Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Certainly,” said Annan, “you’re the sort of cheerful ass we need in our business. Come on! Some of these taxis belong to us—”

  “Where do you want me to go, you crazy—”

  “Now be nice, Louis,” he said, soothingly; “play pretty and don’t kick and scream. Burleson was going with us to see the old year out at the Cafe Gigolette, but he’s got laryngitis or some similar species of pip—”

  “I don’t want to go—”

  “You’ve got to, dear friend. We’ve engaged a table for six—”

  “Six!”

  “Sure, dearie. In the college of experience coeducation is a necessary evil. Step lively, son!”

  “Who is going?”

  [Illustration: “‘Me lord, the taxi waits.’”]

  “One dream, one vision, one hallucination—” he wafted three kisses from his gloved finger tips in the general direction of Broadway— “and you, and Samuel, and I. Me lord, the taxi waits!”

  “Now, Harry, I’m not feeling particularly cheerful—”

  “But you will, dear friend; you will soon be feeling the Fifty-seven Varieties of cheerfulness. All kinds of society will be at the Gigolette — good, bad, fashionable, semi-fashionable — all imbued with the intellectual and commendable curiosity to see somebody ‘start something.’ And,” he added, modestly, “Sam and I are going to see what can be accomplished—”

  “No; I won’t go—”

  But they fell upon him and fairly slid him into a taxi, beckoning two other similar vehicles to follow in procession.

  “Now, dearie,” simpered Sam, “don’t you feel better?”

  Neville laughed and smoothed out the nap of his top hat.

  They made three stops at three imposing looking apartment hotels between Sixth Avenue and Broadway — The Daisy, The Gwendolyn, The Sans Souci — where negro porters and hallboys were gorgeously conspicuous and the clerk at the desk seemed to be unusually popular with the guests. And after every stop there ensued a shifting of passengers in the taxicabs, until Neville found himself occupying the rear taxi in the procession accompanied by a lively young lady in pink silk and swansdown — a piquant face and pretty figure, white and smooth and inclined to a plumpness so far successfully contended with by her corset maker.

  “I have on my very oldest gown,” she explained with violet-eyed animation, patting her freshly dressed hair with two smooth little hands loaded with diamonds and turquoises. “I’m afraid somebody will start something and then they’ll throw confetti, and somebody will think it’s funny to aim champagne corks at you. So I’ve come prepared,” she added, looking up at him with a challenge to deny her beauty. “By the way,” she said, “I’m Mazie Gray. Nobody had the civility to tell you, did they?”

  “They said something…. I’m Louis Neville,” he replied, smiling.

  “Are you?” she laughed. “Well, you may take it from mother that you’re as cute as your name, Louis. Who was it they had all framed up to give me my cues? That big Burleson gentleman who’d starve if he had to laugh for a living, wasn’t it? Can you laugh, child?”

  “A few, Mazie. It is my only Sunday accomplishment.”

  “Dearie,” she added, correcting him.

  “It is my only accomplishment, dearie.”

  “That will be about all — for a beginning!” She laughed as the cab stopped at the red awning and Neville aided her to descend.

  Steps, vestibules, stairs, cloak-rooms were crowded with jolly, clamouring throngs flourishing horns, canes, rattles, and dusters decked with brilliant ribbons. Already some bore marks of premature encounters with confetti and cocktails.

  Waiters and head-waiters went gliding and scurrying about, assigning guests to tables reserved months in advance. Pages in flame-coloured and gold uniforms lifted the silken rope that stretched its barrier between the impatient crowd and the tables; managers verified offered credentials and escorted laughing parties to spaces bespoken.

  Two orchestras, relieving each other, fiddled and tooted continuously; great mounds of flowers, smilax, ropes of evergreens, multi-tinted electroliers made the vast salon gay and filled it with perfume.

  Even in the beginning it was lively enough though not yet boisterous in the city where all New York was dining and preparing for eventualities; the eventualities being that noisy mid-winter madness which seizes the metropolis when the birth of the New Year is imminent.

  It is a strange evolution, a strange condition, a state of mind not to be logically accounted for. It is not accurate to say that the nicer people, the better sort, hold aloof; because some of them do not. And in this uproarious carnival the better sort are as likely to misbehave as are the worse; and they have done it, and do it, and probably will continue to say and do and tolerate and permit inanities in themselves and in others that, at other moments, they would regard as insanities — and rightly.

  Around every table, rosily illuminated, laughter rang. White throats and shoulders glimmered, jewels sparkled, the clear crystalline shock of glasses touching glasses rang continual accompaniment to the music and the breezy confusion of voices.

  Here and there, in premonition of the eventual, the comet-like passage of streaming confetti was blocked by bare arms upflung to shield laughing faces; arms that flashed with splendid jewels on wrist and finger.

  Neville, coolly surveying the room, recognised many, responding to recognition with a laugh, a gesture, or with glass uplifted.

  “Stop making goo-goos,” cried Mazie, dropping her hand over his wrist.

  “Listen, and I’ll be imprudent enough to tell you the very latest

  toast—” She leaned nearer, opening her fan with a daring laugh; but

  Ogilvy wouldn’t have it.

  “This is no time for single sentiment!” he shouted. “Everybody should be perfectly plural to-night — everything should be plural, multiple, diffuse, all embracing, general, polydipsiatic, polygynyatic, polyandryatic!”

  [Illustration: Mazie Gray.]

  “What’s polyandryatic?” demanded Mazie in astonishment.

  “It means everybody is everybody else’s! I’m yours and you’re mine but everybody else owns us and we own everybody.”

  “Hurrah!” shouted Annan. “Hear — hear! Where is the fair and total stranger who is going to steal the first kiss from me? Somebody count three before the rush begins—”

  A ball of roses struck him squarely on the mouth; a furious shower of confetti followed. For a few moments the volleys became general, then the wild interchange of civilities subsided, and the cries of laughter died away and were lost in the loud animated hum which never ceased under the gay uproar of the music.

  When they played the barcarole from Contes d’Hoffman everybody sang it and rose to their feet cheering the beautiful prima donna with whom the song was so closely identified, and who made one of a gay group at a flower-smothered table.

  And she rose and laughingly acknowledged the plaudits; but they wouldn’t let her alone until she mounted her chair and sang it in solo for them; and then the vast salon went wild.

  Neville, surveying the vicinity, recognised people he never dreamed would have appeared in such a place — here a celebrated architect and his pretty wife entertaining a jolly party, there a well-known lawyer and somebody else’s pretty wife; and there were men well known at fashionable clubs and women known in fashionable sets, and men and women characteristic of quieter sets, plainly a little uncertain and surprised to find themselves there. And he recognised assorted lights of the “profession,” masculine and feminine; and one or two beautiful meteors that were falling athwart the underworld, leaving fading trails of incandescence in their jewelled wake.

  The noise began to stun him; he laughed and talked and sang with the others, distinguishing neither his own voice nor the replies. For the tumult grew as the hour advanced toward midnight, gathering steadily in strength, in license, in abandon.

  And now, as the minute hands on the big gilded clock twitched near
er and nearer to midnight, the racket became terrific, swelling, roaring into an infernal din as the raucous blast of horns increased in the streets outside and the whistles began to sound over the city from Westchester to the Bay, from Long Island to the Palisades.

  Sheer noise, stupefying, abominable, incredible, unending, greeted the birth of the New Year; they were dancing in circles, singing, cheering amid the crash of glasses. Table-cloths, silken gowns, flowers were crushed and trampled under foot; flushed faces looked into strange faces, laughing; eyes strange to other eyes smiled; strange hands exchanged clasps with hands unknown; the whirl had become a madness.

  And, suddenly, in its vortex, Neville saw Valerie West. Somebody had set her on a table amid the silver and flowers and splintered crystal. Her face was flushed, eyes and mouth brilliant, her gown almost torn from her left shoulder and fluttering around the lovely arm in wisps and rags of silk and lace. Querida supported her there.

  They pelted her with flowers and confetti, and she threw roses back at everybody, snatching her ammunition from a great basket which Querida held for her.

  Ogilvy and Annan saw her and opened fire on her with a cheer, and she recognised them and replied with volleys of rosebuds — was in the act of hurling her last blossom — caught sight of Neville where he stood with Mazie on a chair behind him, her arms resting on his shoulders. And the last rose dropped from her hand.

  Querida turned, too, inquiringly; recognised Neville; and for a second his olive cheeks reddened; then with a gay laugh he passed his arm around Valerie and, coolly facing the bombardment of confetti and flowers, swung her from the table to the floor.

  A furious little battle of flowers began at his own table, but Neville was already lost in the throng, making his way toward the door, pelted, shouldered, blocked, tormented — but, indifferent, unresponsive, forcing his path to the outer air.

  Once or twice voices called his name, but he scarcely heard them. Then a hand caught at his; and a breathless voice whispered:

  “Are you going?”

  “Yes,” he said, dully.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve had enough — of the New Year.”

  Breathing fast, the colour in her face coming and going, she stood, vivid lips parted, regarding him. Then, in a low voice:

  “I didn’t know you were to be here, Louis.”

  “Nor I. It was an accident.”

  “Who was the — girl—”

  “What girl?”

  “She stood behind you with her hands on your shoulders.”

  “How the devil do I know,” he said, savagely— “her name’s

  Mazie — something — or — other.”

  “Did you bring her?”

  “Yes. Did Querida bring you?” he asked, insolently.

  [Illustration: “And the last rose dropped from her hand.”]

  She looked at him in a confused, bewildered way — laid her hand on his sleeve with an impulse as though he had been about to strike her.

  He no longer knew what he was doing in the sudden surge of unreasoning anger that possessed him; he shook her hand from his sleeve and turned.

  And the next moment, on the stairs, she was beside him again, slender, pale, close to his shoulder, descending the great staircase beside him, one white-gloved hand resting lightly within his arm.

  Neither spoke. At the cloak-room she turned and looked at him — stood a moment slowly tearing the orchids from her breast and dropping the crushed petals underfoot.

  A maid brought her fur coat — his gift; a page brought his own coat and hat.

  “Will you call a cab?”

  He turned and spoke to the porter. Then they waited, side by side, in silence.

  When the taxicab arrived he turned to give the porter her address, but she had forestalled him. And he entered the narrow vehicle; and they sat through the snowy journey in utter silence until the cab drew up at his door.

  Then he said: “Are you not going home?”

  “Not yet.”

  They descended, stood in the falling snow while he settled with the driver, then entered the great building, ascended in the elevator, and stepped out at his door.

  He found his latch-key; the door swung slowly open on darkness.

  CHAPTER VII

  An electric lamp was burning in the hallway; he threw open the connecting doors of the studio where a light gleamed high on the ceiling, and stood aside for her to pass him.

  She stepped across the threshold into the subdued radiance, stood for a moment undecided, then:

  “Are you coming in?” she asked, cheerfully, quite aware of his ill-temper. “Because if you are, you may take off my coat for me.”

  He crossed the threshold in silence, and divested her of the fur garment which was all sparkling with melting snow.

  “Do let’s enjoy the firelight,” she said, turning out the single ceiling lamp; “and please find some nice, big crackly logs for the fire, Kelly! — there’s a treasure!”

  His frowning visage said: “Don’t pretend that it’s all perfectly pleasant between us”; but he turned without speaking, cleared a big arm-chair of its pile of silks, velvets, and antique weapons, and pushed it to the edge of the hearth. Every movement he made, his every attitude was characterised by a sulky dignity which she found rather funny, now that the first inexplicable consternation of meeting him had subsided. And already she was wondering just what it was that had startled her; why she had left the café with him; why he had left; why he seemed to be vexed with her. For her conscience, in regard to him, was perfectly clear and serene.

  “Now the logs, Kelly, dear,” she said, “the kind that catch fire in a second and make frying-pan music, please.”

  He laid three or four logs of yellow birch across the bed of coals. The blaze caught swiftly, mounting in a broad sheet of yellow flame, making their faces brilliant in the darkness; and the tall shadows leaped across floor and wall and towered, wavering above them from the ruddy ceiling.

  “Kelly!”

  “What?”

  “I wish you a Happy New Year.”

  “Thank you. I wish you the same.”

  “Come over here and curl up on the hearth and drop your head back on my knees, and tell me what is the trouble — you sulky boy!”

  He did not appear to hear her.

  “Please?—” with a slight rising inflection.

  “What is the use of pretending?” he said, shortly.

  “Pretending!” she repeated, mimicking him delightedly. Then with a clear, frank laugh: “Oh, you great, big infant! The idea of you being the famous painter Louis Neville! I wish there was a nursery here. I’d place you in it and let you pout!”

  “That’s more pretence,” he said, “and you know it.”

  “What silly things you do say, Louis! As though people could find life endurable if they did not pretend. Of course I’m pretending. And if a girl pretends hard enough it sometimes comes true.”

  “What comes true?”

  “Ah! — you ask me too much…. Well, for example, if I pretend I don’t mind your ill-temper it may come true that you will be amiable to me before I go home.”

  There was no smile from him, no response. The warmth of the burning logs deepened the colour in her cold cheeks. Snow crystals on her dark hair melted into iris-rayed drops. She stretched her arms to the fire, and her eyes fell on Gladys and her kitten, slumbering, softly embraced.

  “Oh, do look, Kelly! How perfectly sweet and cunning! Gladys has her front paws right around the kitten’s neck.”

  Impulsively she knelt down, burying her face in the fluffy heap; the kitten partly opened its bluish eyes; the mother-cat stretched her legs, yawned, glanced up, and began to lick the kitten, purring loudly.

  For a moment or two the girl caressed the drowsy cats, then, rising, she resumed her seat, sinking back deeply into the arm-chair and casting a sidelong and uncertain glance at Neville.

  The flames burned steadily, noiselessly, now; nothing els
e stirred in the studio; there was no sound save the ghostly whisper of driving snow blotting the glass roof above.

  Her gaze wandered over the silken disorder in the studio, arrested here and there as the firelight gleamed on bits of armour — on polished corselet and helmet and the tall hilts of swords. Then she looked upward where the high canvas loomed a vast expanse of gray, untouched except for the brushed-in outlines of men in shadowy processional.

  She watched Neville, who had begun to prowl about in the disorder of the place, stepping over trailing velvets, avoiding manikins armed cap-a-pie, moving restlessly, aimlessly. And her eyes followed his indecision with a smile that gradually became perplexed and then a little troubled.

  For even in the uncertain firelight she was aware of the change in his face — of features once boyish and familiar that seemed now to have settled into a sterner, darker mould — a visage that was too lean for his age — a face already haunted of shadows; a mature face — the face of a man who had known unhappiness.

  He had paused, now, head lifted, eyes fixed on vast canvas above. And for a long while he stood there leaning sideways against a ladder, apparently oblivious of her.

  Time lagged, halted — then sped forward, slyly robbing him of minutes of which his senses possessed no record. But minutes had come and gone while he stood there thinking, unconscious of the trick time played him — for the fire was already burning low again and the tall clock in the shadows pointed with stiff and ancient hands to the death of another hour and the birth of yet another; and the old-time bell chimed impartially for both with a shift and slide of creaking weights and wheels.

  He lifted his head abruptly and looked at Valerie, who lay curled up in her chair, eyes closed, dark lashes resting on her cheeks.

  As he passed her chair and returned to place more logs on the fire she opened her eyes and looked up at him. The curve of her mouth grew softly humorous.

  “I’d much prefer my own bed,” she said, “if this is all you have to say to me.”

  “Had you anything to say to me?” he asked, unsmiling.

  “About what, Kelly, dear?”

  “God knows; I don’t.”