Part I — Rebellion
Chapter One I
A young man of twenty-seven, a dashing Count d’Orsay type, was sitting astride a chair in flat number fifteen, one of the three-room flats in the Lorillard model tenement houses. He was alone in the room but evidently not in the flat, for he was directing animated remarks at one of two closed doors that flanked a projecting china cupboard.
“It’s to be a masked ball, Cornelia,” he was saying, “and I’m going as the head of John the Baptist.”
Two feminine voices, one from behind the door, laughed merrily. Much pleased, the young man continued:
“Or I might go as a Spanish cavalier. The costume in Whistler’s painting of ‘Henry Irving as Philip II’ would suit me to a T.”
“Claude, I know what you’re thinking of,” returned a well-pitched voice behind the right door. “You’re not thinking of the part of Philip II, but of the part of Don Juan, in which you expect to be irresistible.”
“Gee,” added kittenish tones behind the door. “It’d be a good sight better if he went as a penitent friar.”
“Leading you attired as Salome, I dare say.”
“Oh, no, I mean to go as St. Cecilia.”
Claude burst into mocking laughter.
“You’d need seven and seventy veils for that part, Mazie,” he said.
When he subsided, the same languid, purring tones replied from the left.
“Say, Claude, you have got a head. But so has a pin.”
“Naughty kitten, showing its claws in company!”
“Lothario!” cried Cornelia, from the right. “No quarreling before supper.”
“Oh, I need a little excitement to give me an appetite,” said Claude.
He got up, walked around the room several times and then stopped in front of the left door.
“I wish you’d hurry up, Mazie.”
“Mary, I’m on my fourth step,” purred her voice in reply.
“I can fairly see you dressing.”
Through Mazie’s door came a coloratura shriek.
“In my mind’s eye, that is,” added Claude, after a pause.
Resuming his seat he addressed the right door again.
“Cornelia, shall we go to the Turk’s or to the Spaniard’s?”
“I’m sorry, Lothario, but I’ve got a date with ‘Big Burley’ for tonight.”
“Hutchins Burley? Then have a good time!”
As his skeptical inflection belied his words, Cornelia asked for an explanation.
“Hutch is in a devil of a temper,” declared Claude grimly, “because Rob covered him with ridicule at the Outlaw Club.”
“Leave it to Robert Lloyd!”
This exclamation from the right door was followed by a peremptory command from the left.
“Say, wait a moment—I can’t hear you, Claude—and I can’t find my garter.”
Ignoring Mazie’s cries of distress, Claude proceeded to explain to the right door that Burley’s temper had been ruffled that afternoon at a meeting of the Outlaws, a club for young radical and artistic people which they all belonged to, and which, since the recent signing of the armistice, had more than trebled its membership. Friction had arisen from the contact of two facts: the need of money to provide the club with larger quarters, and the proposal to hold a public masked ball as an easy means of raising the money.
Hutchins Burley, who had organized the Outlaws, sponsored this proposal, but some of the members opposed it on the ground that, in the existing state of public opinion, a radical club might get a black eye from the improprieties or the hooliganism that outsiders could practice under cover of the masks. “Big Burley” had flattened out most of the opposition with his usual steam-rollering bluster, the Outlaws, like more timid gentry, being victims of a popular superstition that a noisy debater is always in the right.
Leading the minority, Claude had moved the substitution of a restricted costume ball for the free and easy masquerade. He was ably seconded by his friend Robert Lloyd, whose short satiric speech won over many supporters, so many that “Big Burley” fairly swelled with the venom of frustration. Claude assured Cornelia that, if a narrow majority had not finally declared itself in favor of the masked ball, Burley would certainly have exploded. As it was—
II
Further explanations were cut short by the opening of the door on the left.
“Mary, I’m on my last step,” announced the occupant, standing on the threshold.
Mazie Ross was taller and slenderer than her purring tones foreshadowed. Her intimates knew that, in addition to being extremely pretty, she was extremely bad. Young as she was, her looks were already enameled with cruelty. A long procession of lovers had left her wholly incapable of tenderness or shame.
With the cadenced poses of a Ziegfield “Follies” girl, she walked to Claude’s chair and stood beside him invitingly. He opened his arms and drew her on his lap. She struggled just enough to put zest into the embraces he immediately engaged her in.
“You haven’t invited me yet,” she said, pouting. “Do you think I don’t eat or drink?”
“Goddesses and sylphs live on nectar and ambrosia, you know.”
“Now you’re talking, old dear. But let me give you a tip. Those dishes don’t figure on the menu of a cheap Turkish restaurant in the gas house district. I do believe you can get them at the Plaza or the Ritz, though.”
Claude’s reply to this hint was to launch into caresses so daring that Mazie took alarm. She was in the habit of giving much less than she received, and she had not as yet received very much from Claude. Therefore she wriggled, with some difficulty, out of his grasp. Perhaps she also desired to anticipate the entrance of her chum. At any rate, Cornelia just then opened the door on the right.
III
“Time I came in,” she remarked; glancing significantly from one to the other.
“Yes,” replied Mazie, looking the picture of wounded innocence. “Since Claude came back from the firing line in France—or was it gay Paree?—liberty and license look alike to him. All the same, my beamish boy, there’s a boundary between the two.”
“Boundaries exist only to be extended,” chanted Claude, delighted with his own audacity.
“I don’t know which of you is the more incorrigible flirt,” said Cornelia, half in reproach.
“Listen to the pot calling the kettle black,” cried the “Follies” girl. “Somebody pass me a whiff of brandy to uplift me.”
“Don’t be vulgar, Mazie.”
Mazie’s answer was to tango to Cornelia’s cupboard, singing provocatively:
“I learnt more from Billy,
On the day I stayed from school,
Than teacher could have taught me in a week.”
She would have said and done much more than this to annoy Cornelia. But she remembered in time that her sayings or doings might offend Claude Fontaine who, in the words of a fellow Outlaw, was “rich, but refined.” She never knowingly gave offence to any form of wealth whilst there was hope of exploiting its owner even on the smallest scale. Besides, she was more than a little afraid of Cornelia.
After helping herself to an undiluted drink, she pranced back to the studio couch and flung herself upon it, face downwards, with the abandon of a Russian ballet dancer.
“Thank the Lord it’s to be a masked affair,” she called out to the others. “What’d be the good of a regular look-and-see ball? Nowadays men are that timid, you can’t have a lark with them unless they don’t see what they’re doing, nor who they’re doing it with.”
“Are you throwing stones at me?” asked Claude.
“No, at Robert Lloyd. What’s he doing in these diggings, anyhow? Why, he’s a regular pale-face. If he’s the new man—you know the kind—the kind that won’t kiss a girl in the dark without first asking her permission—then give me the old Nick.”
“Don’t blame it all on poor Cato,” Cornelia intervened.
Cornelia Covert was about thirty, blonde, loose-framed and of medium height. Her rich golden hair sounded a dominant note of which her pupils and her eyebrows were overtones. A firm, square chin heightened an illusion of strength with which her form invested her, but which her pale coloring and listless eye did not support.
“Claude sided with the strait-laced party, too,” she reminded Mazie.
“Oh, well,” said Claude, flushing slightly, “I’m really quite glad that the minority lost. To tell the truth, what I chiefly objected to was Hutchins Hurley’s cockiness. Personally I prefer a masked ball. I haven’t got Robert’s interest in backing the radicals or keeping their reputation spotless. Let’s risk it, I say. It’s a case of nothing venture, nothing have, isn’t it?”
“So Robert was the real leader of the rumpus all the time,” said Cornelia, sweetly. “I thought so. Still, I’m free to say that I admire his courage in defying ‘Big Burley.’ Especially when I think how afraid of Hutch all the Outlaws are.”
Claude rose to his full stature and walked to the head of the couch where he stood, handsome and commanding.
“Am I afraid of him?” he asked, amused.
“Well, you generally agree with him, Lothario.”
He received this jab with a smile. He supposed Cornelia to be speaking only of bodily fear, and as his physical courage and strength were unusual, the shaft glanced off.
“I mean,” said Cornelia, “that, like Big Burley, you are an anarchist at heart, only not such a wicked one. You work within the law, he works without.”
Claude was preparing a vigorous assault on any theory that placed Burley and himself in the same class, when a ring at the outer door took the opportunity away.