Head and Shoulders


In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A--excellent--in Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry.

Two years later while George M. Cohan was composing "Over There," Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on "The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form," and during the battle of Chateau-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on "The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists."

After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of "Spinoza's Improvement of the Understanding." Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on "German Idealism."


He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop.


And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.





The rap sounded--three seconds leaked by--the rap sounded.

"Come in," muttered Horace automatically.



"Leave what on the bed in the other room?"


"The laundry."

"I can't."

Horace stirred impatiently in his chair.

"Why can't you?"

"Why, because I haven't got it."




Horace stared at her dazedly. The momentary suspicion came to him that she existed there only as a phantom of his imagination. Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters.




"What do you want?" he asked.

"I want them letters," whined Marcia melodramatically--"them letters of mine you bought from my grandsire in 1881."

Horace considered.


"You're only seventeen?" repeated March suspiciously.

"Only seventeen."

"I knew a girl," said Marcia reminiscently, "who went on the ten-twenty-thirty when she was sixteen. She was so stuck on herself that she could never say 'sixteen' without putting the 'only' before it. We got to calling her 'Only Jessie.' And she's just where she was when she started--only worse. 'Only' is a bad habit, Omar--it sounds like an alibi."

"My name is not Omar."

"I know," agreed Marcia, nodding--"your name's Horace. I just call you Omar because you remind me of a smoked cigarette."


Marcia stared at him in wonder.

"Me--1881? Why sure! I was second-line stuff when the Florodora Sextette was still in the convent. I was the original nurse to Mrs. Sol Smith's Juliette. Why, Omar, I was a canteen singer during the War of 1812."

Horace's mind made a sudden successful leap, and he grinned.

"Did Charlie Moon put you up to this?"

Marcia regarded him inscrutably.

"Who's Charlie Moon? "

"Small--wide nostrils--big ears."

She grew several inches and sniffed.


"Then it was Charlie?"

Marcia bit her lip--and then yawned. "Oh, let's change the subject, Omar. I'll pull a snore in this chair in a minute."

"Yes," replied Horace gravely, "Hume has often been considered soporific---"

"Who's your friend--and will he die?"




Horace stopped quickly in front of her.

"Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently, "Do you just go round kissing people?"



Marcia nodded understandingly.

"Do you ever have any fun?" she asked.

"What do you mean by fun?"


Horace shook his head.

"Later, perhaps," he answered. "You see I'm a plan. I'm an experiment. I don't say that I don't get tired of it sometimes--I do. Yet--oh, I can't explain! But what you and Charlie Moon call fun wouldn't be fun to me."

"Please explain."


"Please explain."

Horace turned.







"No, you haven't kissed me."


"Oh, don't be so darned reasonable!"

"I can't help it."

"I hate these slot-machine people."

"I assure you I---" began Horace.

"Oh shut up!"

"My own rationality---"



"Well, that's O.K. with me. I got a notion I want to see you do something that isn't in your highbrow programme. I want to see if a what-ch-call-em with Brazilian trimmings--that thing you said you were--can be a little human."

Horace shook his head again.

"I won't kiss you."


"What show?"

"I'm a wicked actress from 'Home James'!"

"Light opera?"

"Yes--at a stretch. One of the characters is a Brazilian rice-planter. That might interest you."

"I saw 'The Bohemian Girl' once," reflected Horace aloud. "I enjoyed it--to some extent---"

"Then you'll come?"

"Well, I'm--I'm---"

"Oh, I know--you've got to run down to Brazil for the week-end."

"Not at all. I'd be delighted to come---"

Marcia clapped her hands.

"Goodyforyou! I'll mail you a ticket--Thursday night?"

"Why, I---"

"Good! Thursday night it is."



He eyed her sardonically.

"I'm several thousand generations older than you are."

"You carry your age well."

They shook hands gravely.

"My name's Marcia Meadow," she said emphatically. "'Member it-- Marcia Meadow. And I won't tell Charlie Moon you were in."


She stopped and looked up--made out a vague form leaning over.


"Here's your connection Omar."


"Impression? Why, you didn't even give me the kiss! Never fret--so long.


Up-stairs Horace paced the floor of his study. From time to time he glanced toward Berkeley waiting there in suave dark-red reputability, an open book lying suggestively on his cushions. And then he found that his circuit of the floor was bringing him each time nearer to Hume. There was something about Hume that was strangely and inexpressibly different. The diaphanous form still seemed hovering near, and had Horace sat there he would have felt as if he were sitting on a lady's lap. And though Horace couldn't have named the quality of difference, there was such a quality--quite intangible to the speculative mind, but real, nevertheless. Hume was radiating something that in all the two hundred years of his influence he had never radiated before.

Hume was radiating attar of roses.


On Thursday night Horace Tarbox sat in an aisle seat in the fifth row and witnessed "Home James." Oddly enough he found that he was enjoying himself. The cynical students near him were annoyed at his audible appreciation of time-honored jokes in the Hammerstein tradition. But Horace was waiting with anxiety for Marcia Meadow singing her song about a Jazz-bound Blundering Blimp. When she did appear, radiant under a floppity flower-faced hat, a warm glow settled over him, and when the song was over he did not join in the storm of applause. He felt somewhat numb.


"Dear 0mar: After the show I always grow an awful hunger. If you want to satisfy it for me in the Taft Grill just communicate your answer to the big-timber guide that brought this and oblige. Your friend, Marcia Meadow."

"Tell her,"--he coughed--"tell her that it will be quite all right. I'll meet her in front of the theatre."

The big-timber guide smiled arrogantly.


"Where--where is it?"

"Ou'side. Tunayulef. Down ee alley."



The arrogant person withdrew. A freshman behind Horace snickered.


"Do you have to do that dance in the last act?" he was asking earnestly--"I mean, would they dismiss you if you refused to do it?"

Marcia grinned.


And then Horace came out with a FAUX PAS.


Marcia blushed fiery red.


"Do you have--fun while you're on the stage?"

"Uh-huh--sure! I got in the habit of having people look at me, Omar, and I like it."

"Hm!" Horace sank into a brownish study.

"How's the Brazilian trimmings?"


"New York."

"For how long?"

"All depends. Winter--maybe."




"Too bad! We got along pretty well."


"Ever take an actress out to supper before?"

"No," said Horace miserably, "and I never will again. I don't know why I came to-night. Here under all these lights and with all these people laughing and chattering I feel completely out of my sphere. I don't know what to talk to you about."


"Very well."

"Well, my name really is Meadow, but my first name isn't Marcia-- it's Veronica. I'm nineteen. Question--how did the girl make her leap to the footlights? Answer--she was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and up to a year ago she got the right to breathe by pushing Nabiscoes in Marcel's tea-room in Trenton. She started going with a guy named Robbins, a singer in the Trent House cabaret, and he got her to try a song and dance with him one evening. In a month we were filling the supper-room every night. Then we went to New York with meet-my-friend letters thick as a pile of napkins.

"In two days we landed a job at Divinerries', and I learned to shimmy from a kid at the Palais Royal. We stayed at Divinerries' six months until one night Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, ate his milk-toast there. Next morning a poem about Marvellous Marcia came out in his newspaper, and within two days I had three vaudeville offers and a chance at the Midnight Frolic. I wrote Wendell a thank-you letter, and he printed it in his column--said that the style was like Carlyle's, only more rugged and that I ought to quit dancing and do North American literature. This got me a coupla more vaudeville offers and a chance as an ingenue in a regular show. I took it--and here I am, Omar."


"Let's get out of here," he said suddenly.

Marcia's eyes hardened.

"What's the idea? Am I making you sick?"


Without another word Marcia signalled for the waiter.

"What's the check?" she demanded briskly "My part--the rabbit and the ginger ale."

Horace watched blankly as the waiter figured it.


With a half-sigh Marcia rose from the table and walked from the room. Horace, his face a document in bewilderment, laid a bill down and followed her out, up the stairs and into the lobby. He overtook her in front of the elevator and they faced each other.


After an instant of wonder Marcia's eyes softened.



"You said you didn't like being with me."

"I didn't like it."



"Well, if you---"





In his excitement Horace put his hands in his pockets.

"All right--just so I can see you alone. I want to talk to you as we talked up in my room."




"I'll drop you a post-card," she said.

Horace's eyes were quite wild.

"Send me a post-card! I'll come up any time after January first. I'll be eighteen then."



He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience--down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her.


"What do they expect for a hundred a week--perpetual motion?" she grumbled to herself in the wings.

"What's the trouble? Marcia?"

"Guy I don't like down in front."

During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised post-card. Last night she had pretended not to see him-- had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking--as she had so often in the last month--of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish fore, the merciless, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her.

And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry--as though an unwonted responsibility was being forced on her.

"Infant prodigy!" she said aloud.

"What?" demanded the negro comedian standing beside her.

"Nothing--just talking about myself."

On the stage she felt better. This was her dance--and she always felt that the way she did it wasn't suggestive any more than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt.

"Uptown, downtown, jelly on a spoon,
After sundown shiver by the moon."


"That's the vibration that thrills me,
Funny how affection fi-lls me
Uptown, downtown---"

Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a droop of disgust on one young girl's mouth? These shoulders of hers--these shoulders shaking--were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren't made for this!

"Then--you'll see at a glance
"I'll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance
At the end of the world I'll---"


Her apartment was very warm--small, it was, with a row of professional pictures and sets of Kipling and O. Henry which she had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it and an atmosphere of other stifled pink throughout. There were nice things in it--nice things unrelentingly hostile to each other, offspring of a vicarious, impatient taste acting in stray moments. The worst was typified by a great picture framed in oak bark of Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad--altogether a frantic, oddly extravagant, oddly penurious attempt to make a cheerful room. Marcia knew it was a failure.


"I followed you this time," he said.


"I want you to marry me," he said.



"I love you," he said.


"Why, you infant prodigy!" she cried.

"Very well, call me that if you want to. I once told you that I was ten thousand years older than you--I am."

She laughed again.

"I don't like to be disapproved of."

"No one's ever going to disapprove of you again."


The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets.

"Because I love you, Marcia Meadow."

And then she stopped calling him Omar.

"Dear boy," she said, "you know I sort of love you. There's something about you--I can't tell what--that just puts my heart through the wringer every time I'm round you. But honey--" She paused.

"But what?"


"Nonsense!" he interrupted. "Put it this way--that I'm in my nineteenth year and you're nineteen. That makes us pretty close--without counting that other ten thousand years I mentioned."

Marcia laughed.

"But there are some more 'buts.' Your people---



"Tacks--yes," he agreed wildly--"on anything. The more I think of how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy---"

"What makes you thank you're that?" asked Marcia quietly--"me?"


"There's more 'buts,'" said Marcia

"What are they?"

"How could we live?"

"I'll make a living."

"You're in college."


"You want to be Master of Me, hey?"

"Yes! What? I mean, no!"



"Oh, don't be so darned reasonable!"

"I can't help it," said Marcia.

"I hate these slot-machine people!"

"But we---"

"Oh, shut up!"

And as Marcia couldn't talk through her ears she had to.


Horace and Marcia were married early in February. The sensation in academic circles both at Yale and Princeton was tremendous. Horace Tarbox, who at fourteen had been played up in the Sunday magazines sections of metropolitan newspapers, was throwing over his career, his chance of being a world authority on American philosophy, by marrying a chorus girl--they made Marcia a chorus girl. But like all modern stories it was a four-and-a-half-day wonder.

They took a flat in Harlem. After two weeks' search, during which his idea of the value of academic knowledge faded unmercifully, Horace took a position as clerk with a South American export company--some one had told him that exporting was the coming thing. Marcia was to stay in her show for a few months--anyway until he got on his feet. He was getting a hundred and twenty-five to start with, and though of course they told him it was only a question of months until he would be earning double that, Marcia refused even to consider giving up the hundred and fifty a week that she was getting at the time.


"I hate it," he objected gloomily.

"Well," she replied emphatically, "Your salary wouldn't keep us in a tenement. Don't think I want to be public--I don't. I want to be yours. But I'd be a half-wit to sit in one room and count the sunflowers on the wall-paper while I waited for you. When you pull down three hundred a month I'll quit."


March mellowed into April. May read a gorgeous riot act to the parks and waters of Manhatten, and they were very happy. Horace, who had no habits whatsoever--he had never had time to form any--proved the most adaptable of husbands, and as Marcia entirely lacked opinions on the subjects that engrossed him there were very few jottings and bumping. Their minds moved in different spheres. Marcia acted as practical factotum, and Horace lived either in his old world of abstract ideas or in a sort of triumphantly earthy worship and adoration of his wife. She was a continual source of astonishment to him--the freshness and originality of her mind, her dynamic, clear-headed energy, and her unfailing good humor.

And Marcia's co-workers in the nine-o'clock show, whither she had transferred her talents, were impressed with her tremendous pride in her husband's mental powers. Horace they knew only as a very slim, tight-lipped, and immature-looking young man, who waited every night to take her home.


He shook his head vaguely.

"I don't know. They raised me to a hundred and thirty-five dollars to-day, and---"

"I don't care," said Marcia severely. "You're killing yourself working at night. You read those big books on economy---"

"Economics," corrected Horace.


"But, Marcia, I've got to---"


"I do. Every morning I---"






Horace hesitated.








Horace grinned at him from his perch.


"What circus he with?"

"He's dead."



"Don't it kill your neck an' shoulder muscles?"

"It did at first, but inside of a week I wrote the QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM on it."


Horace swung idly on the trapeze.


"Not I."


"Here's another," chirped Horace eagerly, and the fat man's mouth dropped suddenly agape as he watched this pink-jerseyed Prometheus again defy the gods and Isaac Newton.


"I fainted twice to-day," she began without preliminaries.



Horace sat down and thought it over.

"I'm glad of course," he said pensively--"I mean glad that we're going to have a baby. But this means a lot of expense."


Horace computed quickly.


Marcia looked blue.


"Of course nothing!" said Horace gruffly. "You'll stay right here. Let's see now--there'll be doctor's bills and a nurse, besides the maid: We've got to have some more money."


Horace rose and pulled on his coat.

"Where are you going?"


Ten minutes later as he headed down the street toward Skipper's Gymnasium he felt a placid wonder, quite unmixed with humor, at what he was going to do. How he would have gaped at himself a year before! How every one would have gaped! But when you opened your door at the rap of life you let in many things.




"Well, I've been thinking it over, and I believe I'd like to try it. I could work at night and on Saturday afternoons--and regularly if the pay is high enough."

The fat men looked at his watch.



"Marcia," he said cheerfully later that same night, "I think we're out of the woods. Paulson thinks he can get me an opening at the Hippodrome, and that means an all-winter engagement. The Hippodrome you know, is a big---"



Marcia reached up and wound both arms tightly round his neck.

"Kiss me," she whispered, "and call me 'dear heart.' I love to hear you say 'dear heart.' And bring me a book to read to-morrow. No more Sam Pepys, but something trick and trashy. I've been wild for something to do all day. I felt like writing letters, but I didn't have anybody to write to."


"I wish I could," breathed Marcia. "If I knew words enough I could write you the longest love-letter in the world--and never get tired."


"Marcia," he whispered.


"Yes, darling."


"Dearest Marcia," he said softly.


"Dear heart," he whispered passionately--"dearest heart."

"What'll we call her?"



"Why the Hume?"

"Because he's the fellow who first introduced us."



Horace tiptoed over to the bureau and opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet:


He smiled. So Samuel Pepys had made an impression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened--he read on. Half an hour passed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed.

"Honey," came in a whisper.

"What Marcia?"

"Do you like it?"

Horace coughed.

"I seem to be reading on. It's bright."


"All right, Marcia," Horace said gently.

Her eyes closed again and Horace crossing over kissed her forehead--stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room.





"Poor gauzy souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book; I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums and then taking what we get-- and being glad."


"Sandra Pepys, Syncopated," with an introduction by Peter Boyce Wendell the columnist, appeared serially in JORDAN'S MAGAZINE, and came out in book form in March. From its first published instalment it attracted attention far and wide. A trite enough subject--a girl from a small New Jersey town coming to New York to go on the stage--treated simply, with a peculiar vividness of phrasing and a haunting undertone of sadness in the very inadequacy of its vocabulary, it made an irresistible appeal.


Marcia received three hundred dollars an instalment for the serial publication, which came at an opportune time, for though Horace's monthly salary at the Hippodrome was now more than Marcia's had ever been, young Marcia was emitting shrill cries which they interpreted as a demand for country air. So early April found them installed in a bungalow in Westchester County, with a place for a lawn, a place for a garage, and a place for everything, including a sound-proof impregnable study, in which Marcia faithfully promised Mr. Jordan she would shut herself up when her daughter's demands began to be abated, and compose immortally illiterate literature.


The gravel crunched raucously under his heel. He saw the lights of his sitting-room gleaming and noticed a big car standing in the drive. Probably Mr. Jordan again, come to persuade Marcia to settle down' to work.

She had heard the sound of his approach and her form was silhouetted against the lighted door as she came out to meet him. "There's some Frenchman here," she whispered nervously. "I can't pronounce his name, but he sounds awful deep. You'll have to jaw with him."

"What Frenchman?"

"You can't prove it by me. He drove up an hour ago with Mr. Jordan, and said he wanted to meet Sandra Pepys, and all that sort of thing."

Two men rose from chairs as they went inside.


"Not Anton Laurier!" exclaimed Horace.

"But, yes. I must come. I have to come. I have read the book of Madame, and I have been charmed"--he fumbled in his pocket--"ah I have read of you too. In this newspaper which I read to-day it has your name."

He finally produced a clipping from a magazine.


Horace's eye skipped down the page.


Horace's eyes caught a passage lower down; he became suddenly aghast--read on hurriedly:


"Mrs. Tarbox seems to merit that much-abused title--'prodigy.' Only twenty---"


"I want to advise you--" he began hoarsely.


"About raps. Don't answer them! Let them alone--have a padded door."



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