14. Zero Hour
Mrs. Jack came from her room a little after eight o’clock and walked along the broad hallway that traversed her big apartment from front to rear. Her guests had been invited for half-past eight, but long experience in these matters told her that the party would not be going at full swing until after nine. As she walked along the corridor at a brisk and rapid little step she felt a tense excitement, not unpleasurable, even though it was now sharpened by the tincture of an apprehensive doubt.
Would all be ready? Had she forgotten anything? Had the girls followed her instructions? Or had they slipped up somewhere? Would something now be lacking?
A wrinkled line appeared between her eyes, and unconsciously she began to slip the old ring on and off her finger with a quick movement of her small hand. It was the gesture of an alert and highly able person who had come to have an instinctive mistrust of other people less gifted than herself. There was impatience and some scorn in it, a scorn not born of arrogance or any lack of warm humanity, but one that was inclined to say a trifle sharply: “Yes, yes, I know! I understand all that. There’s no need telling me that kind of thing. Let’s get to the point. What can you do? What have you done? Can I depend on you to do everything that’s necessary?” So, as she walked briskly down the hall, thoughts too sharp and quick for definition were darting across the surface of her mind like flicks of light upon a pool.
“I wonder if the girls remembered to do everything I told them,” she was thinking. “Oh, Lord! If only Nora hasn’t started drinking again!—And Janie! She’s good as gold, of course, but God, she is a fool!—And Cookie! Well, she can cook, but after that she doesn’t know April from July. And if you try to tell her anything she gets flustered and begins to gargle German at you. Then it’s worse than if you’d never spoken to her at all.—As for May—well, all you can do is to hope and pray.” The line between her troubled eyes deepened, and the ring slipped on and off her finger more rapidly than ever. “You’d think they’d realise how well off they are, and what a good life they lead here! You’d think they’d try to show it!” she thought indignantly. But almost instantly she was touched with a feeling of tender commiseration, and her mind veered back into its more usual channel: “Oh, well, poor things! I suppose they do the best they can. All you can do is to reconcile yourself to it—and realise that the only way you can get anything done right is to do it yourself.”
By this time she had reached the entrance to the living-room and was looking quickly about, assuring herself by a moment’s swift inspection that everything was in its proper place. Her examination pleased her. The worried expression about her eyes began to disappear. She slipped the ring back on her hand and let it stay there, and her face began to take on the satisfied look of a child when it regards in silence some object of its love and self-creation and finds it good.
The big room was ready for the party. It was just quietly the way she always liked to have it. The room was so nobly proportioned as to be almost regal, and yet it was so subtly toned by the labour of her faultless taste that whatever forbidding coldness its essential grandeur may have had was utterly subdued. To a stranger this living-room would have seemed not only homelike in its comfortable simplicity, but even, on closer inspection, a trifle shabby. Almost everything in it was somewhat worn. The coverings of some of the chairs and couches had become in places threadbare. The carpet that covered the floor with its pattern of old, faded green showed long use without apology. An antique gate-legged table sagged a little under the weight of its pleasant shaded lamp and its stacks of books and magazines. Upon the mantel, a creamy slab of marble, itself a little stained and worn, was spread a green and faded strip of Chinese silk, and on top of it was a lovely little figure in green jade, its carved fingers lifted in a Chinese attitude of compassionating mercy. Over the mantel hung a portrait of herself in her young loveliness at twenty, which a painter now dead and famous had made long ago.