Chapter IX
The party was in full progress when they arrived. Jack and Tom Lindabury resided, as far as they could be said to reside anywhere, in a great green stone house of the 1860 period, with a deep garden in the back on which originally stood a stable, access to which was had, in the Parisian style, by a long, vaulted passage at one side. The Lindaburys, having discovered, as many other young men of fortune did at this period, the social adaptability of the artist’s atelier, had transformed the stable into a great studio, with a kitchen and two or three dressing-rooms, which served when the place was given over to amateur theatricals or to the not always restrained fêtes of the brothers’ invention.
Gunther’s party emerged from the hollow passage into the sudden cool of the short garden, where masked stone seats and arbors were faintly disclosed by the great stable lantern which swung at the entrance of the studio. Several couples, profiting by the obscurity, could be seen moving in the sudden shadows of the garden, laughing with a nervous, stifled laughter, as groups crossed or joined one another.
Holliday and Beecher, recognizing acquaintances, saluted them with the light banter, which was the note of the evening. Mme. Fornez, inside, called her companions with exclamations of surprise which drew the whispered curiosity of every one to her entrance.
“Oh, how funny it is! Look, Teddy, what do you call it? It is your—cowboy life, is it not?”
The great room had been transformed into a mining saloon of the type made popular by a certain play of the day. A bar ran across one end, presided over by an impossibly wicked bartender. A roulette-wheel was crowded at one side, while a negro orchestra, in 1850 costume, was busily sawing away, led by a cotton-head darky on a soap-box, who droned out his directions. Three-fourths of the room were in costume, Indian, Spanish, cowboy or frontier At the appearance of the new arrivals in evening dress, a shout went up:
“Tenderfeet, tenderfeet!”
“Fine them!”
“Shoot ’em up!”
But, in deference to Mrs. Fontaine and Emma Fornez, the protest was not so boisterous or accompanied by such rushing tactics as had greeted others. Nevertheless they were fined and escorted to one of the dressing-rooms. The men were forced to don dusters and white top-hats, and the women were given sombreros and mantillas.
Mme. Fornez, despite the frowns of Holliday, clung to Beecher’s arm, insisting on being personally conducted, plying him with innumerable questions.
“Oh what a terrible man! What an awful knife. I like the black men—sont ils rigolots—with their red and white collars. I want to see the bar-man toss drinks—so, in the air, Teddy. Come this way.”
All at once she stopped, and, facing about, took him by the lapels of the coat.
“It does not annoy you that I adopt you—that I call you Teddy?” she said, with a simulation of timidity and a sudden concentration of her swimming black eyes.
“Emma,” he said, laughing, “if you stop there I shall die of disappointment.”
She frowned a little at the “Emma,” but yielded the point.
“You are not very responsive, Monsieur Beecher,” she said, with a flash, “when I am so nice to you.”
“My dear Emma,” said Beecher, who, not being in love, could see clearly, “if I don’t fall at your feet, it’s because I know very well that the moment I did you would bulldoze me like Bob Holliday.”
Emma Fornez looked at him with a sudden gay approval.
“Teddy, you are very nice,” she said decidedly. “You understand how to play. I forbid you to fall in love, to get caught by any other woman, you understand. You are to be mine for the whole season—hein?”
“Nothing promised,” said Beecher, laughing.
Holliday came with two or three friends, clamoring to be introduced. Beecher profited by the confusion to make the turn of the room, which was crowded with laughing groups striving to penetrate the disguises of others while maintaining their own. At the faro table, a group from his club called to him to join them, but he kept on, saluting the dealer, costumed according to Bret Harte, with an approving wave of the hand.
The assembly was one of those curious social demarcations which prevail when formal society essays to be Bohemian, and which is probably evolved by the women in their always curious desire to study at close range those whose lives they are generally condemning. As is usually the case, the guests were made up of those who remained wrapped up in a mantel of inquisitive respectability, and would go early; a large body who waited impatiently for this first secession; and a certain element, not all professionals, at present exceedingly punctilious, who would inherit the right to put out the lanterns and close up the doors.
Young Beecher, pacing restlessly, nodding and smiling, searched in the crowd without quite admitting to himself what it was he sought. In the short period of his return, he had gone into many different sets, always retaining the prerogatives of his own. The women, besides those of the younger married women whom he knew, were of the opera, the stage, one or two, even, whose names were electrically displayed in vaudeville. He was caught up, greeted enthusiastically, and extricated himself with deftness, seeking in a general way to reach the great fireplace near which he had detected the figure of Mrs. Kildair.
The men, without exception, were of his own kind—of that second generation which is the peculiar problem of America. They were strong, well put together, with heads chiseled somewhat on the vigorous lines of the father spirits, condemned by the accident of wealth to the most un-American of professions, the idler. Without the mental languor of the foreign dilettante, consumed in reality by their own imprisoned energy, they were a restless, dissatisfied testimony of the error of their own civilization, the inability of the great, barbaric, money-acquiring American to comprehend the uses of wealth. Tonight, threatened with tomorrow’s disaster, stirred by the restlessness of the multitude, this excess of baffled energy was felt everywhere: at the bar, in the Anglo-Saxon intensity; at the faro table where the play had a certain desperate counterpart of the spirit that had assembled the future; in the momentary sudden accesses of gaiety that began to spread through the hesitant crowd, as an overturned bottle spreads its fluid over the cloth.
Beecher, too, without comprehending it, felt the stimulus, awakening all the nervous unemployed funds of energy within him and the intoxication of movement and laughter that brought him a sudden feverish hilarity, brought also a sense of unrest and dissatisfaction. Underneath all the over-excited spirits of frivolity was a current of grave apprehension which he felt in the occasional groupings of men and the low snatches of conversation which reached him.
“Bo Lynch’s cleaned out.”
“—not the only one.”
“—and thousands thrown on the market.”
“Eddie Fontaine’s crowd.”
“Copper’ll blow up higher than a kite!”
“—if Slade goes too.”
“They say there’s a line formed in front of the Atlantic.”
In his progress he encountered Jack Lindabury, lank and broad-shouldered, with the magnificent shell of a head that might have been set on the shoulders of a Gladstone. They shook hands with cordiality.
“Devil of a mess about Majendie,” said Lindabury.
“Are you hit?”
“Of course; Eddie Fontaine’s had us all in on his tip. Some of the crowd are liable to be wiped out. They tell me Bo Lynch had plunged every cent in the world.”
“Shouldn’t wonder,” said Beecher, reflecting. “Is he here?”
“Sure; he’s the bartender,” said Lindabury.
Beecher, surprised, nodded and made his way toward the end that had been converted into a frontier saloon, where, behind enormous mustaches, he recognized the long features of his fellow lodger.
“What’ll y’have?” said Lynch, in hoarse accents. Then, perceiving that he was recognized, he drew Beecher aside and said anxiously:
“You owe me fifty, Ted; we pulled it out. Go over and stake it at the table for me, if you’ve got it.”
“Sorry,” said Beecher, eying him critically and resolving to lie.
“Oh, well,” said Lynch philosophically, “it’ll look big as a house to-morrow.”
“Are you cleaned out, Bo?” said Beecher anxiously.
“Oh, no; I’m worth thousands,” said Lynch, with a grin, “until the market opens to-morrow.”
“Tough luck.”
“Steve Plunkett’s worse—he’s got to negotiate his gold fillings, they say.”
A party came up, clamoring for attention, and Lynch hastened to the rescue. Beecher continued curiously toward the faro table, admiring with an admiration tinged with compassion the sang froid of the losers, who in a desperate attempt to recover the imminent loss of the morrow, were staking sums that made the spectators raise their eyebrows in amazement.
“Supposing that Jap came back and sneaked the ring the second time,” said Gunther, taking his arm.
Beecher started in surprise.
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said.
“But I was. That puzzle of yours has been running in my head ever since. I’ve got six people now absolutely logically worked out for the thief—perfect deduction. Take me over to Mrs. Kildair; I want to meet that woman.”
“I say, Bruce,” said Beecher as they started to cross the room, “it’s going to be an awful smash. All the boys are caught. There’ll be the deuce to pay here later on.”
“Shouldn’t wonder—they started in pretty fierce.”
“Eat, drink, and be merry—eh?”
“Sure.”
By the hazards of the crowd they found themselves opposite Nan Charters, who was on the arm of Charlie Lorraine, a clean-cut, pleasant type of the racing set, decidedly handsome in a dark way.
“Hello, fellows, any old clothes to give away?” said Lorraine, who had the topic of the evening in jest. “I speak first. How the deuce did Eddie Fontaine miss you two? Heard what we are doing? We are organizing the Eddie Club. Every one who’s taken his tip is going up to live on Eddie’s farm for the winter—great idea, eh?”
While Gunther and Lorraine were laughing over this plan, a creation of Bo Lynch’s, Beecher was listening to Nan Charters, with a difficult attempt at calming the sudden emotion which her appearance with Lorraine had fired within him.
“What a dreadful time you chose to call!” she said directly. “Don’t you know that it takes a modern woman hours to mix her war-paint?”
She looked at him with a little tantalizing malice in her eyes.
“Coquette,” he thought furiously. “She is delighted because I was ass enough to call and give her the opportunity to refuse to see me.”
“Oh, not a call,” he said aloud, committing the stupidity of lying. “I was just rushing downtown, and stopped to inquire how you were after last night.”
This answer brought a natural pause. Each looked at the other, he with defiance, she with laughter in her eyes.
“You’re staying late,” he said at last, because her listening attitude forced him to say something.
“Yes, indeed.”
“It’ll be more amusing when it thins out,” he said in a purposely languid tone.
“When the sight-seers have left—yes,” she said, smiling.
Wishing to show what slight importance he attached to the encounter, he contrived to nudge Gunther as a signal that he was ready; but, his friend proving insensible, he was forced to proceed.
“Did you come with Mrs. Kildair?” he said perfunctorily.
“No.”
“With whom?” he asked, regretting the question as soon as it was uttered.
“With Mr. Lorraine—of course,” she said, looking down modestly, but beneath her eyelids he divined again the cunning malice.
At this moment, to his delight, Emma Fornez perceived him, and, being profoundly bored by her chance cavalier, a purely passive listener thoroughly bewildered by her sallies, gave a cry of joy:
“Teddy, traitor, where have you been?”
Dismissing her companion with a bob of her head, she seized Beecher’s arm, exclaiming:
“Heavens—save me! I have been shrieking at a deaf-mute.”
In the crowd, the head of her late companion could be seen, rolling his uncomprehending eyes. Beecher, overjoyed at the arrival, which gave him an advantage he was quick to perceive, nodded to Miss Charters and departed, exaggerating, for her benefit, the confidential intimacy which Mme. Fornez’s attitude permitted.
“Who is that woman?” said Emma Fornez immediately. “She is watching us. She doesn’t seem pleased. Tant pis!”
“Nan Charters—one of our younger actresses.”
“Ah! Good?”
“Yes.”
“She is pretty—in a way,” said Mme. Fornez, using her lorgnette, without caring in the least that Miss Charters perceived it. “Pas mal—pas mal. Not much temperament—afraid to uncover her shoulders. It is not an actress; it is a woman. You are interested, Teddy?”
“No.”
“Oh, avec ça. You are in love?”
“I met her last night for the first time.”
“That’s not an answer. Yes, you have a guilty look. You are a little taken—she provokes you—these little dolls always do. I will give you good advice; I will help you.”
“How?” said Beecher, a bit confused.
“I will be very, very nice with you,” said his companion gaily, her feet dancing to the music. “A woman always wants what another woman wants, particularly when she is a little actress and I am Emma Fornez. It’s very simple, but it never fails; only, I will not help you if you are really in love, you understand?”
Beecher solemnly assured her that she need have no fear.
“Very well, then. Be sure to pay attention to Madame Fontaine too; she likes you. We are the two women most distinguished here tonight—both high, high above your little Charters. It will double the effect. Do as I say; it’ll be amusing.”
Gunther joined them, protesting.
“I say, Madame Fornez, it’s not fair. We’ll have to get up a Whitecaps party and kidnap Ted, if you don’t stop.”
“Oh, we understand each other perfectly,” said Beecher, delighted to perceive that Nan Charters was still following his progress. “Whenever Emma wants to escape from some one, she remembers that she’s crazy about me. It is all arranged.”
Emma Fornez burst out laughing and gave him a little pat on his shoulder with the lorgnon.
“We are—chums, you say—hein, Teddy? Monsieur Gunthère is different. I like to talk with him—seriously.”
But at this moment, in response to a clamor, one of the negroes began dancing a shuffle in a quickly formed circle. Emma Fornez rushed off, with a cry of delight, deserting both young men.
“You’ve made a killing, Ted,” said Gunther, laughing.
“Pooh! she’ll forget my name tomorrow,” said Beecher, who, however, believed nothing of the sort. “Come on.”
Mrs. Kildair was standing by the great Italian fireplace, her glance playing incessantly through the crowd, nodding from time to time, but without hearing the remarks of two or three older men who surrounded her. So different was the magnetic animation of her whole attitude from the ordinary feline languor of her pose, that Beecher noticed it at once, an impression heightened by the flash of the eyes and the almost electric warmth of her hand as she greeted him. Mrs. Kildair, who had followed his entrance with Mrs. Craig Fontaine and Emma Fornez and moreover was particularly pleased at his presenting young Gunther, was unusually gracious.
Gunther, with his direct, almost obtrusive stare, studied her with unusual curiosity, conversed a little, and departed, after receiving a cordial invitation from her to call.
“What is the matter with you, Rita?” said Beecher immediately.
“Matter—how do you mean?”
“I have never seen you so excited.”
“Really, do I seem so?” she said, waving to some one on the floor.
“Extraordinarily so.”
“I am generally—dormant,” she said, laughing. “Yes, I am excited tonight.”
“You are on the track of the ring—you have found it,” he said instantly, with a pang of disappointment.
“No, not that,” she said, with a frown.
An idea came to him. He imagined that she too, like the good gambler he felt her to be, was laughing before the irretrievable disaster of the morrow.
“Look here, Rita,” he said sympathetically, “you’re not caught in the stock market, are you?
“No, no, of course not.” She saw the look on his face, and was touched by it. “Ruined and dying game? No, no; I am excited, very much excited, that’s all. Will you ask me to dance, sir?”
“Are they dancing?”
“Of course. Hurry up!”
Some of the more ardent spirits, impatient for the crowd to thin out, were whirling about, clearing an expanding circle by force of their revolving attacks. In a moment they were moving among the dancers.
Mrs. Kildair danced remarkably well. In this lithe body, so pliant and yet so inspired with the vertigo of the waltz, Beecher was again aware of the strange excitement that seemed to animate her whole being, and continued to ask himself the cause of such an unusual emotion. From time to time, the light fingers on his arms contracted imperiously, urging him to a wilder measure. He had a strange sensation of mystery and flight, as though he were no longer dancing, but whirling around with her in his arms, each striving, in the frantic flight, to conquer the other.
The dance ended. The spectators burst into applause. Mrs. Kildair, half opening her eyes, thanked him with a grateful smile. He walked away with her on his arm, agitated and troubled. What all the brilliance of Emma Fornez had not been able to accomplish, one touch of Rita Kildair had effected.
“I’ve lots of things to ask you,” he said hurriedly, remembering McKenna’s suggestions.
“No, no; not now—tomorrow,” she said breathlessly, with the same caressing, half-veiled look. She gave him her hand in dismissal.
He understood. The sensation which had come in the few moments of their vertigo had been too extraordinary to be dimmed by a descent to conversation.
He left her, as always, aware of the artist in her, that never failed in the conception of a situation.
“If I fall in love, it won’t be with Nan Charters,” he said, following Mrs. Kildair with his eyes.
Then, mindful of Emma Fornez’s advice, he joined Mrs. Fontaine, staying with her until she gave the signal to leave for those who had come to watch.
With this departure, in which Mrs. Kildair joined, a certain element of restraint disappeared. The unmistakable rising note of loosened tongues freed from Anglo-Saxon restraint by the scientifically contrived punch, began to mount above the rhythmic beat of the music, which itself seemed suddenly possessed of a wilder abandon. At the roulette table the players, coldly concentrated, continued in strained attitudes, oblivious of all but the blinding green nap before them.
Toward two o’clock the thirty or forty who still remained formed a circle, camping on the floor, Indian fashion, clamoring for songs and vaudeville turns. Jack Lindabury and Bo Lynch gave their celebrated take-off on grand opera. Elsie Ware, riotously acclaimed, accompanied by an hilarious chorus, sang her famous successes, turning to and fro coquetting with first one man and then another.
Emma Fornez, excited as a child, without waiting to be urged, ran to the piano and struck the first riotous chords of the “Habanera” of Carmen. Instantly there was a scramble for the sides of the long piano, and when she looked up again it was into a score of comically adoring faces, each striving to attract her attention. But Beecher, first to a position of vantage, received the full concentration of the diva’s glances. Flushed with the peculiar fleeting intoxication of exuberant youth—the knowledge of the evening’s success with women others coveted—he leaned far over the piano, resting his chin in his hands, gazing with a provoking malice into the eyes of the singer, exaggerating the intensity of his look, maliciously obvious of Nan Charters, whom he felt at his side. Emma Fornez, lending herself to the maneuver, opened her wide, languorous eyes, singing to him alone, with a little forward leaning of her body:
“L’amour est enfant de la Bohême,
Il n’a jamais connu de loi
Si tu m’aimes.”
The song ended in a furore. Mme. Fornez was overwhelmed with spontaneous adulation, and Beecher, laughing and struggling, was choked and carried away by the indignant suitors. Escaping, he came back, happy and resolved on more mischief. He had always had a passion for what is called fancy dancing, and in Europe had learned the dances of the country. He proposed to Emma Fornez a Spanish dance, and the idea was received with shouts of enthusiasm. Every one camped on the floor again, while three or four of the men, converting their sombreros into imaginary tambourines, shook them frantically in the air, led by Bo Lynch, who had somehow procured a great tin tray.
“You dance—are you sure?” asked Emma Fornez, looking at his flushed face with an anxious look; for some of the men, notably Lorraine and Lynch, were in a visibly excited state.
“Very well,” he said confidently.
“Allons, then!”
The dance he had chosen was one somewhat akin to the tarantella, a slow movement gradually and irresistibly singing up into a barbaric frenzy at the climax—one of those dances that are the epitome of primal coquetry, of the savage fascinating allurements of the feline, provoking to the dancer, doubly provoking to the spectator, bewildered by the sudden antagonisms of the poses and the brusque yieldings. At the end, according to Spanish custom, the dance ended in an embrace. Emma Fornez, surprised to find so inspired a partner, transported by the mood, ended laughingly with a kiss, her warm arms remaining languidly a moment about the shoulders of the young man, whom she complimented with expressions of surprise. Besieged at every side with cries for an encore, they repeated the dance, freer in their revolving movements from the intimacy of the first passage.
From time to time Beecher had managed to steal a glance in the direction of Nan Charters. She was sitting straight and unrelaxing, her eyes never leaving him, the lines of her mouth drawn a little tightly. When Emma Fornez had embraced him for the second time, Beecher, relaxing, perceived that Nan Charters turned her back and was conversing volubly, her shoulders rising and falling with little rapid movements, while her fan had the same nervous lashing that one sees in the uneasy panther.
He was delighted at his success, at the revenge he had inflicted, at the superiority he had regained. The dances began again, but he did not dance. He held himself near the entrance, surveying the scene triumphantly. The experience was new to him; in the few years he had passed since college, he had been really out of the world. This game—the most fascinating of all the games of chance that can fascinate the gambler in each human being—the game between man and woman, came to him as a revelation, with a zest that was almost a discovery of his youth.
All at once a feminine hand was laid on his arm and the voice of Nan Charters said:
“Come outside—in the garden. I want to speak to you. Come quietly.”
Elated by a strange, almost cruel feeling of conquest, he followed her, with a last look back at the studio, at the littered bar, where Bo Lynch was still calling raucously for customers, at the silent intensity of the gamblers, whom he occasionally perceived between the flitting dresses of the dancers. In the middle of the floor Lorraine and Plunkett, stumbling and unsteady, were solemnly waltzing in each other’s arms—the specter of the morning forgotten.
He closed the door softly and joined the young actress, who was waiting for him at some distance.
“Can you take me home?” she asked directly. “Mr. Lorraine is in such a condition that I do not wish to go with him.”
“Certainly,” he said, a feeling of protection replacing the first victorious perception of the fire of jealousy he had awakened in her.
Gunther’s automobile was waiting, and they entered it. She did not say a word to him, and he, determined to force her to begin the conversation, waited with a pleased enjoyment until three-quarters of the journey had been accomplished. All at once she turned, and, taking him by the lapels of the coat, brought him toward her as one scolds a child.
“Are you so angry because I didn’t see you this afternoon?” she said, smiling.
The feminine defensive instinct of avoiding the issue by ambushing it with subterfuges, is equaled only by that instinct for attack which brushes aside all preliminaries and strikes directly. Beecher, taken off his guard, was a prey to two contrary impulses. Two replies, absolutely opposed and illogically joined, came to his lips. One brutal, still charged with the savageness of the evening, to say:
“Angry? Not at all. Aren’t you claiming a little too much?”
And the other, a warm, yielding desire to blurt out frankly:
“Yes, I was angry. I wanted to see you.”
She waited. Her large eyes, seeming larger in the dim light of the carriage, continued steadily on him. The first impulse dominated the second, but was modified by it.
“Angry? What a curious idea!” he began, with a half laugh. “You were so upset—”
She interrupted him, shaking her head.
“Why did you act the way you did tonight? Don’t do things that are not like you. That is not the way we began.”
He was silent, not knowing what to answer. Presently she withdrew into her corner, glanced out of the window, as if to assure herself that they were near their destination, and, placing her hand over his, said gently:
“You are very sympathetic to me. Keep it so.”
For all that he said to himself that it was his favor with other women that made him precious to her, he felt a certain yielding of the spirit. He wondered if he could take her in his arms; but he restrained himself, and closed his two hands over hers.
“Yes, we are very sympathetic,” he said; but he did not say all he meant.
“What a foolish boy you are,” she said finally, looking up at him. “Don’t you know that if I say one word you will go wherever I want you to?”
He was so taken by surprise at the audacity and confidence of her remark, that he could not collect himself for an answer, outgeneraled by the woman who had so calculated to a nicety her last words that the arrival of the automobile left him without response.
He went home, repeating to himself what she had asserted, resisting a wild desire to return to the Lindaburys’ and forget there the disorder in his soul; and, though he rebelled scornfully against her confident assertion, the incessant repetition of it did leave an impression.
As he passed the great marble façade of the Atlantic Trust, an unusual sight made him bend out of the window. In the chill gray of the coming dawn, a thin line of depositors was waiting, some standing, others huddled on campstools. At the sight the seriousness of life smote him, and he returned home, the tremulous turns of the human gamble he had played feverishly blended and confused with the dark realities of the rising tragedy of speculation.