The Salamander Part 48

Below, everywhere was the feeling of the people, happy, prosperous, relaxed, feasting on heavy bourgeois dishes flanked by huge b.u.mpers of the beer which made the "Hickory Log" a Mecca for the thirsty. The floor was sanded, the tables bare of cloth. Opposite them a young man had his arm about his sweetheart, bending his head to her ear. When a group of the revelers saluted them with enthusiasm, each returned a laughing acknowledgment, but without change of pose.

"How natural all this is!" said Dodo, finding in her hungry soul a kindred longing. "How they enjoy things! We must come here often. This garden, this table--it shall be ours!"

"And how do you keep Sa.s.soon and Blood in good appet.i.te, little Mormon?"

he persisted.

She hated this incredulous cynical mood of his, and she disapproved of the epithet.

"Why do you always begin like this?" she said, chopping off the head of a celery stalk with a vicious blow of her knife. "I am not a Mormon, and you know perfectly well that no one else exists now for me!" She turned, saw his quizzical look, and added vigorously: "And I am _not acting_!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: They had gone to the Hickory Log]

"Do, please. It is your great charm!"

"You are positively hateful!"

"Well, why did you encourage Sa.s.soon, then?" She looked at him with a little malice in her eyes.

"I suppose you want to think yourself one of many?"

This was too near the mark. He answered evasively:

"All I wish is to be your father confessor, you know!"

This simulation of friends.h.i.+p was another thing that always aroused her.

She wished to punish him, and began to embroider.

"Yes, I encourage Sa.s.soon," she said, leaning on the table, nodding in emphasis, and switching a celery stalk among the gla.s.ses venomously, like the tail of an irritated leopard. "Harrigan Blood, too. And I have my reasons. You think I am a wild little creature who never looks ahead.

Quite wrong! Everything is planned out. Everything will be settled--definitely--soon!"

"When?"

"On my twenty-third birthday--on the tenth of March. Remember that date!"

"Very appropriate month," he interjected.

"Then I am through with this sort of a life--good-by forever to Dodo!"

she went on rapidly. "You don't believe me? I a.s.sure you, I never was more serious! Then I shall choose"--she raised her fingers, counting--"a great love, marriage, career, or"--she ended with a shrug--"lots of money!"

"I see," he said, comprehending her maneuver, and yet annoyed by it.

"And so Sa.s.soon is a possibility?"

"If you fail, quite a possibility!" she said, to irritate him further.

"At any rate, I shall keep him just where I want him--until the time comes to decide!"

"You could never do that, Dodo!" he said sharply.

"Oh, couldn't I?" she cried, delighted that he had entertained the thought. "I'm quite capable of being a cold-blooded little adventuress!

Perhaps I am one, and am only making sport of you. Beware! As for Sa.s.soon--do you know what I'd do? I'd make him give me a career, and then, when I am very, very well known, perhaps--if I wanted--I'd make him divorce, and become Mrs. Sa.s.soon! How would you like to meet me in society?" She laughed at the thought, but added immediately: "Oh, it is not so impossible, either! Nowadays, a clever girl who sees just what she wants can do anything!"

"Is that what you would do with me?" he said quietly.

She turned swiftly, abandoning all her pretense, pain in her eyes.

"Oh, no, Your Honor! Not with you! I would take nothing from you, now or ever!"

"Then don't say such things!" he said, strangely soothed by the pa.s.sion in her voice.

"Don't be--friendly, then!" she retorted, and with a quick appealing raising of her eyes she laid her hand on his.

"I must talk frankly with her!" he said to himself, with a groaning of the spirit. "She will not face the situation, and there can be no solution to it--no possible solution!" He turned heroically, resolved to lay down the law, and his stern eyes encountered hers, so troubling and so untroubled, tempting and yielding--glorified and inconscient.

"I am so happy!" she said; and, in an excess of emotion, as if suffocating, her eyes closed and her breast rose in a long sigh.

Arguments and fears went riotously head over heels in flight.

It was almost at the end of the dinner before, his calm returning, he said:

"Let's talk of your career. Do you know, I believe you'd do big things!"

She glanced up suspiciously, judging the tone rather than the words.

"You say that because you wish to get rid of me!" she said abruptly.

He protested vehemently to the contrary.

"Yes, yes, you would! I'm beginning to know you and your tricks! But look out! I warn you, you will never get rid of me!" She rose impatiently. "I don't like it here. We do nothing but quarrel. Come!"

Outside his automobile was waiting. "No, no; let's walk a little. It's good to be among people who are natural!"

"I have a meeting I can not put off--at nine; I told you," he said, irritated and impatient to be free.

It was cold, with a sharp, dry, exhilarating sting. The shop-windows were set with glaring enticements for the Christmas season--red and green or sparkling with tinsel and gold ornament. The sidewalks were alive with the sluggish loitering of a strange people, Italians, Germans, Jews from Russia, negroes flowing in from dark side streets, occasional Irish about the saloons, whose doors swung busily; but the signs above the shops were foreign, without trace of the first Anglo-Saxon emigration which had pa.s.sed on to the upper city.

Everything interested Dore. She wished to stop at every window, mingling with the urchins and the curious, prying into cellars whence the odor of onions or leather came to their nostrils. He yielded his arm, following her whims, and yet unamused. A policeman saluted him, grinning sympathetically at the spectacle of His Honor unbending. Ma.s.singale did not look back, but he divined, with annoyance, the smile and the interpretation. All this sodden or abject world, which pa.s.sed before his eyes day in and day out, with its unanswerable indictments, its bottomless misery, left on him a very different impression. He saw in it the quicksands of life, where those who steered their course without foresight sometimes disappeared, closed over by floods of mediocrity and poverty. Natural and happy? He felt in it only a horror and a threat. On his arm the touch of the young girl grew imperiously heavy, that touch which stopped him abruptly or forced him ahead, unwilling, bored and reluctant.

"I could be happy here--very happy!" she said romantically. There was something in this that recalled the few regretted sides of her early life. Sorrow was sorrow, and joy pure delight, and each walked here, unhesitating and unashamed, unhampered by little spying social codes or the artifices of manners. Her hand slipped down his arm to where his was plunged in his pocket, closing over it.

"It's wonderful! So free, so _honest_! Don't you adore the feeling?"

"No!" he said abruptly. He had been thinking of a college mate of his who had broken through the permitted of society and married where he should not have: a forgotten friend who had dropped out, who might have ended,--who knows?--in a howling stuffy flat in just such a quarter.

She drew her hand impatiently away.

"I hate you to-night! I won't keep you any longer. Take me home!"

In his own automobile, surrounded by the atmosphere of things he knew and enjoyed, Ma.s.singale felt an easier mood. Besides, her indifference and flashes of temper always exercised a provocative effect.

"What a little whirligig you are, Dodo," he said, laughing. "Happy there? You wouldn't last an afternoon! Besides, romance is one thing, but think of the dirt!"