Neville had begun to see less and less of Valerie West. When she first
returned from the country in September she had come to the studio and
had given him three or four mornings on the portrait which he had begun
during the previous summer. But the painting of it involved him in
difficulties entirely foreign to him--difficulties born of technical
timidity of the increasing and inexplicable lack of self-confidence. And
deeply worried, he laid it aside, A dull, unreasoning anxiety possessed
him. Those who had given him commissions to execute were commencing to
importune him for results. He had never before disappointed any client.
Valerie could be of very little service to him in the big mural
decorations which, almost in despair, he had abruptly started. Here and
there, in the imposing compositions designed for the Court House, a
female figure, or group of figures, was required, but, in the main, male
figures filled the preliminary cartoons--great law-givers and
law-defenders of all ages and all lands, in robes and gowns of silks; in
armour, in skins, in velvet and ermine--men wearing doublet, jack-coat,
pourpoint; men in turban and caftan, men covered with mail of all
kinds--armour of leather, of fibre, of lacquer, of quilted silk, of
linked steel, Milanaise, iron cuirass; the emblazoned panoply of the
Mongol paladins; Timour Melek's greaves of virgin gold; men of all
nations and of all ages who fashioned or executed human law, from Moses
to Caesar, from Mohammed to Genghis Kahn and the Golden Emperor, from
Charlemagne to Napoleon, and down through those who made and upheld the
laws in the Western world, beginning with Hiawatha, creator of the
Iroquois Confederacy--the Great League.
His studio was a confusion of silks, cut velvets, tapestries,
embroideries, carpets of the East, lay figures glittering with replicas
of priceless armour. Delicate fabrics trailed over chair and floor
almost under foot; inlaid and gem-hilted weapons, illuminated missals,
glass-cased papyri, gilded zones, filets, girdles, robes of fur, hoods,
wallets, helmets, hats, lay piled up, everywhere in methodical disorder.
And into and out of the studio passed male models of all statures, all
ages, venerable, bearded men, men in their prime, men with the
hard-hammered features and thick, sinewy necks of gladiators, men
slender and pallid as dreaming scholars, youths that might have worn the
gold-red elf-locks and the shoulder cloak of Venice, youth chiselled in
a beauty as dark and fierce as David wore when the mailed giant went
crashing earthward under the smooth round pebble from his sling.
Valerie's turn in this splendid panoply was soon over. Even had she been
so inclined there was, of course, no place for her to visit now, no
place to sit and watch him among all these men. After hours, once or
twice, she came in to tea--to gossip a little with the old-time ease,
and barter with him epigram for jest, nonsense for inconsequence. Yet,
subtly--after she had gone home--she felt the effort. Either he or she
had imperceptibly changed; she knew not which was guilty; but she knew.
Besides, she herself was now in universal demand--and in the furor of
her popularity she had been, from the beginning, forced to choose among
a very few with whom she personally felt herself at ease, and to whom
she had become confidently accustomed. Also, from the beginning, she had
not found it necessary to sit undraped for many--a sculptor or
two--Burleson and Gary Graves--Sam Ogilvy with his eternal mermaidens,
Querida--nobody else. The other engagements had been for costume or, at
most, for head and shoulders. Illustrators now clamoured for her in
modish garments of the moment--in dinner gown, ball gown, afternoon,
carriage, motor, walking, tennis, golf, riding costumes; poster artists
made her pretty features popular; photographs of her in every style of
indoor and outdoor garb decorated advertisements in the backs of monthly
magazines. She was seen turning on the water in model bathtubs, offering
the admiring reader a box of bonbons, demurely displaying a brand of
hosiery, recommending cold cream, baked beans, railroad routes, tooth
powder, and real-estate on Long Island.
Her beauty, the innocent loveliness of her features, her dainty modest
charm, the enchanting outline and mould of her figure were beginning to
make her celebrated. Already people about town--at the play, in the
park, on avenue and street, in hotels and restaurants, were beginning to
recognise her, follow her with approving or hostile eyes, turn their
heads to watch her.
Theatrical agents wrote her, making attractive offers for an engagement
where showgirls were the ornamental caryatids which upheld the three
tottering unities along Broadway. She also had chances to wear very
wonderful model gowns for next season at the Countess of Severn's new
dressmaking, drawing-rooms whither all snobdom crowded and shoved to get
near the trade-marked coronet, and where bewildering young ladies
strolled haughtily about all day long, displaying to agitated Gotham the
most startling gowns in the extravagant metropolis.
She had other opportunities, too--such as meeting several varieties of
fashionable men of various ages--gentlemen prominently identified with
the arts and sciences--the art of killing time and the science of
enjoying the assassination. And some of these assorted gentlemen
maintained extensive stables and drove tandems, spikes, and fours; and
some were celebrated for their yachts, or motors, or prima-donnas, or
business acumen, or charitable extravagances.... Yes, truly, Valerie
West was beginning to have many opportunities in this generously
philanthropic world. And she was making a great deal of money--for
her--but nothing like what she might very easily have made. And she knew
it, young as she was. For it does not take very long to learn about such
things when a girl is attempting to earn her living in this altruistic
world.
"She'll spread her wings and go one of these days," observed Archie
Allaire to Rita Tevis, who was posing as Psyche for one of his clever,
thinly brushed, high-keyed studies very much after the manner and
palette of Chaplin when they resembled neither Chartrain nor Zier, nor
any other artist temporarily in vogue. For he was an adaptable man,
facile, adroit, a master navigator in trimming sail to the fitful breeze
of popular favour. And his work was in great demand.
"She'll be decorating the tonneau of some big touring car with crested
panels--and there'll be a bunch of orchids in the crystal holder, and a
Chow dog beside her, defying the traffic squad--"
"No, she won't!" snapped Rita. "She's as likely to do that as she is to
dine with you again."
Allaire, caught off his guard, scowled with unfeigned annoyance.
Repeated essays to ingratiate himself with Valerie had finally resulted
in a dinner at the Astor, and in her firm, polite, but uncompromising
declination of all future invitations from him, either to sit for him or
beside him under any circumstances and any conditions whatever.
"So that's your opinion, is it, Rita?" he inquired, keeping his
light-blue eyes and his thin wet brush busy on his canvas. "Well,
sister, take it from muh, she thinks she's the big noise in the Great
White Alley; but they're giving her the giggle behind her back."
"That giggle may be directed at you, Archie," observed Rita, scornfully;
"you're usually behind her back, you know, hoisting the C.Q.D."
"Which is all right, too," he said, apparently undisturbed; "but when
she goes to Atlantic City with Querida--"
"That is an utter falsehood," retorted Rita, calmly. "Whoever told you
that she went there with Querida, lied."
"You think so?"
"I know so! She went alone."
"Then we'll let it go at that," said Allaire so unpleasantly that Rita
took fiery offence.
"There is not a man living who has the right to look sideways at Valerie
West! Everybody knows it--Neville, Querida, Sam, John Burleson--even you
know it! If a man or two has touched her finger tips--her waist--her
lips, perhaps--no man has obtained more than that of her--dared more
than that! I have never heard that any man has ever even ventured to
offend her ears, unless"--she added with malice, "that is the reason
that she accepts no more invitations from you and your intimate
friends."
Allaire managed to smile and continue to paint. But later he found use
for his palette knife--which was unusual in a painter as clever as he
and whose pride was in his technical skill with materials used and
applied _premier coup_.
With October came the opening of many theatres; a premature gaiety
animated the hotels and restaurants; winter fabrics, hats, furs, gowns,
appeared in shops; the glittering windows along Fifth Avenue reflected
more limousines and fewer touring bodies passing. Later top hats
reappeared on street and in lobby; and when the Opera reopened, Long
Island, Jersey, and Westchester were already beginning to pour in
cityward, followed later by Newport, Lenox, and Bar Harbour. The police
put on their new winter uniforms; furs were displayed in carriages,
automobiles, and theatres; the beauty of the florist's windows became
mellower, richer, and more splendid; the jewellery in the restaurants
more gorgeous. Gotham was beginning to be its own again, jacked up by
the Horse Show, the New Theatre, and the Opera; and by that energetic
Advertising Trust Company with its branches, dependencies, and mergers,
which is called Society, and which is a matter of eternal vigilance and
desperate business instead of the relaxation of cultivated security in
an accepted and acceptable order of things.
Among other minor incidents, almost local in character, the Academy and
Society of American Artists opened its doors. And the exhibition
averaged as well as it ever will, as badly as it ever had averaged.
Allaire showed two portraits of fashionable women, done, this time, in
the manner of Zorn, and quite as clever on the streaky surface. Sam
Ogilvy proudly displayed another mermaid--Rita in_ the tub--and two
babies from photographs and "chic"--very bad; but as usual it was very
quickly marked sold.
Annan had a portrait of his sister Alice, poorly painted and even
recognised by some of her more intimate friends. Clive Gail offered one
of his marines--waves splashing and dashing all over the canvas so
realistically that women instinctively stepped back and lifted their
skirts, and men looked vaguely around for a waiter--at least Ogilvy said
so. As for Neville, he had a single study to show--a full length--just
the back and head and the soft contour of limbs melting into a
luminously sombre background--a masterpiece in technical perfection,
which was instantly purchased by a wise and Western millionaire, and
which left the public staring but unmoved.
But it was José Querida who dominated the whole show, flooding
everything with the splendour of his sunshine so that all else in the
same room looked cold or tawdry or washed out. His canvas, with its
superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the
exhibition. Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of
Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his
long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in
three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida's inwardly
suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction. Serious young men wrote
"appreciations" about it; serious young women published instructive
discourses concerning it in the daily papers. Somebody in the valuable
columns of the _Tribune_ inquired whether Querida's painting was meant
to be symbolical; somebody in the _Nation_ said yes; somebody in the
_Sun_ said no; somebody in something or other explained its
psychological subtleties; somebody in something else screamed, "bosh!"
Meanwhile the discussion was a god-send to fashionable diners-out and to
those cultivated leaders of society who prefer to talk through the Opera
and philharmonic.
In what the educated daily press calls the "world of art" and the "realm
of literature," Querida's picture was discussed intelligently and
otherwise, but it _was_ discussed--from the squalid table d'hôte, where
unmanicured genius punctures the air with patois and punches holes in it
with frenzied thumbs, to quiet, cultivated homes, where community of
taste restricts the calling lists--from the noisy studio, where pianos
and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare boards or the velvet
elegance of studios where authority and preciousness, and occasionally
attainment, reside, and sometimes do not.
_Cognatis maculis similis fera_.
Neville was busy, but not too busy to go about in the evening among his
own kind, and among other kinds, too. This unexpected resurgance within
him of the social instinct, he made no attempt to account for to others
or to himself. He had developed a mental and physical restlessness,
which was not yet entirely nervous, but it had become sufficiently
itching to stir him out of fatigue when the long day's work had
ended--enough to drive him out of the studio--at first merely to roam
about at hazard through the livelier sections of the city. But to the
lonely, there is no lonelier place than a lively one; and the false
brilliancy and gaiety drove him back upon himself and into his lair
again, where for a while he remained meditating amid the sombre menace
of looming canvases and the heavy futility of dull-gold hangings, and
the mischievous malice of starlight splintering into a million
incandescent rainbow rays through the sheet of glass above.
Out of this, after some days, he emerged, set in motion by his
increasing restlessness. And it shoved him in the direction of his kind
once more--and in the direction of other kinds.
He dined at his sister's in Seventy-ninth Street near Madison Avenue; he
dined with the Grandcourts on Fifth Avenue; he decorated a few dances,
embellished an opera box now and then, went to Lakewood and Tuxedo for
week ends, rode for a few days at Hot Springs, frequented his clubs,
frequented Stephanie, frequented Maxim's.
And all the while it seemed to him as though he were temporarily
enduring something which required patience, which could not last
forever, which must one day end in a great change, a complete
transformation for himself, of himself, of the world around him and of
his aim and hope and purpose in living. At moments, too, an odd
sensation of expectancy came over him--the sense of waiting, of
suppressed excitement. And he could not account for it.
Perhaps it concerned the finishing of his great mural frieze for the
Court House--that is, the completion of the section begun in September.
For, when it was done, and cleared out of his studio, and had been set
in its place, framed by the rose and gold of marble and ormolu, a heavy
reaction of relief set in, leaving him listless and indifferent at
first, then idle, disinclined to begin the companion frieze; then again
restless, discontented, tired, and lonely in that strange solitude which
seemed to be growing wider and wider around him in rings of silence. Men
praised and lauded the great frieze; and he strove to respond, to
believe them--to believe in the work and in himself--strove to shake off
the terrible discouragement invading him, lurking always near to reach
out and touch him, slinking at his heels from street to street, from
room to room, skulking always just beyond the shadows that his reading
lamp cast.
Without envy, yet with profound sadness, he stood and faced the
splendour of Querida's canvas. He had gone to Querida and taken him by
both of his thin, olive-skinned hands, and had praised the work with a
heart clean of anything unworthy. And Querida had laughed and displayed
his handsome teeth, and returned compliment for compliment.... And
Neville had seen, on his dresser, a photograph of Valerie, signed in her
long, girlish, angular hand--"To José from Valerie"; and the date was of
mid-winter.
Christmas came; he sent Valerie some furs and a note, and, before he
went to Aiken to spend the holidays with his father and mother, he tried
to get her on the telephone--tried half a dozen times. But she was
either busy with business or with pleasure somewhere or other--and he
never found her at home; so he went South without hearing from her.
[Illustration: "Querida had laughed ... and returned compliment for
compliment."]
After he arrived, it is true, he received from her a cigarette case and
a very gay and frank Christmas greeting--happy and untroubled
apparently, brimming with gossip, inconsequences, and nonsense. In it
she thanked him for his letter and his gift, hoped he was happy with his
parents, and expressed an almost conventional desire to see him on his
return.
Then his parents came back to New York with him. Two days before New
Year's Day they went to Spindrift House instead of sailing for Egypt,
where for some years now they had been accustomed to spend the winters
shivering at Shepherd's. And he and his sister and brother-in-law and
Stephanie dined together that evening. But the plans they made to
include him for a New Year's Eve home party remained uncertain as far as
he was concerned. He was vague--could not promise--he himself knew not
why. And they ceased to press him.
"You're growing thin and white," said Lily. "I believe you're getting
painter's colic."
"House painters acquire that," he said, smiling. "I'm not a member of
their union yet."
"Well, you must use as much white lead as they do on those enormous
canvases of yours. Why don't you start on a trip around the world,
Louis?"
He laughed.
Later, after he had taken his leave, the suggestion reoccurred to him.
He took enough trouble to think about it the next morning; sent out his
servant to amass a number of folders advertising world girdling tours of
various attractions, read them while lunching, and sat and pondered. Why
not? It might help. Because he certainly began to need help. He had gone
quite stale. Querida was right; he ought to lie fallow. No ground could
yield eternally without rest. Querida was clever enough to know that;
and he had been stupid enough to ignore it--even disbelieve it,
contemptuous of precept and proverb and wise saw, buoyed above
apprehension by consciousness and faith in his own inexhaustible energy.
And, after all, something really seemed to have happened to him. He
almost admitted it now for the first time--considered the proposition
silently, wearily, without any definite idea of analysing it, without
even the desire to solve it.
Somehow, at some time, he had lost pleasure in his powers, faith in his
capacity, desire for the future. What had satisfied him yesterday,
to-day became contemptible. Farther than ever, farther than the
farthest, stars receded the phantoms of the great Masters. What they
believed and endured and wrought and achieved seemed now not only
hopelessly beyond any comprehension or attainment of his, but even
beyond hope of humble discipleship.
And always, horribly, like an obsession, was creeping over him in these
days the conviction of some similarity between his work and the thin,
clear, clever brush-work of Allaire--with all its mastery of ways and
means, all its triumph over technical difficulties, all its tricks and
subtle appeals, and its falsity, and its glamour.
Reflection, retrospection sickened him. It was snowing and growing late
when he wrote to a steamship agent making inquiries and asking for plans
of staterooms.
Then he had tea, alone there in the early winter dusk, with the
firelight playing over Gladys who sat in the full heat of the blaze,
licking her only kitten, embracing its neck with one maternal paw.
He dressed about six, intending to dine somewhere alone that New Year's
Eve. The somewhere, as usual, ended at the Syrinx Club--or rather at the
snowy portal--for there he collided with Samuel Strathclyde Ogilvy and
Henry Knickerbocker Annan, and was seized and compelled to perform with
them on the snowy sidewalk, a kind of round dance resembling a pow-wow,
which utterly scandalised the perfectly respectable club porter, and
immensely interested the chauffeurs of a row of taxicabs in waiting.
"Come! Let up! This isn't the most dignified performance I ever assisted
at," he protested.
"Who said it was dignified?" demanded Ogilvy. "We're not hunting for
dignity. Harry and I came here in a hurry to find an undignified
substitute for John Burleson. You're the man!"
"Certainly," said Annan, "you're the sort of cheerful ass we need in our
business. Come on! Some of these taxis belong to us--"
"Where do you want me to go, you crazy--"
"Now be nice, Louis," he said, soothingly; "play pretty and don't kick
and scream. Burleson was going with us to see the old year out at the
Cafe Gigolette, but he's got laryngitis or some similar species of
pip--"
"I don't want to go--"
"You've got to, dear friend. We've engaged a table for six--"
"Six!"
"Sure, dearie. In the college of experience coeducation is a necessary
evil. Step lively, son!"
"Who is going?"
[Illustration: "'Me lord, the taxi waits.'"]
"One dream, one vision, one hallucination--" he wafted three kisses
from his gloved finger tips in the general direction of Broadway--"and
you, and Samuel, and I. Me lord, the taxi waits!"
"Now, Harry, I'm not feeling particularly cheerful--"
"But you will, dear friend; you will soon be feeling the Fifty-seven
Varieties of cheerfulness. All kinds of society will be at the
Gigolette--good, bad, fashionable, semi-fashionable--all imbued with the
intellectual and commendable curiosity to see somebody 'start
something.' And," he added, modestly, "Sam and I are going to see what
can be accomplished--"
"No; I won't go--"
But they fell upon him and fairly slid him into a taxi, beckoning two
other similar vehicles to follow in procession.
"Now, dearie," simpered Sam, "don't you feel better?"
Neville laughed and smoothed out the nap of his top hat.
They made three stops at three imposing looking apartment hotels between
Sixth Avenue and Broadway--The Daisy, The Gwendolyn, The Sans
Souci--where negro porters and hallboys were gorgeously conspicuous and
the clerk at the desk seemed to be unusually popular with the guests.
And after every stop there ensued a shifting of passengers in the
taxicabs, until Neville found himself occupying the rear taxi in the
procession accompanied by a lively young lady in pink silk and
swansdown--a piquant face and pretty figure, white and smooth and
inclined to a plumpness so far successfully contended with by her corset
maker.
"I have on my very oldest gown," she explained with violet-eyed
animation, patting her freshly dressed hair with two smooth little hands
loaded with diamonds and turquoises. "I'm afraid somebody will start
something and then they'll throw confetti, and somebody will think it's
funny to aim champagne corks at you. So I've come prepared," she added,
looking up at him with a challenge to deny her beauty. "By the way," she
said, "I'm Mazie Gray. Nobody had the civility to tell you, did they?"
"They said something.... I'm Louis Neville," he replied, smiling.
"Are you?" she laughed. "Well, you may take it from mother that you're
as cute as your name, Louis. Who was it they had all framed up to give
me my cues? That big Burleson gentleman who'd starve if he had to laugh
for a living, wasn't it? Can you laugh, child?"
"A few, Mazie. It is my only Sunday accomplishment."
"Dearie," she added, correcting him.
"It is my only accomplishment, dearie."
"That will be about all--for a beginning!" She laughed as the cab
stopped at the red awning and Neville aided her to descend.
Steps, vestibules, stairs, cloak-rooms were crowded with jolly,
clamouring throngs flourishing horns, canes, rattles, and dusters decked
with brilliant ribbons. Already some bore marks of premature encounters
with confetti and cocktails.
Waiters and head-waiters went gliding and scurrying about, assigning
guests to tables reserved months in advance. Pages in flame-coloured and
gold uniforms lifted the silken rope that stretched its barrier between
the impatient crowd and the tables; managers verified offered
credentials and escorted laughing parties to spaces bespoken.
Two orchestras, relieving each other, fiddled and tooted continuously;
great mounds of flowers, smilax, ropes of evergreens, multi-tinted
electroliers made the vast salon gay and filled it with perfume.
Even in the beginning it was lively enough though not yet boisterous in
the city where all New York was dining and preparing for eventualities;
the eventualities being that noisy mid-winter madness which seizes the
metropolis when the birth of the New Year is imminent.
It is a strange evolution, a strange condition, a state of mind not to
be logically accounted for. It is not accurate to say that the nicer
people, the better sort, hold aloof; because some of them do not. And in
this uproarious carnival the better sort are as likely to misbehave as
are the worse; and they have done it, and do it, and probably will
continue to say and do and tolerate and permit inanities in themselves
and in others that, at other moments, they would regard as
insanities--and rightly.
Around every table, rosily illuminated, laughter rang. White throats and
shoulders glimmered, jewels sparkled, the clear crystalline shock of
glasses touching glasses rang continual accompaniment to the music and
the breezy confusion of voices.
Here and there, in premonition of the eventual, the comet-like passage
of streaming confetti was blocked by bare arms upflung to shield
laughing faces; arms that flashed with splendid jewels on wrist and
finger.
Neville, coolly surveying the room, recognised many, responding to
recognition with a laugh, a gesture, or with glass uplifted.
"Stop making goo-goos," cried Mazie, dropping her hand over his wrist.
"Listen, and I'll be imprudent enough to tell you the very latest
toast--" She leaned nearer, opening her fan with a daring laugh; but
Ogilvy wouldn't have it.
"This is no time for single sentiment!" he shouted. "Everybody should
be perfectly plural to-night--everything should be plural, multiple,
diffuse, all embracing, general, polydipsiatic, polygynyatic,
polyandryatic!"
[Illustration: Mazie Gray.]
"What's polyandryatic?" demanded Mazie in astonishment.
"It means everybody is everybody else's! I'm yours and you're mine but
everybody else owns us and we own everybody."
"Hurrah!" shouted Annan. "Hear--hear! Where is the fair and total
stranger who is going to steal the first kiss from me? Somebody count
three before the rush begins--"
A ball of roses struck him squarely on the mouth; a furious shower of
confetti followed. For a few moments the volleys became general, then
the wild interchange of civilities subsided, and the cries of laughter
died away and were lost in the loud animated hum which never ceased
under the gay uproar of the music.
When they played the barcarole from Contes d'Hoffman everybody sang it
and rose to their feet cheering the beautiful prima donna with whom the
song was so closely identified, and who made one of a gay group at a
flower-smothered table.
And she rose and laughingly acknowledged the plaudits; but they wouldn't
let her alone until she mounted her chair and sang it in solo for them;
and then the vast salon went wild.
Neville, surveying the vicinity, recognised people he never dreamed
would have appeared in such a place--here a celebrated architect and his
pretty wife entertaining a jolly party, there a well-known lawyer and
somebody else's pretty wife; and there were men well known at
fashionable clubs and women known in fashionable sets, and men and women
characteristic of quieter sets, plainly a little uncertain and surprised
to find themselves there. And he recognised assorted lights of the
"profession," masculine and feminine; and one or two beautiful meteors
that were falling athwart the underworld, leaving fading trails of
incandescence in their jewelled wake.
The noise began to stun him; he laughed and talked and sang with the
others, distinguishing neither his own voice nor the replies. For the
tumult grew as the hour advanced toward midnight, gathering steadily in
strength, in license, in abandon.
And now, as the minute hands on the big gilded clock twitched nearer and
nearer to midnight, the racket became terrific, swelling, roaring into
an infernal din as the raucous blast of horns increased in the streets
outside and the whistles began to sound over the city from Westchester
to the Bay, from Long Island to the Palisades.
Sheer noise, stupefying, abominable, incredible, unending, greeted the
birth of the New Year; they were dancing in circles, singing, cheering
amid the crash of glasses. Table-cloths, silken gowns, flowers were
crushed and trampled under foot; flushed faces looked into strange
faces, laughing; eyes strange to other eyes smiled; strange hands
exchanged clasps with hands unknown; the whirl had become a madness.
And, suddenly, in its vortex, Neville saw Valerie West. Somebody had set
her on a table amid the silver and flowers and splintered crystal. Her
face was flushed, eyes and mouth brilliant, her gown almost torn from
her left shoulder and fluttering around the lovely arm in wisps and rags
of silk and lace. Querida supported her there.
They pelted her with flowers and confetti, and she threw roses back at
everybody, snatching her ammunition from a great basket which Querida
held for her.
Ogilvy and Annan saw her and opened fire on her with a cheer, and she
recognised them and replied with volleys of rosebuds--was in the act of
hurling her last blossom--caught sight of Neville where he stood with
Mazie on a chair behind him, her arms resting on his shoulders. And the
last rose dropped from her hand.
Querida turned, too, inquiringly; recognised Neville; and for a second
his olive cheeks reddened; then with a gay laugh he passed his arm
around Valerie and, coolly facing the bombardment of confetti and
flowers, swung her from the table to the floor.
A furious little battle of flowers began at his own table, but Neville
was already lost in the throng, making his way toward the door, pelted,
shouldered, blocked, tormented--but, indifferent, unresponsive, forcing
his path to the outer air.
Once or twice voices called his name, but he scarcely heard them. Then a
hand caught at his; and a breathless voice whispered:
"Are you going?"
"Yes," he said, dully.
"Why?"
"I've had enough--of the New Year."
Breathing fast, the colour in her face coming and going, she stood,
vivid lips parted, regarding him. Then, in a low voice:
"I didn't know you were to be here, Louis."
"Nor I. It was an accident."
"Who was the--girl--"
"What girl?"
"She stood behind you with her hands on your shoulders."
"How the devil do I know," he said, savagely--"her name's
Mazie--something--or--other."
"Did you bring her?"
"Yes. Did Querida bring _you_?" he asked, insolently.
[Illustration: "And the last rose dropped from her hand."]
She looked at him in a confused, bewildered way--laid her hand on his
sleeve with an impulse as though he had been about to strike her.
He no longer knew what he was doing in the sudden surge of unreasoning
anger that possessed him; he shook her hand from his sleeve and turned.
And the next moment, on the stairs, she was beside him again, slender,
pale, close to his shoulder, descending the great staircase beside him,
one white-gloved hand resting lightly within his arm.
Neither spoke. At the cloak-room she turned and looked at him--stood a
moment slowly tearing the orchids from her breast and dropping the
crushed petals underfoot.
A maid brought her fur coat--his gift; a page brought his own coat and
hat.
"Will you call a cab?"
He turned and spoke to the porter. Then they waited, side by side, in
silence.
When the taxicab arrived he turned to give the porter her address, but
she had forestalled him. And he entered the narrow vehicle; and they sat
through the snowy journey in utter silence until the cab drew up at his
door.
Then he said: "Are you not going home?"
"Not yet."
They descended, stood in the falling snow while he settled with the
driver, then entered the great building, ascended in the elevator, and
stepped out at his door.
He found his latch-key; the door swung slowly open on darkness.