Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “I suppose you’re looking for Mrs. Leeds,” said Westguard, smiling.

  “I fancy every man here is doin’ the same thing,” replied the clown. “What’s her costume? Do you know, Ironsides?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if I did,” said Westguard frankly.

  The Harlequin shrugged.

  “This world,” he remarked, “is principally encumbered with women, and naturally a man supposes the choice is unlimited. But as you live to drift from girl to girl you’ll discover that there are just two kinds; the kind you can kiss and the kind you can’t. So finally you marry the latter. Does Mrs. Leeds flirt?”

  “Will a fish swim?” rejoined the clown. “You bet she will flirt. Haven’t you met her?”

  “I? No,” said the Harlequin carelessly. Which secretly amused both Westguard and O’Hara, for it had been whispered about that the new beauty not only had taken no pains to meet Quarren, but had pointedly ignored an opportunity when the choice lay with her, remarking that dancing men were one of the social necessities which everybody took for granted — like flowers and champagne. And the comment had been carried straight to Quarren, who had laughed at the time — and had never forgotten it, nor the apparently causeless contempt that evidently had inspired it.

  The clown brandished his bunch of toy balloons, and gazed about him:

  “Anybody who likes can go and tell Mrs. Leeds that I’m her declared suitor. I don’t care who knows it. I’m foolish about her. She’s different from any woman I ever saw. And if I don’t find her pretty soon I’ll smash every balloon over your head, Ricky!”

  The Harlequin laughed. “Women,” he said, “are cut out in various and amusing patterns like animal crackers, but the fundamental paste never varies, and the same pastry cook seasoned it.”

  “That’s a sickly and degenerate sentiment,” observed Westguard.

  “You might say that about the unfledged,” added O’Hara— “like those kittenish Bacchantes. Winifred Miller and the youngest Vernon girl were two of those Flappers, I think. But there’s no real jollity among the satiated,” he added despondently. “A mask, a hungry stomach, and empty pockets are the proper ingredients for gaiety — take it from me, Karl.” And he wandered off, beating everybody with his bunch of toy balloons.

  Quarren leaped to the seat of a chair and squatted there drawing his shimmering legs up under him like a great jewelled spider.

  “Bet you ten that the voluminous domino yonder envelops my aunt, Mrs. Sprowl,” whispered Westguard.

  “You’re betting on a certainty and a fat ankle.”

  “Sure. I’ve seen her ankles going upstairs too often.... What the devil is the old lady wearing under that domino?”

  “Wait till you see her later,” said Quarren, delightedly. “She has come as Brunhilda.”

  “I don’t want to see three hundred pounds of relative as Brunhilda,” growled Westguard.

  “You will, to-morrow. She’s given her photograph to a Herald man.”

  “What did you let her do it for?” demanded Westguard wrathfully.

  “Could I help it?”

  “You could have stopped her. She thinks your opinion is the last lisp in fashionable art problems.”

  “There are some things you can’t tell a woman,” said Quarren. “One of ’em concerns her weight.”

  “Are you afraid of Mrs. Sprowl?”

  The Harlequin laughed:

  “Where would I be if I incurred your aunt’s displeasure, dear friend?”

  “Out of the monkey house for good I suppose,” admitted Westguard. “Lord, Ricky, what a lot you have had to swallow for the sake of staying put among these people!”

  Quarren sat meditating under his mask, cross-legged, twirling his sword, the crash of the floor orchestra dinning in his close-set ears.

  “Yes,” he said without resentment, “I’ve endured my share. That’s one reason why I don’t want to let several years of humiliation go for nothing. I’ve earned whatever place I have. And I mean to keep it.”

  Westguard turned on him half angrily, hesitated, then remained silent. What was the use? If Quarren had not been guilty of actually fawning, toadying, currying favour, he had certainly permitted himself to be rudely used. He had learned very thoroughly his art in the school of the courtier — learned how and when to be blind, silent, deaf; how to offer, how to yield, when and how to demand and exact. Which, to Westguard, meant the prostitution of intelligence. And he loathed the game like a man who is free to play it if he cares to. Of those who are denied participation, few really hate it.

  But he said nothing more; and the Harlequin, indolently stretching his glittering limbs, dropped a light hand on Westguard’s cuirassed shoulder:

  “Don’t be forever spoiling things for me, Karl. I really do enjoy the game as it lies.”

  “It does lie — that is the trouble, Rix.”

  “I can’t afford to criticise it.... Listen; I’m a mediocre man; I’d never count among real men. I count in the set which I amuse and which accepts me. Let me enjoy it, can’t you?”

  An aged dandy, masked, painted, wizened, and dressed like Henri II, tottered by with a young girl on his arm, his shrill, falsetto giggle piercing the racket around them.

  “Do you wish to live to be like that?” asked Westguard sharply.

  “Oh, I’ll die long before that,” said Quarren cheerfully, and leaped lightly to his feet. “I shall now accomplish a little dancing,” he said, pointing with his wooden sword at the tossing throng. “Venus send me a pretty married woman who really loves her husband.... By Bacchus! Those dancers are going it! Come on, Karl. Leave us foot it!”

  Many maskers were throwing confetti now: multi-tinted serpents shot out across the clamorous gulf; bunches of roses flung high, rising in swift arcs of flight, crossed and recrossed. All along the edges of the dance, like froth and autumn leaves cast up from a whirlpool, fluffy feminine derelicts and gorgeous masculine escorts were flung pell-mell out of the maelstrom and left stranded or drifting breathless among the eddies setting in toward the supper-room.

  Suddenly, as the Harlequin bent forward to plunge into the crush, the very centre of the whirlpool parted, and out of it floated a fluttering, jingling, dazzling figure all gold — slender, bare-armed and bare of throat and shoulders, auriferous, scintillating from crown to ankle — for her sleeveless tabard was cloth-of-gold, and her mask was gold; so were her jewelled shoes and the gemmed fillet that bound her locks; and her thick hair clustering against her cheeks had the lustre of precious metal.

  Jingling, fluttering, gems clashing musically, the Byzantine dancer, besieged by adorers, deftly evaded their pressing gallantries — evaded the Harlequin, too, with laughing mockery, skilfully disengaging herself from the throng of suitors stumbling around her, crowded and buffeted on every side.

  “Jingling, fluttering, gems clashing musically, the Byzantine dancer, besieged by adorers, deftly evaded their pressing gallantries.”

  After her like a flash sped Harlequin: for an instant, just ahead of him, she appeared in plain sight, glimmering brightly against the green and swaying tapestry of living leaves and flowers, then even as her pursuers looked at her, she vanished before their very eyes.

  They ran about distractedly hunting for her, Turk, Drum Major, Indian Chief, and Charles the First, then reluctantly gave up the quest and drifted off to seek for another ideal. All women are ideal under the piquant promise of the mask.

  A pretty shepherdess, lingering near, whispered close to Quarren’s shoulder behind her fan:

  “Check to you, Harlequin! That golden dancer was the only girl in town who hasn’t taken any pains to meet you!”

  He turned his head, warily, divining Molly Wycherly under the disguise, realising, too, that she recognised him.

  “You’ll never find her now,” laughed the shepherdess. “Besides she does not care a rap about meeting a mere Harlequin. It’s refreshing to see you so thoroughly snubbed once in a while.” And she danced gail
y away, arms akimbo, her garlanded crook over her shoulder; and her taunting laughter floated back to him where he stood irresolute, wondering how the golden dancer could have so completely vanished.

  Suddenly he recollected going over the house before its completion with Jim Wycherly, who had been his own architect, and the memory of a certain peculiarity in the construction of the ball-room flashed into his mind. The only possible explanation for her disappearance was that somebody had pointed out to her the low door behind the third pillar, and she was now in the gilded swallow’s-nest aloft.

  It was a whim of Wycherly — this concealed stair — he recalled it perfectly now — and, parting the living tapestry of blossoms, he laid his hand on the ivory and gilded paneling, pressing the heart of one carved rose after another, until with a click! a tiny door swung inward, revealing a narrow spiral of stairs, lighted rosily by electricity.

  He stepped inside, closed the door, and listened, then mounted noiselessly. Half way up he caught the aroma of a cigarette; and, a second later he stepped out onto a tiny latticed balcony, completely screened.

  The golden dancer, who evidently had been gazing down on the carnival scene below from behind the lattice, whirled around to confront him in a little flurry of cigarette smoke.

  For a moment they faced each other, then:

  “How did you know where to find me, Harlequin?”

  “I’d have died if I hadn’t found you, fairest, loveliest — —”

  “That is no answer! Answer me!”

  “Why did you flee?” he asked. “Answer that, first.”

  She glanced at her cigarette and shrugged her shoulders:

  “You see why I fled, don’t you? Now answer me.”

  The Harlequin presented the hilt of his sword which was set with a tiny mirror.

  “You see why I fled after you,” he said, “don’t you?”

  “All the same,” she insisted, smilingly, “I have been informed on excellent authority that I am the only one, except the family, who knows of this balcony. And here comes a Harlequin blundering in! You are not Mr. Wycherly; and you’re certainly not Molly.”

  “Alas! My ultimate ends are not as shapely.”

  “Then who are you?” She added, laughing: “They’re shapely enough, too.”

  “I am only a poor wandering, love-smitten Harlequin—” he said, “scorned, despised, and mocked by beauty — —”

  “Love-smitten?” she repeated.

  “Can you doubt it, now?”

  She laughed gaily and leaned back against the balcony’s velvet rail:

  “You lose no time in declaring yourself, do you, Harlequin? — that is, if you are hinting that I have smitten you with the pretty passion.”

  “Through and through, beautiful dancer — —”

  “How do you know that I am beautiful under this mask?”

  “I know many things. That’s my compensation for being only a poor mountebank of a Harlequin — magic penetration — the clairvoyance of radium.”

  “Did you expect to find me at the top of those cork-screw stairs?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Inference. Every toad hides a jewel in its head. So I argued that somewhere in the ugliness of darkest Philistia a gem must be hidden; and I’ve searched for years — up and down throughout the haunts of men from Gath to Ascalon. And — behold! My quest is ended at your pretty feet! — Rose-Diamond of the World!”

  He sank lithely on one knee; she laughed deliciously, looking down at his masked face.

  “Who are you, Harlequin? — whose wits and legs seem to be equally supple and symmetrical?”

  “Tell it not in Gath; Publish it not in the streets of Ascalon; I am that man for whom you were destined before either you or I were born. Are you frightened?”

  The Byzantine dancer laughed and shook her head till all the golden metal on her was set chiming.

  He said, still on one knee at her feet:

  “Exquisite phantom of an Empire dead, from what emblazoned sarcophagus have you danced forth across our modern oceans to bewitch the Philistia of to-day? Who clothed you in scarlet delicately? Who put ornaments of gold upon your apparel — —”

  “You court me with Scripture as smoothly as Heaven’s great Enemy,” she said— “and to your own ends, as does he. Are you leagued with him, O agile and intrusive Harlequin, to steal away my peace of mind?”

  Lithely, silently he leaped up to the balustrade and, gathering his ankles under him, squatted there, cross-legged, peering sideways at her through the slanting eye-holes.

  “If that screen behind you gives way,” she warned him, “you will have accomplished your last harlequinade.”

  He glanced coolly over his shoulder:

  “How far is it to the floor below, do you suppose?”

  “Far enough to make a good harlequin out of a live one,” she said.... “Please be careful; I really mean it.”

  “Child,” he said solemnly, “do you suppose that I mind falling a hundred feet or so on my head? I’ve already fallen infinitely farther than that this evening.”

  “And it didn’t kill you?” she exclaimed, clasping her hands, dramatically.

  “No. Because our destiny must first be accomplished before I die.”

  “Ours?”

  “Yours and mine, pretty dancer! I’ve already fulfilled my destiny by falling in love with you at first sight. That was a long fall, wasn’t it?”

  “Very. Am I to fulfil mine in a similar manner?”

  “You are.”

  “Will it — kill me, do you think?”

  “I don’t think so. Try it.”

  “Will it hurt? — this terrible fall? And how far must I descend to fall in love with you?”

  “Sometimes falling in love does hurt,” he said gravely, “when the fall is a long one.”

  “Is this to be a long one?”

  “You may think so.”

  “Then I decline to tumble. Please go somewhere about your business, Master Harlequin. I’m inclined to like you.”

  “Dancer, my life’s business is wherever you happen to be.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Magic,” he said seriously. “I deal in it.”

  “Wonderful! Your accomplishments overwhelm me. Perhaps, through the aid of magic, you can even tell me who I am!”

  “I think I can.”

  “Is that another threat of magic?”

  “It’s a bet, too, if you like.”

  “Are you offering to bet me that, before I unmask, you will be able to discover who I am?”

  “Yes. Will you make it a wager?” She stood, silent, irresolute, cautious but curious; then:

  “Do you mean that you can find out who I am? Now? Here in this balcony?”

  “Certainly.”

  “That is sheer nonsense,” she said with decision. “I’ll bet you anything you like.”

  “What stakes?”

  “Why there’s nothing to bet except the usual, is there?”

  “You mean flowers, gloves, stockings, bon-bons?”

  “Yes.”

  The Harlequin, smiling at her askance, drew from the hilt of his lathe-sword a fresh cigarette, lighted it, looked across at the level chandelier, and sent a ring of smoke toward the twinkling wilderness of prisms hanging in mid-air.

  “Let’s be original or perish,” he said. “I’ll bet you a day out of my life against a day out of yours that I discover who you are in ten minutes.”

  “I won’t accept such a silly wager! What would you do with me for a day?”

  The Harlequin bent his masked head. Over his body the lozenges of scarlet and gold slid crinkling as though with suppressed and serpentine mirth.

  “What are you laughing at?” she demanded half vexed, half amused.

  “Your fears, pretty dancer.”

  “I am not afraid!”

  “Very well. Prove it! I have offered to bet you a day out of my life that I’ll tell you who y
ou are. Are you afraid to wager a day out of yours that I can’t do it?”

  She shook her head so that the burnished locks clustered against her cheeks, and all over her slim figure the jingling gold rang melodiously.

  “I haven’t long to live,” she observed. “A day out of life is too much to risk.”

  “Why don’t you think that you have long to live?”

  “I haven’t. I know it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.... Besides, I don’t wish to live very long.”

  “You don’t wish to live long?”

  “Only as long as I’m young enough to be forgetful. Old age is a horror — in some cases. I don’t desire ever to be forty. After forty they say one lives on memory. I don’t wish to.”

  Through the slits of his mask his curious eyes watched her steadily.

  “You’re not yet twenty-four,” he said.

  “Not quite. That is a good guess, Harlequin.”

  “And you don’t want to live to be old?”

  “No, I don’t wish to.”

  “But you are rather keen on living while you’re young.”

  “I’ve never thought much about it. If I live, it’s all right; if I die, I don’t think I’ll mind it.... I’m sure I shouldn’t.”

  Her cigarette had gone out. She tossed it aside and daintily consented to exchange cigarettes with him, offering her little gold case.

  “You’re carefully inspecting my initials, aren’t you?” she observed, amused. “But that monogram will not help you, Master Harlequin.”

  “Marriage alters only the final initial. Are you, by any unhappy chance — —”

  “That’s for you to find out! I didn’t say I was! I believe you are making me tell you things!”

  She threw back the lustrous hair that shadowed her cheeks and leaned forward, her shadowed eyes fixed intently upon him through the apertures of her golden mask.

  “I’m beginning to wonder uneasily who you may be, Monsieur Harlequin! You alarm me a little.”

  “Aha!” he said. “I’ve told you I deal in magic! That you don’t know who I am, even after that confession, makes me reasonably certain who you are.”

  “You’re trying to scare me,” she said, disdainfully.

  “I’ll do it, yet.”