"Miss Baxter," said Miss Vickers in a low voice.
"She's not a reporter?" said Busby, hesitating.
"Honest to God, Buzzy," said Adèle Vickers vehemently. "She's on the stage, the legitimate—Doré Baxter, a friend of mine!"
"I know her!" said Busby, suddenly enlightened by the full name, and going to her, he said: "Met you at a party of Bruce Gunther's, I believe, Miss Baxter."
Doré, who thus found herself, to her vexation, sailing under her own colors, said, with a pleading look:
"Don't give me away, will you? It's just a lark, and," she added lower, "don't call me Miss Baxter!"
"A stage name, eh?"
"Splendid one—Trixie Tennyson. Doesn't that sound like a head-liner?" she added confidentially, in the low tone in which the conversation had been conducted.
Busby repeated the name, chuckling to himself, yielding to his sense of humor. "All right! Now, girls, come on!"
"But what shall we call him?"
"Call him anything you like ... after the soup!" said Busby, laughing. "Remember! he's here to be amused!... Have any of you girls changed your names since I saw you last?... No?... Then I know them!..." He told them off, counting with his fingers: "Adèle Vickers, Georgie Gwynne—it used to be Bronson last year—"
"It never was!" exclaimed a petite Irish brunette, with a saucy smile and a roguish eye: "Baron—"
"I'll give you a better one: Georgie Washington!" continued Busby. "Why not? Fine!... A press-agent would charge for that!... I see an inch of nose, a gray eye and a brown cheek under an avalanche of hat—must be Viola Pax!"
"Violetta, please!" said a southern type with soft consonants.
"To be sure!... to be sure!... Both are up-to-date, though!... Trixie Tennyson ... ah, there's a name!... Do you know who Tennyson was, little dears?... A great scientist who discovered the reason why brooks go on forever!" Adèle and Doré smiled, but the rest accepted the information. "Paula Stuart and Consuelo ... dear me! I never did know your last name, Consuelo, darling!"
"Vincent! and cut out the guying!" said a fair buxom type, child of the Rialto. "Let's get a move on!"
"Quite right!" said Busby, offering an arm to Adèle Vickers and Violetta Pax. "Follow me ... always!"
The dressing-room emptied itself, with a last struggle for the mirror, a few hurried applications of rouge, and a loosening of perfumes, while, above the pleasant rustle of skirts, the voice of Georgie Gwynne was heard in a stage whisper:
"Remember, girls! Act refined!"
Consuelo Vincent, under pretext of a cold, insistedon keeping a magnificent sable cape, which she shifted constantly the better to display it.
On perceiving Busby arriving with this bouquet of vermilion smiles, polished teeth and flashing eyes, the Comte de Joncy, who had begun to be restless under the strain of serious conversation, brightened visibly, and holding out both hands, exclaimed with the practised familiarity of a patron of all the arts:
"Why you make me wait so long?Jolis petits amours!Ah, she is charming, this one. What a naughty little eye! Oho! something Spanish—do you dance the Bolero? Ah, but each is perfect—adorable! I could eat every one of them!"
But to this royal affability the ladies of the chorus, very stiff, very correct, lisping a little, made answer:
"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure!"
"It's quite an unexpected pleasure!"
"Indeed, most glad to meet you!"
The introductions continued, and presently the room resounded with such phrases as these:
"I hope we're not terribly late!... New York streets are so crowded!"
"Delightful weather, don't you think?"
"What a charming view!... I dote on views, don't you?"
"Have you seenPéléas and Mélisande?"
And Georgie Gwynne, picking her words with difficulty, was remarking to Harrigan Blood:
"You're such a celebrity, Mr. Blood!... I'm tick ... I'm delighted to know you!"
The Comte de Joncy, overcome by this flood of manners, said to his host:
"The devil,mon cherSassoon, they overawe me! You are sure it is no mistake? It is not some of your dreadful wives?"
"Wait!" said Sassoon, raising a finger.
Busby, who knew their ways, arrived with a tray of cocktails, scolding them like a stage-manager:
"Now, girls—girls! Unbend! Warm up, or His Highness will catch a cold! Come on, Consuelo, you've aired your furs enough; send them back—you give us a chill! This will never do! Now perk up, girls, do perk up!"
Doré took the cocktail offered, and profiting by the stir, emptied it quickly behind her in the roots of a glowing orange tree. She raised her eyes suddenly to Massingale's. He had detected the movement, and was smiling. She made a quick, half-checked gesture of her arm, imploring his confidence, as, amused, he came to her side.
"What a charming name, Miss Tennyson," he said, without reference to what he had seen. "Are you related?"
She understood that he would not betray her.
"Alfred's a sort of distant cousin," she said with a lisp, affecting a mannerism of the shoulders. "Of course, I haven't kept my full name—my full name is Rowena Robsart Tennyson; but that wouldn't do for the stage, would it? Trixie—Trixie Tennyson is chicker, don't you think?"
"Is what?"
"Chicker—French, you know!"
"Ah, morechic," he said, looking at her steadily with a little lurking mockery in the corners of his eyes.
"I'm not fooling him," she said to herself, impressed by the steadiness of his judicial look, half inquisitorial, half amused. Nevertheless, she continued with a mincing imitation of Violetta Pax, who could be heard discoursing on art.
"What charming weather! Do you like our show? Have you seen it?"
"Yes—have you?" he said, with malice in his eyes.
"What do you mean by that? I'm sure I don't know!"
"I understood you came in place of your sister. Did you forget?"
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, knowing the comedy useless, but continuing it. She was easily impressed, especially at a first meeting, and she had a feeling that to be a judge one must know all, see through every subterfuge.
"'Course I've only been in the sextette a couple of nights."
"And what is your ambition? Tragedy?"
"Oh, no!" she said, with an important seriousness. "I don't think tragedy's in my complexion, do you? I dote on comedy, though; I'd like to be a Maude Adams s-some day."
"So you are serious?" he said gravely.
"Oh, much so—'course, I don't know. I haven'tany prejudices against marriage," she continued, allowing her great blue troubling eyes to remain on his. "I sometimes think I'd like to go to London and marry into the English aristocracy."
He bit his lips to keep from laughing.
"Society is so narrow here—there's more opportunity abroad, don't you think?"
He did not answer, considering her fixedly, plainly intrigued.
She moved into the embrasure of a window with a defensive movement.
"The view's quite wonderful, isn't it?"
They were on the fifteenth floor, with a clear sweep of the lower city. He moved to her side, looking out gravely, impressed as one who reads beneath the surface of things. From the window the spectacle of the city below them irrevocably rooted to the soil, caged in the full tide of labor, gave an exquisite sense of luxury to this banquet among the clouds. To the south a light bank of fog, low and spreading, was eating up the horizon of water and distant shore, magnifying the checkered chart of the city as it closed about it. It seemed as if the whole world were there, the world of toil, marching endlessly, regimented into squares, chained to the bitter gods of necessity and the commonplace.
"It gives you the true feeling of splendor," he said. "The world does not change. We might be on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon." He continued, his eyes lit up by a flash of imagination that revealed the youth still in his features: "It is Babylon, Assyria, Egypt. The Pyramids were raised thus, man in terms of a thousand, harnessed and whipped, while a few looked down and enjoyed."
She forgot the part she had assumed, keenly responsive. Her mind, still neglected, was not without perceptions, ready to be awakened to imagination. She saw as he saw, feeling more deeply.
She extended her hand toward the Egyptian hordes beneath them, looking at him curiously.
"And that interests you?"
"Both interest me. That and this. Everything is interesting," he said, with a smile that comprehended her. "Especially you and your motive."
"You know I'm not one of—" she began abruptly.
He shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly, and in his eyes was the same look of delighted malice that had brought him to her.
"You needn't explain. Your manner was perfect. I quite understand you—much better than you believe."
He moved forward, joining the movement into the dining-room. She followed, watching him covertly, enveloped still by his unusual personality.
As the chorus girls still persisted in their display of mannered stateliness, the men listened to Harrigan Blood, who had begun to coin ideas.
"Count, here you have America in a thimble." He elevated his second cocktail, speaking in the slightly raised tone of one who is accustomed to the attention of all listeners. "Your Frenchman takes an afternoon sipping himself into gaiety; your German begins to sing only when he has drunk up a river of beer; but your American—he's different! What do we do? We've won or we've lost—we've got to rejoice or forget—it's all the same. We bolt to a bar and cry: 'Tom, throw something into me that'll explode!' And he hands us a cocktail! Here's America: a hundred millions in a generation, a century's progress in a decade—the future to-morrow, and a change of mood in a second!"
He ended, swallowing his drink in a gulp. Like most mad geniuses of the press, he drank enormously, feeding thus the brain that he punished without mercy.
Busby, who peddled epigrams, murmured to himself with a view to future authorship, "A cocktail is an explosion of spirits; a cocktail...."
The chorus girls, who regarded Harrigan Blood as a sort of demigod who could make a reputation with a stroke of his pen, acclaimed this sally with exaggerated delight. The party crowded into the dining-room, seeking their places.
Doré found herself between Judge Massingale and Lindaberry, Harrigan Blood opposite between Georgie Gwynne and Violetta Pax. Sassoon was at the farther end, opposite Lindaberry, with Adèle Vickers and Busby to his right, and Paula Stuart and the Comte de Joncy on his left, Consuelo Vincent sharing the noble guest, with Massingale next to her.
Beside each feminine plate a bouquet of orchids and yellow pansies, daintily blended, was waiting, and from the loosely bound stems the edge of a bank-note showed—a slit of indecipherable green.
Immediately there was a murmur of voices, a quick outstretching of hands, and a sudden careful pinning on to waists, while each glance affected unconsciousness of what it had detected. Doré did not imitate the others. Her eye, too, had immediately caught the disclosed corner. She contrived, while folding her gloves, to turn the bouquet slightly, so that no trace of what it contained showed. Then, when the opportunity came, she examined the faces of the men. So quickly had the flowers been transferred to the bodices that the male portion remained in ignorance. Massingale was too close to her to be sure of. Had his quick eye detected what the others had missed?To refuse the bouquet meant to bring down on her head a torrent of explanations; ignorance were better.
At this moment there was a hollow pause. The caviar had just been served, and the chorus girls, watching for a precedent, were in a quandary between a fork which inclined to a knife, and a fork that was a tortured spoon. But Georgie Gwynne, too long repressed, exclaimed:
"Oh, hell! Buzzy, tell us the club."
This remark, and the roar with which is was greeted, dispelled at once the gloom that had settled about the Royal Observer. The chorus girls, unbending, began to talk American—all at once, chattering, gesturing. Doré profited by the moment to affix the bouquet among the orchids she already wore. The success of Georgie Gwynne's ice-breaking was such that the Comte de Joncy, charmed by such naturalness, wished to invite her to his side; but, amid protests, it was decided, on a happy motion of Busby's, that the guests should rotate after each course.
The chorus girls began to talk
The chorus girls began to talk
The chorus girls began to talk
"Sorry it's so," said Massingale, turning; "I shall lose you!"
"Oh, now you know I'm a counterfeit," Dodo said maliciously, "I shall spoil your fun. Never mind; I promise to go early!"
"Who are you?" he said, by way of answer.
"Trixie Tennyson!"
"I've half a mind to denounce you!"
"Oh, Your Honor, you wouldn't do that!"
"So you won't tell me who you are?"
"It'll be so much more fun for you to find out!"
She listened to him with her head set a little to one side. She rarely gave the full of her face, keeping always about her a subtle touch of evasion.
"I know her kind well," he had said to himself. But he continued to watch her intently, interested in that innate sense of the shades of coquetry she displayed in the lingering slanted glances, and the eerie smile which gathered from the malicious corners of her eyes, slipping down the curved cheek to play a moment about her lips.
"Why did you come?" he said, wishing that she would turn toward him.
"Curiosity!"
"Precipices?"
She turned to him, genuine surprise in the blue clouded eyes, her rosy lips parted in amazement.
"How did you know?"
"It wasn't difficult!"
"You're uncanny!"
His sense of divination had so startled her that she turned from him a moment, wondering what attitude to assume. While feigning to listen to the declaiming of Harrigan Blood, she took every opportunity to study him. Massingale, scarcely forty, had an intellectual aristocracy about him that lay in the impersonality of his amused study of others. Yet in this scrutiny there was no accent of criticism. His lips were relaxed in a tolerant humor, and this smile puzzled her. Was he also of this company who sought amusement in a descent to other levels, or was he simply an observer, a man who had ended a phase oflife, but who still delighted in the contemplation of the ridiculous, the grotesque and the absurdity of these petty contests of wits? She was aware that he had attacked her imagination in a way no man had tried before, and this presumption awoke an instant spirit of resistance. She stole a glance from time to time in the mirror, but she avoided opportunities for conversation.
From the farther end of the table she beheld the guest of the day radiating happiness under a storm of questions from the chorus girls:
"Perfectly horrid of you to call yourself count!"
"Count, lord, I've got a string of 'em!"
"Barons."
"Dukes, too. I know Duke of What's-His-Name Biscay. He's a nice boy! Do you know him?"
And Georgie Gwynne, flushed with her first success, said to Harrigan Blood, in a permeating aside:
"When I get to His Nibs, watch what I'll hand him!"
But Harrigan Blood, absorbed in an idea, answered her:
"Be quiet now, Georgie—gorge yourself!"
"Composing an editorial on luxury, Harrigan?" said Lindaberry, speaking for the first time.
Harrigan Blood admitted the patness of the guess with a wave of his hand, leaning heavily on the table with his elbows. He had always an air of being in his shirt-sleeves.
"See theFree Pressto-morrow," he said, moving his large hand over his face and frowning spasmodically. His eye ran quickly over the menu, calculating the cost per plate, the value of the rare wines, the decorations, the presents and the tips. "Two thousand dollars at the least—four thousand dinners below Fourteenth Street, five years abroad for a genius who is stifling, twenty thousand tired laborers to a moving-picture show. And with what we turn over with our fork and regret, the waste that will be thrown away, a family could live a year! This is civilization and Christianity!"
"Appetite good, Harrigan?" said Lindaberry, with an impertinence that few would have ventured.
"Better than yours," said Blood impatiently. "Ideas and personalities have no connection. Ends are one thing, instruments another. Who was the greatest of the disciples? St. Paul. He had experienced! Shakespeare—Tolstoy. The caviar is delicious!"
In his attitude he felt no hypocrisy. He looked upon himself as a machine, to be fed and to be kept in order by sensations—experiences: a privileged nature dedicated passionately to ideal ends. For the rest, his contempt for mankind in the present was profound. He had conquered success early, but he retained an abiding bitterness against the world which had misunderstood him and forced him a short period to wait.
"And this is Harrigan Blood!" Doré thought, wondering. Another day flashed before her—two years old—when, just arrived, a despairing claimant, she had pleaded in vain for opportunity in the greatsoul-crushing offices of theFree Press. The sport of fate had flung her a chance, and watching Harrigan Blood from the malicious corners of her busy eyes, she planned her revenge.
Lindaberry had not as yet addressed a single word to her. He had gradually come out of the stolid dull intensity that had lain on him with the weight of last night's dissipation, but one felt in the awakening vivacity of his eye, the impatient opening and shutting of his hand, the quick smile that followed each outburst of laughter, a struggle to reach the extreme of gaiety which such a company brought him to relieve him from that depression which closed over him when condemned to be alone.
For her part, she had scarcely noticed him—having a horror of men who drank. At this moment a butler, under orders from Busby, placed before him a bottle of champagne for his special use. He turned courteously but impersonally, without that masculine impertinence in the eye which is still a compliment.
"May I freshen up your glass?"
"Thank you, no!" she said icily. "I'm afraid I don't appreciate your special brand of conversation!"
He looked at her, startled—her meaning gradually dawning on him. But, before he could reply, Busby had risen, sounding his knife against his plate.
"Next course, ladies will please chassé! Gentlemen, make sure of your jewelry!"
Doré rose, and, as she did so, addressing the butler who drew out her chair, said:
"In order that Mr. Lindaberry may feel quite athome, do please place a bottle oneachside of him!"
She made him an abrupt mocking bow, and went to her place past Massingale, next to the Comte de Joncy, while Lindaberry, flushing, was left as best he could to face the laughter and clapping of hands that greeted her sally.
The Comte de Joncy had risen courteously, studying her keenly from his pocketed, watery blue eyes, seating her with marked ceremony, too keen an amateur of the sex not to feel a difference in her.
"Bravo!" he said, laughing, and in a confidential tone: "Madame de Staël could not have answered better!"
The allusion was not in her ken, but she felt the compliment.
"Are you what? Wolf in sheep's clothing, or sheep—"
"Beware!" she said maliciously, converting a fork into a weapon of attack. "I am a desperate adventuress who has taken this way to meet Your Highness!"
"If it were only true!" he said, looking questions.
"Why not?" The game amused her, and besides, something perversely incited her to recklessness. Massingale was on the other side of her—Massingale, who, after the impudence of having comprehended her, treated her with only tepid interest. "Where shall I follow you? Paris or Dresden?"
He stared at her with squinting eyes, not quite deceived, not quite convinced. At the end he laughed.
"Pretty good—almost you fool me!"
"You don't believe me?" she said, raising her eyes a moment to his.
"Mademoiselle, your eyes have a million in each of them!" he said, after a moment, but not quite so calmly. "Will you give me your address?"
"Why not?" she said, opening her hands in a gesture of surprise.
"I will come!" he said, yet not entirely the dupe of her game.
"Poor Count!" she said, with a quick change of manner. "You don't know what a dangerous animal we have here. Beware!"
"What?"
"The great American teaser!" she said, laughing.
"Teaser—teaser! What is that?"
She entered into an elaborate explanation, glancing into the mirror, striving from there to catch Massingale's look.
"I say, angels!" said Buzzy, bubbling over with mischief. "I've got an idea!"
"Buzzy has an idea!"
"Good for Buzzy!"
"We want to amuse the Count, don't we?" said Busby artfully.
"Sure!..."
"You bet!..."
"Well, then, let's tell our real names!"
Violetta Pax gave a scream of horror and retired blushing under her napkin at the storm of laughter her scream of confession had aroused.
"Real name's Lou Burgstadter!" said Consuelo Vincent in a whisper to De Joncy, who had forgot her.
Violetta Pax was on her feet in an instant.
"Consuelo Vincent, I like your nerve!... Consuelo, indeed! Cassie Hagan!" she cried furiously. "Yes, and Carrie Slater, too, needn't put on airs!"
The rest was lost in an uproar; the chorus girls were on their feet, protesting vigorously, all chattering at once, the men applauding and fomenting the tumult, Busby secretly enjoying the mischief he had exploded, running from one to the other, pleading, provoking, adding fuel to the burning.
"Ladies!... Ladies! Remember there are gentlemen present!... Georgie, Violetta's giving you away!... Girls! Girls! Remember His Highness!... Paula, dear, you ought to hear what Georgie said, of you! Awful ... awful.... Now, dearies, behave!... remember your manners!"
At the end of a moment, overcome with laughter, he capsized on a sofa in weak hysterics. Blood exclaimed that Busby had a fit, and thus procured a diversion which restored calm. Nevertheless, the storm had been so sudden that the wreckage was strewn about the room; Busby gathered them together again, conciliated every one and brought them back to their seats.
Doré was excited by this outburst. At last the party promised something to her curiosity. She waited eagerly, her eyes dancing, her fingers thrumming on the cloth, curious to see these men, of whom she had heard so much, unmask.
While continuing her banter with De Joncy, she had turned her attention to Sassoon, who, in the midst of the hilarity, preserved the fatigue and listlessness of his first appearance, a smile more contemptuous than amused lurking about the long oriental nose and burnt-out eyes without abiding quite anywhere. He paid no attention to the girls at either side, peering restlessly at those farther away, dissatisfied, unamused.
His reputation was of the worst, his name bandied about in big places and in small; nor, as is usually the case, did gossip bear unmerited reproaches. Neither a fool, as most believed, nor of originating imagination, as a few credited who witnessed from the inside the shrewd and infallible success of his colossal schemes, Sassoon at bottom was a prey to an obsession that stung him like a gadfly to restless seeking, eternally tormented by the fever of the hunter, eternally disillusioned. For thirty years, following the exigencies of a maladive heredity, he had raked the city with his craving eye, always alert, always disappointed, running into dark side streets, ringing obscure bells, pursuing a shadow that had awakened a spark of hope. And at the end it was always the same—emptiness! To-day he sat moodily, fiercely resentful at a fresh deception.
A certain disdainful defiance, a trick of Violetta Pax, fleeing, bacchante-like, in the sextette, had stirred in him a flash of expectancy, a hungering hope, which had died in hollowness now that she was at his side,unresisting, too ready. So he sat, brooding, heavy-lidded, already turning to other fugitive forms that he might follow in a vague impulse—of all the millions in the city the one most enslaved. When, in her turn, Doré came to take her place beside him, after the first listless acknowledgment he spoke no word to her. She responded by turning her back to him at once, with a complete ignoring. This attitude, so different from the challenging eyes of the others, struck him—he who craved opposition, resistance. All at once, as she was leaving him to take her place between Busby and Harrigan Blood, he said, his soft hand on her arm, in his low, rather melodious feminine voice:
"You haven't paid much attention to me, pretty thing!"
"Your own fault, Pasha!" she said impertinently. "Men run after me!"
And she was aware that his eye, dead as a cold lantern, followed her now, running over her neck and shoulders, aroused as from its lethargy. Satisfied that her instinct had not failed, she took her seat. Then, all at once, she felt a new annoyance: Massingale, the observer, was smiling to himself.
The hilarity began to freshen. Consuelo Vincent, who had magnificent hair, was heard exclaiming:
"I say, girls! we're stiff as a bunch of undertakers. Let's slip our roofs!"
Amid general acclaim, the top-lofty, overburdened hats were consigned to a butler. Every one began to chatter on a higher key, across the constant riseof laughter. Georgie Gwynne, installed by the Royal Observer, saucy and unabashed, was saying:
"Well, Kink, how do you like us?"
In another moment the Comte de Joncy, sublimely content, was being initiated into the art of eating brandied cherries from the ripe lips of Violetta Pax and Georgie Gwynne.
From the moment Doré had taken off her toque, Sassoon and Harrigan Blood had not ceased to stare at her.
"A hat is not becoming to me," she said to Harrigan Blood, and added: "Besides, I have nothing to conceal."
Amid the pyramided and confectioned head-dresses, the simplicity of her own, playing about her forehead like a golden cloud, stood out. For the first time, her youth and naturalness appeared, depending on no artifice.
Harrigan Blood did not go to what attracted him by four ways, or around a hill.
"You don't belong to this crowd," he said pointblank. "Don't lie to me! What are you?"
"The story of my life?" she said. "It's getting to the time, isn't it?"
"You know what I mean," he said roughly. "People don't often interest me. You do! I've been watching you. Do you want backing?"
She was surprised—genuinely so. She had felt that Blood was different—too powerful, too merciless, to be caught as other men were caught. She did not look up at him, as others would have, butremained smiling down at the cloth, running her mischievous fingers through the low dish of yellow pansies before her. And, with the same averted look, which brought her a complete understanding of the impetuousness of his attack, she felt Sassoon's awakened stare and the scrutiny of Judge Massingale, who, while he pretended to talk to Paula Stuart, was listening with a concentrated interest. She was pleased, quite satisfied with herself. Only Lindaberry remained.
"You are very impulsive, aren't you?" she said slowly.
"On the stage? A beginner?"
She nodded.
"Come to me—at my office, any afternoon, after five." And he added, without lowering his voice: "If you're after a career, don't waste your time on this sort. I can put you in a day where you want."
She rose to take her seat on his right, next to Lindaberry.
"Will you come?" he said, detaining her.
"Why not?" she said, lifting her eyes, with a little affectation of surprise at so simple a question.
During her progress about the table she had kept Lindaberry in mind, with a lurking sense of antagonism, a desire to return to the attack, to punish him further. A certain grace that he had, which appealed to her instinct, the quality of instinctive elegance, only increased her resentment. At the bottom, the intensity of this resentment surprised her—without her being able to analyze it.
He had risen with a bow that was neither exaggerated nor curt. There was undeniable power in his face, boyish and weak as it was in its unrestraint, like a flame spurting fiercely on a trembling wick. He brought to men a little sense of fear—never to women. To-day this intensity seemed clouded, not fully awake as if there were still dinning in his ears the echoes of the night before. The dullest observer, looking on his face, would have seen where he was riding. In his own club (where he was adored) bets were up that he would not last the year.
Presently he leaned toward her and said, protected by the shrieks of laughter that surrounded De Joncy:
"Don't you think you were in the wrong? What right had you to come here?"
She understood that Busby had betrayed her to him and to Harrigan Blood.
"Even if I were a—" she gave a glance up the table, "you should make a difference between a woman and a—bottle!"
"You are quite right," he said, after a moment. "Will you accept my apologies? I am seldom discourteous to a woman—never intentionally."
She looked at him, and saw with what an effort he spoke, his brain on fire, yet making no mistake in the precision of his words. She nodded, and turned again to Harrigan Blood, all her nature aroused to opposition at this weakness in such a man. Yet ordinarily her sympathies were quick.
"You are too hard on him," said Harrigan Blood,who had listened. "It's gone too far; he can't help it. He's got his coffin strapped to his back."
"Why doesn't some one help him?" she said irritably.
Blood shrugged his shoulders, answering with the superiority of the self-made man before the misfortune of the friend who has thrown everything away:
"Help him? There's your feminism again! The world's turned crazy on sentimentalized charity! Charity is nothing but a confession of failure! Build up! Let derelicts go! Save him? For what? In New York? We are too busy. The best that can be said is, he's drinking himself to death like a gentleman—doing it royally! His self-control's a miracle—some day there'll be an explosion! If you knew his history—"
"What is his story?"
As Blood was about to begin it, he was interrupted by a general pushing back of chairs. Busby, at the piano, flung out the chords of the sextette that had made a mediocre opera famous.
Half the party crowded, laughing and bantering, to render the chorus, the Comte de Joncy insisting on being taught the latest curious American dance. Tenafly entered to see to the clearing of the room.
He was the type of the valet ennobled, a mask of incomparable vacuity, a secret smile that missed nothing, internal rather than outward, yet still chained to the servant's habit of picking up his feet.
Sassoon summoned him with a nod which Tenafly perceived instantly across the room.
"The little girl in yellow—who is she?"
The eye of the restaurateur passed vaguely over the company, but the instant sufficed to photograph each detail.
"She's new," he said, without moving his lips.
"She's not of the sextette?"
Tenafly shook his head.
"She's dined here—below—I've seen her!"
"Know her name?"
Tenafly searched the pigeonholes of his memory.
"I don't know her."
"Find out what you can—soon!"
"I will, sir!"
He spoke a moment in low tones with the master, who had no evasions with him. At the end Sassoon said impatiently:
"Can't be bothered ... see her for me and get a receipt."
Every one wished to dance, whirling and bumping, none too restrained in their movements, the Royal Observer awkwardly enthusiastic, enjoying himself immoderately. Doré, a little apart, Harrigan Blood at her side, watched with eyes keen with curiosity. Busby, De Joncy, Lindaberry amused themselves hugely, caricaturing the eccentricities of the dance, their arms about their partners, clinging, bacchanalian, in their movements. Doré followed Lindaberry, frowning, feeling a blast of anger that set her sensitive little nostrils to quivering with scorn. The feeling was unreasonable. She did not know why he should disturb her more than another, and yet he did. He seemedso incongruous there; she could not associate his refinement, his courtesy, with Georgie Gwynne, who held him pressed in her arms, her head thrown back, her throat bared, laughing provokingly. She had come to see behind the scenes, and yet this one roused her fury. Besides, there was in his attitude a scornful note—a contemptuous valuation of the woman, of women in general, she felt, as if he were thus proclaiming: "See, this is all they are worth!"
She began to glance at the door, counting the minutes. Judge Massingale came to her side.
"Dance?"
"I turned my ankle this morning."
"You don't want to!"
"No!"
He began to dance with Adèle Vickers, but not as the others, not with the same immoderate abandon. She noted this swiftly.
At last, in a pause between the dances, to Doré's relief, a footman, entering, announced:
"Miss Baxter's car is waiting."
It was an effect she had carefully planned, taking a full half-hour to lead Stacey Van Loan to an innocent participation. A group came up, protesting, acclaiming the discovery of her name—as she had wished.
"Oho! Miss Baxter, is it?"
"We won't let you go!"
"The fun's just beginning!"
"My chauffeur can wait!" said Doré superbly, perceiving the danger of an open retreat before thisover-excited group. Her curiosity was satisfied. She began to foresee what she did not wish to witness, ugliness appearing from behind the carnival mask of laughter. She began to glance apprehensively at Harrigan Blood, who clung to her side, wondering how she could elude him. Then, as the group of protestants broke up, Sassoon, advancing deliberately, in that silken effeminate voice that expected no refusal, said abruptly: "Miss Baxter, where do you live?"
She was on the point of an indignant answer, but suddenly checked herself. She gave the address, but in a sharp muffled tone, boiling with anger within, with a quick resolve to punish him later.
"When are you in?"
Before she could answer, Harrigan Blood pushed forward, determined and insolent.
"Too late, Sassoon, my boy; nothing here for you!"
"I fail to understand you," said Sassoon.
"Don't you? Well, I'll make it plainer!"
"You'll kindly not interfere."
"And I'll thank you not to trespass!"
"What?"
"Don't trespass!"
Sassoon responded angrily; Harrigan Blood retorted with equal heat. In a moment the room was in an uproar.
Doré seized the confusion of the hubbub to slip from the group which rushed in to separate these two men whom a glance from a little Salamander had turned back into the raw.
She went quickly, frightened by the sounds of anger and the increasing uproar, flung into her furs, and stole toward the door.
All at once it opened before her, and in the hall was Lindaberry, roguishly ambushed.
No, no, not so fast!
"No, no, not so fast!"
"No, no, not so fast!"
"No, no—not so fast!" he cried.
He flung out his arm, barring the way. For a moment she was frightened, seeing what was in his eyes, hearing the tumult in the salon behind. Then, without drawing back, she raised her hand gently, and put his arm away.
"Please, Mr. Lindaberry, protect me! I need it! I ought not to be here."
"What?" he said, staring at her.
"I'm a crazy little fool!" she said frantically. "Help me to get away!"
"Crazy little child!" he said, after staring a moment as if suddenly recognizing her. "Get away, then—quickly!"
She felt no more resentment, only a great pity, such as one feels before a magnificent ruin. She wished to stop to speak to him—but she was afraid.
"Thank you," she said, with a look that appealed to him not to judge her. "I am crazy—out of my mind! Come and see me—do!"
The faithful Stacey was below, lounging at the door of the grill-room, as she came tripping down, the sensation of escape sparkling on her delicate features. She was so delighted at the effect he had achieved for her that she gave him an affectionate squeeze of the arm.
"Stacey, you're a darling! When the footman announced 'Miss Baxter's car' you could have heard a pin drop among the squillionairesses!"
Stacey had been told, and dutifully believed, that the luncheon was a heavy affair, very formal, very correct.
"I say, you didn't bore yourself, did you?" he said, noticing the excitement still on her cheeks.
"No, no!"
"Fifth Avenue, or Broadway?"
"Fifth first."
"Bundle up; it's turning cold!"
The next moment the car had found a wedge in the avenue, and Stacey, solicitous, relapsed into gratifying silence.
She was all aquiver with excitement. Her little feet, exhilarated by the memories of music, continued tapping against the floor, and had Stacey turned he would have been surprised at the mischievous, gaylittle smile that constantly rippled and broke about her lips. Indeed, she was delighted with her success, with the discord she had flung between Sassoon and Harrigan Blood. She could scarcely believe that it could be true.
"What! I, little Dodo, have done that!" she said, addressing herself caressingly, overjoyed at the idea of two men of such power descending to a quarrel over a little imp like herself.
She had no illusions about these flesh hunters. If she had given Sassoon her address instead of hotly refusing, it was from a swift vindictive resolve to punish him unmercifully, to entice him into fruitless alleys, to entangle and mock him, with an imperative desire to match her wits against his power, and teach him respect through discomfiture and humiliation. Sassoon did not impress her with any sense of danger. She rather scoffed at him, remembering his silken voice, the slight feminine touch of his hand, the haunted dreamy discontent in his heavy eyes.
Harrigan Blood was different. In her profound education of a Salamander, she knew his type, too: the man without preliminaries, who put abrupt questions, brushing aside the artifices and subtleties that arrest others. She would make no mistake with him—knowing just how little to venture. And yet, always prepared, she might try her fingers across such hungry flames. Strangely enough, she did not resent Harrigan Blood as she did Sassoon; for men of force she made many allowances.
She thought of Lindaberry and Judge Massingale:of Lindaberry rapidly, with a beginning of pity, but still inflamed with an irritation at this magnificent spectacle of a man going to destruction so purposelessly. He, of all, had been the most indifferent, too absorbed to lift his eyes and study what sat by his side. She did not know all the reasons why he so antagonized her, nor whence these reasons came ... yet the feeling persisted, already mingled with a desire to know what was the history that Harrigan Blood had started to tell. Perhaps, after all, there may have been a tragic love-affair. She reflected on this idea, and it seemed to her that if it were so, then in his present madness there might be something noble ... magnificent.
"How stupid a man is to drink!" she said angrily.
"Eh? What's that, Dodo?" said Stacey.
She perceived that, in her absorption, she had spoken half aloud.
"Go down Forty-second and run up Broadway!" she said hastily.
Massingale she could not place. She comprehended the others, even the Comte de Joncy, whom she had left with a feeling of defrauded expectation. But Massingale she did not comprehend, nor did she see him quite clearly. Why was he there? To observe simply, with that tolerant baffling smile of his? What did he want in life? Of her? He had been interested; he had even tried to arouse her own curiosity. She was certain that the effort had been conscious. Then there had come a change—a quiet defensive turn to impersonality. Tactics, or what?
What impression had she left? Would he call, or pass on? She did not understand him at all; yet he excited her strangely. She had a feeling that he would be too strong for her. She had felt in him, each time his glance lay in hers, the reading eye that saw through her, knew beforehand what was turning in her runaway imagination, and that before him her tricks would not avail.
Then she ceased to remember individuals, lost in a confused, satisfied feeling of an experience. It seemed to her as if she had taken a great step—that opportunity had strangely served her, that she had at last entered a world which was worthy of her curiosity.
She had met few real men. She had played with idlers, boys of twenty or boys of forty, interested in nothing but an indolent floating voyage through life. For the first time, she had come into contact with a new type, felt the shock of masculine vitality. Whatever their cynical ideas of conduct, she felt a difference here. They were men of power, with an object, who did not fill their days with trifling, but who sought pleasure to fling off for a moment the obsession of ambitions, to relax from the tyranny of effort, or to win back a new strength in a moment of discouragement. Perhaps if she continued her career she might turn them into friends—loyal friends. It would be difficult but very useful. The men she met usually, at first, misunderstood her.
"Perhaps one of them will change my whole life!Why not? I have a feeling—" she said solemnly to herself, nodding and biting her little under lip.
The truth was, she felt the same after every encounter, dramatizing each man, and flinging herself romantically on a sea of her imagining. But to-day it was a little different. The feeling was more profound, calmer, more penetrating. She felt, indeed, under the influence of a new emotion, a restlessness in the air, an unease in the crowded streets.
Since morning, the glowing warmth of the last summery stillness had slipped away unperceived. The wind in an hour had gone round to the north, and from each whipping banner threaded against the sky one felt the whistling onrush of winter. In the air there was something suspended, a melancholy resounding profoundly, penetrating the soul of the multitude. The gray sluggish currents in the thoroughfare quickened, stirring more restlessly, apprehensive, caught unawares. Little gusts of wind, scouts heralding the chill battalions piling up on the horizon, drove through the city clefts, sporting stray bits of paper to the rooftops, in turbulent dusty, swooping flight, uncovering heads and rolling hats like saucers down the blinded streets. Then suddenly the gusts flattened out. A stillness succeeded, but grim, permeating, monstrous; and above the winter continued to advance.
She felt something in all this—something ominous, prophetic, vaguely troubling, and being troubled, sought to put it from her. She began to dramatize another mood. About her she felt the city she adored:the restaurants, the theaters, the great hotels, the rocket-rise of the whiteTimesbuilding, towering like a pillar of salt in accursed Sodom. But her mind did not penetrate to ugliness. The febrile activity, the glistening surface of pleasure, the sensation of easy luxurious flight awoke in her the intoxication of enjoyment. She adored it, this city whom so many curse, whose luxuries and pleasures opened so facilely to her nod, whose conquest had borne so little difficulty.
She forgot the unease that lay in the air at the sight of the feverish restaurants where so often she had dipped in for adventure of the afternoon. The sight of the theaters, even, with their cold white globes above the outpouring matinée crowds, brought an impatience for the garlanded night, when elegant shadows would come, slipping into flaming portals, amid the flash of ankles, the scent of perfume, glances of women challenging the envy of the crowd.
The multitude churned about her, roaring down into the confusion of many currents: the multitude—the others—whom she felt so distant, so far below her. They were there, white of face, troubled, frowning, harassed, swelling onward to clamoring tasks, spying her with thousand-eyed envy; and everywhere darting in and out, dodging the gray contact of the mass, alert, light, skimming on like sea-gulls trailing their wings across the chafing ocean, the luxurious women of the city sped in rolling careless flight. She felt herself one of them, admiring and admired, glancing eagerly into tonneaus bright with laughter and fashion,deliciously registering the sudden analytical stare of women, or the disloyal tribute boldly telegraphed of men.
She had lunched with Sassoon, De Joncy, Massingale. She was a part of all this—of the Brahmin caste; and her little body rocking to the swooping turns, deliciously cradled, her eyes half closed, her nostrils drawing in this frantic air as if it were the breath of an enchanting perfume, she let her imagination go: already there by right, married to Massingale or Lindaberry—she saw not which quite clearly. Nor did it matter. Only she herself mattered.
"Riverside or park, Dodo?"
"Through the park," she said; and roused from her castle-building, she laughed at herself with a tolerant amused confusion.
"Good spirits, eh?"
"So-so!"
In the park there were fewer automobiles. She no longer had the feeling of the crowd pressing about her, claiming her for its own. There were no restaurants or climbing façades. There was the earth, bare, shivering, and the sky filled with the invader.
She had a horror of change, and suffered with a profound and uncomprehended trouble when, each year, she saw summer go into the mystery of winter, and again when came the awakening miracle. Yesterday, when she had passed, the splendor of the trees, it is true, lay shorn upon the ground; but the earth was warm, pleasant, with a fragrant odor, the air soft and the evening descended in a glow. Nowthere was a difference. Over all was the dread sense of change. Each tree stood alone, aghast, against the sky, the ground bleak, bare, the leaves wandering with a little moaning, driven restlessness. Even against the gray banks piling up against the north there was something vacant and horribly endless. From tree, sky and empty earth a spirit had suddenly withdrawn, and all this change had come within an hour, in a twinkling—without warning.
Now she could no longer put it from her, this resistless verity that laid its chill fingers across her heart. It was not of the change in nature she thought—no; but of that specter which some day, inexorably, would rise from a distant horizon, even as the wind in an hour goes round to the north and winter rushes in. She was twenty-two and she had a horror of this thief, who came soft-footed and unreal, to steal the meager years.
She stiffened suddenly, clutching her stole to her throat.
"Too cold?"
"Yes!"
"I've got a coat for you."
"No; go back!"
"Already?"
"Yes!"
"Tea?"
"No! Go back!"
She closed her eyes, not to see, but the thing was there, everywhere, in the air that came to her, in the sad tiny sounds that rose about them. Yes, she herself would change inexorably, as all things filled their appointed time. What she had was given but for a day—all her fragile armament was but for a day. Not much longer could she go blithely along the summery paths of summer. She thought of Winona Horning, who had played too long. She thought of thirty as a sort of sepulcher, an end of all things! She felt something new impelling her on—a haste and a warning.
"It can't go on always!" she said to herself, in her turn using the very words that Winona had uttered. "Not much longer. A year, only a year, then I must make up my mind!"
"Blue, Dodo?" said Stacey.
"Horribly!"
The word seemed so incongruously ridiculous, after what she had felt, that she burst into exaggerating laughter.
"Going to change your mind?"
"No, no! I'm out of sorts—a cold! Get me back!"
They reentered the city as the first owlish lights were peeping out, futile, brave little rebels against the spreading night. Below, high in the air, suspended above the ghostly town whose sides had faded, the great illumined eye of the Metropolitan tower shone forth. Then all at once long sentinel files of lights rose on the avenue and down the fleeting side streets, miraculous electric signs burst out against the night, a myriad windows caught fire, and the city, which a moment ago had seemed flat, climbed blazing into the air.They were again nearing the great artery, which changes its name with the coming of the artificial night, no longer Broadway, but the Rialto, with its mysteries of entangled beams and profound pools of darkness, its laughter free or suspect, its mingled virtue and vice, elbowing and staring at each other, its joy and its despair treading in each other's steps.
But the dread reminder was still above, hurling its black engulfing storm across the bombardment of a million lights, that painted it with a strange red glare, but could not destroy its menace. A few cold drops of rain, wind driven, dashed against their faces, as they went with the crowd, scuttling on. There was something unreal now in all this, something artificial in the glimpse of vacant restaurants setting their candles for the guests who went fleeing home. Of plunging temperament, she had a horror of these rare depressions, striving frantically against the realization of what must be, and striving thus, always suffering the more keenly. In seeing all this fugitive world, flat shadows driven restlessly as the shorn splendor of the streets, she asked herself of what use it was after all, to be young, to be attractive, to go laughing and dancing, to dare, to conquer ... why, indeed, childhood, maturity and old age should stretch so far, and youth, the exultant brilliant hour she clung to, should be allotted only the few, the fingered years! She felt a sense of loneliness, of terrified isolation, the need of some one to come and talk to her, to interpose himself between her and these unanswerable questions, to close her eyes and stop her ears.
When they reached Miss Pim's the rain was beginning in little flurries. She ran in and up-stairs hurriedly. She had hoped that she would find her room lighted, that Snyder or Winona would be home. No one was there, and when she opened the door she entered a region of obscure shadowy forms, faintly lighted by the reflection of a street lamp below. Across the windows on the avenue was the cyclopean eye of the Metropolitan tower, which she saw always every night with her last peeping glance from her covers—enormous eye, bulging, swollen with curiosity. At the other side was the wall of brick pressing against the window-pane, this wall she hated as she hated the idea of the commonplace in life.
She stood in the luminous pathway, gazing outward.
"What is the matter with me?" she thought. "Am I like Winona? Am I getting tired of it all? Or is it—what?"
The metallic summons of the telephone broke upon her mood. She lighted the gas quickly. The telephone continued to clamor, but she took no step toward it. All that she had planned as a choice for the evening no longer interested her. She was in another mood. She flung down her things rapidly. Then, remembering the bouquet of Sassoon's, she took it off, pricking her fingers. Inclosed was a bank-note for a hundred dollars!
Then she began to laugh—a bitter incongruous note. She understood now why he had gone so abruptly to his questions, confident in the test he hadprepared among the fragile stems of orchids and dainty yellow pansies.
All at once her eye went to her pin-cushion, caught by the white note of visiting-cards left there by Josephus, the colored chore-boy. She crossed quickly, stretching out her finger impatiently. Which of the four had come, as she had determined? The first bore the name of Harrigan Blood, the second Albert Edward Sassoon. She stood staring at the last, the hundred-dollar bill still wrapped in her fingers.... Sassoon and Harrigan Blood! She let the cards drop, profoundly disappointed, prey to a sudden heavy return of disillusionment.
The telephone, querulous, impatient, again called her, but she turned her shoulder impatiently. Now the thought of an evening of gaiety revolted her. She changed quickly, wrapped herself up in an ulster, took an umbrella and went out, though by the wide-faced clock in the skies it was scarcely six. Before, she had sought to break away, to escape recklessly from the depression that claimed her: now she sought it out, surrendering to this tristesse that whirled her on with its exquisite benumbing melancholy.
She supped at a lunch-room in Lexington Avenue, paying out a precious thirty cents for a cup of coffee, a bowl of crackers and milk, a baked potato. Not many were there yet. A young fellow without an overcoat, stooping already, pinched by struggle, came and sat at her table, seeking an opportunity to offer her the sugar. But, seeing her so silent and inwardly tortured, he did not persist.