SHE was talking the most indifferent nothings as they went up the stairs to the dancing-room, a largish space with an encircling gallery. As usual the dancing-floor was a clearing in a thicket of tables. It was swarming already with couples engaged in the same jig as the night before.
The costumes were duller than at night, of course. Most of the men wore business suits; the women were not décolletées, and they kept on their hats.
Only Forbes noted at once that the crowd included many very young girls and mere lads. Here, too, there was a jumbled mixture of plebeian and aristocrat and all the grades between. There were girls who seemed to have been wanton in their cradles, and girls who were aureoled with an innocence that made their wildest hilarity a mere scamper of wholesome spirits.
An eccentricity of this restaurant was a searchlight stationed in the balcony. The operator swept the floor with its rays, occasionally fastening on a pair of professional dancers, and following it through the maze, whimsically changing the colors of the light to red or green or blue. For the general public the light was kept rosy.
When Forbes arrived a certain couple whirled madly off the dancing-floor straight into the midst of Persis' guests, with the havoc of a strike in a game of tenpins.
The young man's heel ground one of the buttons of Forbes' shoe deep into his instep, and the young girl's flying hand smote him in the nose. He needed all hisself-control to repress a yowl of pain and dismay. Persis must have suffered equal battery, but she quietly straightened out the dizzy girl and smiled.
"Come right in, Alice; don't stop to knock."
The girl under whose feet the floor still eddied clung to Persis and stared at her a second, then gasped:
"Oh, Miss Cabot, is ityou? I must have nearlykilledyou. Can you evereverforgiveme?"
Persis patted her hand and turned her round to Forbes: "You'd better ask Mr. Forbes. You gave him a lovely black eye."
The girl acknowledged the introduction with a duck and a prayer of wild appeal:
"Oh, Mr. Forbes,whata ghastly,ghastlyshame! Did I really hurt you? I must have simplymurderedyou. I'm soashamed. Can you evereverforgive me?"
Forbes smiled at her melodramatic agitation: "It's nothing at all, Miss—Miss—I never liked this nose, anyway. I only wish you had hit it harder, Miss—"
"Miss Neff," Persis prompted. "You met her mother last night."
Forbes vaguely remembered that somebody had said something about a beautiful mother of a more beautiful daughter; but he could not frame it into a speech, before Persis startled the girl beyond reach of a pretty phrase, by casually asking:
"Were you expecting to meet your mother here this afternoon, Alice?"
"Good Lord, I should saynot! Why?"
"I just wondered. She is to meet us here."
"When? In heaven'sname! When?"
"She ought to be here now."
Alice thrust backward a palsied hand and, clutching the young man she had danced with, dragged him forward. He was shaking hands with Ten Eyck, and brought him along.
"Stowe! Stowe!" Alice exclaimed, with a tragic fire that did not greatly alarm the young man; he was apparently used to little else from her.
"Yes, dear," he answered, with a lofty sweetness; and she cried:
"Oh, honey, whatdoyou suppose?"
"What, dear?"
"That awful Mother of mine is expected here anymoment!"
The young man's majesty collapsed like an overblown balloon in one pop: "Lord!"
Tableau! Ten Eyck, seeing it, muttered, gloatingly:
"Some folks gits ketched."
Alice turned eyes of reproach upon him:
"She'llkillus if she finds us together. Isn't there some other way out?"
"I could go down the stairs the waiters come up," said Stowe; "but how will you get home?"
"Oh, Mother will get me home all right, never fear!" said Alice. "Run for yourlife, honey. I'll have my maid call you on the 'phone later."
The young man gave her one long sad look fairly reeking with desperate kisses and embraces. Then he vanished into the crowd.
Alice must have remarked the comments in Forbes' eyes, for she turned to him:
"You mustn't misunderstand the poor boy, Mr. Forbes. Mr. Webb is asbraveas alion, but he runs away on my account. He knows that my mother will give me no rest if she finds it out."
"I understand perfectly," said Forbes. "There are times when the better a soldier is the faster he runs!"
"Mr. Forbes is a soldier," Persis explained.
"Oh, thank you, twice as much!" said Alice, "for appreciating the situation." Then she turned to Persis, and clenched her arm as if she were about to implore some unheard-of mercy: "And, Oh, Miss Cabot, will you dome oneterriblygreat favor? I'll remember it to mydyingday, if you only will."
"Of course, my dear," Persis answered, with her usual serenity. "What is it? Do you want me to tell your mother that I met you somewhere and dragged you here against your will to meet her?"
Alice's wide eyes widened to the danger-point:
"Aren't you simplywonderful! How on earth could you possibly have evereverguessed it?"
Persis cast a sidelong glance at Forbes; it had all the effect of a wink without being so violent.
"I'm a mind-reader," she said.
Alice caught the glance but not the irony of it, and exclaimed:
"Indeedshe is, Mr. Forbes. She reallyis."
"I know she is," said Forbes, with a quiet conviction that was almost more noisy than the violent emphasis of Alice.
Persis gave Forbes another sidelong glance; this time with a meek wonderment in place of irony. Once more the man had shown a kind of awe of her. Unwittingly he was attacking her on her most defenseless wall; for a woman who is always hearing praise of her beauty or her vivacity, so hungers and thirsts after some recognition of her intellectual existence that she is usually quite helpless before a tribute to it.
Persis knew that there was no importance in her guess at what Alice was about to ask; but there was importance in the high rating Forbes gave it. The comfort she found in this homage was put to flight by Alice's nails nipping her arm.
"Before mother comes we must rehearse what we're to say. She thinks I went to one of those lectures on Current Topics. They're so very improvingthat Mother can't bear to go herself. She sendsmeand then forgets to ask me what it was all about. So I sneaked it to-day and met Stowe."
Persis could not resist a motherly question: "Is this an ideal trysting-place, do you think?"
"Where's the harm? We couldn't go to the Park very well. Everybody's always goingbyand lookingon."
"Why don't you receive Mr. Webb at home?"
"Oh,whydon't I, indeed! Mother won't allow him within amileof the place. Didn't you know that?"
Persis shook her head and turned to Forbes: "Doesn't it sound old-fashioned, a young girl afraid of her parents?"
"Quite medieval," Forbes agreed.
"Oh, but you are quaint, Alice," Persis laughed. "I thought it only happened in books and plays, but here's Alice actually obeying a cruel order like that. I'd like to see my father try to boss me. I'd really enjoy it as a change."
Alice broke in: "Oh, fathers—they're different! My poor Daddelums was the sweetest thing on earth. I wrapped him round my little finger. But mother—umm, she gets her own way, I can tell you—at least shethinksshe does. I wouldn't letanyearthly power tear me away from my darling Stowe, but I don't dare face her down."
"I thought she always liked Mr. Webb?" Persis said.
"Oh, she did till his father's will was probated. His insurance was immense, but his debts were immenser. So poor Stowe is dumped upon the world with hardly a cent. Of course, I love him all the more; but mother has turned against him. I wouldn't mind starving with Stowe, but mother issomaterialistic! She wants to marry me off to that dreadful old Senator Tait."
"Dreadful?" snorted Winifred, who had listened in silence. "Old? Senator Tait is neither dreadful nor old. He is a cavalier, and in the prime of his powers."
"You can have him!" snapped Alice, with a flare of temper that she regretted instantly, and the more sincerely since she knew that Winifred had long been angling vainly and desperately for the Senator. There was a bitterer sarcasm in her retort than she meant, but Winifredknew what Alice was thinking, and canceled it by meeting it frankly:
"I wish I could have him. God knows I'd prefer him to any of these half-baked whippersnappers that—"
"Winifred!" Persis murmured, subduingly; and Miss Mather subsided like a retreating thunder-storm. "The Senator is one of the—"
"I know he is, my dear," Alice broke in, in her most soothing tone. "He's far,fartoo splendid a man for a fool like me. But can't I admit how splendid he would be in the Senate Chamber without wanting him in my boudoir?"
"Alice!" gasped Persis. "Remember that there are young men present."
Forbes spoke very solemnly: "Pardon my asking, but do you really mean that Senator Tait is—is proposing for your hand?"
"So my awful mother says."
"It doesn't sound like the Senator Tait I used to know."
"You knew him well?" Persis asked, with a quick eagerness that did not quite conceal a note of surprise.
Forbes caught it, and answered somewhat icily: "I had that privilege. He and my father used to ride to the hounds together. In fact, they were together when my father's horse threw him and fell on him, and crushed him to death. Senator Tait brought the body home to my poor mother. He was very dear to us all."
Persis looked what sympathy she could for such remote suffering. And Forbes was something less of a stranger. Also he had moved one step closer to her degree.
He had appeared first under the auspices of Murray Ten Eyck, who guaranteed him as an officer in the army. He had demonstrated his own dignity and magnetism. And now his family was sponsored by an old-time friendship with Senator Tait, a very Warwick of American royalty.
PERSIS was not of the period or the set that thinks much of family. In fact, the whole world and its aristocracies have been shaken by too many earthquakes of late to leave walls standing high enough to keep youth from overlooking and overstepping them. Few speak of caste nowadays except novelists, editors, and the very old. What aristocracies we have are clubs or cliques gathered by a community of tastes, and recruited individually.
In any case, the Persis that was willing to go out into the byways and highways and public dancing-places would have made no bones of granting her smiles and her hospitality to anybody that entertained her, mountebank or mummer, tradesman or riding-master.
And yet it did Forbes no harm in her eyes to be established as of high lineage and important acquaintance. If only now he were rich, he would be graduated quite into the inner circle of those who were eligible to serious consideration.
Unconsciously Ten Eyck gave him this diploma also, though his motive was rather one of rebuke to Persis for her little tang of surprise.
"You needn't raise your brows, Persis, because Forbesy knows senators and things," he said. "He's a plutocrat, too. I caught him depositing a million dollars in one of our best little banks to-day."
"A million dollars!" Forbes gasped. "Is there that much money in the world?"
Forbes had no desire to obtain the reputation of moneyunder false pretenses. Yet he could not delicately discuss his exact poverty. He could not decently announce: "I have only my small army pay and a few hundred dollars in the bank." It would imply that these people were interested in his financial status. Yet even the pretense by silence troubled him, till his problem was dismissed by an interruption:
"Is anybody at home?"
Mrs. Neff spoke into the stillness as if she had materialized from nothing. Nobody had noticed her approach, and every one was startled. To Forbes her sharp voice came as a rescue from incantation. And Mrs. Neff was in the mood of the most unromantic reality. She did not pause to be greeted or questioned, but went at her discourse with a flying start:
"I'm mad and I'm hungry as the devil—oh, pardon me! I didn't see my angel child. Alice, darling, how on earth did you get here? Murray, if you have a human heart in your buzzum get the waiter man to run for a sandwich and a—a—no, I'll be darned if I'll take tea, in spite of example to youngers, who never follow our good examples, anyway; make it a highball, Murray; Scotch, and quick!"
The waiter nodded in response to Ten Eyck's nod, and vanished with an excellent imitation of great speed.
"Give over, Win!" Mrs. Neff continued, prodding Miss Mather aside and wedging forward with the chair Ten Eyck surrendered to her. "What's in those sandwiches? Lettuce? Thanks! Don't all ask me at once where I've been! I'm the little lady what seen her dooty and done it. If my angel child had done hers she would be even now listening to a lecture on Current Topics, so that she could inform her awful mother, as she calls me, what the tariff talk is all about, and who Salonica is, and why the Vulgarians are fighting the Balkans. But, of course, being a modern child, she plays hookey and goes tothés dansantswhile her poor old mother works."
"But mother dear, I was just—"
"Don't tell it, my child! I know what you're going to say: that Persis picked you up and dragged you here by the hair, and Persis will back you up, of course, like the dear little liar she is. But I'll save you the trouble, darlings. Where is he? Is he still here or did he learn of my approach and flit?"
"He—who?" said every one, zealously, with a stare of innocence sadly overdone.
"He—who?" Mrs. Neff mocked. "He-haw! Oh, but you're a putrid lot of actors. So he has been here. Well, I mention no names, but if a certain young person whose initials are Stowe Webb wants to meet a little old lady named Trouble, let him come out from under the table."
"Mother dear, how you do run on," Alice protested. "I don't think you really need another highball."
"Another! Listen to that. Dutiful child trying to save erring mother from a drunkard's grave! And me choking with thirst since luncheon! Do you know where I've been? Yes? Then I will tell you. I've been at a committee meeting of the Vacation Savings Fund."
The waiter brought a tiny flask, a tall glass, and a siphon, and offered to mix her a potion; but she motioned him aside and arranged it to her own taste. The band struck up, and she sipped hastily as she talked:
"That's the most insulting music I ever heard, and I'm just mad enough to dance well. If nobody has any prior claim on this young soldier man, he's mine. Mr. Forbes, would you mind supporting your grandmother around the room once or twice?"
Forbes had counted on having this dance with Persis. He had wasted one important tango while Alice poured out her woes. To squander this dance on her mother was a grievous loss. There was nothing for him to do, however, but yield.
He bowed low and smiled. "Nothing would give me more pleasure."
Mrs. Neff returned his bow with an old-fashioned courtesy, as she beamed:
"Very prettily said! Old fashioned and nice. My first husband would have answered like that. Did Murray tell you that I had offered you the job of being my third husband?"
"Mother!" Alice gasped.
Forbes was exquisitely ill at ease. It is hard to parry banter of that sort from a woman. He bowed again and answered with an ambiguous smile:
"Nothing would give me more pleasure."
"Fine! Then we may as well announce our engagement. Kind friends, permit me to introduce my next husband, Mr.—Mr.—what is your first name, darling?"
"Mother!" Alice implored.
"Oh, I'm sure his first name can't be Mother. But we're missing the dance. Come along, hero mine!"
Forbes cast a farewell look of longing at Persis, who was regarding him with an amused bewilderment.
The blare of the band was as effectual as a Gabriel's trumpet opening graves. From the tables the dead came to life and took on stilts if not wings.
Big Bob Fielding and Winifred Mather set out at once in close embrace.
"Look at 'em! Look at 'em!" Ten Eyck chortled. "They're grappled like two old-time battleships on a heavy sea." Ten Eyck was the great-great-grandson of one of the first commissioned officers in the American navy, a rival even of Paul Jones. So now his comment was nautical. "Bob and Winifred remind me of theBonhomme Richardand theSerapis. And Winifred is like old John Paul Jones: when everybody else is dead her motto is: 'I've just begun to fight.'"
But Alice could not smile. She folded her hands and sighed. "It's awful to be a widow when they play that tango."
Persis provided for her at once. "Murray, you take Alice out and dance with her."
Ten Eyck saluted. "Come on, Alice, we'll go in for the consolation stakes."
Alice protested: "But we can't leave you alone."
Persis beckoned to a lonesome-looking acquaintance at another table, and he came to her with wings outstretched. She locked pinions with him, and they were away.
Ten Eyck put his arms up like racks; Alice hung herself across them, and they romped away. As they performed it, the dance was as harmless as a game of tag.
As Persis was twirled past Forbes now and again, her eyes would meet his with a gaze of deep inquiry.
And he was thinking so earnestly of her that at some indefinitely later period he was almost surprised to find that Mrs. Neff was in his arms, and that they were footing it intricately through a restless maze. He realized, also, that he had not spoken to her yet. He cast about in his mind for a topic of conversation, as one whips a dark trout-pool, and brought up a question:
"That Vacation Savings Fund—may I ask what it is?"
"You may, indeed, young man," she answered, and talked glibly as she danced, occasionally imitating a strain of music with mocking sounds. "It's an attempt a lot of us old women have been making to teach the poor woiking goil what we can't learn ourselves; namely, to save up money—la-de-de-da-de-da!The poor things slave like mules and they're paid like slaves—te-dum-te-dum!—yet most of them never think of putting a penny by for a rainy day, or what's more important—ta-ra-rum!—a sunny day.
"So Willie Enslee's mother, and Mrs. Clifton Ranger, and the Atterby girls, and a gang of other busybodies got ourselves together and cooked up a scheme—la-de-de-da-de-da!—to encourage the girls to stay home—ta-ra-rum!—from a few moving-picture fêtes and cut down their ice-cream-soda orgies a little, and put the pennies into a fund to be used in giving each of them—te-dum-te-dum—a little holiday when her chance came—te-di-do-dee!"
"Splendid!" said Forbes. "Did it work out?"
"Rather. We started with forty girls, and now we've got—how many do you suppose?"
"A hundred and fifty."
"Eight thousand! And they've saved fifty thousand dollars!"
"That's wonderful!" Forbes exclaimed, stopping short with amazement. Instantly they were as battered and trodden by the other dancers as a planet would be that paused in its orbit.
"Come on, or we'll be murdered!" cried Mrs. Neff, and dragged him into the current again.
Forbes looked down at her with a different feeling. This typical gadabout, light-minded, cynical little old woman with the girlish ways, was after all a big-hearted toiler in the vineyard. She did not dress as a Sister of Charity, and she did not pull a long and philanthropic face, but she was industrious in good works.
He was to learn much more of this phase of New York wealth, its enormous organizations for the relief of wretchedness, and its instant response to the human cry once it makes itself heard above the noise of the cars or the music of the band.
City people have always made a pretense of concealing their sympathetic expressions under a cynical mask. It is this mask that offends so many of the praters against cruelty, irritates them to denunciations more merciless than the lack of mercy they berate, and blinds their nearsighted eyes to the village heart that beats in every city—a huge heart made up of countless village hearts.
So Mrs. Neff, having betrayed an artless Samaritanism, made haste to resume the red domino of burlesque to hide her blushes, as children caught in a prettyaction fall to capering. Her motive was not lost on Forbes when she said:
"We've got to do something to get into heaven, you know. That line about the camel and the needle's eye is always with us poor rich, though the Lord knows I'm not rich. I hope you have a lot of money, or we'll starve—unless we loot the Savings Fund."
He hardly knew what to say to this, so he danced a little harder and swept her off her feet, till she was gasping for breath and pleading:
"Stop, stop! I'm afraid I'm only an old woman after all. And I didn't want you to know."
He led her to a chair, where she sank exhausted and panting hard. By the time the dance was over and the rest had returned, she was herself again.
"My new husband is the love of a tangoist," she babbled across her highball. "If that infernal committee meeting hadn't kept me so late, I could have had more. Are you all going to the Tuesday to-night?"
They all were.
"I was to have taken Alice, but I'm going to put her to bed without any supper. I'll take Mr. Forbes instead. Will you come? Nothing would give you more pleasure. That's right. Sorry I can't accept your invitation to dinner, but I'm booked. What about the opera to-night? It's 'Tristan and Isolde' with Fremstad. Senator Tait was to have taken us, but he can't go; so Alice won't care to go. He sent me his box, and I have all those empty chairs to fill. Mr. Forbes can fill one. You can, can't you?" He nodded helplessly, and she hunted him a ticket out of a handbag as ridiculously crowded as a boy's first pocket. "It begins at a quarter to eight. I can't possibly be there before nine. You go when you want to. Who else can come?"
Persis said that she was dining at Winifred's with Willie, and added: "He hates the opera, but if I can drag him along I'll come. And if I can't I'll come anyway."
Winifred accepted for Bob. "I always think I ought to have been a grand-opera singer," she sighed, "I've got the build for it."
Ten Eyck "had a dinner-job on," but promised to drop in when he could.
Having completed her quorum, and distributed her tickets, Mrs. Neff made ready to depart by attacking her highball again. The music began before she had finished it, and Forbes rose before Persis with an old-time formula.
"May I have the honor?"
As Persis stepped into his arms, Winifred cried:
"Traitress! It's my turn with the li'l snojer man."
And Mrs. Neff caught Persis' elbow to say: "Be very circumspect or I'll sue you for alienation of the alimony."
Forbes and Persis sent back mocking smiles as they side-stepped into the carousel.
She was his again in the brief mock-marriage of the dance. His very muscles welcomed her with such exultance that he must forcibly restrain them from too ardent a clasp. The whole mood of the music was triumph, overweening boastfulness, and irresistible arrogance. It was difficult to be afraid of anything in that baronial walk-around.
But Forbes was afraid of silence. It gave imagination too loose a rein. To keep himself from loving her too well, and offending her again after she had forgiven him once, he had recourse to language, the old concealer of thought.
At first he had been too new to the steps to talk freely. Words had blurted out of him as from a beginner in a riding-school. But now there was a spirit in his feet that led him who knows how?
Forbes astonished Persis and himself by his first words:
"Don't you ever sleep, Miss Cabot?"
She threw him a startled glance. "Do I look so jaded as all that?"
He was so upset that he lost step and regained it withawkwardness of foot and word. "No, no, it's be—because you look—you look as if you slept for—forever. I don't mean that exact—exactly, either."
"Then what do you mean, Mr. Forbes?"
"I mean: I left you this morning at about four o'clock in one costume, and I saw you at eight in another."
"At eight this morning? Oh yes, I was riding with my father. Were you riding, too? I didn't see you."
"Oh yes, you did. I stood on the bridge at daybreak. And you looked at me and cut me dead."
"Did I really? I must have been asleep."
"Far from it. Your eyes were as bright as—as—"
"This music is very reassuring, isn't it?"
"Yes; please blame the music if I grow too rash. But you really were wonderful. I thought you were a boy at first. And you ride so well! You were racing your father. How could you be so wide awake after so strenuous a night?"
"Oh, I had to get up. It is poor Dad's only chance nowadays. He's awfully busy in the Street, and he's so worried. And he needs the exercise. He won't take it unless I go along."
There was an interlude of tenderness in the music. He responded to it.
"That's very beautiful and self-sacrificing of you. But how can you keep up the pace?"
"I can't, much longer. I'm almost all in. The season is nearly over, though. If everything goes right, Dad and I will get out of town—to the other side, perhaps. Then I can sleep all the way across. If he can't go abroad, we'll be alone anyway, since everybody else will leave town. Then I can catch up on sleep."
"You must be made of iron," he said.
"Am I so heavy as all that?"
"Oh, no, no, you are—you are—" But he could not say anything without saying too much. She saved the day by a change of subject.
"And I stared right at you, and didn't know you?"
"Why should you? It was stupid of me to expect you to remember me. But I did, and—when you didn't, I was crushed."
"Of course you were," she crooned. "I always want to murder anybody who forgets me."
"Surely that can't happen often? How could any one forget You?"
It was perfectly sincere, yet it sounded like the bumptious praise of a yokel. She raised her eyelids and reproved him.
"That's pretty rough work for a West-Pointer. Rub it out and do it over again."
Again he lost the rhythm, and suffered agonies of confusion in recovering it. But the tango music put him on his feet again. How could he be humble to that uppish, vainglorious tune, that toreador pomposity?
Persis herself was like a pouter pigeon strutting and preening her high breast. All the dancers on the floor were proclaiming their grandeur, playing the peacock.
Forbes grew consequential, too, as he and Persis marched haughtily forward shoulder to shoulder, and outer hands clasped, then paused for a kick, whirled on their heels, and retraced their steps with the high knee-action of thoroughbreds winning a blue ribbon.
Then each hopped awhile on one foot, the other foot kicking between the partner's knees. Then they dipped to the floor. As he swept her back to her full height, the music turned sly and sarcastic. It gave an unreal color to his words.
"Will you pardon me one question?"
"Probably not. What is it?"
"Didn't you wear this same hat yesterday?"
Her head came up with a glare. "Isn't that a rather catty remark for a man to make?"
"Oh, I didn't mean it that way," he faltered. "It's a beautiful hat."
"No hat is beautiful two days in succession. It's unkind of you, though, to notice it, and rub it in."
"For heaven's sake, don't take it that way. I—I followed this hat of yours for miles and miles yesterday."
"You followed this hat?"
"Yes."
They danced, marched, countermarched, pirouetted, in a pink mist. And he told her in his courtly way, with his Southern fervor, how he had been captivated by the white plume, and the shoulder and arm, and the foot; how vainly he had tried to overtake her for at least a fleeting survey. He told her how keen his dismay was when she escaped him and fled north. He told her how he made a note of the number of her car. He did not tell her that he forgot it, and he did not dare to tell her that he was jealous of the unknown to whom she had hastened.
Persis could not but be pleased, though she tried to disguise her delight by saying:
"It must have been a shock to you when you saw what was really under this hat."
She had not meant to fish so outrageously for a compliment. She understood, too late, that her words gave him not only an excuse, but a compulsion to praise. Praise was not withheld.
"If you could only know how I—how you—how beautiful you—how—I wish you'd let me say it!"
"You've said it," she murmured. His confusion revealed an ardor too profound to be rebuked or resisted. She luxuriated in it, and rather sighed than smiled:
"I'm glad you like me."
It was a more girlish speech than she usually made. Unwittingly she crept a trifle closer to him, and breathed so deeply that he felt her bosom swell against him with a strangely gentle power. By immeasurably subtle degrees the barrier between them dissolved, or rather shifted untilit surrounded them. They were no longer strangers. They were together within a magic inclosure.
He understood the new communion, and an impulse swept him to crush her against him. He fought it so hard that his arm quivered. She felt the battle in his muscles, and rejoiced in the duel of his two selves, both hers. She knew that she had a lover as well as a guardian in his heart.
She looked up to see what manner of man this was who had won so close to her soul in so brief a time. He looked down to see who she really was. Their eyes met and held, longer than ever before, met studiously and hospitably, as the eyes of two lonesome children that have become neighbors meet across a fence.
What she saw in his gaze gave a little added crimson to her cheeks. And then the music flared up with a fierce ecstasy that penetrated even their aloofness. He caught her close and spun with her in a frenzied rapture round and round. He shunted other dancers aside and did not know it. He was glared at, rebuked, and did not know it. The impetus of the whirl compelled a tighter, tighter clutch. Their hands gripped faster. He forgot everything in the mystic pursuit and surrender of the dance, the union and disunion of their bodies—her little feet companioning his, the satin and steel of her tense sinews, the tender duality of her breast against the rock of his, the flutter of her quick, warm breath on his throat, the sorcery of her half-averted eyes tempting his lips almost unbearably.
The light burned about them like a flaming rose. The other couples had paused and retreated, staring at them; but they did not heed their isolation. They swooped and careened and twirled till they were blurred like a spinning top, till they were exhausted and wavering in their flight.
At length he found that she was breathless, pale, squandered. She hung all her weight on his arm, and grew so heavy that it ached.
And now, when he looked down at her, he saw that the operator had inadvertently put upon them the green light. In Forbes' eyes it had a sickly, cadaverous glimmer as of death and dissolution. He did not know that she was about to swoon; but she was so gray and lifeless that he was frightened. In the green, clammy radiance she looked as if she had been buried and brought back to the daylight. She was horribly beautiful.
Just in time the music came to an abrupt end, and thedanse macabrewas done. But the floor still wheeled beneath his feet, and he staggered as he held her limp and swaying body.
She shook the dizziness from her eyes, and put away his arm, but seized it again. He supported her to the table and guided her to a seat. Then he caught up a glass and put it to her wan mouth.
Ten Eyck, who had been watching them from his place, shoved a chair against Forbes relaxing knees, and set a tall glass in his hand, saying:
"Gad, old man, you need a drink!"
Forbes took a gulp of a highball and sat staring at Persis. Ten Eyck was quietly dipping his fingers into his own glass and flicking water on Persis' face. She regained her self-control wonderingly. Her lips tried pluckily to smile, though her eyes studied Forbes with a kind of terrified anger—more at herself than at him. He met them with a gaze of adoration and dread.
As his hot brow cooled, it seemed that an icy hand passed across it.
THE safety match that resists all other friction needs only the touch of its peculiar mate to break into flame. And many chemical compounds, including souls, change their behavior and expose their secret identities when they meet just the right—or the just the wrong—reagent.
Persis Cabot was the wonder of her world for being at the same time so cordial and so cold, so lightly amused, so extravagant, and yet apparently so immune to the follies of passion. She was thought to be incapable of losing either her head or her heart. Mrs. Neff called her "fireproof."
Willie Enslee was universally accepted as her fiancé, simply because his wealth and his family's prestige were greater than anybody's else in her circle. This made him the logical candidate. Everybody knew that he was mad about Persis in his petty way. But nobody expected Persis to fall madly in love with Willie, or to let that failure keep her from marrying him.
And now Forbes appeared from the wilderness and strange influences began to work upon her. She began to study the man with increasing interest. She resented his effect upon her, and could not resist it. He was like a sharp knife, or a loaded revolver, or the edge of a cliff, quiet and unpursuing, yet latent with danger, terrifying and therefore fascinating.
Hitherto she had played with firearms and danced along abysses and juggled daggers in many a flirtation, but always she had kept her poise and felt no danger. Now she was just a trifle startled by a feeling of insecurity.
Many men had made ferocious love to her, had tried to set up a combustion in her heart, had threatened her with violence, with murder and with suicide; and she had laughed at them, laughed them back to the sanity she had never lost.
But this man Forbes made no campaign against her. If he pressed her too hard in the dance he apologized at once. He seemed to be at her mercy, and yet she felt that he brought with him some influence stronger than both. He was like one of Homer's warriors attended by a clouded god or goddess bent on his victory or his destruction—she could not tell which. When she caught him gazing at her devouringly he looked away, yet she found herself looking away, too, and breathing a little faster.
Scores of men had embraced her as she danced with them and some of them had muttered burning love into her ear. But they left her cold. This man said little or less, and he held her almost shyly; yet she felt a strange kindling in his touch, saw in his eye a smoldering.
In this last dance with him a panic of helplessness had confounded her. He had whirled her about till she had lost all sense of floor and ceiling. She felt herself falling and spinning down the gulfs of space in a nightmare of rapture. She would have swooned had he not seen how white and lost she was and stopped short. She had felt that other people were staring and making comments.
She was afraid to dance with him again. When she had regained her self-control she made a pretext to escape out of the lateness of the hour and the necessity of dressing for dinner and the opera.
There was an almost hysterical flippancy in her chatter. In spite of the protestations of the three men, she insisted on paying the bill. It was her own party, she said. The waiter looked sad at this, but what she left on the plate tempered his despair of her sex.
She offered to drop Forbes and Ten Eyck at their destinations, and they clambered into her car with Winifredand Bob. Forbes was all too soon deposited at his hotel, where the footman and the starter hailed Persis with affectionate homage and Forbes with a new courtesy because of her. Forbes lingered at the curb to watch her away. As the landaulet sped toward Fifth Avenue all he saw of her was the fluttering white interrogation-mark.
FORBES was prompt at the Opera. Though it was barely half past seven, he found the foyer already swarming with a bustling mob of women swaddled in opera-cloaks, and prosperous-looking men overcoated and mufflered. Everybody was making haste. Dinners had been gulped or skimped, and there was evident desire not to miss a note.
Forbes knew nothing of the music except a vague echo of the ridicule on which Wagner had ridden to the clouds. He was just as ignorant of the poem, and though he bought a libretto from an unpromising vocalist in the lobby, he had time only to skim the argument, and to learn with surprise that Isolde was Irish, and her royal husband, Mark, a Cornishman.
The head usher directed him up a brief flight of steps, and another attendant unlocked a door marked with the name-plate of Lindsley Tait. From the little anteroom where he hung up his hat and coat, Forbes saw as through a telescope the vast curtain and the tremendous golden arch of the proscenium; at its foot a pygmy orchestra settling into tune and making oddly pleasant discords.
When Forbes stepped to the edge of the box, he seemed to be the entire audience, another mad King of Bavaria come to witness a performance in solitude. The famous red horseshoe stretched its length a hundred yards or more on either side of him. In each of its little scallops a family of empty chairs sat facing the stage in solemn silliness. The owners were still filling chairs at dinner-tables.
But when Forbes took the next step forward he found a multitude. Above him he saw other horseshoes in tiers dense with faces peering downward. Below him a plain of Babel inhabited by the tops of heads, numberless pates in long windrows, the men's skulls close-cropped or bald, and their shoulders black; the women's elaborately coiffed, over an enormous acreage of bared shoulders and busts.
Suddenly all the white-gloved hands fluttered in coveys with the show and sound of innumerable agitated pigeons. Toscanini was picking his way through the orchestra to the desk.
From the opening phrase of the Vorspiel Forbes became a Wagnerian. Those first stifled moans of almost sullen desire so whelmed him that he wondered how Persis and Mrs. Neff and her guests should dare to be late and lose this precious expression. Before the opera had finished breaking his heart on its eternal wheel of anguish, he wondered that any one should care to submit to its intolerable beauty a second time.
Yet here were thousands thronging to its destroying blaze like fanatic moths—moths that paid a high price to be admitted to the lamp, and clamored to be consumed in its divine distress.
Forbes smiled at the universal lust for artistic and vicarious suffering that has made other people's pathos the most lucrative of all forms of entertainment.
The time was to come when he himself would pay dearly for the privilege of great pain; when his mind would strive futilely to dissuade his heart from clenching upon the thorn that made it bleed. Humanity has almost always preferred strong emotions at any cost, to peace however cheap.
The prelude was one long stream of bitter-sweet honey, and it affected Forbes as music had never affected him. He wondered how people could ever have ridiculed or resisted this man Wagner. He wished that Persis wouldcome soon. He thought of her as "Persis"—or "Isolde"; he could not think of her as Miss Cabot to this music.
The first act was ended and the long intermission almost over before she arrived, with Enslee, followed immediately by Bob and Winifred, and last of all by the hostess, Mrs. Neff.
Everybody greeted Forbes with the casual informality of old friendship, except Willie Enslee, who nodded obliquely, and murmured:
"H' are yu, Mr. Ward."
Nobody corrected him, least of all Forbes, who was too much disgusted with Willie's existence there to feel any minor resentment. The three women fell to wrangling, altruistically, of course, over the two front seats. Mrs. Neff was trying to bully Persis and Winifred into occupying them. Winifred's demurrer was violent:
"If I sit there nobody can see the stage. You're such a little wisp I can see round you or through you."
Persis preferred almost anything to a disturbance, and her protest was a mere form.
Only the rising curtain brought the battle to a close. Persis dropped into a chair on the right. Winifred pushed Mrs. Neff into the other, and sat back of her. Willie annexed the chair behind Persis, Bob Fleming took that aft of Winifred, and motioned Forbes to the center chair. Then Mrs. Neff beckoned him to hunch forward into the narrow space between her and Persis.
All along the horseshoe people were just arriving or returning from visits among the boxes. There was much chatter. The orchestra might as well have been wasting its sweetness on a crowded restaurant.
Forbes pretended to be looking over the audience on his right, but he was looking at Persis. The music of the garden where Isolde awaited her Tristan, and the far-off rumorous hunting-horns of the King, her husband, were working a magic upon her. He could see its influence on her face.
She wore brighter raiment than at the theater; her head-dress was more imperious, and more jewelry glittered about her. When she breathed or moved the diamonds at her ears, her throat, and in her corsage flashed and dulled as if they had eyelids; the pearls had a veiled radiance.
She was a combination of beauty unadorned and most adorned. Despite her trappings of gem and fabric, even more of her was candidly presented than at the theater last night—or was it not a year ago? Surely he must have known her for more than a day.
Her bodice would have seemed to be shamelessly low, had it not been as high as almost any other there. This was one of those common yet amazing sessions where thousands of women of every age and class agree to display as much of their skins as the police will allow, and far more than their husbands and fathers approve.
But Forbes had not yet reached the stage where a man resents the publication of his charmer's charms. He was still hardly more than a fascinated student of Persis. He found her a most engrossing text.
She was so thoroughly alive—terribly alive all over! Wordsworth's phrase would have suited Forbes' understanding of her: she "felt her life in every limb." Her brows now moved sinuously, and now relaxed as Isolde sang of her longing and quenched the torch for a signal to her lover. One moment Persis' eyelids throbbed with excitement; the next they fell and tightened across her eyes. Accesses of emotion swelled her nostrils and made her lips waver together. Her throat arched and flexed and was restless; and her lovely disparted bosom filled and waned.
If she sat with clasped hands, the fingers seemed to convene and commune. She was incessantly thrusting back her hair and stroking her temples, or her forearms. Her knees were always exchanging places one above theother; her feet crossed, uncrossed, and seemed unable to settle upon precedence.
If she had been a child she would have been called fidgety, but all her motions were discreet and luxurious. She was like a lotos-eater stirring in sleep and just about to open her eyes.
The second act of the opera proved to be hardly more than a prolonged duet. The rapture of it outlasted Forbes' endurance; it did not bore him, it wore him out. He grew weary of eavesdropping on these two. He was jealous to love and be loved on his own account.
The woman next him was becoming more beautiful every moment. He felt a craving to touch her—with reverence; to link arms in comradeship, and to clench hands with her when the music stormed the peaks.
An aura seemed to transpire mistily from his pores to meet the aureole that shimmered about her.
His mood was far above any thought of flirtation, or evil desire. He was too knightly at heart to dream of adventure against her sacred isolation. But he wished and wished that he knew her better; had known her longer. Unconsciously he plagiarized the sigh of Johanna Ambrosius' poem: "Ach, hätt' ich früher dich geseh'n!"
But Fate can play the clown as well as the tragedian, and accomplish as much by an absurd accident as by elaborate glooms.
That afternoon, when Forbes was lured into the haberdashery, he had invested in black silk hosiery, very sheer and very dear. Later he had acquired a pair of new pumps. The shoes were not too small, but their rigid edge cut his instep like a dull knife. By the time that Isolde's husband had found her in Tristan's arms, and begun to deplore his friend's treachery at great length, the pressure upon Forbes' heart relaxed enough to let his feet attract his attention. They proclaimed their discomfort acutely.
After some hesitation he resolved to slip them out of their glistening jails a moment, under cover of the darkness.
A sense of immense relief rejoiced him when he sat with his silk-stockinged feet perched on top of instead of inside of his shoes. Though he was unaware of it, he was not the only one in that box to seize the opportunity. Heaven alone knew how much empty foot-gear was scattered along the floors of that opera-house. Persis for one had vacated her slippers long ago. She always did at every opportunity.
Eventually she tucked her little left foot back of her and bent it round the leg of her chair. By and by Forbes, in shifting his position, straightened his right knee. His foot collided with a most smooth something, and paused in a kind of surprise. Primevally our feet had as much tactile intelligence as our hands, and Forbes' almost prehensile big toe pondered that tiny promontory a second; then it hastily explored the glossy surface of Persis' sole.
Silk is a facile conductor of electricity, and Persis was not divine enough to be above ticklishness. Shudders of exquisite torment ran through her before she could snatch her foot away. And before she could check the impulse she snickered aloud.
And Forbes, suddenly understanding what he had done, snickered too, and just managed to throttle down a loud guffaw.
Mrs. Neff and Winifred turned in amazement at hearing such a sound at such a time, and the women in the next box craned their necks to inflict a punitive glare. Which made it all the worse.
Persis and Forbes were suddenly backslidden almost to infancy. They were like a pair of children attacked with a fit of giggles in church. The more they wanted to be sober, the more foolish they felt. The harder they tried to smother the laughter steaming within them, the more it threatened to explode.
Persis would have taken to flight, but one of her slippers she could not find, and she could not get the other on.
She and Forbes were still stuffing their handkerchiefs into their mouths when the act ended, as the pitifully distraught Tristan permitted the infuriated Melot to thrust him through with a sword, and fell back in Kurwenal's arms.
Mrs. Neff and her faction did not join the ovation to the singers. They were too busily demanding what Persis and Forbes had found to laugh at. But neither of them would tell. It was their secret.
Willie Enslee was acutely annoyed. He had not curiosity enough to be quick to jealousy, nor intelligence enough to suspect that Persis' and Forbes' laughter might be, must be, due to some encounter.
Still, he had ideals of his own, such as they were, and his religion was to avoid attracting attention. He had liked Persis because she was of the same faith; but now she had sinned against it, and he rebuked her. She did not flare up as usual. She laughed.
She was ashamed to have been so frivolous, ashamed to have profaned the temple of art with her childishness. And so was Forbes. But when they looked into each other's eyes now they no longer stared with timorous wonderment; they smiled together in a dear and cozy intimacy. And already they owned a secret.
MRS. NEFF and Winifred may have had their suspicions. They were both amiable cynics, and always put the worst possible interpretation on any happening. But whatever their theories, they could never have guessed the actual reason for the contretemps, and Persis speedily changed the subject. But her feet remembered it and tingled with reminiscent little electric storms. And when she looked at Forbes she tittered like a school-girl. So she avoided his eyes.
Willie was furious at Persis' lack of dignity, and forgot his own in complaining of it.
"Cut out the soubrette spasms, for God's sake, Persis, or let us all in on the joke. If you have any comic relief for this ghastly opera let me have it. Why did you drag me here, anyway? We might have gone to Hammerstein's. It wouldn't be so bad if Caruso were singing; but Caruso knows better than to bark himself hoarse on this Wagner fella. And that Dutch tenor has got to die yet. He'll be two hours dying, and then the lady has to follow suit. Why should we sit here all that time watching people die? Why didn't we go to Bellevue Hospital and watch an amusing operation? What would you say to making a sneak just about now and—"
"I'd say, run right along, Willie, if you want to," said Persis. "Moi, j'y suis, j'y reste!"
"Oh, all right, I suppose I'll have tosuisandreste, too. But don't mind if I snore."
Ten Eyck appeared now with apologies for his delay. And a number of callers knocked at the back door of thebox and were admitted to an informal little reception, shared by the next-door neighbors, who gossiped across the rail with a charming friendliness. These latter were determined to find out what Persis had been laughing at. But she shook her head mysteriously.
Forbes heard great names bandied, and he judged that he was meeting important people, but there were no introductions, except in the case of a man and a woman who were treated with deference. To these Ten Eyck presented Forbes with flourish as an eminent military expert called home from the Philippines to help fortify New York against foreign attack.
Forbes denied this violently, but Ten Eyck winked.
"Diplomatic, eh?"
When they were gone Forbes asked who they were.
"Society reporters!" said Ten Eyck. And the next day Forbes read in two of the papers a varying description of the costumes of Persis, Winifred, and Mrs. Neff, and a duplicated mention of his own name with the added information that he was "the eminent military expert called home from the Philippines to help fortify New York against foreign attack."
When he read this Forbes breathed a prayer that none of his superior officers might be addicted to the social columns.
But that was to-morrow's excitement.
The third act brought him back under the Wagnerian yoke. Tristan's castle walls ran along a cliff overlooking the ocean; in a green space under a tree the wounded knight lay eternally demanding of his devoted squire if he could not yet see the ship, the ship that was to bring Isolde to nurse him back to life.
Forbes forgot all light thoughts before the infinitely pathetic wail of the shepherd's pipe and the reiterated appeal of Tristan for "das Schiff!das Schiff!"
Like most men of to-day, Forbes never wept except at the theater, or at some other fiction. He had not weptso well since he had seen "Romeo and Juliet" played. Now again, as then, it startled him to think what a genius for love some hearts have, while others have only a talent or a taste for it. He felt a little ashamed that he had never been able to love as Romeo or Tristan loved, and yet he thanked his stars that he had been spared that fatal power.
How often we thank our stars that we have never met the very thing that waits us round the corner! Perhaps that Pharisee who stands immortally thanking the Lord that he was not as other men, found out the same afternoon how very like he was.
The thrall of the theater was so complete upon Forbes that when the sorrowful drone of the shepherd's pipe suddenly turned to joy at the sight of Isolde's ship, Forbes' heart leaped up as if he were witnessing a rescue in actual life.
The hurrying rapture of the music that described Isolde's arrival, and her haste up the cliff, sent his hopes to heaven; but when the delirious Tristan rose from his couch to his staggering feet and began to tear at the bandages about his wound, Forbes felt the stab of fear. He wanted to cry out, "Oh no! no!" He sat with lips parted in anguish, and his hand groping for support.
The left hand of Persis was reaching about in the same gesture of protest against intolerable cruelty. It met the hand of Forbes. Their fingers clutched each other in an instinct for companionship. The two souls were so intent upon the action of the scene, and so swept along by the torrential music, that they hardly knew their hands were joined.
When Tristan fell at Isolde's feet, with one poor wailing "Isolde!" and died before she could clasp him in her arms, it seemed that Forbes' heart broke. A groan escaped him; his hand clenched the hand of Persis with all its might. He heard a little gasp from her, and he thought that her heart had broken with his.
He had bitten into one of the beautiful apples of Hades, and his mouth was filled with ashes. The tears poured down his cheeks, and in his aching throat there was a lump like broken glass.
The noblest song in all music, the "love-death" of Isolde, gave the tragedy nobility; but it was the mad beauty of a grief too great for grieving over. Passion shivered in the air and seemed to come from Forbes' own soul. The harmonies kept climaxing, eternally reaching the last possible thrill, only to find that it led on to one yet higher. The melodies were crowded like the angels climbing Jacob's ladder into the clouds, where every rung seemed heaven, till it disclosed one more.
The music was a love-philter to Forbes and Persis; they could not escape it, had no thought of escape. Their hands swung in a little arc, clenched and unclenched in an utter sympathy of mind and body, in a kind of epic dance.
And then the opera was over, and Forbes began to dread the raising of the lights. He was grateful for the long ovation to the singers, since it kept the house dark till he could shake off the tears he was ashamed to dab with a handkerchief. Time was when greater soldiers than he were proud rather than ashamed of their tears, but Forbes was thankful for the gloom. He applauded and joined the cries of "Bravo!" to prolong the respite.
Mrs. Neff was sniffling as she beat her gloves together.
"Even Isolde's husband couldn't hate her—or him—for a love like that."
And Winifred, with her cheeks all blubbered, swallowed hard as she applauded.
"Why don't we have such lovers nowadays? Even I could play Isolde if I could find a Tristan."
"Permit me," said Bob Fielding. But he was referring to the opera-cloak he was holding out for her.
Willie Enslee, however, shook his head contemptuously and made no pretense of applause.
"Can you beat 'em, Mr. Lord? They're never so happy as when they're crying their make-up off. They pretend they're blue, but they've been having the time of their lives."
And Forbes hated him for saying it. Then he noted that Persis was not applauding. She was pulling off a long glove slowly and wincingly. When it was off, she looked ruefully at her left hand and nursed it in her right. She glanced to see that the others were busy with their wraps, then she held her hand out where Forbes could see it; and gave him a look of pouting reproach.
His first stare showed him only that her soft, slim fingers were almost hidden with rings. And then he saw that the flesh was all creased and bruised and marred with marks like tiny teeth. He realized that it was his fierce clench that had ground the rings and their settings into her flesh, and his heart was wrung with shame and pity.
He saw, too, that on one of the little fingers there was a thread of blood. The alert old eyes of Mrs. Neff caught the by-play of the two, and her curiosity brought her forward with a question.
"How in heaven did you hurt your finger?"
Persis answered quietly and at once:
"I caught it on the thorn of a rose. It's nothing."
Willie insisted on seeing the wound, and was frantic with excitement. He was genuinely distressed. He poured out sympathy for the pain, anxiety for the future of the wound, the necessity for sterilizing it. But it was Willie's doom to be always tactless or unwelcome, and his sympathy was an annoyance.
Forbes was compelled to silence by Persis' explanation of the accident. He must not say how sorry he was, though he had wounded her—he had wounded Persis till she bled!