Evening Star Newspaper, December 15, 1929, Page 118

B The Buried Talent—By Margery Land May Here Is a Romance With a Punch. The Love Story of a Man Who Made Good and a Girl Whose Failure IWas Her Great Success. =«E was the last, the very last perscn Jane Crawford wanted to see. And he should have been the first. Or, at least, he was the first with almost every other girl in town. But then, of course, it wasn't likely that any of the glossy, shingle-haired little debs who eyed him so raptly had ever known him when he was plain Jerry Peyton without the wealth or the name that he had since made for himself in the world. Plain Jerry Peytcn in his shabby tweed suit, with his whimsical, slanting, one-sided smile! How well she remembered him! How vividly she recalled the many evenings he had spent talking with her of the {fancies—the day dreams—he had since turned into facts. She closed her eyes and at once, as if it had happened but yesterday, the picture was be- fore her. The lamp light and the hearth light and Jerry at ease in the worn leather chair which he always pre-empted. With his biue eyes blazing from a lean, tanned face: ¥7“I'm going far, and so will you, Jane. You've talent and pluck. All you need is a year or so of training in New York and as a monologuist youw'll have Ruth Draper looking to her laurels,” he said. Dreams! Dreams! How often on crisp, Win- try evenings they had sought the shabby warmth of her 3-room flat to sit and talk of their dreams. And the promises Jerry had made to himseif were promises Jerry had kept. He had gone far. In 10 years the young reporter for the morning paper of a sleepy Southern town had become an advertising genius whose services were sought by the richest manufacturers of the Nation. “This man, Peyton, can make a soap ad read like a tale from ‘Arabian Nights,’” an inter- viewer had written cf him in one of the maga- zines that feature stories of success. “And when he writes of soup you smell it!” H, yes, he had gone far. And she wished—- fervently—that he had stayed far instead of coming back at Christmas time to find her still clacking away on typewriter keys in the same old office. Click—click—ping! “To the Honorable Judge of the First Judicia’ District Court,” As her expert fingers flew over the keyboard transcribing the petition she was aware of him standing beside her. The same, yet different. Poised now and assured, with the look, the un- mistakable aura of one who can command the luxuries of life. “Well, Jerry * * *” With his whimsical twisting smile, he sald: “Well, Jane * * *” For a moment their eyes met and held as 1if aach would thus learn what caprices life had played on the other. Then, noting his hat and stick, the fit ¢f his suit, the matching blend of tie and shirt and collars: “The world has done well by you, hasn't it?” he said. He gave his old-time, bantering chuckle. “Oh, come now, Jinks. Give me some credit Say, rather, that I have done well by myself.” She thought: “How gay and care-free he is! How smooth! How different from the Jerry I used to know,” and she searched his face in vain for the tense, hard-driven look, the pinching make-ends-meet look that Jerry used to wear. “Well, I'm glad,” she commented quictly, “I'm happy for you, Jerry. You always said you would succeed, and you've done it.” His face sobered. He looked at her intently A slim girl. Not pretty, perhaps, as the world counts beauty, but with a glory ¢f chestnut hair and somefhing—an expression—indescribably lovely in her eyes. ENDING forward he put his palm over the shorthand notes to which the glance of those eyes kept returning. “Come, Jane. We can’t talk here. I want you to lunch with nie,” he told her. "$'She shook her head. “I can't. I've got to type this petition.” Positively: “No, you don’t. T've already spoken to Alcott. I'm his house guest, you know. And he tells me this law oflice can wag along very well without you for one afternoon,” he said. “ Scmehow Jane hated that. As she stood be- fore the mirror in the wash room, powdering her nose and pulling a plain black cloche over her vivid hair, she was thinking: “How foolish I am. But I can't help it. I knew him when his oxfords were scuffed and his shirt cuffs frayed. And now, here he is back again—the rich and noted Mr. Peyton of Chi- The phone rang with jangling insistence . . . Jane let it ring. cago, whcse word is so magic that he has only to speak and old, strutting, cock-cf-the-walk Alcott lets his hirelings go for the day.” But a few minutes later, as they were push- ing their way through the crowds of good-na- tured Christmas shoppers she, too, felt his magic. Also a certain ridiculous pride when he stepped to buy a sprig of holly berries from an Italian on the corner and she saw girls—shop- girls and business girls and sleek girls, in hining roadsters, which they suddenly slowed—casting quick, admiring glances at Jerry. Until that moment she had never thought him good-looking. But suddenly, seeing him through the appraising gaze of those other girls who eyed him as he pinned the holly on her ccat, she realized how keen and blue his eyes were against his sun bronze and that his newly acquired air of commanding life, instead of be-. ing driven by it, gave him distinction. “He’s the type that head waiters notice,” she mused to herself as a long-coated factotum bowed them to a table, gay with red candles and poinsettias, and suggested, in purring deference, the most expensive dishes. Noting and, as she drew it off, quickly hiding in her lap her mended glove, she said: “Remember the Christmas eve when we sat on those stools at Tony's and celebrated with a midnight supper of chili and oysters?” IN the ruddy light cast by the small lamp on their table, Jerry's face was gay. “You bet I remember. Tough young things we were then. It's a wonder we didn't die of indigestion. And now, Miss Colford,” with his arms on the white surface of the heavy damask cloth, he leaned toward her, “suppose ycu tell me about yourself. And about Chloe and Sue and Ned.” At mention of her sisters and brothers, all younger than she, a look tender and lovely toock possession of Janc's smoky-gray eyes. Ani- matedly, her cheeks flushing pink beneath the escaping tendrils cf her tucked-in hair: “Oh, Jerry, they're so clever,” she exclaimed “They're all in New York and making their mark, just as both of us predicted they would. Ned's had some of his covers accepted by the magazines. Not the great big magazines, of course. I tell him that will come later. And Sue is doing a toe dance at the Capitol. It's quite a feather in her bonnet, really, fcr you know how elaborately they present photoplays ix the cities these days. And Chloe—I'm terribly proud of Chloe. She's a reporter for the Morn- ing News and she had a full-page feature story in last week’s Sunday issue.” Gently, he said: “And Jane?” Her eyes, which had been like happy stars as she told him of the family triumphs, clouded noticeably. “Well,” she said, tcying with her spoon, “the same plain. old Jane, as you see. I'm afraid——" She looked off-—far off from him, “that I haven't the venturesome spirit.” With a courteous “May I?” he lit a cigarette and for a moment gazed at her contemplatively through the blue spirals which the smoke from it made. “THAT'S odd,” he remarked at last. *“I al- ways thought you the most venturesome as well as the most clever of the Colfords. Sue, for instance. As I remember her, she was quite a timid little thing.” Jane's heart was beating with a sudden sick- ening thump. Jerry! The same, yet oh, so dif- ferent! A man of the world—Jerry. Cosmo- politan. Suave. Finished. So near to her. So near that she had only to put cut her hand to touch him and yet so infinitely removed. “Oh, well,” she laughed uncertainly. “People change. And, after all, as you yourself used to say in the old days, when it comes to success— to making a go of things—you either have it or you haven't. The determination, grit, ambition —call it what you will—that puts you across is either in your fiber or it isn’t. If anything can swerve you from your goal, then you really didn’t want your goal. For,” meditatively, as if this were a much-mulled thought to which she was giving utterance, “what we really want, we get, I think.” The intent fixity of his gaze disturbed her. It was as if he were searching her; trying to plumb deep to the secret little corners of her soul. “That's odd,” he repeated, pushing his entree aside. “I've always felt that it was your daring that kept me nerved when again and again I was trembling in my boots. It seems to me 13 was only yesterday that you and I were so full of schemes and plans of our futures that we couldn’t talk of anything else. Remember how miserly we were and the little barrel banks each of us had into which we slipped every available penny? That time you wouldn't let me take you to the foot ball game because of the pledge we'd made to save every nickel toward what we called The Big Chance? Remember that?” She twinkled with sudden laughter. “Of course I remember. Also the day I made you dye your brown shoes black when you— spendthrift—were actually thinking of wasting your substance on new cnes.” I_IE laughed, too, but with the easy humor of one who has relegated the necessity for all such corner-cutting to the past. “We certainly were a determined pair in those days. And yet”—his expression as he looked at her was puzzled—“after all that, you tell me that you didn't want a career?” At his question, her features stiffened. The old, instant gayety which had flavored their friendship and which for a moment they seemed to have recaptured was chilled. “ESay, rather, that there was something else I wanted more,” she parried. As if sensing a rebuff, “Oh,” he said flatly, and during the remainder of the luncheon the atmosphere between them was so taut that the highly seasoned French concoctions which the waiter fetched and whisked away were as taste- less as sawdust to Jane. It was when the luncheon was done with and they had emerged from the hotel and were standing on the pavement in the crisp December air that Jerry said: “I say, Jane, it's a ripping day. Let's charter a car and take a spin around this new lake bculevard I've heard so much about. I'd like to sze it.” Jane shook her head. “I can't, Jerry. I don’t care what Mr. Al- cott told you, I've got to type that petition. It has to be filed tomorrow. And if I don’t work on it this afternoon I'll have to go back to the office tonight.” Standing, hat in hand, with his dark, well chiseled head bared to the sun, Jerry looked at her as if bewildered. “Well,” he said slowly, “when can 1 see you? I'm only here for a day or two. As a matter of fact I may be called East any minute. And I want to talk with you. How about this evening? Do you still have that peachy little flat?” “Yes,” she sald and, not trying to hide her mended giove, she held out her hand in fare- well, “I still have it. Good-by. It’s been 8o nice to sce you. Thanks for the swanky lunchecn. And if you have another spare moment while you're here, phone me, Jerry.” TH]:RE! It was done. She had turned and left him, peering after her—the new, debonair Jerry, gazing after her with puzzled, questioning eyes. Click—clack—ping! “Wherefore, petitioner prays that an attorney at law be appointed * * *” All that blue-gold afternoon, as she sat at her desk automatically transcribing the meaningless words, the thought of Jerry was like a murky undercurrent in Jane's mind. She could not get away from it. She kept thinking of the way he had looked, the things he had said. She kept thinking, too: “I'm mean. I'm a scratch-cat. I was rude to him. As if he were to blame, poor fellow, that after 10 years he should come back to find me with a mend in my glove * * *” A wave of compunction swept over her. Sud- denly she wanted most poignantly to see him again. His image, the quick, brown hands, the gay brown face, was before her. And she knew, with a sudden, terrible stillness of the heart, that she had been waiting for him—yearning for him through these years. Like mad, magic things her fingers compassed the keyboard, typing out the stilted, heavy ver- biage of the law. Breathlessly she finished, eager, desperate to get home in time for Jerry’s phone call should he ring. But when it came, an insistent, many times repeated clangor that shattered the silence of her little flat, she did not answer. It was no use to answer. It was folly even to see him again, 8o far had his success removed him from her. HE belonged now to a new life. To the free, frothy life of the Alcott girl at whose side, in whese low, streamline speedster she had glimpsad him riding—his dark, whimsical face smiling down on her as she swooped past tha Jjolting tramway that was taking Jane home. The phone spoke with a jangling insistence. Off and on during the early hours of the eve=- ning its clamor broke the stillness of the threee room flat. Jane let it ring. Heavy with lassi- tude she stretched herself in the worn leather chair that Jerry had once pre-empted. For a long time she sat there, and though the phone finally stilled, telling her that Jerry had given up his efforts to reach her, she stayed on. Miserable though she was, there were no tears to go pouring down her cheeks. Dry eyed, de- termined, she shut Jerry from her life. And then she switched off her light to be still further alone. 3 It was good that she had, too, she told herself later, for after a long quiet in which she must have gone to sleep, she heard footsteps in the hall. They were Jerry’s steps, and it was Jerry pounding at her door and calling anxicusly. But she had shut him from her life and would not answer. After a time he left. She was alone again. Now she could go to bed and rest. She had settled her own fate and Jerry's, too. * * * T}!F Alcott girl swept down on the office the n~il afterncon. She was a pretty thing—a fan i"ior, sparkling figure to employes who were acciziomed to her precipitate onslaughts on her father and very much amused at her way of wheedling him out of anything she wished. Slim, dark and as compelling as a red bird in her crimson Yuletide felt and the loose sports coat that matched it, she stormed her father’s office, nct troubling to announce herself nor to close the door as she breezed in. “Now, Puss. Not another cent.” Alcott’s voice, lifted in the usual, futile protest, came clearly to Jane at her typewriter in the ante- room. “Mercenary old thing. Who wants your silly money? I'm sure I don't. Nct now, at any rate. What I came to ask you is: where's Jerry? ‘When Jennings brought up my breakfast tray he told me he'd flown the coop.” “He has. Called to New York on business. Got the wire late last night and left on the early morning train.” A pause. Then, irritably: “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in my office. It doesn't ook well,” Alcott said. She laughed. A gay, silvery laugh like the Contiuued on Nineteenth Page