Dog talk absorbed everybody during dinner. Mrs. Barres and Lee were intensely interested in Thessalie’s description of the Grand Duke Cyril’s Russian wolfhounds, with which she had coursed and hunted as a child.
Once she spoke, also, of those strange, pathetic, melancholy Ishmaelites, pitiable outcasts of their race — the pariah dogs of Constantinople. For, somehow, while dressing that evening, the distant complaint of a tethered beagle had made her think of Stamboul. And she remembered that night so long ago on the moonlit deck of the Mirage, where she had stood with Ferez Bey while, from the unseen, monstrous city close at hand, arose the endless wailing of homeless dogs.
How strange it was, too, to think that the owner of the Mirage should this night be her host here in the Western World, yet remain unconscious that he had ever before entertained her.
* * * * *
Before coffee had been served in the entrance hall, the kennel master sent in word that one of the pups, a promising Blue Belton, had turned very sick indeed, and would Mrs. Barres come to the kennels as soon as convenient.
It was enough for Mrs. Barres and for Lee; they both excused themselves without further ceremony and went away together to the kennels, apparently quite oblivious of their delicate dinner gowns and slippers.
“I’ve seen my mother ruin many a gown on such errands,” remarked Garry, smiling. “No use offering yourself as substitute; my mother would as soon abandon her own sick baby to strangers as turn over an ailing pup to anybody except Lee and herself.”
“I think that is very splendid,” murmured Dulcie, relinquishing her coffee cup to Garry and suffering a maid to invest her with a scarf and light silk wrap.
“My mother is splendid,” said Garry in a low voice. “You will see her prove it some day, I hope.”
The girl turned her lovely head, curiously, not understanding. Garry laughed, but his voice was not quite steady when he said:
“But it all depends on you, Dulcie, how splendid my mother may prove herself.”
“On me!”
“On your — kindness.”
“My — kindness!”
Thessalie came up in her pretty carnation-rose cloak, esquired by the enraptured Westmore, expressing admiration for the clothing adorning the very obvious object of his devotion:
“All girls can’t wear a thing like that cloak,” he was explaining proudly; “now it would look like the devil on you, Dulcie, with your coppery hair and — —”
“What exquisite tact!” shrugged Thessalie, already a trifle restive under his constant attendance and unremitting admiration. “Can’t you, out of your richly redundant vocabulary, find something civil to say to Dulcie?”
But Dulcie, still preoccupied with what Barres had said, merely gave her an absent-minded smile and walked slowly out beside her to the porch, where the headlights of a touring car threw two broad beams of gold across the lawn.
It was a swift, short run through the valley northward among the hills, and very soon the yellow lights of Northbrook summer homes dotted the darkness ahead, and cars were speeding in from every direction — from Ilderness, Wythem, East and South Gorloch — carrying guests for the Gerhardts’ moonlight spectacle and dance.
Apropos of the promised spectacle, Barres observed to Dulcie that there happened to be no moon, and consequently no moonlight, but the girl, now delightfully excited by glimpses of Hohenlinden festooned with electricity, gaily reproached him for being literal.
“If one is happy,” she said, “a word is enough to satisfy one’s imagination. If they call it a moonlight spectacle, I shall certainly see moonlight whether it’s there or not!”
“They may call it heaven, too, if they like,” he said, “and I’ll believe it — if you are there.”
At that she blushed furiously:
“Oh, Garry! You don’t mean it, and it’s silly to say it!”
“I mean it all right,” he muttered, as the car swung in through the great ornamental gates of Hohenlinden. “The trouble is that I mean so much — and you mean so much to me — that I don’t know how to express it.”
The girl, her face charmingly aglow, looked straight in front of her out of enchanted eyes, but her heart’s soft violence in her breast left her breathless and mute; and when the car stopped she scarcely dared rest her hand on the arm which Barres presented to guide her in her descent to earth.
It may have been partly the magnificence of Hohenlinden that so thrillingly overwhelmed her as she seated herself with Garry on the marble terrace of an amphitheatre among brilliant throngs already gathered to witness the eagerly discussed spectacle.
And it really was a bewilderingly beautiful scene, there under the summer stars, where a thousand rosy lanterns hung tinting the still waters of the little stream that wound through the clipped greensward which was the stage.
The foliage of a young woodland walled in this vernal scene; the auditorium was a semi-circle of amber marble — rows of low benches, tier on tier, rising to a level with the lawn above.
The lantern light glowed on pretty shoulders and bare arms, on laces and silks and splendid jewels, and stained the sombre black of the men with vague warm hues of rose.
Westmore, leaning over to address Barres, said with an amused air:
“You know, Garry, it’s Corot Mandel who is putting on this thing for the Gerhardts.”
“Certainly I know it,” nodded Barres. “Didn’t he try to get Thessa for it?”
Thessalie, whose colour was high and whose dark eyes, roaming, had grown very brilliant, suddenly held out her hand to one of two men who, traversing the inclined aisle beside her, halted to salute her.
“Your name was on our lips,” she said gaily. “How do you do, Mr. Mandel! How do you do, Mr. Trenor! Are you going to amaze us with a miracle in this enchanting place?”
The two men paid their respects to her, and, with unfeigned astonishment and admiration, to Dulcie, whom they recognised only when Thessalie named her with delighted malice.
“Oh, I say, Miss Soane,” began Mandel, leaning on the back of the marble seat, “you and Miss Dunois might have helped me a lot if I’d known you were to be in this neighbourhood.”
Esmé Trenor bent over Barres, dropping his voice:
“We had to use a couple of Broadway hacks — you’ll recognise ’em through their paint — you understand? — the two that New York screams for. It’s too bad. Corot wanted something unfamiliarly beautiful and young and fresh. But these Northbrook amateurs are incredibly amateurish.”
Thessalie was chattering away with Corot Mandel and Westmore; Esmé Trenor gazed upon Dulcie in wonder not unmixed with chagrin:
“You’ve never forgiven me, Dulcie, have you?”
“For what?” she inquired indifferently.
“For not discovering you when I should have.”
She smiled, but the polite effort and her detachment of all interest in him were painfully visible to Esmé.
“I’m sorry you still remember me so unkindly,” he murmured.
“But I never do remember you at all,” she explained so candidly that Barres was obliged to avert his amused face, and Esmé Trenor reddened to the roots of his elaborate hair. Mandel, with a wry grin, linked his arm in Trenor’s and drew him away toward the flight of steps which was the stage entrance to the dressing rooms below.
“Good-bye!” he said, waving his hat. “Hope you’ll like my moonlight frolic!”
“Where’s your bally moon!” demanded Westmore.
As he spoke, an unseen orchestra began to play “Au Claire de la Lune,” and, behind the woods, silhouetting every trunk and branch and twig, the glittering edge of a huge, silvery moon appeared.
Slowly it rose, flashing a broad path of light across the lawn, reflected in the still little river. And when it was in the position properly arranged for it, some local Joshua — probably Corot Mandel — arrested its further motion, and it hung there, flooding the stage with a witching lustre.
All at once
the stage swarmed with supple, glimmering shapes: Oberon and Titania came flitting down through the trees; Puck, scintillating like a dragon-fly, dropped on the sward, seemingly out of nowhere.
It was a wonderfully beautiful ballet, with an unseen chorus singing from within the woods like a thousand seraphim.
As for the play itself, which began with the calm and silvered river suddenly swarming alive with water-nymphs, it had to do, spasmodically, with the love of the fairy crown-prince for the very attractive water-nymph, Ythali. This nimble lady, otherwise, was fiercely wooed by the King of the Mud-turtles, a most horrid and sprawling shape, but a clever foil — with his army of river-rats, minks and crabs — to the nymphs and wood fairies.
Also, the music was refreshingly charming, the singing excellent, and the story interesting enough to keep the audience amused until the end.
There was, of course, much moonlight dancing, much frolicking in the water, few clothes on the Broadway principals, fewer on the chorus, and apparently no scruples about discarding even these.
But the whole spectacle was so unreal, so spectral, that its shadowy beauty robbed it of offence.
That sort of thing had made Corot Mandel famous. He calculated to the width of a moonbeam just how far he could go. And he never went a hair’s breadth farther.
Thessalie looked on with flushed cheeks and parted lips, absorbed in it all with the savant eyes of a professional. She also had once coolly decided how far her beauty and talent and adolescent effrontery could carry her gay disdain of man. And she had flouted him with indifferent eyes and dainty nose uplifted — mocked him and his conventions, with a few roubles in her dressing-room — slapped the collective face of his sex with her insolent loveliness, and careless smile.
Perhaps, as she sat there watching the fairy scene, she remembered her ostrich and the German Embassy, and the aged Von-der-Goltz Pasha, all over jewels and gold, peeping at her through thick spectacles under his red fez.
Perhaps she thought of Ferez, too, and maybe it was thought of him that caused her smooth young shoulders the slightest of shivers, as though a harsh breeze had chilled her skin.
As for Dulcie, she was in the seventh heaven, thrilled with the dreamy beauty of it all and the exquisite phantoms floating on the greensward under her enraptured eyes.
No other thought possessed her save sheer delight in this revelation of pure enchantment.
So intent, so still she became, leaning a little forward in her place, that Barres found her far more interesting and wonderful to watch than Mandel’s cunningly contrived illusions in the artificial moonlight below.
And now Titania’s trumpets sounded from the woods, warning all of the impending dawn. Suddenly the magic fairy moon vanished like the flame of a blown-out candle; a faint, rosy light grew through the trees, revealing an empty stage and a river on which floated a single swan.
Then, from somewhere, a distant cock-crow rang through the dawn. The play was ended.
Two splendid orchestras were alternating on the vast marble terraces of Hohenlinden, where hundreds of dancers moved under the white radiance of a huge silvery moon overhead — another contrivance of Mandel’s — for the splendid sphere aglow with white fire had somehow been suspended above the linden trees so that no poles and no wires were visible against the starry sky.
And in its milky flood of light the dancers moved amid a wilderness of flowers or thronged the supper-rooms within, where Teutonic architectural and decorative magnificence reigned in one vast, incredible, indigestible gastronomic apotheosis of German kultur.
Barres, for the moment, dancing with Thessalie, pressed her fingers with mischievous tenderness and whispered:
“The moonlit way once more with you, Thessa! Do you remember our first dance?”
“Can I ever thank God enough for that night’s folly!” she said, with such sudden emotion that his smile altered as he looked into her dark eyes.
“Yet that dance by moonlight exiled you,” he said.
“Do you realise what it saved me from, too? And what it has given me?”
He wondered whether she included Westmore in the gift. The music ceased at that moment, and, though the other orchestra began, they strolled along the flowering balustrade of the terrace together until they encountered Dulcie and Westmore.
“Have you spoken to your hostess?” inquired Westmore. “She’s over yonder on a dais, enthroned like Germania or a Metropolitan Opera Valkyrie. Dulcie and I have paid our homage.”
So Barres and Thessalie went away to comply with the required formality; and, when they returned from the rite, they found Esmé Trenor and Corot Mandel cornering Dulcie under a flowering orange tree while Westmore, beside her, chatted with a most engaging woman who proved, later, to be a practising physician.
Esmé was saying languidly, that anybody could fly into a temper and kick his neighbours, but that indifference to physical violence was a condition of mind attained only by the spiritual intellect of the psychic adept.
“Passivism,” he added with a wave of his lank fingers, “is the first plane to be attained on the journey toward Nirvana. Therefore, I am a pacifist and this silly war does not interest me in the slightest.”
The very engaging woman, who had been chatting with Westmore, looked around at Esmé Trenor, evidently much amused.
“I imagined that you were a pacifist,” she said. “I fancy, Mr. Mandel, also, is one.”
“Indeed, I am, madam!” said Corot Mandel. “I’ve plenty to do in life without strutting around and bawling for blood at the top of my lungs!”
“Thank heaven,” added Esmé, “the President has kept us out of war. This business of butchering others never appealed to me — except for the slightly unpleasant sensations which I experience when I read the details.”
“Oh. Then unpleasant sensations so appeal to you?” inquired Westmore, very red.
“Well, they are sensations, you know,” drawled Esmé. “And, for a man who experiences few sensations of any sort, even unpleasant ones are pleasurable.”
Mandel yawned and said:
“The war is an outrageous bore. All wars are stupid to a man of temperament. Therefore, I’m a pacifist. And I had rather live under Prussian domination than rush about the country with a gun and sixty pounds of luggage on my back!”
He looked heavily at Dulcie, who had slipped out of the corner on the terrace, where he and Esmé had penned her.
“There are other things to do more interesting than jabbing bayonets into Germans,” he remarked. “Did you say you hadn’t any dance to spare us, Miss Soane? Nor you either, Miss Dunois? Oh, well.” He cast a disgusted glance at Barres, squinted at Westmore through his greasy monocle in hostile silence; then, taking Esmé’s arm, made them all a too profound obeisance and sauntered away along the terrace.
“What a pair of beasts!” said Westmore. “They make me actually ill!”
Barres shrugged and turned to the very engaging lady beside him:
“What do you think of that breed of human, doctor?” he inquired.
She smiled at Barres and said:
“Several of my own patients who are suffering from the same form of psycho-neurotic trouble are also peace-at-any-price pacifists. They do not come to me to be cured of their pacifism. On the contrary, they cherish it most tenderly. In examining them for other troubles I happened upon what appeared to me a very close relation between the peculiar attitude of the peace-at-any-price pacifist and a certain type of unconscious pervert.”
“That passivism is perversion does not surprise me,” remarked Barres.
“Well,” she said, “the pacifist is not conscious of his real desires and therefore cannot be termed a true pervert. But the very term, passivism, is usually significant and goes very deep psychologically. In analysing my patients I struck against a buried impulse in them to suffer tyrannous treatment from an omnipotent master. The impulse was so strong that it amounted to a craving and tried to absorb all the psychic material wit
hin its reach. They did not recognise the original impulse, because that had long ago been crushed down by the exactions of civilised life. Nevertheless, they were tortured and teased, made unsettled and wretched by a something which continually baffled them. Deep under the upper crust of their personalities was concealed a seething desire to be completely, inevitably, relentlessly, unreservedly overwhelmed by a subjugation from which there was no escape.”
She turned to Westmore:
“It’s purely pathological, the condition of those two self-confessed pacifists. The pacifist loves suffering. The ordinary normal person avoids suffering when possible. He endures it only when something necessary or desirable cannot be gained in any other way. He may undergo agony at the mere thought of it. His bravery consists in facing danger and pain in spite of fear. But the extreme passivist, who is really an unconscious pervert, loves to dream of martyrdom and suffering. It must be a suffering, however, which is forced upon him, and it must be a personal matter, not impersonal and general, as in war. And he loves to contemplate a condition of complete captivity — of irresponsible passivity, in which all resistance is in vain.”
“Do you know, they disgust me, those two!” said Westmore angrily. “I never could endure anything abnormal. And now that I know Esmé is — and that big lout, Mandel — I’ll keep away from them. Do you blame me, doctor?”
“Well,” she said, much amused and turning to go, “they’re very interesting to physicians, you know — these non-resisting, pacifistic perverts. But outside a sanatorium I shouldn’t expect them to be very popular.” And she laughed and joined a big, good-looking man who had come to seek her, and who wore, in his buttonhole, the button of the French Legion of Honour.
Thessalie had strolled forward along the terrace by herself, interested in the pretty spectacle and the play of light on jewels and gowns.
Westmore, busy in expressing to Barres his opinion of Esmé and Mandel, did not at the moment miss Thessalie, who continued to saunter on along the balustrade of the terrace, under the blossoming row of orange trees.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 889
