“I reckon I and Hugo had better be movin’ along. We got to make Baltimore by night.”
“That’s a long way.”
“I want to sleep south tonight,” he said.
Together they walked down the path and past the idiotic statue of Diana on the lawn.
“You see,” added Amanthis gently, “you don’t have to be rich up here in order to go around, any more than you do in Georgia——” She broke off abruptly. “Won’t you come back next year and start another academy?”
“No mamm, not me. That Mr. Harlan told me I could go on with the one I had but I told him no.”
“Haven’t you——didn’t you make money?”
“No mamm,” he answered. “I got enough of my own income to just get me home. One time I was ahead but I was livin’ high and there was my rent an’ apparatus and those musicians.”
He didn’t consider it necessary to mention that Mr. Harlan had tried to present him with a check.
They reached the automobile just as Hugo drove in his last nail. Jim opened a pocket of the door and took from it an unlabeled bottle containing a whitish-yellow liquid.
“I intended to get you a present,” he told her awkwardly, “but my money got away before I could, so I thought I’d send you something from Georgia. This here’s just a personal remembrance. It won’t do for you to drink but maybe after you come out into society you might want to show some of those young fellas what good old corn tastes like.”
She took the bottle.
“Thank you, Jim.”
“That’s all right.” He turned to Hugo. “I reckon we’ll go along now. Give the lady the hammer.”
“Oh, you can have the hammer,” said Amanthis tearfully. “Won’t you promise to come back?”
“Someday—maybe.”
He looked for a moment at her yellow hair and her blue eyes misty with sleep and tears. Then he got into his car and as his foot found the clutch his whole manner underwent a change.
“I’ll say good-bye mamm,” he announced with impressive dignity. “We’re goin’ south for the winter.”
The gesture of his straw hat indicated Palm Beach, St. Augustine, Miami. His body-servant spun the crank, gained his seat and became part of the intense vibration into which the automobile was thrown.
“South for the winter,” repeated Jim. And then he added softly, “You’re the prettiest girl I ever knew. You go back up there and lie down in that hammock, and sleep—sle-eep——”
It was almost a lullaby, as he said it. He bowed to her, magnificently, profoundly, including the whole North in the splendor of his obeisance——
Then they were gone down the road in quite a preposterous cloud of dust. Just before they reached the first bend Amanthis saw them come to a full stop, dismount and shove the top part of the car onto the bottom part. They took their seats again without looking around. Then the bend—and they were out of sight, leaving only a faint brown mist to show that they had passed.
— ◆ —
Diamond Dick [and the First Law of Woman].
(Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, April 1924)
When Diana Dickey came back from France in the spring of 1919, her parents considered that she had atoned for her nefarious past. She had served a year in the Red Cross and she was presumably engaged to a young American ace of position and charm. They could ask no more; of Diana’s former sins only her nickname survived——
Diamond Dick!—she had selected it herself, of all the names in the world, when she was a thin, black-eyed child of ten.
“Diamond Dick,” she would insist, “that’s my name. Anybody that won’t call me that’s a double darn fool.”
“But that’s not a nice name for a little lady,” objected her governess. “If you want to have a boy’s name why don’t you call yourself George Washington?”
“Be-cause my name’s Diamond Dick,” explained Diana patiently. “Can’t you understand? I got to be named that be-cause if I don’t I’ll have a fit and upset the family, see?”
She ended by having the fit—a fine frenzy that brought a disgusted nerve specialist out from New York—and the nickname too. And once in possession she set about modeling her facial expression on that of a butcher boy who delivered meats at Greenwich back doors. She stuck out her lower jaw and parted her lips on one side, exposing sections of her first teeth—and from this alarming aperture there issued the harsh voice of one far gone in crime.
“Miss Caruthers,” she would sneer crisply, “what’s the idea of no jam? Do you wanta whack the side of the head?”
“Diana! I’m going to call your mother this minute!”
“Look at here!” threatened Diana darkly. “If you call her you’re liable to get a bullet the side of the head.”
Miss Caruthers raised her hand uneasily to her bangs. She was somewhat awed.
“Very well,” she said uncertainly, “if you want to act like a little ragamuffin——”
Diana did want to. The evolutions which she practiced daily on the sidewalk and which were thought by the neighbors to be some new form of hop-scotch were in reality the preliminary work on an Apache slouch. When it was perfected, Diana lurched forth into the streets of Greenwich, her face violently distorted and half-obliterated by her father’s slouch hat, her body reeling from side to side, jerked hither and yon by the shoulders, until to look at her long was to feel a faint dizziness rising to the brain.
At first it was merely absurd, but when Diana’s conversation commenced to glow with weird rococo phrases, which she imagined to be the dialect of the underworld, it became alarming. And a few years later she further complicated the problem by turning into a beauty—a dark little beauty with tragedy eyes and a rich voice stirring in her throat.
Then America entered the war and Diana on her eighteenth birthday sailed with a canteen unit to France.
The past was over; all was forgotten. Just before the armistice was signed, she was cited in orders for coolness under fire. And—this was the part that particularly pleased her mother—it was rumored that she was engaged to be married to Mr. Charley Abbot of Boston and Bar Harbor, “a young aviator of position and charm.”
But Mrs. Dickey was scarcely prepared for the changed Diana who landed in New York. Seated in the limousine bound for Greenwich, she turned to her daughter with astonishment in her eyes.
“Why, everybody’s proud of you, Diana,” she cried. “The house is simply bursting with flowers. Think of all you’ve seen and done, at nineteen!”
Diana’s
