The Salamander Part 9

"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.

Dore 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 Sa.s.soon, 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, Sa.s.soon 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 s.e.xtette, 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, Dore 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 att.i.tude, 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: Ma.s.singale, 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 rise of 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 Dore had taken off her toque, Sa.s.soon 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, but remained 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 Sa.s.soon's awakened stare and the scrutiny of Judge Ma.s.singale, 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 s.e.xtette 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 enn.o.bled, 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.

Sa.s.soon summoned him with a nod which Tenafly perceived instantly across the room.