The Danger Mark Part 93

"Pair of b.u.m whips. We've laid on the lash too hard. I'm going to stable my five nags--my five wits!"--he explained with a sneer as the other regarded him with all the bovine intelligence of one of his own stable-boys--"because they're foundered; and that's the why, young four-in-hand!"

He left the bar, adding as he pa.s.sed:

"I'm a rotting citizen, but you"--he laughed insolently--"you have become phosph.o.r.escent!"

The street outside was all fog and melting snow; the cold vichy he had gulped made him internally uncomfortable.

"A gay day to go to Mulqueen's," he muttered sourly, gazing about for a taxicab.

There was none for hire at that moment; he walked on for a while, feeling the freezing slush penetrate his boot-soles; and by degrees a sullen temper rose within him, revolting--not at what he had done to himself--but at the consequences which were becoming more unpleasant every moment.

As he trudged along, slipping, sliding, his overcoat turned up around his pasty face, his cheeks wet with the icy fog, he continued swearing to himself, at himself, at the slush, the cold vichy in his belly, the appet.i.te already awakened which must be denied.

Denied?... Was he never to have one more decent drink? Was this to be the absolute and final end? Certainly. Yet his imagination could not really comprehend, compa.s.s, picture to himself life made a nuisance by self-denial--life in any other guise except as a background for inertia and indulgence.

He swore again, profanely asking something occult why he should be singled out to be made miserable on a day like this? Why, among all the men he knew, he must go skulking about, lapping up cold mineral water and c.o.c.king one ear to the sounds of human revelry within the Tavern.

As for his work--yes, he ought to do it.... Interest in it was already colder; the flare-up was dying down; habitual apathy chilled it to its embers. Indifference, ill-temper, self-pity, resentment, these were the steps he was slowly taking backward. He took them, in their natural sequence, one by one.

Old Squills meant well, no doubt, but he had been d.a.m.ned impertinent....

And why had Old Squills dragged in his sister, Sylvia?... He had paid as much attention to her as any brother does to any sister.... And how had she repaid him?

Head lowered doggedly against the sleet which was now falling thickly, he shouldered his way forward, brooding on his "honour," on his sister, on Dysart.

He had not been home in weeks; he did not know of his sister's departure with Bunny Gray. She had left a letter at home for him, because she knew no other addresses except his clubs; and inquiry over the telephone elicited the information that he had not been to any of them.

But he was going to one of them now. He needed something to kill that vichy; he'd have one more honest drink in spite of all the Old Squills and Mulqueens in North America!

At the Cataract Club there were three fashion-haunting young men drinking hot Scotches: Dumont, his empurpled skin distended with whiskey and late suppers, and all his former brilliancy and wit cankered and rotten with it, and his slim figure and clean-cut face fattened and flabby with it; Myron Kelter, thin, elegant, exaggerated, talking eternally about women and his successes with the frailer ones--Myron Kelter, son of a gentleman, eking out his meagre income by fetching, carrying, pandering to the rich, who were too fastidious to do what they paid him for doing in their behalf; and the third, Forbes Winton, literary dilettante, large in every feature and in waistcoat and in gesture--large, hard, smooth--very smooth, and worth too many millions to be contradicted when misstating facts to suit the colour of his too luxuriant imagination.

These greeted Quest in their several and fashionably wearied manners, inviting his soul to loaf.

Later he had a slight dispute with Winton, who surveyed him coldly, and insolently repeated his former misstatement of a notorious fact.

"What rot!" said Quest; "I leave it to you, Kelter; am I right or not?"

Kelter began a soft and soothing discourse which led nowhere at first but ended finally in a re-order for four hot Scotches.

Then Dumont's witty French blood--or the muddied dregs which were left of it--began to be perversely amusing at Quest's expense. Epigrams slightly frayed, a jest or two a trifle stale, humorous inversions of well-known maxims, a biting retort, the originality of which was not entirely free from suspicion, were his contributions to the festivities.

Later Kelter's nicely modulated voice and almost affectionate manner restrained Quest from hurling his gla.s.s at the inflamed countenance of Mr. Dumont. But it did not prevent him from leaving the room in a vicious temper, and, ultimately, the Cataract Club.

The early winter night had turned cold and clear; sidewalks glittered, sheeted with ice. He inhaled a deep breath and expelled a reeking one, hailed a cab, and drove to the railroad station.

Here he bought his tickets, choosing a midnight train; for the journey to Mulqueen's was not a very long one; he could sleep till seven in the car; and, besides, he had his luggage to collect from the hotel he had been casually inhabiting. Also he had not yet dined.

Bodily he felt better, now that the vichy had been "killed"; mentally his temper became more vicious than ever as he thought of Dumont's blunted wit at his expense--a wit with edge enough left to make a ragged, nasty wound.

"He'll get what's coming to him some day," snarled Quest, returning to his cab; and he bade the driver take him to the Amphitheatre, a restaurant resort, wonderful in terra-cotta rocks, papier-mache grottos, and Croton waterfalls--haunted of certain semi-distinguished pushers of polite professions, among whom he had been known for years.

The place was one vast eruption of tiny electric lights, and the lights of "the profession," and the demi-monde. Virtue and its ant.i.thesis disguised alike in silk attire and pearl collars, rubbed elbows unconcernedly among the papier-mache grottos; the cascades foamed with munic.i.p.al water, waiters sweated and scurried, lights winked and glimmered, and the music and electric fans annoyed n.o.body.

In its usual grotto Quest found the usual group, was welcomed automatically, sat down at one of the tables, and gave his order.

Artists, newspaper men, critics, and writers predominated. There was also a "journalist" doing "brilliant" s.p.a.ce work on the _Sun_. He had been doing it nearly a month and he was only twenty-one. It was his first job. Ambition tickled his ribs; Fame leaned familiarly over his shoulder; Destiny made eyes at him. His name was Bunn.

There was also a smooth-shaven, tired-eyed, little man who had written a volume on Welsh-rarebits and now drew cartoons. His function was to torment Bunn; and Bunn never knew it.

A critic rose from the busy company and departed, to add l.u.s.tre to his paper and a nail in the coffin of the only really clever play in town.

"Kismet," observed little Dill, who did the daily cartoon for the _Post_, "no critic would be a critic if he could be a fifth-rate anybody else--or," he added, looking at Bunn, "even a journalist."

"Is that supposed to be funny?" asked Bunn complacently. "_I_ intend to do art criticism for the _Herald_."

"What's the objection to my getting a job on it, too?" inquired Quest, setting his empty gla.s.s aside and signalling the waiter for a re-order.

He expected surprise and congratulation.

Somebody said, "_You_ take a job!" so impudently that Quest reddened and turned, showing his narrow, defective teeth.

"It's my choice that I haven't taken one," he snarled. "Did you think otherwise?"

"Don't get huffy, Stuyve," said a large, placid, fat novelist, whose financial success with mediocre fiction had made him no warmer favourite among his brothers.

A row of artists glanced up and coldly continued their salad, their Vandyck beards all wagging in unison.

"I want you to understand," said Quest, leaning both elbows offensively on Dill's table, "that the job I ask for I expect to get."

"You might have expected that once," said the cool young man who had spoken before.

"And I do now!" retorted Quest, raising his voice. "Why not?"

Somebody said: "You can furnish good copy, all right, Quest; you do it every day that you're not working."

Quest, astonished and taken aback at such a universal revelation of the contempt in which he seemed to be held, found no reply ready--nothing at hand except another gla.s.s of whiskey and soda.

Minute after minute he sat there among them, sullen, silent, wincing, nursing his chagrin in deepening wrath and bitterness; and his clouding mind perceived in the rebuke nothing that he had ever done to deserve it.

Who the devil were these rag-tags and bob-tails of the world who presumed to snub him--these restaurant-haunting outsiders, among whom he condescended to sit, feeling always the subtle flattery they ought to accord him by virtue of a social position hopeless of attainment by any of them?

Who were they to turn on him like this when he had every reason to suppose they were not only aware of the great talent he had carelessly neglected to cultivate through all these years, but must, in the secret recesses of their grubby souls, reluctantly admire his disdain of the only distinctions they scrambled for and could ever hope for?

His black looks seemed to disturb n.o.body; Bunn, self-centred, cropped his salad complacently; the Vandyck beards wagged; another critic or two left, stern slaves to duty and paid ads.

The lights bothered him; tremors crawled over and over his skin; within him a dull rage was burning--a rage directed at no one thing, but which could at any moment be focussed.

Men rose and left the table singly, by twos, in groups. He sat, glowering, head partly averted, scowlingly aware of their going, aware of their human interest in one another but not in him, aware at last that he counted for nothing whatever among them.