He wore a curious costume, representing the devil carrying off his
corpse; but I recognised him at once as the lesser lion of a London
evening party last season. Then he had just returned from a Polar
expedition, and wore the glacier of civilisation on his breast.
To-night he was among the maddest of the mad, dancing savagely with
the Bacchantes of the Latin Quarter at the art students' ball, and
some of his fellow-Americans told me that he was the best marine
painter in the _atelier_ which he had joined. More they did not pause
to tell me, for they were anxious to celebrate this night of nights,
when, in that fine spirit of equality born of belonging to two
Republics, the artist lowers himself to the level of his model.
The young Arctic explorer, so entirely at home in this more tropical
clime, had relapsed into respectability when I spoke to him. He was
sitting at a supper-table smoking a cigarette, and gazing somewhat
sadly--it seemed to me--at the pandemoniac phantasmagoria of screaming
dancers, the glittering cosmopolitan chaos that multiplied itself
riotously in the mirrored walls of the great flaring ball-room, where
under-dressed women, waving many-coloured paper lanterns, rode on the
shoulders of grotesquely clad men prancing to joyous music. For some
time he had been trying hard to get some one to take the money for
his supper; but the frenzied waiters suspected he was clamouring for
something to eat, and would not be cajoled into attention.
Moved by an impulse of mischief, I went up to him and clapped him on
his corpse, which he wore behind.
There was a death-mask of papier-mache on the back of his head with
appropriate funereal drapings down the body.
"I'll take your money," I said.
He started, and turned his devil upon me. The face was made
Mephistophelian, and the front half of him wore scarlet.
"Thanks," he said, laughing roguishly, when he recognised me. "It's
darned queer that Paris should be the place where they refuse to take
the devil's money."