It was no use.Joan had been one too many for him.What, in any case, was the good of trying to follow? She preferred Palgrave.She had no use, at that moment, for home.She was bored at the mere idea of talking things over.She was not serious.She refused to be faced up with seriousness.She was like a precocious child who snapped her fingers at authority and pursued the policy of the eel at the approach of discipline.What had she cried out that night in the dark with her chin tilted up and her arms thrown out? "I shall go joy-riding in that huge round-about.If I can get anybody to pay my score, good.If not, I'll pay it myself, whatever it costs.My motto's going to be 'A good time as long as I can get it, and who cares for the price!'"Martin helped the porter to his feet, stanched his flow of County Kerry reproaches with a ten-dollar bill and went back into the Crystal Room.He had gone there half an hour ago with a party of young people to kill loneliness and forget a bad hour of despair.
His friend, Howard Oldershaw, who had breezed him out of the reading room of the Yale Club, was one of the party.He was in the first flush of speed-breaking and knew the town and its midnight haunts.
He had offered to show Martin the way to get rid of depression.
Right! He should be put to the test.Two could play the "Who cares?"game; and Martin, cut to the quick, angry and resisted, would enter his name.Not again would he put himself in the way of being laughed at and ridiculed and turned down, teased and tantalized and made a fool of.
Patience and gentleness--to what end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp;he had married a butterfly.Why continue to play the martyr and follow the fruitless path of rectitude? Hadn't she said, "I can only live once, and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go?" He could only live once, and if life was not to spin with her, let it spin without her."Who cares?" he said to himself."Who the devil cares?" He gave up his coat and hat, and went back into that room of false joy and syncopation.
It was one o'clock when he stood in the street once more, hot and wined and careless."Let's hit it up," he said to Oldershaw as the car moved away with the sisters and cousins of the other two men."Ihaven't started yet."
The red-haired, roistering Oldershaw, newly injected with the virus of the Great White Way, clapped him on the back."Bully for you, old son," he said."I'm in the mood to paint the little old town.I left my car round the corner in charge of a down-at-heel night-bird.Come on.Let's go and see if he's pinched it."It was one of those Italian semi-racing cars with a body which gave it the naked appearance of a muscular Russian dancer dressed in a skin and a pair of bangles.The night-bird, one of the large army of city gypsies who hang on to life by the skin of their teeth, was sitting on the running board with his arms folded across his shirtless chest, smoking a salvaged cigar, dreaming, probably, of hot sausages and coffee.He afforded a striking illustration of the under dog cringing contentedly at the knees of wealth.
"Good man," said Oldershaw, paying him generously."Slip aboard, Martin, and I'll introduce you to one of the choicest dives I know."But the introduction was not to be effected that night, at any rate.
Driving the car as though it were a monoplane in a clear sky, with an open throttle that awoke the echoes, Oldershaw charged into Fifth Avenue and caught the bonnet of a taxicab that was going uptown.
There was a crash, a scream, a rending of metal.And when Martin picked himself up with a bruised elbow and a curious sensation of having stopped a punching bag with his face, he saw Oldershaw bending over the crumpled body of the taxi driver and heard a girl with red lips and a small white hat calling on Heaven for retribution.
"Some men oughtn't to be trusted with machinery," said Oldershaw with his inevitable grin."If I can yank my little pet out of this buckled-up lump of stuff, I'll drive that poor chap to the nearest hospital.Look after the angel, Martin, and give my name and address to the policeman.As this is my third attempt to kill myself this month, things ought to settle down into humdrum monotony for a bit now."Martin went over to the girl."I hope you're not hurt?" he asked.
"Hurt?" she cried out hysterically, feeling herself all over."Of course I'm hurt.I'm crippled for life.My backbone's broken; Ishall have water on both knees, a glass eye and a mouth full of store teeth.But you don't care, you Hun.You like it."And on she went, at the top of her voice, in an endless flow of farce and tragedy, crying and laughing, examining herself with eager hands, disbelieving more and more in the fact that she was still in the only world that mattered to her.
Having succeeded in backing his dented car out of the debris, Oldershaw leaped out.His face had been cut by the glass of the broken windshield.Blood was trickling down his fat, good-natured face.His hat was smashed and looked like that of the tramp cyclist of the vaudeville stage."All my fault, old man," he said in his best irrepressible manner, as a policeman bore down upon him."Help me to hike our prostrate friend into my car, and I'll whip him off to a hospital.He's only had the stuffing knocked out of him.It's no worse than that....That's fine.Big chap, isn't he--weighs a ton.I'll get off right away, and my friend there will give you all you want to know.So long." And off he went, one of his front wheels wabbling foolishly.
