lap. Not quickly enough, however. “A new ring, isn’t it?” Jicky observed. She extended her hand and Georgia, disengaging hers, reluctantly submitted the tips of her fingers for examination.

“Isn’t it darling,” said Jicky in a hoarse voice.

Georgia laughed embarrassedly. “I hardly know what to say,” she admitted. “In fact I— I’m not free to say anything just now.”

In her own room a few moments later, Jicky took her glasses off for the last time. As a matter of fact, she threw them on the floor and dug her heel through them. She had a hairdresser and his assistants up and spent her afternoon undergoing elaborate rites of beautification that left her looking at least ten years older. Then when Russell Bain called up, she accepted the inevitable with what amounted to stoic philosophy.

As she crossed the foyer on her way out, she came face to face with Scotty, handing his hat to the maid. He took in the mandarin coat and rhinestone vanity case at a glance.

“Good evening,” she said briefly. “And by the way, allow me to congratulate you.”

He stared at her blankly. “What for?”

“Announce the gentleman to my mother, Leila,” she said, and closed the door on him. She went down in the elevator with the feeling that somehow her evening was definitely spoiled even before it had got under way. She caught the gleam of something liquid on her lashes in the beveled mirror facing her.

“Where to?” asked Russell, sitting waiting for her in the car with his stick between his legs.

“Don’t give me a minute’s time to think tonight,” she warned him, “or I’ll fold up on you and die.”

Two days later the count appeared. Georgia’s room meanwhile had become a bower of flowers overnight. “Count Riano,” she explained, weaving a pattern in the air with her atomizer. “A dear friend of mine from Paris. Won’t you come out and say how do?”

Jicky groped to straighten her glasses. Then she remembered that they were gone.

He was sitting in the half light of several lamps, slowly turning the leaves of a book without attempting to look at it. He laid the book aside and stood up, his shoulders orange in the evening light.

“My daughter, Jocelyn,” said Georgia.

“But how charming,” said the count.

When Georgia came in that night, there was a droop to her; she was crestfallen as Jicky had never seen her crestfallen before.

Jicky patted her on the shoulder.

“Did he dance terribly, shake like a leaf and all that? Did he spill things when he ate? Something went wrong, I can feel it. Won’t you tell me, dearest?”

“Oh, no,” Georgia answered simply. “He carries himself like a twenty-year-old with the antics left out. It’s myself. I never realized it until tonight. It’s — it’s over eight months since we’ve seen each other, you know.”

“You mean he found a change in you?”

“‘How fresh and youthful all your American women are,’ he said, and then he looked at me. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe New York agrees with you. You were not so pale last year in Paris. You have a harried look—”

“Oh, well,” said Jicky bitterly, “if he insists on throwing a roomful of debutantes in your teeth, let it go at that. I think the average person seeing you out together would take him to be your father.”

“No,” said Georgia pensively, “you’re very good to me, but something’s got to be done. It’s for my own satisfaction, you understand. There is this new treatment everyone is beginning to talk about,” she said. “I wonder — Sondra Clark was telling me about it only yesterday. Some kind of heliotrope rays — I don’t know what they’re called — that vitalize the muscles of the face. It’s really an electric bath.”

“Things like that can be dangerous,” said Jicky. “Please don’t.”

“How absurd,” said Georgia. “This is 1928. Things are perfected beyond the point where any risk enters into them. Didn’t that dancer do it when she wanted to acquire a tropical sunburn?”

A week later she was beginning the experiment. Brimful of enthusiasm, she could talk of nothing else. “But I do look better, don’t I?” she would ask Jicky half a dozen times in the course of a day. Jicky was undecided whether it was the process itself or her enormous faith in it that gave her an undeniably quickened reaction these days. The treatments were rather early. As a rule Georgia was gone before anyone was up.

One morning the count put in an appearance just as Jicky had finished breakfast. She recoiled in synthetic modesty, but he seemed not to see her. Obviously pale and shaken, he went directly to the wall cabinet and poured himself a small glass of cordial with a wrist that trembled so exaggeratedly it almost suggested a stage effect.

“Vite. Get yourself dressed,” he said hoarsely.

“What’s happened?” she said. “Where’s Mother?”

“I beg of you get yourself dressed,” he said. “The vibrator have been accident.”

She had no sooner left the room than she was back with a coat thrown over her, tears beginning to form in her eyes. They hurried out together, leaving the door open behind them.

Georgia was already under ether in one of the emergency wards. She lay coifed in gauze like a nun. The count led Jicky from the room after a while, and all afternoon long she paced back and forth in the little waiting room outside. Toward four o’clock they held a consultation over her and announced there was no immediate danger. Skin grafting would be undertaken, they gave Jicky to understand.

“There will be marks, unavoidably, but we will do everything in our power.”

The count shook his head morosely as they seated themselves in the car and started back.

“The marriage will have to be postpone.”

“Marriage?” echoed Jicky.

“She no have told you of our engagement, then? Mon dieu, since last year in Paris already.”

“I’ve seen the ring, I think,” said Jicky.

“Ah, yes, the ring,” he agreed indifferently.

At her door he handed her out of the car with elaborate politeness. Something told Jicky, as she watched him resume his seat and carefully button one chamois glove, that that was the last they would see of him.

Six weeks later, in her own home, the shades drawn and the light carefully tempered, the bandages were finally removed from Georgia’s face and throat. Jicky had taken refuge in the hallway outside that significantly closed door, her chilled wrists in Scotty’s keeping. There was an air of fatality about the apartment. A sickening stillness that gave pause to some ominous thing about to happen. In the other room the light footstep of a nurse was heard, the doctor’s voice in a guarded murmur, and then a silence, utter and obliterating, that lasted hours, it seemed.

A scream, short and swift as a knife thrust, rang out behind Georgia’s door. It held an element of surprise, of a sharp indignity thrust upon one. It could have been the death cry of a woman’s vanity.

Jicky was in Scotty’s arms now, trembling, her face buried on his shoulder.

“My dear, my dear,” she choked, “I can’t bear the thought of it.”

“Go in to her,” he urged. “You’ll have to, you know. You’ve got to see her through it.”

She left him and went toward the door, conscious of a bitter resentment against herself. “You won’t have to be envious of her now, you rotter.”

There was a slight tinge of drugs in the air and the nurse stood unobtrusively over in a corner. There was no one else in the room but Georgia, a pathetic Georgia, her hands lying limply beside her on the covers, palms up.