The fire strode about the city like a giant. It littered young pythons of fire that glided subterraneously hither and thither and set a red doom on old wooden warehouses and shops. It stretched quivering tongues of flame across the streets and knit up one quarter of the town with another. It triumphed scarletly in the night and, pushing violently against lofty walls of brick and stone, sent them rattling to the ground.
“It is a good night for everyone except the insurance companies,” said Mrs. Knumf, complacently.
But when they stepped from the carriage on to the road, a gust of hot air carried to them the brain-sickening smell of burnt flesh.
“A good many people will be missing to-morrow,” remarked Tansy.
“I suppose Hell’s a bit like this,” was all that Adolph found to say.
Half-an-hour later the two girls were escorted by Mrs. Knumf to the discreet, private entrance to the brothel. They had been rescued with the utmost difficulty, and both of them were now shaken and a little distraught.
“You would like to rest, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Knumf, leading the way to a double-bedded room.
“You are very kind,” said Marie, looking at her a little distrustfully. Then she turned to her sister who was seated on the edge of one of the beds, trembling a little.
“Undress yourself, dear,” she said, “we will stay here until the morning.”
“You will have some refreshment first?” asked Mrs. Knumf.
But Marie refused, and the woman, walking quickly to the door, vanished. Almost immediately, through a second door on the opposite side of the room, Adolph and Tansy entered.
“Well, ladies,” said Adolph, looking keenly at Marie, “it was a narrow escape, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” answered Marie, impulsively; “we owe you our lives. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
She moved over towards Alys as though to protect her.
Adolph suddenly lurched forward.
“Well, you’re pretty well beat,I should think,” he said; “what about a bottle of wine?”
“Oh, no! Indeed, no!” protested Marie, standing by Alys’ side, and placing a hand upon her shoulder. “We only want to be left in peace.”
“Oh! but you must!” said Adolph. “Mustn’t they, Tansy?”
“Of course they musht,” said Tansy, eagerly. “Ring for wine. Champagne’s the stuff: we’ve plenty of it.”
Marie suddenly made up her mind.
“My sister is ill—can’t you see she is? I beg you to leave us. You have been very good to us: we are both grateful to you: do not spoil everything by thrusting upon us further kindness that ... that is not to be endured.”
“She’s right,” said Tansy, with drunken conviction, “absholutely right. What did I say? ‘Leave ’em a bit': thash whatIsaid. Leave ’em to simmer down. Now isn’t that just whatIsaid?”
“Very well,” said Adolph. “If you want anything, just ring. Mrs. Knumf will attend to you.”
They left the room by the door through which they had entered, and Marie heard the key turn in the lock.
She turned to Alys bravely.
“Get into bed, little one,” she said, “I will sleep with you.”
Two gilt candelabra, each holding half a dozen lighted candles, illuminated the room. Marie examined the room with apprehensive eyes. There were no windows: only bare walls faced her on every side. Near the ceiling, on one side of the room, were three ventilators. She crept to the door through which Mrs. Knumf had left the room and softly turned the handle: it was locked.
Without a word and with a faint smile she approached Alys.
“Do not take your clothes off,” she said; “let us sleep as we are.”
Leaving the candles still burning, she lay down by her sister. Folded in each other’s arms, they lay for a long time without sleeping. Vague noises, whether in the house or not they could not tell, disturbed them from time to time.
“The fire’s coming nearer,” whispered Alys at length. “Iknowit is: Ifeelit is. Marie, let us go away from here: we shall be caught.”
She sat up in bed and looked wildly round the room.
“Lie down, little one,” said her sister, soothingly, as, rising on to her knees, she placed her arm round Alys’ waist. “We can do nothing till the morning. Lie down in my arms. You are quite safe.”
But Alys’ instinct was right. The fire was spreading with incredible rapidity, and even now was within a few yards of the brothel. The vague noises grew louder and more sinister.
Both the girls were in that condition which is neither sleep nor wakefulness when one of the doors quietly opened and Adolph and Tansy entered. The former, after rapidly glancing at both the beds, locked the door, pocketed the key, went to the nearest candelabrum and extinguished all the candles it contained.
Marie, holding her sister’s hand, slipped out of bed.
“Leave those other candles alone,” she commanded.
“We have come for our reward,” said Adolph, thickly.
Tansy seated himself on the table and made himself steady by placing his hands on the table on either side of him; even with this support he swayed a little. Alys had also risen from the bed; she now stood by her sister’s side.
“What do you want?” asked Marie.
“Well, aren’t you going to rest?” asked Adolph. “Let me help you to undress.”
But instead of approaching Marie, he lurched towards the younger sister and placed a cruel, beautiful hand upon her arm. Alys winced as though her head had been struck with a whip. For a moment, Marie hesitated: then her fist shot out and caught Adolph between the eyes. He staggered and fell, but on the instant rose to his feet.
“Come on, Tansy,” he called, mad with drink and lust; “it’s going to be a fight—it’sgotto be one.”
Tansy, abandoning the support of the table, rushed blindly on to the two girls, his bestial face alive with cruelty. Alys, sick and faint with horror, fell to the floor.
“She’s mine!” shouted Adolph, dropping on his knees by her side and bending over her.
“Let her alone! Let her alone!” shouted Marie, ceasing to struggle with Tansy in whose ape-like arms she was imprisoned. “Take me—both of you. Do what you like with me—only leave her untouched.”
But Adolph answered her with an insane, triumphant laugh.
“You belong to Tansy,” he said, and raising Alys from the floor, he carried her to one of the beds.
A great accession of strength seemed to flow through Marie’s body and limbs from her brain; her excitement and terror were inexhaustible sources of energy. With a superhuman effort, she released herself from Tansy’s grasp, and rushed like a flame across the room to the bed on which Alys, only half-conscious, was now stretched. Throwing herself upon Adolph from behind, she put her long fingers about his throat, and it appeared to her as though her will to destroy pumped wave after wave of power along her shoulders, down her arms, and into her fingers, and made them stronger than steel. The man, half turning, struck her several blows upon her face; but she felt nothing. Tansy, in attempting to pursue her, had stumbled over a chair, crushing his head against a corner of the table. He now lay on the floor, moaning.
It was while Marie’s fingers were still about Adolph’s throat that she became conscious of dull explosive sounds immediately outside one of the doors. At the same moment some one began to attempt to force an entrance through the other door. A voice shouted excitedly, warningly. But Marie still clung to her victim until all the strength left his limbs and he fell to the floor. A key rolled out of one of his pockets. She tried to pick it up, but a sudden faintness overcame her, and she sat on the edge of the bed unable to move, her head light and empty, her legs trembling with the utmost violence.
As one who dreams, she heard a great blow upon the door from beyond which the strange explosive noises had been coming, and with unbelieving eyes she saw the door fall inwards, torn from its hinges by a great beam that had fallen against it. An inexhaustible cloud of black smoke rushed into the room, almost suffocating her; with the smoke came a wave of heat and the noisy crackle of burning wood. The excited warning voice at the second door had ceased to shout.
All Marie’s senses were incredulous of her approaching doom. She gazed on her surroundings with the detachment of an onlooker who was not directly affected by those surroundings. She said to herself: “If Alys and I don’t escape soon—now—we shall be burned alive.” But still she did not move. She could not. She tried to lift her arm, but it remained inert on the bed. She attempted to speak to her sister, but no sound came from her lips....
The fire came roaring down the passage and entered the room. It was so hot that Marie felt her skin was being scorched. The horror of dying in flames seemed to her much less dreadful than the horror from which she had just escaped. Yet it would now be a comparatively easy matter to get away if only she could move. Her heart was beating violently, and her breath came and went most stormily. With a supreme effort she gathered all the forces of her mind together and concentrated them, willing herself to move; in response to this effort, her body rose from the bed and began to obey her wishes. Her hand picked up the key from the floor, her arms folded themselves about her sister and half-dragged, half-carried her to the second door. She fitted the key into the lock and turned it. In a second the door was open, and she and her sister were in the passage.
The door banged to after them, imprisoning the two half-conscious evil men.
With many intervals for rest, Marie carried her sister to the end of the passage and out into the open air. The brothel was almost surrounded by fire: another five minutes, and she would have been too late. As she emerged into the street and looked around her, she saw it was deserted. No one in Salonika was interested in the burning of a brothel when great hotels, huge warehouses, and fine palaces were being destroyed. And degraded women are but poor loot when compared with jewels and drink.
As for Adolph and Tansy....
ToT. Michael Pope
ISUPPOSE that, after all, I am at heart a good deal of a snob, for I remember taking enormous pleasure in being seen in Captain Porritt’s company as we sauntered by British Headquarters, and passed along by the side of the quay until we reached the Café Roma. For Porritt was most decidedly a notability in Salonika. He would have attracted attention anywhere. He was dark and sudden, like a Spaniard. He had an air of distinction, even of disdain, and though his face was peculiarly animated, it never revealed anything. He looked what he was; an eager young aristocrat, absorbed in and hugely entertained by his surroundings. Every part of him had intuition: his handsknew.
Now, I must explain that Porritt had been in some little trouble. A lady, I think; certainly not drink. She was somebody else’s wife, and Somebody Else happened to be a millionaire merchant. So for three weeks Salonika had been closed to Porritt, and to-day was the first day of the ban’s lifting.
“I’d better go slow the first day, Old Thing,” he said; “we’ll go to the Roma instead of the White Tower, and after lunch, if that little room’s empty, you shall play Brahms to me—especially the Little Valse.”
We mounted the stone stairway that takes you so unexpectedly to the restaurant. As soon as the manager saw Porritt he came fussing towards us.
“Ah, monsieur!” he exclaimed, delightedly; “you once more! Are you well? Yes?”
“Excessively. But how crowded you are!”
The manager gazed around at his cosmopolitan clients, and smiled reassuringly.
“There, in the corner—a table for two. True, it is engaged for somebody else, but you shall have it.”
He tangled fatly through the room, and, when at the table, turned about and smiled.
We sat down, and our guide handed a wine list to Porritt.
“It is some weeks since you were in Salonika?” he suggested, rather than asked.
“Yes; three. Very busy up-country. Very busy ... ve ... ry ... bu ... sy ...” Porritt’s eyes were among the champagnes.
“Ah: Indeed! Something important then?” (He had not heard of Somebody Else’s wife.)
Porritt looked up and winked knowingly. “Rather! You wait and see.” He lowered his voice, adding, confidentially: “There’s a move on.”
“Ah! The Big Push!”
His eyebrows shaped themselves into a question.
Porritt nodded gravely and impressively.
“The Big Push! The Big Push!” breathed the manager once more.
He murmured the words reverently and softly, and at once increased in stature a couple of inches, thus falsifying the spirit, if not the letter, of the Scriptural axiom. He was one of the Few who Knew. He was a personality.
He tangoed away for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. Porritt grinned.
“You watch!” he said. “It’ll spread as quickly as a scandal in a cathedral city.”
And, really, the effect of this purely imaginary piece of news, deposited in the bosom of the manager, was electrical. He passed from table to table, and dropped a bomb on each. In five minutes the restaurant was seething with excitement.
“The Great Push at last!... In France as well, no doubt.... Every front.... Yes, the Great Push. I always said it would begin in May.”
At one table the manager lingered for some little time. He was talking with some animation to three journalists, correspondents of French newspapers. Two of them were busy writing in note-books. It appeared that the manager had no lack of news to impart: he spread out his plump hands, lifted his shoulders, and wrinkled his brows. And then he looked furtively towards us, and whispered something behind his hand. The journalists also looked, half rose, thought a second time, and sat down again.
“Damned funny, isn’t it?” said Porritt.
“I’m afraid you’re rather in for it,” I remarked.
“Oh, I’ll soon dispose ofthem.”
Only one table went on smoothly and systematically with its eating. Seated at it were two Fleet Street men, who had just come to Salonika to conductThe Balkan News. They had listened to the manager, but had remained unmoved. But, presently, one of them took a slip of paper from his pocket, wrote a few words, and sent it across to us by a waiter.
Porritt unrolled the slip. On it was written: “Is there anything in it?” He hesitated a moment, then wrote underneath: “Damfino.” “Which,” said he to me, “being interpreted, means: ‘I’m damned if I know.’”And that is all the English journalists got; as a matter of fact, it was all they wanted, and they sat back in their chairs, and watched the rumour grow.
Extraordinary our human love of the sensational! Extraordinary our inability to pass on a piece of news without adding to it! Extraordinary the credulity we give to impossible stories we desire to be true!
“Let’s have our coffee and liqueurs down at Floca’s,” suggested Porritt. “It’ll be rather jolly to see to what fantastic shapes my Yarn has grown down there.”
Floca’s, of course, is just underneath the Roma, but though only a floor and a ceiling divide them, they are as different in mental atmosphere as the gilt-mirrored lounge of the Café Royal, and the dining-room at Morley’s Hotel.
The word “seethes” is banal; nevertheless, Floca’s seethed. For the Yarn had grown. It now had many twisted forms, each fashioned according to the desires and fears of the individual gossiper. Porritt, the only begetter of this disturbance, leaned back with a gratified smile on his lips.
“One must amuse oneself,” said he.
“Ah! Porritt! Porritt! Little do you know the mischief you have done! At this moment the news is on its way to Athens, thence to London, Berlin, Vienna—everywhere. At about seven o’clock this evening, just when the night editors are beginning to think of dinner, it will reach Fleet Street, perhaps by way of Zurich or Amsterdam. Even now, as I speak, the world is beginning to wake up to this great new event. Thousands of pounds will be spent on cables. Reputations will be lost. Perhaps Roumania will be induced to come in at last. Greece will stir uneasily, the Kaiser will wire to Hindenburg, the Stock Exchange....”
“Would it were all true!” interrupted Porritt. “Do you know, Cumberland, I have never felt so important in all my life? Look over there!”
He pointed to a neighbouring table. At it were seated two men, both of whom I knew well by sight. One a fat, hairy Greek Jew with a pendulous jaw, and great bags under his eyes, was a fabulously wealthy financier; the other his confidential clerk. They had been taken unawares by the news, and forgot that a dozen eyes were upon them. The financier was white and trembling, and time after time he tried to rise from his chair, only to sink back repeatedly in a condition of distressing exhaustion. Fear, a devastating fear, dwelt in his eyes.
“What is he afraid of?” I whispered to Porritt.
“Only his clerk knows. But evidently he thinks he is ruined.”
“Tell him!” I urged; “tell him it’s not true—that it’s only your invention.”
“Why should I? If people will speculate in human lives, let them take the consequences.... And now,” added he, “I must go to the canteen to get those six cases of whiskey. I’ve a limber waiting for me just off Piccadilly Circus.”
It reached Fleet Street precisely at nine.
“I think we might have a leader on it—in any case, a short one,” said Hartley, Editor of theTrumpet, that powerful organ of democracy, to the night editor. “Tell Bisham to come along.”
Like a lizard, Bisham darted in, an unlit stump of a cigar between his thin, intelligent lips.
“Well, Bish, the Big Push is on at last. All fronts. Just through on the wire. Waiting for censor’s permish. No details. Let’s have a couple of sticks, in case. The news about Salonika; the wire itself—it comes from Zurich—will go in under any circs. And, you, Beale,” he added, turning to the night news editor, “wire Amsterdam, and do the necessary with Paris. Now, trot along both of you. I’m busy.”
ToJack Kahane
IT was in May, 1912, that Katya Kontorompa met cosmopolitan Guy Fallon, and decided to make him fall in love with her. She was staying at the Olympos Hotel, in Salonika, with her mother, and Fallon had a suite of rooms on the ground floor. He was tall, dark, and vivid; moreover, he was young; best of all, he was fabulously wealthy.
“A week next Thursday,” said Katya one afternoon to her mother, as they sat on the shaded balcony on the first floor, “Guy Fallon will propose to me. It will take place in the evening in one of those boats.”
She nodded towards a flotilla of little rowing-boats that stirred lazily to the rhythm of the lazy waves.
“Yes?” inquired her mother, who sat in a low chair looking benevolently at the world that God had made specially for her.
“And though I shall be a little timid at first,” continued Katya, “I shall say yes as soon as he has kissed me passionately on the mouth. But not until. I think he would kiss rather well, don’t you?”
“I think he would be thorough, dear.... But we musn’t talk like this. I never used even tothinklike it till you came home from Brussels.”
“Would you like Guy for a son-in-law, mamma?”
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Kontorompa was fascinated by Fallon almost as much as her daughter was, and it was with a wholly sensuous feeling that she closed her lids and said:
“Yes, dear, I should—very much.”
“But the kind of kisses he would bestow upon you, mamma, would be very different from those I should get,” said Katya, mischievously.
But though Fallon saw a good deal of the two ladies during the next few days, there was something in his manner that made Mrs. Kontorompa suspect he had no intention of marrying her daughter. He was in love with her—yes; but it was not quite the kind of love that leads to marriage. Rather was it the kind of hot, uneasy passion that persecutes a man until he has gained his desire, when it shrinks and dies like an orchid in a night of frost. But Katya, of course, was extraordinarily clever: ignobly so. She was directing the affair with elaborate carefulness, confident that in the end she would trap this bright tiger of a man in her net of conspiracies.
Though living in the same hotel, Fallon wrote to her twice every day. Sitting up in bed in his yellow pyjamas each night, he wrote just before he slept, and the note was delivered by his valet to Katya’s maid at eight o’clock every morning. And just before dinner in the evening he also wrote, and this letter he himself handed to Katya as they said good night. Fallon knew how to write. He had a habit of intoxicating himself with words, and though each letter said: “I love you! I want you!” he rescued himself from monotony and her from boredom, by saying the same thing in a hundred different ways. But he was never tender, and Mrs. Kontorompa, who eagerly read the letters Katya passed on to her, was driven on one occasion to remark:
“It is not marriage-love. Your father has never loved me like that!”
“Poor mamma!” murmured Katya; “poor mamma! But don’t you wish he had?”
Fallon was with the Kontorompas almost every hour of every day. In the afternoons, when Mrs. Kontorompa slept, the two lovers played pianoforte duets in the big, deserted lounge. Fallon was a masterful pianist, and he played in a manner that suggested intense hunger of the soul. In these hours he had no courtesy, and when she bungled a passage he would scowl at her and call her a little fool. And at this she would laugh and play carelessly in order to taste his anger once again....
“To-day is Thursday,” announced Katya, one morning, as she and her mother breakfasted alone in their room.
“So it is,” agreed her mother, without conviction.
“But I mean it’stheThursday. This evening Guy will ask me to marry him. After dinner he and I will walk to the White Tower. There we shall get a boat. Guy will row. There will be a moon.”
She spoke as though she had arranged for the moon to be there.
“Do take care of yourself, dear. Mr. Fallon is so dark and so ... so impulsive. You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know what you mean, mamma; but those little rowing-boats are quite safe in more senses than one.”
And because she was so anxious for the evening to come, Katya found the bright hours of the day tepid and slow. She was very quiet and subdued in the afternoon, when Fallon found her in the empty lounge.
“Come and play!” he commanded.
“I feel languid and lazy, like a cat in the sun,” she said; “besides, I’m reading.”
“Very well—we’ll play thePetite Suiteof Debussy’s and some other tame stuff. Let’s sentimentalize together.”
“Oh, but you’d find out too much about me. We should get too close to each other in that soft, melting music.”
“Is it possible for us to get too close to each other?” he asked, with a laugh that seemed to be half a sneer.
She rose, and together they walked to the piano.
Only those who have played in concerted music know how easy it is for two souls to mingle in sound. They enjoy an intimacy which no passionate avowals, no tender pleadings, and, indeed, no physical contact can provide. Debussy is never entirely innocent: even his gold-fishes swim wantonly in their pool: and the very tender miniatures of thePetite Suiteare decadent with faint exhalations of patchouli.
Fallon detested the casual promiscuities of secret lovers—the pressure of hands, the stolen kisses, the entire vocabulary of illicitness. He had the fastidiousness of the gourmet, and as yet his body had tasted nothing of Katya’s delights, save the sharp thrill that eyes can communicate, and the peculiar, ghostly, but sensuous intimacy supplied by music.
Katya’s moon was in its appointed place as the two lovers silently descended the quay at the White Tower and embarked in their little boat. Guy rowed out into the bay. There was no breathing in the air, no ripple on the sea. The stars made magic in the sky, and conspired with the moon to create a feeling of far-off voluptuousness.
Fallon rowed lazily until they were a mile or so from the town, which was visible as a vast congeries of lights—chains of lights, terraces of lights, huge constellations poised in the air, lonely points of flame burning in solitary places.
“Like a huge window full of jewels,” said Katya.
The tens of thousands of lights were reflected in the sea as clearly as a face is reflected in a mirror.
“Which is the more real?” asked Fallon; “the city’s illumination or the sea’s version of it?”
“The water is quite warm,” said Katya, laying a white hand on the surface of the indigo sea.
“Yes,” said Fallon. “You could, if you wished, more easily plunge your hand into my heart than into that water.”
“I know,” she said; “perhaps some day I will.”
“Perhaps some day it will be too late. I cannot go on loving you like this—desperately—for ever. Love can be broken by its own strength.”
“You must not threaten me,” she said. “Your attraction for me is your strength: strong people do not threaten. They do not even warn.”
“Then you do love me?”
“Of course. That is, if you call it love.”
“If I lean forward I can kiss your ankle.”
She laughed.
“Humour must be preserved even if propriety isn’t,” she said; “nevertheless, you may kiss it.”
She felt the long warmth of his lips through her puce-coloured silk stockings. A hot wind suddenly came from the south, stirring the sea to life.
“And now,” she said, “you’d better row back.”
“We were fools to come here,” he said.
“Yes?... Why? Tell me.”
But he sat moodily for a minute without speaking. Then he lit a cigarette, and by the light of his match Katya saw the passion in his eyes.
“You’re a bit of a tiger,” she said.
“And you’re much of an iceberg,” he retorted.
“Passionless, cold, serene,” she quoted. “I wonder if I am. I’ve never yet had the chance of finding out.”
But he made no reply. His silence, his lack of directness, the lazy contemptuous manner in which he smoked his cigarette, whipped her to anger.
“Let’s go back,” she said, abruptly.
“No,” he replied, with grimness. “I’ve got you here.”
“Very well,” she said; “then give me a cigarette.”
He threw her a case and a box of matches.
Then, suddenly, words came from him in a torrent.
“You confess you love me. Well, if you do—passion’s what I want. Affection’s nothing to me. You’ve ‘never yet had a chance of finding out.’ Do you expect me to believe that? You were made to tempt men ... and to satisfy them. Listen, Katya: I love every bit of you. You’re not cold. You could kiss, I know. Let me row you back.”
His cigarette gave a little hiss as it hit the water. He threw his arms forward, desperately.
“Yes, let me row you back,” he repeated.
“I love you,” she answered, “but I can never be your mistress. I’m not angry with you....”
“Do you think I should care if you were?” he interrupted, violently. “Do you think I care a damn for your anger?—or your love? You would like to be cruel to me:Iknow: I know your sort. But I can wash you from my mind as easily as the sea has put out my cigarette.”
“Oh, no!” she said; “you can’t do that. You know you can’t. Something of me will be with you always.”
He took the oars and began to row. The little indigo waves passed by them; the feathered oars slid along their crests. At each pull the boat leapt; something of his strength was imparted to her body; she quivered in response.
At the quay of the White Tower he was rough and insolent.
“Get out, quick!” he commanded; “let’s finish this ridiculous business as speedily as possible.”
She turned upon him with an amused smile.
“You have the most dreadful manners of any man I have ever met,” she said, with a little laugh. “When you are in a temper, you are about twelve years old.”
He called agharry, waited until she had stepped into it, and then strode away.
Mrs. Kontorompa was sitting up in bed, reading, when Katya opened her mother’s bedroom door. She looked at her daughter with a contented smile.
“Nothing happened,” announced Katya. “He does not want to marry me.”
“My poor child! Never mind: there were weeks and weeks when I used to think the same about your father. Men never know their own minds.”
“But Fallon shall know his,” said Katya; “I’m as clever as any man I’ve come across yet.”
“Do be careful, dear. You were careful to-night?”
“Very. He only kissed my ankle.”
“Your ankle!” exclaimed her mother, in amazement; “whatever for? Why should he want to kiss your ankle?”
“Well,” said Katya, laughing, “I’ve got rather a nice ankle, you know.”
Mrs. Kontorompa, who had no ankles at all, but merely calves terminating in feet, sighed anxiously.
“Your father never kissedmyankles,” she said, disapprovingly.
“Ask him to!” urged Katya, mischievously; “it’s a delightful feeling.”
A week later Fallon, dressed in white duck, knocked early one morning at Mrs. Kontorompa’s drawing-room door. Katya and Katya’s mother were to go with him to Langaza to picnic. But at the very last moment Mrs. Kontorompa, as had been arranged between her daughter and herself, felt indisposed.
“You will come by yourself,” said Fallon.
“Of course,” answered Katya.
The chauffeur was discreet and unobservant: he was paid a very large salary for not seeing things.
Their car was fitted with a lace awning, but the air was so hot and dry, that before they were well over the deserted Lembet plain they were inordinately thirsty. So Fallon stopped the car and opened a half-bottle of champagne.
“I didn’t bring champagne just because it’s expensive,” he explained, “but because I know you like it. Look!—the ice is half melted already.”
“It will be cooler by the lake,” said Katya; “there may even be a little breeze. I never drink champagne on a hot day,” she added, “without longing to have a bath in it. It would tingle so deliciously, like electricity.”
“Sensualist! I’ve often noticed you love the sensations you’ve never experienced.”
“The worst of it is, there are so few of them left.”
But Fallon was not interested, and he threw the empty bottle on the roadside with a gesture of boredom.
“Drive on!” he ordered the chauffeur.
When a mile from Langaza Lake, the car was drawn up by the side of the deserted road, and their chauffeur spread out their lunch under the shade of a little grove of poplars.
In silence they ate and drank. The sun-baked plain sent waves of visible heat into the sky. No birds sang. The bronze sound of a sheep-bell came from afar.
“Life passes,” said Katya, at length, “and we grow older.”
“True,” answered he, mockingly. “It is only the grass that never withers. It was here ten thousand years ago, and it is here to-day.”
“But you and I!—how quickly age will come to us!” she said.
“How foolish, then, to waste our youth!” he urged. “Sometimes I feel angry at those days which slip by empty of ecstasy. Waste! It’s all waste! Waste of days, of months, of years! Just because we refuse to take what life offers us. We do not live for ever, and the things that taste sweet to-day will in a few years be but bitterness and ashes.”
He allowed his wine-glass to slip from his lax fingers on to the grass.
“Let us walk,” he said; “I’m restless.”
So they rose and walked slowly towards the lake.
“What is that parcel you are carrying?” he asked, when they were near the lake’s border.
“Oh, I thought perhaps I’d do some sketching when we got to the lake. We can sit down, and you may smoke while I work. No, thanks: I can easily carry it myself.”
They walked on in silence. Then:
“You were talking about waste,” she said.
“Was I? Yes. But it’s a dreary subject. I was lecturing you, really, you know; for you’re wasting my life as well as your own. You’re destroying these days. It’s just a week since you told me you loved me.”
“Yes, but I said ‘if you call it love.’ To you love is one thing; to me, another.”
“Why? What do you imagineismy idea of love?”
“Just appetite—the satisfaction of an appetite.”
“And your idea?”
“Service.”
He laughed on a high note of contempt.
“You deceive yourself,” he said. “Do you think I don’t know you? Do you think I live with my eyes shut? If you were to confess that your idea of love is a means of obtaining security against life, I’d believe you. In other words—you like me in my brutal moods, don’t you?—if I asked you to marry me, you would serve me for what I would give you in return. Is that what you mean by service?”
“You believe, then, I would accept your invitation if you asked me to marry you?”
“Most assuredly. Let’s finish this subtle, month-old fight of ours, and speak in plain words.”
“But we understand each other so well without plain words!” she protested.
“Do we? I wonder. Tell me, then: why don’t I ask you to marry me?”
“Because you don’t love me. Your body merely aches for mine. You suffer, I know.”
“Yes, I do,” he acknowledged; “but I can endure pain. Most men can’t: that is why they are willing to incur the discomfort and long penance of marriage—anything rather than continue to suffer.”
“Then why don’t you go away? Why don’t you leave me altogether?”
But he did not answer.
“Is it,” she asked, “because you still hope to win me without marriage?”
He turned upon her savagely.
“Temptress and taunter!” heexclaimed. “I know your sort. You love to feel your hideous power. You suck delight from my misery.”
He drew nearer to her and seized one of her wrists.
“I love you,” he whispered; “isn’t that enough?”
They were in a little pathway among the rushes by the lake’s side. Suddenly, she wrested herself away from him and, raising her right arm, threw the parcel she carried into the lake. It floated on the surface, and the gentle south wind moved it slowly across the water in the direction of Langaza village, a couple of miles away.
She looked at him with a mocking smile.
“Let us go back,” she said, “for this is merely the waste of another day.”
“Why have you thrown your sketching things away?” he asked, stupidly.
“I haven’t. The things I have thrown away were once yours. Then they became mine. They will belong to the person who finds them.”
The words came hysterically, and she trembled a little.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Your letters to me. I have finished with you. This is the end.”
He began to laugh, but his laughter quickly died in his throat.
“You fool!” he exclaimed; “you spiteful little devil! My name is on each of those letters.”
He quivered withanger, and raised his fist as though to strike.
“I know,” she said. “That is one of the reasons why I threw them away. It is time your folly was known to others besides me.”
She looked upon him with malice, delighting in his anger. Then she laughed softly, taunting him.
“Can’t you swim?” she asked. “See, it isn’t very far off.”
But he strode away in the direction of the motor-car. She called after him, gently, lovingly.
“Guy! Guy!”
He stopped and turned, his face and attitude contemptuous. Running up to him, she threw her arms about his neck and, half-sobbing, half-laughing, stammered:
“Guy! Dear Guy! I was only fooling you. They were not your letters—not one of them. Your dearest letters I carry in my breast, next to my heart.”
He pressed his face hard against her neck.
“You little devil, you! Why do we torture each other like this?”
She clung to him desperately.
“Marry me! Marry me!” she implored.
“Yes, I will: I’m damned if I won’t. But, I warn you—look out! We shall both have a hell of a time.”
“But there’ll be a month or two of heaven first,” she said, and, opening his shirt at the neck, she kissed him low down on his breast.
ToMary Harrison
XAVIER PETROVSKI was English in spite of his name, appearance, and his temperament.
“As for his appearance,” said Judith Lesueur to her sister, Marian, “well, it’s too ravishing for words. Eyes that melt, my dear—melt with their own fire.”
Marian laughed.
“I never like your little gods, your little tin gods; your little gods of flesh and blood. And I particularly hate the melting variety. Just like the butter you get in the Café Roma in August.”
His temperament was melancholy, for he was cursed with a hot, uneasy ambition that goaded him on to work till his body grew tired, his brain stale, and his spirit dejected. He believed himself to be a musical composer.
“I have genius: IknowI have genius,” he said, over and over again in spring nights when he lay in his lodging overlooking the sea.
And then he would sleep and dream, his brain ravished by sumptuous harmonies, his very flesh soothed by sound.
For a living he played the violin in the Orient Café, for he was a member of the Ostrovsky Quartet. From three o’clock in the afternoon till midnight he played, whilst the loose men and women of Salonika danced and drank and ate. In the mornings he composed music and counted up the money he had saved. For Xavier was nothing if not practical. He was not going to miss the reward of his genius by foolish conduct or faulty management of his affairs. Already he had saved £800. Not a penny was spent that could by any contriving be added to his hoard. In a little while he would take his money to London, and then! Oh, then he would show them! The finest orchestra in the world should play his music and the critics should praise it; it should be printed and sold; his name should be on the lips of every man. Fame: money: the companionship of the great: the smiles of women: the intoxication of life lived to the full. All should be his. In a little while. He was sure of it.
At least, sometimes he was sure. In his happy moments, his moods of exaltation. But there were black moods.
“Is it possible that I have written these inanities?” he would sometimes ask himself. “I am a fool, sick with vanity, eaten up with egomania.”
In one of these unendurable moods he met Judith Lesueur, the most beautiful and most cultured demirep in all Salonika.
“Oh, Miss Lesueur,” he exclaimed, “do help me.”
“What is it?” she asked, smiling. “Has someone been horrid to you?” (She always treated him as though he were a child.)
“No: but I’m terribly depressed: my music won’t come right. I looked at my String Serenade this morning, and it is inconceivable that I should have written such ridiculous stuff. And when I was writing it I thought it was so splendid.”
“It probablyissplendid,” she said, sympathetically; “everyone has moods. Come to the Café and drink with me.”
“Oh, no!” he protested. “This rotten feeling—I must walk it off. Drink would only make me worse.”
But, instead of going a long tramp as he had intended, he returned to his lodgings, and sat brooding at his open window. His thoughts turned to his dead father: he also had been a composer of music, and he had been one of life’s failures. He had worked hard and very patiently, but no one had ever played anything he had written.
Xavier rose from his chair and walked across the room to a big chest full of MSS., all in his father’s neat writing. He turned over page after page—symphonies, overtures, songs, string quartets. How like his father this music was!—mystical, tender, exquisite. “Like the poems of Rossetti,” Xavier murmured to himself. Soon he became so absorbed in his father’s work, that he nearly lost consciousness of himself. The music he was reading murmured and sang in his ears. His father’s very spirit seemed to suspire from the pages. Almost could his voice be heard. It was as though the soul of the dead man was brooding over his living son....
Some of the music had been written only ten years ago: it was very much in advance of its period, and perhaps it was for this reason that both publishers and conductors had disdained it. Xavier’s father had lived in London where, it is true, good music cannot for long go unrecognized; but he had been proud and almost vainly sensitive, and the rejection of a composition usedto throw him into a condition of despair so great, that months would pass before he could persuade himself to give the work another chance. His sensitive pride had been his ruin....
Xavier, wrapped up in his own work, had not for some years examined his father’s music, and had never divined its true quality; but now he recognized its extraordinary distinction, its peculiar originality, its brooding power and barbed eloquence. Oblivious of time, he read on until his landlady entered with his lunch.
“We are going to have a thunderstorm,” she said, looking at the copper sky.
“Very likely,” he said, his eyes still on the music.
And while he ate his frugal meal, he continued reading his father’s music; he absorbed it until it was time to go to the Orient Café. As he walked slowly thither, he felt that during the last few hours his personality had undergone a strange metamorphosis. He was not himself: something had been added to him: some luxury, a kind of mental wantonness—had entered his spirit unawares. His mind was larger, his imagination more rapid and higher in its flights.
There was something ghostly in this, something, perhaps, even threatening. But no doubt the minatory feeling came from the sulphur sky that hung so low, a sky heavy with electricity and sulky with spleen....
The danceshe and his comrades played that afternoon and evening meant less than nothing to him, for he did not even hear them. One performs mechanically the acts one performs frequently. The music that was in the air about him was the music he had read that morning.
At midnight, the day’s work over, he left the Café and sought his lodging. There were no stars. Thunder had begun to mutter, but as yet no rain had fallen. Faint fires trembled in the sky. Xavier felt the excitement of something important about to happen. His brain teemed with ideas. As soon as he got home, he would begin to compose.
“‘The Storm!’”he said, suddenly, speaking aloud. “The storm that never breaks—that’s an idea, and a damned good one, too. The storm that is always threatening and never begins. Something brooding, something gathering itself together, something couching, something licking its chops. And nothing ever happening.”
He knitted his brows in deep thought, and by the time he had reached his room, musical ideas for his composition were already filling his mind.
He sat down and wrote. Muted horns cried mysteriously on the paper before him in discords that were continually on the point of being, but never were, resolved.... At the end of an hour he read what he had written; from the very first bar it was good. It was with difficulty that he kept his excitement under control. He worked without effort, without thought, but with deep and disturbed feeling. His pen moved mechanically, and he could but wonder at its strange activity.
Just before dawn, he lay down and fell asleep. At the end of the third hour of his slumber, he awoke suddenly, all his senses fresh and alert. The sun was in his room. Anxiously he bounded out of bed, and sat down at his little table near the window, scanning his MS. with eager eyes. The muted horns made magic music. Yes—it was fine! Every note of it was fine! How mysteriously yet significantly the strings stirred! How broodingly the wood-wind kept suggesting the principal theme that was never fully stated!
It was with a trembling fear that he took his pen in hand. Had his inspiration failed? Had that mood gone? No: without effort he began at the point at which he had left off. Though it was happy day outside, the storm was still brewing on his paper. Little flickers of flame danced on his sky’s edge: a black turbulence was at his zenith....
Three days later, his Symphonic Poem was finished, and he sought out Judith Lesueur that she might share his joy.
“Oh, Miss Lesueur,” he said, bursting into her flat, “do sympathize with me!”
“What is it?” she asked. “Has someone been horrid to you?”
“No: I’m so happy I can’t remain alone. I’ve written a wonderful work: I can’t believe it is I who have written it. And really—don’t laugh at me!—it just seemed to me all the time that somebody else was writing it for me.”
“Oh, I’msoglad. If you weren’t so terribly virtuous, I would kiss you.”
Involuntarily, he moved a pace or two away from her. She held out her hand.
“Don’t be afraid, dear friend!” She smiled on him. “If you are happy, I am also. And now, I suppose, you’ll be going to London and I shall see you no more. Poor Judith!”
“Yes,” he answered, “I shall be going soon. It describes a storm—the gathering of a storm: clouds coming out of the vacant blue and massing together: yellow, treacherous vapours emerging from God knows where: enmity in the air. But the storm never breaks. All the thick, heavy passions of nature mingle until they become clogged. And then the music stops, choked by its own congestion.”
Judith did not understand him: he was just a little mad, she thought.
“I do hope it will be a success,” she said. “I’m sure it will. But I wish I was coming to London with you to hear it.”
He glanced at her rather shyly.
“Do you?” he asked. “Do you, really?”
“Why, of course I do. I want toseeyour success: I want to be with you in the midst of it.”
“Perhaps, some day ...” he said, vaguely, blushing a little. “Well, good-bye,” he added, “I must be off to the Café now.”
London was much kinder than Xavier Petrovski had anticipated, for he had not reflected that all cities, all people, are kind to men who have money to spend. He came with letters of introduction, and was soon on friendly terms with many musicians, critics, and people of social influence. A German firm of publishers had already accepted a volume of his songs, and the wealthy amateur, Countess Idionowsky, had arranged for an evening of his music to be given at her house in Portman Square. His timid manner, his air of distinction, and the “melting” eyes, which Judith had tried to describe to her sister, made him very popular with women, and he received more invitations than he could accept.
More satisfactory than anything else, he had been able to secure Queen’s Hall for an evening in the first week in June, and Marcel Xystobam was to conduct for him, and the great soprano, Alice Gardner, was to sing a group of his songs and a scene from his operaDido.
On this concert, and in advertising it, he had spent a large portion of his hoard. All his hopes for the future were centered on this event. If it failed, his life would be broken, his ambition killed. But the thought of failure rarely entered his mind, so full were his days of happiness, so continuous was the flow of praise he received from his new friends.
In the afternoon of the day before his orchestral concert, a stranger called to see Xavier at his hotel. He was a tall ascetic-looking man, fashionably dressed, courteous, even a little deferential.
“My name is Shaw—Geoffrey Shaw,” he said, “and I have called to see you because I knew your father well: indeed, he was a dear friend of mine.”
Xavier, who had been writing at a desk when the stranger entered, rose excitedly to his feet.
“You knew my father?” he asked.
“Yes. I was with him when he died. In those days I was not so ... so well-circumstanced as I am now, or perhaps he would not have died when he did. I was one of those who had faith in him—in his genius.”
“Tell me about him. You know, I was only fifteen when he died, and during the last two years of his life I never saw him at all.”
So the stranger told Xavier of his father’s last years—of his patient courage, his extraordinary capacity for work, his sensitiveness.
“He really had very great powers,” Shaw continued, “but the weakness in him was that he had not sufficient faith in himself. His faith came and went. A single hostile word was sufficient to make him suspect his own genius.”
He stayed for half-an-hour and then rose to go.
“I am going to your concert to-morrow, of course,” he said; “perhaps you will come and sup at my flat when it is over. My place is in Oxford Street, less than five minutes’ walk from Queen’s Hall.”
“I shall be delighted.”
There are few experiences so salutary, and yet at the same time so galling, as that undergone by an inexperienced composer when he listens to the first performance of his orchestral works. His music may look extraordinarily lucid on paper, but in actual performance all kinds of elaborately calculated effects fail to “come off”: they are destroyed by lack of balance between the different sections of the orchestra. The ideas are there, but they are not heard.
At the long rehearsal of his music, Xavier suffered deeply. It seemed to him that his compositions were like exquisite paintings at which handfuls of mud had been thrown: the tender sound would suddenly become meaningless noise: muddy patches here and there stopped and choked the logical continuity of his work.
When he first noticed this, his instinct was to throw the blame on his conductor, Marcel Xystobam, but two or three minutes’ reflection disclosed to him that the fault was in the writing itself, and not in the manner of its interpretation. Only one work, “The Storm,” came out in sound precisely as he had heard it in his inner ear; his other compositions were palpably the work of an untried, though gifted, amateur.
Xavier Petrovski sat writhing at his own music.
The large audience was obviously bored; even Alice Gardner’s appearance did not lift them out of their apathy. During the interval many left the hall. The applause bestowed on each composition could only just be heard. All the critics were already congregated round the refreshment bar. Nothing but a miracle could prevent the concert from being the most conspicuous failure of the season.
There was nothing from which Xavier could derive consolation. The fault was his own. His music was the music of a man who had not learned the technique of his art; the sounds that reached him from the orchestra were not the sounds that had come to him in the silence of his room in Salonika; through lack of skill—through want of experience—he had failed to record what he had heard.
After what to the composer seemed hours of misery, the last work was reached. He knew well that if the audience were in a mood to listen, “The Storm” could not fail of its effect. In rehearsal, it had been peculiarly impressive. Not a single note was miscalculated: it was the work of a mature mind: it had all the attributes of genius.
And to-night, the very first bars gripped the tired and disappointed listeners. They forgot their disappointment in listening to this strange disturbing sound. Brooding yet passionate, the music filled the hall: it flickered like flame; it rolled, like heavy waters; it menaced, like distant, just-heard thunder. It made its listeners believe that something terrible was about to happen. And when all the black beauty of it had passed away without its threatened terribleculmination, the listeners felt an exquisite relief that expressed itself in thunderous applause.
Not until the conductor had signified with an expressive gesture that the composer was not present and could not therefore bow his acknowledgments from the platform, did the audience begin to disperse....
At the entrance of the hall Xavier Petrovski found his new friend, Geoffrey Shaw, waiting for him. The meeting of the two men was constrained; it seemed almost as though they were enemies compelled to meet on a matter of business. They began to walk towards Oxford Street.
“I wish to God I had stayed in Salonika,” said Petrovski, at length, “for it’s all been waste.”
His companion tried to comfort him.
“You have not yet had the experience that every composer needs before he can become successful—the kind of experience that you can’t get out there in Greece. You must stay in London—live here. You would learn quickly all that is required.”
“But my ‘Storm’ succeeded, didn’t it?”
For a moment Shaw made no reply. Then:
“Yes,” he said; “that work was a great success.”
“But they tell me the critics did not stop to hear it. They all left the hall long before the concert was finished. I do not blame them, but it’s a pity they did not hear my best work.... I feel like a beginner, Mr. Shaw—I have everything yet to learn. And for some years I havebeen flattering myself that I was a master of my art.”
“Don’t be too despondent, my dear fellow. You’ve got the stuff in you all right: it only wants bringing out and putting into proper shape.”
“Yes; but the curious thing is that my work, ‘The Storm,’ is absolutely free from all faults of inexperience. It might almost have been written by another man.”
They had now reached Shaw’s flat. His host unlocked the door and led him to his dining-room where supper was laid.
Shaw’s sympathetic kindness and, no doubt, the wine also soon put Petrovski into a more hopeful frame of mind. When they had finished supper, Shaw invited his guest into his library. The room contained nothing but books, a desk, and a couple of easy chairs.
“I have something here I want to show you,” he said, very gravely. “It is a MS. of your father’s—he gave it to me a few weeks before his death. I happen to know it is the only copy in existence; and I was present when he destroyed the preliminary sketch on which this composition is founded.”
Taking a thin volume from a cabinet, he opened it at the first page and placed it before his guest.
At the very first glance Petrovski uttered an exclamation of surprise. Then, bending over it, he examined it hurriedly and with the utmost agitation. His hands trembled so violently that he could scarcely turn over the pages.
“Good God!” he exclaimed at length; “it’s ‘The Storm'—note for note—my own work!”
He transferred his gaze from the MS. to his host.
“What does it mean?” he asked; “in God’s name, what does it mean?”