The Salamander Part 11

CHAPTER IV

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, gay little smile that constantly rippled and broke about her lips. Indeed, she was delighted with her success, with the discord she had flung between Sa.s.soon 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 Sa.s.soon 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. Sa.s.soon 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, brus.h.i.+ng 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 Sa.s.soon; for men of force she made many allowances.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "No, no, not so fast!"]

She thought of Lindaberry and Judge Ma.s.singale: 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 n.o.ble ... 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.

Ma.s.singale she could not place. She comprehended the others, even the Comte de Joncy, whom she had left with a feeling of defrauded expectation. But Ma.s.singale 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 pa.s.s 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 mult.i.tude. 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 white _Times_ building, 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 matinee 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 mult.i.tude churned about her, roaring down into the confusion of many currents: the mult.i.tude--the others--whom she felt so distant, so far below her. They were there, white of face, troubled, frowning, hara.s.sed, swelling onward to clamoring tasks, spying her with thousand-eyed envy; and everywhere darting in and out, dodging the gray contact of the ma.s.s, 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 fas.h.i.+on, deliciously registering the sudden a.n.a.lytical stare of women, or the disloyal tribute boldly telegraphed of men.

She had lunched with Sa.s.soon, De Joncy, Ma.s.singale. 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 Ma.s.singale 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 facades. There was the earth, bare, s.h.i.+vering, 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 pa.s.sed, 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. Now there 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.