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[Illustration: THEY WERE AS OBLIVIOUS OF THEIR PERIL AS TRISTAN AND
ISOLDE

[See page 405]]




  WHAT WILL
  PEOPLE SAY?

  A NOVEL
  BY
  RUPERT HUGHES

  ILLUSTRATED

  [Illustration]

  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
  NEW YORK AND LONDON
  MCMXIV




  COPYRIGHT, 1914. BY HARPER & BROTHERS

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
  PUBLISHED APRIL, 1914




ILLUSTRATIONS


  THEY WERE AS OBLIVIOUS OF THEIR PERIL
    AS TRISTAN AND ISOLDE                     _Frontispiece_

  AND NOW DESIGN EMERGED, A WOMAN STOOD
    REVEALED                                  _Facing p.  18_

  "THERE'S THAT OTHER ME DOWN IN THE POOL,
    WATCHING THIS ME"                         _Facing p. 252_


  HER OBSTINATE PLUCK BEWILDERED HIM          _Facing p. 480_




WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY?




CHAPTER I


Fifth Avenue at flood-tide was a boiling surf of automobiles. But at
nearly every corner a policeman succeeded where King Canute had failed,
and checked the sea or let it pass with a nod or a jerk of thumb.

The young army officer just home-come from the Philippines felt that he
was in a sense a policeman himself, for he had spent his last few years
keeping savage tribes in outward peace. When he was away or asleep the
Moros rioted at will. And so the traffic-officer of this other extreme
of civilization kept these motor-Moros in orderly array only so long as
he kept them in sight.

One glare from under his vizor brought the millionaire's limousine to a
sharp stop, or sent it shivering back into position. But once the vista
ahead was free of uniforms all the clutches leaped to the high; life and
limb were gaily jeopardized, and the most appalling risks run with
ecstasy.

The law of New York streets and roads forbids a car to commit at any
time a higher speed than thirty miles an hour; and never a man that owns
one but would blush to confess it incapable of breaking that law.

As Lieutenant Forbes watched the surge of automobiles from the superior
height of a motor-bus it amused him to see how little people lose of the
childhood spirit of truancy and adventure. All this grown-up,
sophisticated world seemed to be run like a school, with joyous deviltry
whenever and wherever the teacher's back was turned, but woe to whoso
was caught; every one winking at guilt till authority detected it, then
every one solemnly approving the punishment.

Mr. Forbes had not seen Fifth Avenue since the pathetic old
horse-coaches were changed to the terrific motor-stages. He had not seen
the Avenue since it was widened--by the simple process of slicing off
the sidewalks and repairing their losses at the expense of the houses.
The residences on both sides of the once so stately corridor looked to
him as if a giant had drawn a huge carving-knife along the walls,
lopping away all the porticos, columns, stoops, and normal approaches,
and leaving the inhabitants to improvise such exits as they might.

The splendid facade of the Enslee home had suffered pitifully. He
remembered how the stairway had once come down from the vestibule to the
street with the sweeping gesture of a hand of welcome. Now the door was
knee-deep in the basement, and the scar of the sealed-up portal was not
healed above.

The barbarity of the assault along the line had not apparently relieved
the choke of traffic. Or else the traffic had swollen more fiercely
still, as it usually does in New York at every attempt in palliation.

As far as Forbes could see north and south the roadway was glutted from
curb to curb with automobiles. And their number astonished him even less
than their luxury. The designers had ceased to mimic hansoms, broughams,
and victorias following invisible horses ridiculously. They had begun to
create motors pure and simple, built to contain and follow and glorify
their own engines.

Many of the cars were gorgeously upholstered, Aladdin's divans of
comfort and speed; and some of them were decorated with vases of
flowers. Their surfaces were lustrous and many-, sleekly
tremendous. They had not yet entirely outgrown the imitation of the
wooden frame, and their sides looked frail and satiny, unfit for rough
usage, and sure to splinter at a shock. But he knew that they were
actually built of aluminum or steel, burnished and enameled.

What he did not know was that the people in them, lolling relaxed, and
apparently as soft of fiber as of skin, were not the weaklings they
looked. They, too, like their cars, only affected fatigue and
ineptitude, for they also were built of steel, and their splendid
engines were capable of velocities and distances that would leave a
gnarled peasant gasping.

This was one of the many things he was to learn.

From his swaying eery he seemed to be completely lost in a current of
idle wealth. The throng, except for the chauffeurs, the policemen, and a
few men whose trades evidently fetched them to this lane of
pleasure--the throng was almost altogether women. And to Forbes' eye,
unused to city standards, almost all the women were princesses.

At first, as his glance fell on each radiant creature, his heart would
cry: "There is one I could love! I never shall forget her beauty!" And
before the vow of eternal memory was finished it was forgotten for the
next.

By and by the show began to pall because it would not end. As peers
become commonplace at a royal court, since there is nothing else there,
so beauty canceled itself here by its very multitude. For the next mile
only the flamboyantly gorgeous or the flamboyantly simple beauty caught
his overfed eye. And then even these were lost in the blur of a
kaleidoscope twirled too fast.

There was one woman, however, that he could not forget, because he could
not find out what she was like. In the slow and fitful progress up the
Avenue it chanced that his stage kept close in the wake of an open
landaulet. The stage never fell far behind, and never quite won
alongside.

A young woman was alone in the tonneau. At least, he judged that she was
young, though his documents were scant. Her head was completely hidden
from his view by a hat that was just exactly big enough to accomplish
that work of spite.

It was a sort of inverted flower-pot of straw--one of those astonishing
millinery jokes that women make triumphs of. It bore no ornament at all
except a filmy white bird-of-paradise feather stuck in the center of the
top and spraying out in a shape that somehow suggested an
interrogation-mark.

Even a man could see that it was a beautiful plume and probably
expensive. It had a sort of success of impudence, alone there, and it
mocked Forbes by trailing along ahead of him, an unanswerable query.

He grew eager and more eager to see what flower-face was hidden under
that overturned straw flower-pot of a hat.

Now and then, as the stage pushed forward, he would be near enough to
make out the cunning architecture of the mystery's left shoulder and the
curious felicity of her left arm. Seen thus detached, they fascinated
him and kindled his curiosity. By and by he was swept near enough to
glimpse one rounded knee crossed over the other, and one straight shin
creasing a tight skirt, and a high-domed instep, and the peak of one
slim shoe.

And once, when the traffic was suddenly arrested, he was close enough to
be wildly tempted to bend down and snatch off that irritating hat. He
would have learned at least the color of her hair, and probably she
would have lifted her startled face to view like a reverted rose. He was
a fearless soldier, but he was not so daring as all that. Still, he
heard her voice as she gossiped to a momentary neighbor who raised his
hat in a touring-car held up abeam her own.

Her voice did not especially please him; it was almost shrill, and it
had the metallic glitter of the New York voice. Her words, too, were a
trifle hard, and as unpoetic as possible.

"We had a rotten time," she said. "I was bored stiff. You ought to have
been there."

And then she laughed a little at the malice implied. The policeman's
whistle blew and the cars lurched forward. And the stage lumbered after
them like a green hippopotamus. Forbes began to feel a gnawing anxiety
to see what was under that paradise feather. He assumed that beauty was
there, though he had learned from shocking experiences how dangerous it
is to hope a woman beautiful because the back of her head is of good
omen.

It became a matter of desperate necessity to overtake that
will-o'-the-wisp chauffeur and observe his passenger. Great expectations
seemed to be justified by the fact that nearly every policeman saluted
her and smiled so pleasantly and so pleasedly that the smile lingered
after she was far past.

Forbes noted, too, that the people she bowed to in other cars or on the
sidewalk seemed to be important people, and yet to be proud when her hat
gave a little wren-like nod in their directions.

At Fifty-first Street, in front of the affable gray Cathedral, there was
a long and democratic delay while a contemptuous teamster, perched atop
a huge steel girder, drove six haughty stallions across the Avenue;
drove them slowly, and puffed deliberate smoke in the face of the
impatient aristocracy.

Here a dismounted mounted policeman paced up and down, followed by a
demure horse with kindly eyes. This officer paused to pass the time of
day with the mysterious woman, and the horse put his nose into the car
and accepted a caress from her little gloved hand. Again Forbes heard
her voice:

"You poor old dear, I wish I had a lump of sugar."

It was to the horse that she spoke, but the officer answered:

"The sight of you, ma'am, is enough for um."

Evidently he came from where most policemen come from. The lady laughed
again. She was evidently not afraid of a compliment. But the policeman
was. He blushed and stammered:

"I beg your pairdon, Miss--"

He gulped the name and motioned the traffic forward. Forbes was
congratulating himself that at least she was not "Mrs." Somebody, and
his interest redoubled just as the young woman leaned forward to speak
to her chauffeur. She had plainly seen that there was a policeless space
ahead of her, for the driver put on such speed that he soon left Forbes
and his stage far in the rear.

Forbes, seeing his prey escaping, made a mental note of the number of
her car, "48150, N. Y. 1913."

He had read how the police traced fugitive motorists by their numerals,
and he vowed to use the records for his own purposes. He must know who
she was and how she looked. Meanwhile he must not forget that
number--48150, N. Y. 1913--the mystic symbol on her chariot of
translation.




CHAPTER II


Helpless to pursue her with more than his gaze, Forbes watched from his
lofty perch how swiftly she fled northward. He could follow her car as
it thridded the unpoliced traffic by that dwindling bird-of-paradise
plume, that sphinxic riddle of a feathery question-mark.

He mused indulgently upon her as she vanished: "She breaks the law like
all the rest when no one is there to stop her. She wheedles the police
with a smile, but behind their backs she burns up the road."

Evidently there were narrow escapes from disaster. One or two
pedestrians leaped like kangaroos to escape her wheels. Once or twice
collisions with other cars were avoided by sharp swerves or abrupt
stops.

The plume went very respectably across the Plaza, for policemen were
there on fixed post; but, once beyond, the feather diminished into
nothingness with the uncanny speed of a shooting-star.

She was gone. And now he wondered whither she sped, and why. To what
tryst was she hastening at such dreadful pace, with such rash desire? He
felt almost a jealousy, at least an envy, of the one who waited at the
rendezvous.

And then he felt alarm for her. Already she might have met disaster. Her
car might have crashed into some other--into a great steel-girder truck
like that that crossed the Avenue. She might even now be lying all
crumpled and shattered in a tangle of wreckage.

That taunting white question-feather might be dabbled with red. The face
might be upturned to any man's view and every man's horror. He was
almost afraid to follow farther lest his curiosity be more than sated.

His irresolution was solved for him. The stage was turning out of Fifth
Avenue, to cross over to Broadway and Riverside Drive. Forbes was not
done with this lane. He rose to leave the bus. It lurched and threw him
from bench to bench. He negotiated with difficulty the perilous descent,
clutched the hand-rail in time to save himself from pitching head first
to the street, clambered down the little stairway with ludicrous
awkwardness, stepped on solid asphalt with relief, and walked south.

The press gradually thickened, and before long it was dense and viscid,
as if theater audiences were debouching at every corner.

The stream was still almost entirely woman: beautiful woman at the side
of beautiful woman, or treading on her high heels; chains of womankind
like strings of beaded pearls, hordes of women, dressed in infinite
variations of the prevailing mode. They strode or dawdled, laughing,
smiling, bowing, whispering, or gazing into the windows of the shops.

The panorama of windows was nearly as beautiful as the army of women.
The great show-cases, dressed with all expertness, were silently
proffering wares that would tempt an empress to extravagance.

A few haberdashers displayed articles of strange gorgeousness for
men--shirt-patterns and scarves, bathrobes, waistcoats that rivaled
Joseph's; but mainly the bazars appealed to women or to the men who buy
things for women.

The windows seemed to say: "How can you carry your beloved past my
riches, or go home to her without some of my delights?" "How fine she
would look in my folds!" "How well my diamonds would bedeck her hair or
her bosom! If you love her, get me for her!" "It is shameful of you to
pretend not to see me, or to confess to poverty! Couldn't you borrow
money somewhere to buy me? Couldn't you postpone the rent or some other
debt awhile? Perhaps I could be bought on credit."

Show-windows and show-women were the whole cry. The women seemed to be
wearing the spoils of yesterday's pillage, and yet to yearn for
to-morrow's. Women gowned like manikins from one window gazed like
hungry paupers at another window's manikins.

The richness of their apparel, the frankness of their allure were almost
frightful. They seemed themselves to be shop-windows offering their
graces for purchase or haughtily labeling themselves "sold." Young or
antique, they appeared to be setting themselves forth at their best,
their one business a traffic in admiration.

"Look at me! Look at me!" they seemed to challenge, one after another.
"My face is old, but so is my family." "My body is fat, but so is my
husband's purse!" "I am not expensively gowned, but do I not wear my
clothes well?" "I am young and beautiful and superbly garbed, and I have
a rich husband." "I am only a little school-girl, but I am ready to be
admired, and my father buys me everything I want." "I am leading a life
of sin, but is not the result worth while?" "My husband is slaving
down-town to pay the bills for these togs, but are you not glad that I
did not wait till he could afford to dress me like this?"

Lieutenant Forbes had been so long away from a metropolis, and had lived
in such rough countries, that he perhaps mistook the motives of the
women of New York, and their standards, underrated their virtues. Vice
may go unkempt and shabby, and a saint may take thought of her
appearance. Perhaps what he rated as boldness was only the calm of
innocence; what he read as a command to admire may have been only a
laudable ambition to make the best of one's gifts.

But to Forbes there was an overpowering fleshliness in the display. It
reminded him of the alleged festivals of Babylon, where all the women
piously offered themselves to every passer-by and rated their success
with heaven by their prosperity with strangers.

It seemed to him that the women of other places than New York must have
dressed as beautifully, but in an innocenter way. Here the women looked
not so much feminine as female. They appeared to be thinking amorous
thoughts. They deployed their bosoms with meaning; their very backs
conveyed messages. Their clothes were not garments, but banners.

He had dwelt for years among half-clad barbarians, unashamed Igorrotes;
but these women looked nakeder than those. The more studiously they were
robed, the less they had on.

A cynicism unusual to his warm and woman-worshiping soul crept into
Forbes' mind. He went along philosophizing:

"All these women are paid for by men. For everything that every one of
these women wears some man has paid. Fathers, husbands, guardians,
keepers, dead or alive, have