Frost in the air of that early Winter day lent its sunlight the cold
brilliance of diamond-dust. The sky was turquoise glaze, more green than
blue, incredibly hard, shining, high and resonant. Though the new year
was well launched, snow had not yet fallen, no dismal sierras of mud,
slush and rubbish disfigured the city streets and hindered their swift
business. But on Fifth avenue, by that mid-morning hour, the crush of
motor-cars had grown so dense that one could hardly hope to drive from
the Plaza to Thirty-fourth street in less than thirty minutes.
Bellamy, nursing a mood blackly malcontent, fumed over every halt
dictated by the winking semaphore lights of the traffic towers. He could
have made far better time afoot, and would infinitely have preferred the
exercise--indeed, felt need of it. But in his understanding it was
essential that the car should set him down in front of the sedate
pressed-brick structure on East Thirtieth street whose entrance was
flanked by an ever-stainless plate of brass advertising in dignified
black letters OFFICES OF THE DRUCE ESTATE--necessary for the planting of
what he was pleased to term his "alibi." It made his mind easier to know
he could prove by the chauffeur that he had "gone to business." What he
did with himself after passing through those austere portals the
chauffeur couldn't know, couldn't be expected to know, consequently
couldn't tell.
It was true, Lucinda had never deigned to question a servant about his
comings and goings, he had no reason to believe she would ever be so far
forgetful of her dignity. Still, if one will flirt with fire, the first
rule is to take out insurance.
Notwithstanding the numerous occasions when his own laches and errors of
judgment had betrayed Bellamy, his life of a licensed philanderer (so he
rated himself) remained one endless intrigue of evasion, a matted tangle
of lies, equivocations, shifts and stratagems, to keep account of which
was not only a matter of life and death with him but a task to tax the
wits of any man. The wonder was less that feet which trod such
treacherous ground were known to slip, than that they slipped so seldom.
Merely to admit the need for all this involution of ambiguity and
double-dealing grievously affronted self-esteem. Deceit was strangely
distasteful to this man who was forever floundering in a muck of it, a
quagmire from whose grim suck his feet were never wholly free. In saner
interludes, times of disillusion and clear inner vision such as this, he
loathed it all, himself most of all. Naturally fastidious, he felt
himself defiled, much as if he were constrained continually to dabble
those well-manicured hands in a kennel. He would have given half of all
he possessed to be free of this feeling of personal dishonor which was
the fruit of self-indulgence. A quaint contradiction was to be read in
the fact that he knew no way to satisfy his vanity but at the cost of
giving his vanity offence.
Today found Bellamy more out of humour with himself than ever before,
more disposed to consider turning over a new leaf, a project often
mooted by his conscience (always when he was falling out of love) often
approved but never seriously tackled.
Now, however, he had every incentive: self-esteem sick to death in
sequence to last night's dissipation, anxiety to reanimate it with a
noble gesture; mortification due to that lapse of memory which had laid
him open to Amelie's derision, accompanied by reluctance to see the lady
soon again; most of all, Lucinda's unmistakable appeal to his senses and
sensibilities both, in their interview just ended.
There was no one like Linda, not a woman in New York who could hold a
candle to her for looks, wit and intelligence, none other whom he could
trust, no one who loved him so well. And it would be such a simple
matter to do as she suggested, humour her, make her happy--clear out of
New York and not return till time had wiped the slate clean of his
score, then settle down to behave, and incidentally to respect, himself.
Where was the sense in holding on this tack, ignoring Linda, making her
miserable, storing up sure retribution, and meantime playing the silly
goat, all for the sake of a few hours of facile excitement? It wasn't as
if he couldn't help himself, as if his fatal beauty rendered it
impossible for women to resist him. No: the women he flirted with were
as ready to flirt with any other man who has as much to offer them....
Why, then go on?
Bellamy assured himself he was damn' sorry that he hadn't, while calling
Amelie up from the library, obeyed his first impulse and broken off the
appointment altogether. Chances were her resentment would have resulted
in a permanent breach. In which event all hands would have been happier.
While if he went on now to meet her at this shady Clique Club, the end
might easily be, what the outcome of persistence in his present courses
must surely be, heart-break, unhappiness, the slime of the divorce
courts.
Thrice in the course of the scant hour he spent at his desk Bellamy put
out a hand to the telephone, meaning to call up Amelie and call it off;
and thrice withheld his hand, partly because he hated the thought of a
wrangle over the wire, partly because he was afraid the girl at the
switchboard might listen in.
In the end he left his office half an hour earlier than he need have,
and telephoned the Severn apartment from the Waldorf, only to learn from
her maid that Mrs. Severn was not at home.
Divided between relief and annoyance, he took a taxi to the Clique,
arriving twenty minutes before the time appointed, and Heaven alone knew
how long before he might expect Amelie. For Amelie was one of those who,
having no personality of their own worth mentioning, build themselves
one of appropriated tricks and traits, as a rule those which are least
considerate of the comfort of others. Amelie believed a certain
distinction inhered in being always late for an appointment.
Now Bellamy detested waiting, especially in a public place, and never
more than in the little foyer of the Clique, with its suggestively
discreet lighting; the last place where one cared to be hung up on
exhibition.
The Clique Club was a post-Prohibition institution of New York, run in
direct, more or less open, and famously successful defiance of the
Eighteenth Amendment. One had to become a member in order to obtain
admission, or else be introduced as the guest of a member; and the
initiation fee was something wholly dependent on one's rating in the
esteem of the Membership Committee, whose powers had been delegated en
bloc to an urbane brigand, the club steward, Theodore by name: in more
humid days the more than ordinarily supercilious, courted and successful
maitre-d'hotel of a fashionable restaurant. Once a member and within
those unhallowed precincts, "everything went," in the parlance of its
frequenters, "you could get away with murder." There was a floor for
dancing, with the inevitable jazz band, rather a good one. Rooms were
provided for private dinner parties of every size, however small. In the
restaurant proper an improper degree of privacy was obtainable at will
simply by drawing the curtains of the booths in which the tables were
individually set apart. The cooking was atrocious, the wines and liquors
only tolerable, the tariffs cynical.
Amelie Severn kept Bellamy kicking his heels a bad quarter of an hour
longer than she need have; and those fifteen minutes, added to the
twenty which he had inflicted upon himself, served to draw his temper
fine. Nothing of this, however, was apparent in his reception of her, in
fact much of it was obscured for the first few minutes by the admiration
which her undeniable good looks could hardly have failed to excite.
There was, after all, a measure of compensation in the knowledge that
one had made a conquest of so rare a creature.
It didn't count that there had been more truth than good faith in
Bellamy's statement to his wife that Amelie was "amiable enough, but
nobody to talk to." Good humour, easy, spirits, grace of manner and
charm of person will carry even a dull woman far. Amelie was neither
stupid nor witty; she was shrewd. Mainly through instinct but in part
through education she was shrewd, she knew what she wanted, which was
every luxury, and how to go about obtaining it, which was simple; all
one needed to do was to fix on some tedious man to flatter with one's
attentions. For the more dull the man, the better the dividends returned
by such inexpensive investments; the more keen-witted, the more disposed
to count the cost.
If there was nothing subtle in the philosophy of Amelie, it boasted this
rare virtue, it was practical and practicable in the extreme; just as it
is practised to an extent few men dream of.
To women of this type love is the poppy of hallucination, calling for
ruthless extermination if found in one's own garden, but sure to produce
goodly crops if cultivated by fair, skilled hands in the fields of the
neighbouring sex.
Amelie had married Ross Severn because he was well-to-do, uninteresting,
middle-aged, of good family; and had quickly repented because he spoiled
her and showed no intention of ceasing to be a good insurance risk. So
she craved much exciting indiscretions as this assignation with
another's husband at the Clique Club of questionable repute.
She frankly owned as much while Bellamy was helping her with her wrap in
the semi-seclusion of their as yet uncurtained booth.
"--Thrilled to a jellybean!" she declared, employing an absurdity which
she had promptly pirated upon hearing the laugh that rewarded its use by
another woman. "Thanks, old dear." She shrugged out of her furs, planted
elbows upon the table, cradled her chin upon the backs of engaged
fingers, and peered about the room with quick, inquisitive, bird-like
glances. "Ross would be furious."
"Hope so. If he weren't, he ought to be spoken to about it. Or don't you
think he has any right to object to your doing as you please?"
"Oh, why worry about Ross's rights? He's just a husband."
"And husbands haven't any rights worth considering. Quite so! All the
same, sometimes they assert 'em."
"I'd like to see Ross...." A laugh of lazy insolence rounded off
Amelie's thought. "Besides, I'm not doing anything wrong...."
"Not yet," Bellamy admitted equably. He nodded to their hovering waiter.
"What kind of cocktail, Amelie? Everything else is ordered."
"Thank goodness: I'm famished. A T-N-T, please."
The waiter noted down this frightful prescription with entire
equanimity, but lingered. "And monsieur----?"
"Nothing, thank you."
"Nothing, monsieur?" Professional poise was sadly shattered for an
instant. Why should one punish oneself with the cuisine of the Clique
and reject the solitary compensation the establishment had to offer?
Ejaculating "Nothing!" once more, in a tone of profound perturbation,
the waiter retired.
Bellamy tried to cover his annoyance with a laugh, but surprised a look
of dark resentment in Amelie's eyes and opened his own. "Hello?"
"Why did you do that? Simply to mortify me?"
"Afraid I don't follow----"
"Do you want the waiters to think you bring me here solely to satisfy
_my_ appetite for liquor? It isn't as if you were a plaster saint in
that line yourself--not exactly."
"Sorry, Amy. Make it a rule never to drink before evening."
"Then why come here at all?"
"Thought we'd agreed a little everyday discretion wouldn't do us any
harm."
"What are you afraid of? Your wife?"
Bellamy answered only with a fatigued look. The cocktail was being
served.
"And the melon, monsieur--shall I bring it at once?"
"Please."
The tone was crisp if the word was civil. Amelie sipped her mixed
poisons, mysterious malice informing the eyes that watched Bellamy over
the rim of the glass.
"Why take it out on the waiter if you're in a temper with me?"
"I'm not, Amy, I--" Bellamy caught himself, and permitted impatience to
find an outlet in a sound of polite expostulation: "Really!"
Amelie put aside an empty glass. Refreshed and fortified, she brooded
with sultry eyes while wedges of under-ripe casaba bedded in cracked ice
were set before them.
"You know, Bel," she observed in the dispassionate accents of the friend
who wouldn't for worlds mention it, only it's for your own good--"you
really ought to be more careful about your drinking. You barely escaped
being pretty awful at times, last night."
An indictment the more unkind because a cloudy memory refused to affirm
or deny its justice. Bellamy began to repent his fidelity to the six
o'clock rule.
"Fancy your forgetting we'd agreed to meet here instead of at the Ritz.
That ought to show you how lit you were."
"Sorry----"
"That's all very well: but suppose you hadn't had sense enough to call
up this morning, suppose I had come here to meet you, just as we'd
arranged, and had to go home after waiting around for hours like some
shop-girl forgotten on a street corner----"
"Poetic justice, if you ask me--something to offset some of the hours
you've kept me fidgeting, wondering if you meant to show up at all."
Injudiciously, Bellamy added a smile to the retort, by way of offsetting
its justice.
"So it amuses you to think of making an exhibition of me in a place like
this!"
"Oh, I don't know." Bellamy surveyed the restaurant without bias. "Not a
bad little hole for people in our position."
The melon, inedible and uneaten, was removed, soup in cups was
substituted.
"'People in our position'! I'm to understand, then, any 'little hole' is
good enough for me, so long as I don't interfere with Lucinda's parties
at the Ritz."
Bellamy straightened his spine and put down his spoon. An understanding
captain of waiters read his troubled eye and made casual occasion to
draw the curtains across the front of the booth.
"It is because Lucinda's lunching at the Ritz today, isn't it?"
"My dear Amy," said Bellamy coolly: "I'm unaware of having done anything
to provoke this, and if I've sinned unwittingly, I beg your pardon very
truly. Won't you believe that, please, and let me off for today? I'm
feeling rather rusty myself, my dear, and this is beginning to get on my
nerves."
At his first words the woman drew back, flushing, eyes stormy above a
mouth whose gentle allure lost itself in a hardening line. Then swiftly
reconsideration followed, visibly the selfish second thought took shape
in the angry eyes and melted their ice to a mist of unshed tears
beneath lids newly languorous. The petulant lips, too, refound their
tremulous tenderness. Amelie's hand fell upon Bellamy's in a warm,
convulsive clasp. She leaned across the corner of the table.
"Kiss me, Bel--I'm so wretched!"
He kissed her adequately but without any sort of emotion, thinking it
strange, all the while her mouth clung to his, that he should so clearly
know this to be good acting, no more than that, no less. Bellamy was not
accustomed to see through women at so young a stage of intimacy; that
came later, came surely; but never before had it come so soon. And in a
little quake of dread he wondered if it were because he had grown old
beyond his years, too aged in sentimental tippling to have retained the
capacity for generous credulity of his younger years. Or was it that the
woman's insincerity had so eaten out her heart, no technical perfection
could lend persuasion to her playing, her caresses potency? Or that he
had, since morning, fallen in love with his wife all over again and so
truly that no rival passion could seem real?
It was true, at least, that his thoughts were quick and warm with
memories of Linda even while he was most engaged with the effort to do
justice to Amelie's lips. And perceiving this to be so, self-contempt
took hold of him like a sickness.
They resumed their poses of nonchalant and sophisticated creatures
amiably discussing an informal meal. But first the woman made effective
use of a handkerchief.
"Forgive me, dear," she murmured. "I know it was perfectly rotten of me,
but I couldn't help it. I'm a bit overwrought, Bel, not too happy; being
in love with you has made the way things are at home doubly hard to
endure, you must know that; and then--of course"--she smiled
nervously--"I'm jealous."
He was silent, fiddling with a fork, avoiding her eye.
"Of Lucinda--you understand."