THE TALKERS
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
THE TALKERS
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
AUTHOR OF “THE FLAMING JEWEL,” “THE SLAYER
OF SOULS,” “THE COMMON LAW,” “IN
SECRET,” “LORRAINE,” ETC.
[Illustration: Decorative Logo]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration: Decorative Logo]
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY
THE TALKERS. I
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
MY FRIEND
ROBERT H. DAVIS
THE TALKERS
CHAPTER I
Sadoul’s only experiences in love had been gross. The cynic in him
admitted nothing better.
Saturnine, without delusions, he went about his business in life, doing
no particular good, and with a capacity for harm limited only by his
talents.
He had been a little of everything, and always clever--art student,
medical student, reporter, critic, writer--intelligent, adroit.
His was a mordant pen and brilliant; and it was for sale.
The query, “Have you read Sadoul’s article in the _Wasp_?” or in the
_View Point_, or in some one of many irregular publications, was not an
uncommon question in the metropolis.
Sadoul on this or that had become fairly familiar to a talkative
public. He had something to say about everything and anything. His
personal convictions made no difference. And he always was interesting.
The second year after the war ended he went to France again. At the
University of Paris he took courses in psychology and philology: in the
Ecole de Médecine he attended lectures. Clinics where hypnosis induced
supplanted anesthesia in minor operations fascinated him.
But life, there, taught him nothing nobler to expect of a world already
proven sordid by personal experience.
He entertained no delusions concerning mankind, its friendship, or
its love; he neither expected nor desired anything of it except the
saturnine amusement which he extracted from it, and which was his
principal form of pleasure.
Then Chance tripped him up. Needing an English stenographer one day,
the American firm on the rue Colchas sent him a girl equipped to take
dictation.
It appeared that she was equipped for more than that. Sadoul silently
went mad about her.
A sort of still terror also took possession of the girl--the hopeless
immobility of a doomed thing, conscious of menace, apparently unable to
escape.
Resistance seemed to hold only along certain lines.
Otherwise there was no defence. She had stepped from reality into a
dream.
At his inquiry she told him her story. She did not wish to do so.
There was a ball in the Latin Quarter given by Julian’s that evening.
Sadoul took her. She wore pale, lunar green; which went with her red
hair and deep green eyes.
She had little to say to Sadoul’s friends. So reticent, so dazed she
seemed that some, troubled and perplexed by her youth and beauty,
suspected her of an addiction to drugs.
As for Sadoul, he had gone completely mad over her. He became her
shadow everywhere. And, save only for certain lines of resistance, he
seemed to have utterly mastered her.
But those occult lines held. The conflict almost crazed him--so pliant,
so yielding she seemed, so obedient had he made her in all excepting
certain lines. His dark face greyed at times under the strain. He
abased himself and begged; he grinned and told her what to expect if
she ever tricked him. The lines held.
His impression upon her had already been made; he could stamp it no
deeper; the girl was not in love with him. She never would be. And he
knew it.
She seemed to be a passionless little thing, her beauty a golden
chrysalis containing nothing--the Psyche within aborted.
In the Latin Quarter, lack of animation is unpopular. There was about
her that innocent detachment one notices in the preoccupation of a nun.
Invited, at first she went everywhere with Sadoul.
After a while they were seldom invited where pleasure was noisy and
untrammelled.
Early in spring a cabled offer from New York brought Sadoul’s affairs
to a climax.
For three days Sadoul beat at her very soul to club it into submission.
Then he crawled and wept. The lines held.
Again he battered her with his implacable will till her bruised,
stupefied mind gave up. But the lines held.
She was in a daze when the civil ceremony was performed. He cabled to
New York, giving up his quarters at the Fireside Club, and requesting
his friend Pockman to secure for him a furnished housekeeping apartment
on Riverside Drive.
He was having his way with her--or tried to believe he was having it.
And then Destiny pulled an ugly face at him. For the girl utterly
refused to submit to the religious ceremony. And the old lines still
held.
Early summer in Paris is paradise. But it had become a hell to Sadoul.
He walked the earth like a damned soul chained to its victim.
In July he secured passage for them both.