The Salamander Part 39

"Please?" she repeated, looking into his eyes with a glance as cold as his own was excited.

"Yes! I ask you--I beg you not to go! You don't know--you don't understand. Mr. Lindaberry is not a safe person--now, under present conditions!"

She leaned a little toward him, modulating her voice for his ear alone.

"I'm sure, Judge Ma.s.singale," she said coldly "that I will be much safer with Mr. Lindaberry, wherever he wishes to take me, than with some other man, even in my own house, alone!"

He understood: she saw it by the hurt look in his eyes. He withdrew without further proffer.

The next instant the car shot out, with the trailing scream of a rocket, shaved a wheel by an inch, swung the corner with hardly a break, the rear wheels sliding over the asphalt, and went streaming up the avenue, the naked trees of the park running at their side.

She sank back into the s.h.a.ggy coat, adjusting the gla.s.ses which the wind cut sharply into her face, appalled at the speed, yet strangely, contemptuously unafraid.

"Fast enough?" he cried, and the words seemed to whistle by her.

"Love it!" she shouted, bending toward him.

She watched him, shrunk against the seat, her curiosity awakening at his mood, so married to her own. Ma.s.singale, the dancers, the stirring pain-giving world of pleasure, were miles away. She remembered all at once that she was with him--a stranger, wild as herself, heedlessly, recklessly engaged in a mad thing. All at once she laughed aloud, a curious sound that made him jerk his head hastily back. If he knew how little she cared if the wheel swerved that necessary fraction of an inch!

"Crazy! We're crazy, both of us!" she thought to herself joyfully. At this moment of wild cynicism she felt that she had flung over everything, done forever with scruples; that, now that she had compromised herself so publicly, nothing more mattered. She would be cruel, selfish, mercenary, but she would make this city of Mammon that went roaring past her serve her by its own false G.o.ds of money and success. In the gathering roar of the hollow air, high roof and low roof, sudden sparkling streets, file on file of blinking lights, fatally brilliant as the lure of shop windows, black instantaneous ma.s.ses on the avenue, streamed behind her in a giddy torrent. Yes, it was her last scruples she thus flung to the winds, and foolishly confident of divining inscrutable fates, she repeated fiercely, defiantly, drunk with the speed madness:

"What do I care! This is the end!"

CHAPTER XVII

"Hold tight!"

She caught his shoulder at a sudden grinding stop, a breakneck turn into a side street, and the released forward leap.

"Look out! Don't touch my arm!" he cried warningly.

The next moment they had leaped an intersecting avenue, skirting the impending rush of a trolley car by inches. He laughed uproariously.

"Afraid?"

"No!"

Another turn, and they were on Riverside, the broad Hudson with its firefly lights below, the Palisades rising darkly, like gathering thunder-clouds. There was no moon, but above their heads were the swarming stars, brilliant as a myriad sword-points. Once a policeman rushed with a peremptory club in their path, springing aside with an oath as Lindaberry set the machine at him--an oath that was lost like a whirling leaf. She no longer sought to distinguish the giddy pa.s.sage at her sides, straining her eyes on the white consuming path of the lanterns, feeling all at once the hungry soul of the monster waking in the machine, strident, throbbing, crying out at the unshaken hand of man which dominated it. Then the Viaduct slipped underneath them, and below, in a swirling dip, the sunken city, hungry as a torrent, awaiting a single mishap.

She had a sudden remembrance of her dream--of Nebbins pulling her over a brink, and the thread of a river grave miles below. Only now she remembered coldly, as if the speed at which they were flying gave her no time to a.s.sociate two ideas. Suddenly, by an instinct not of fear but of disdainful certainty, her eyes closed before the impossibility of surviving a looming obstacle. When she opened them again they were among trees and fields, while the goaded machine hurled itself forward in tugging leaps. Now, as they seemed to fling themselves irrevocably on the destruction of wall or upstarting tree, she no longer winced or closed her eyes, but breathlessly waited the sudden liberating touch of the hand, which s.n.a.t.c.hed them miraculously aside in the last fraction of time. She felt something that she had never felt before--an appet.i.te and an intoxication in thus defrauding destruction; even her flesh responded with a tingling electric glow. All at once she perceived that he was trying her purposely--steering from right to left, seemingly bent on a plunging end, trying to draw a cry of fear. She laughed again disdainfully, and all at once the runaway came back into control, gliding into a smooth easy flight, slower and slower, until it came to a stop.

"By George! you have nerve!" he said, turning toward her.

"Go on! Go on!" she said feverishly.

He extended to her his hand, which was trembling.

"G.o.d! that's excitement that's worth while!" he said. "A fight every minute. Ugly old brute! Wouldn't it like to throw me just once?" He put on the brakes, drawing his sleeve across his forehead, which was wet with perspiration, taking a long breath. "Each century has its vice. By George, this is ours--speed! And it's got everything in it--gamble, danger, intoxication, all! Like it?"

"Yes!"

He remained silent a moment, as if struggling to clear his heavy head of befogging weights. Then he said slowly, a little thickly, curiosity growing:

"Why the devil did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Risk your neck with a fool like me?"

"Oh, don't let's talk!" she said nervously. "Go on! Fast!"

"All right!"

They were off again, a wild liberating rush, and then a calmer motion, a gliding ease. She felt in him a different mood, a mood that sought an opportunity to put questions and weigh answers, and as she felt a desire to escape personalities, she said complainingly:

"But it's so slow--so tame! Let's go on running away!"

"This is different," he said, with a wave of his hand overhead at the myriad-eyed night. "You can't run away from this! The rest--houses, people, rotten brutality, useless things, yes; that's what I like to go plunging from--to get to this. I like the feeling--solitude. George! if you could only go steering your way out of all the old into something new!" He repeated the phrase moodily, as if to himself: "If one only could--if it were only possible!" Then he broke off abruptly, laughing to himself: "You're too young. You can't understand. Everything is new to you. By George, marry me and start for Australia, or Timbuctoo, to-morrow! What do you say?"

"Look out! I might accept!" she said, laughing, and yet understanding.

"Every one thinks I'm a wild a.s.s," he said grimly. "Wish I could do something really wild--make over the world! Look here; are you going to answer my question?"

"What question?"

"Why in the name of the impossible are we here to-night?"

"I wonder?" she said, half to herself.

The reply seemed to satisfy him; he continued a moment, absorbed in their smooth progress. Insensibly she felt her mood yielding to his, no longer impatient, vaguely content, lulled into reverie, giving herself over to a new strange companionable inclination toward the man who had revealed himself, half boy, half savage, in his first unconscious longings.

To escape from the old? No, she did not yet understand that; but she did comprehend the all-pervading serenity of the night, warm still with the touch of Indian summer. The grating strident sounds of the day were gone; the whisper on the wind was soft as a lullaby--sharp angles and brutally straight lines lost in the feathery suffusion that lay on the fields. Ahead, the brave steadfast rays of their lamps pierced through sudden pools of darkness, that closed gently above them, and gave way again to clear visions of stars. Once or twice she saw across the enchanted blackness a distant trolley, unheard, rolling its ball of fire like the track of a shooting star. Again, the far-off leathery bark of a watch-dog complaining. But of man no sound. Only the mysterious shadows held a spirit of life; only a giant tree, silhouetted against the faint sky, seemed to move as they moved, racing with them past the vanishing road bushes. A rabbit, started from its security, horribly hypnotized by this chugging, fiery-eyed monster, scurried foolishly before them. Once a swerving bat zigzagged before her eyes like the cut of a black whirling blade. Even these were intruders, out of place in the old world, older than the pyramids, older than the first stirring of life--this waiting dominion of time, which reclaimed each night the futile centuries of men, secure of the hour when all must return in loyalty to its first silence. She looked at the stars, and the world beneath dwindled into nothingness, to the span of a hand before these twinking immensities. Which was real? This night, where only the infinite and the inevitable reigned, or the day, with its clamoring intrusion of confusing and needless voices?

She put her hand on his arm.

"It's so strange. It's so long since I remembered. I had forgot!"

She had forgot, indeed, that world which lay beyond men's world; but she remembered it now--the strange night, which formerly in the quiet of a child's room came gently, like a friendly stream, across her white counterpane, awaking troubled questionings, impossible, terrifying confrontations of the beyond and the hereafter. She had feared these strange whys and wherefores then; and now they laid upon her only a great peace--perhaps because she sought no answer.

She wanted to talk to him as one could talk in the hidden night, away from foolish conventions. What did it matter what they said or did here in this engulfing quiet? Why should human beings be constantly at war with one another, stopped by vanities? She had forgot her anguish, in an impulse toward the weakness in the man.

He stopped the car and turned toward her.

"What's wrong? What's the trouble?"