“Certainly,” said Lacy, airily; “we’re all at Mrs. Leeds’s feet! Even the blind bat of Drumgool could see that! So why deny it?”
“You’re not denying it, Mr. Lacy,” said Strelsa, laughing. “But I realise perfectly that I am in the Irish Legation. So I shall carefully salt everything you say to me.”
“If you think I’ve kissed the blessed pebble you ought to listen to that other bankrupt upstairs,” said Lacy.
“As far as pretty speeches are concerned you seem to be perfectly solvent,” said Strelsa gaily, looking around her at the various adornments of this masculine abode. “I wonder where you dine,” she added with curiosity unabashed.
“We’ve a fine dining-room below,” he said proudly, “haven’t we, Roger? And as soon as Dick Quarren and I are sufficiently solvent to warrant it, the Legation is going to give a series of brilliant banquets; will you come, Mrs. Leeds?”
“When you are solvent, perhaps,” said Strelsa, smiling.
“Westguard and I will give you a banquet at an hour’s notice,” said O’Hara, eagerly. “Will you accept?”
“Such overwhelming offers of hospitality!” she protested. “I had believed the contrary about New Yorkers. You see I’ve just emerged from the West, and I don’t really know what to think of such bewildering cordiality.”
“Karl,” said Mrs. Wycherly, “are you going to show us over the house? If you are we must hurry, as Strelsa and I are to decorate the Calderas’ box this evening, and it takes me an hour to paint my face.” She turned a fresh, winsome countenance to Westguard, who laughed, rose, and took his pretty cousin by the hand.
Under triple escort Mrs. Wycherly and Mrs. Leeds examined the Legation from kitchen to garret — and Strelsa, inadvertently glancing in at a room just as Westguard started to close the door, caught sight of a recumbent shape on a bed — just a glimpse of a blond, symmetrical head and a well-coupled figure, graceful even in the careless relaxation of sleep.
Westguard asked her pardon: “That’s Quarren. He was probably up till daylight.”
“He was,” said Molly Wycherly; “and by the same token so was I. Thank you so much, Karl.... Thank you, Mr. O’Hara — and you, too, Jack!” — offering her hand— “We’ve had a splendid party.... Strelsa, we really ought to go at once — —”
“Will you come again?”
“We will come again if you ask us,” said Strelsa; “we’re perfectly fascinated by the Legation.”
“And its personnel?” hinted Lacy. “Do you like us, Mrs. Leeds?”
“I’ve only seen three of you,” parried Strelsa, much amused.
“We refuse to commit ourselves,” said Molly. “Good-bye. I suppose you all are coming to my house-warming.”
They all looked at Mrs. Leeds and said that they were coming — said so fervently.
Molly laughed: she had no envy in her make-up, perhaps because she was too pretty herself.
“Oh, yes,” she said, replying to their unasked questions, “Mrs. Leeds will be there — and I plainly see my miserable fate. But what can a wretched woman expect from the Irish? Not constancy. Strelsa, take warning. They loved me once!”
After Westguard had put them in their limousine, he came back to find Quarren in his sitting-room, wearing a dressing-gown, and Lacy madly detailing to him the charms of Strelsa Leeds:
“Take it from me, Dicky, she’s some queen! You didn’t miss a thing but the prettiest woman in town! And there’s a something about her — a kind of a sort of a something — —”
“You appear to be in love, dear friend,” observed Quarren kindly.
“I am. So’s every man here who met her. We don’t deny it! We glory in our fall! What was that costume of hers, Karl? Mourning?”
“Fancy a glorious creature like her wearin’ black for that nasty little cad,” observed O’Hara disgustedly.
“It’s probably fashion, not grief,” remarked Westguard.
“I guess it’s nix for the weeps,” said O’Hara— “after all she probably went through with Reggie Leeds, I fancy she had no tears left over.”
“I want to talk,” cried Lacy; “I want to tell Rix what he missed. I’d got as far as her gown, I think — —”
“Go on,” smiled Quarren.
“Anyway,” said Lacy, “she wore a sort of mourning as far as her veil went, and her furs and gown and gloves were black, and her purse was gun-metal and black opals — rather brisk? Yes? — And all the dingles on her were gun-metal — everything black and sober — and that ruddy gold head — and — those eyes! — a kind of a purple-gray, Ricky, slanting a little, with long black lashes — I noticed ’em — and her lips were very vivid — not paint, but a kind of noticeably healthy scarlet — and that straight nose — and the fresh fragrant youth of her — —”
“For Heaven’s sake, Jack — —”
“Sure. I’m through with ’em all. I’m wise to the sex. That was merely a word picture. I’m talking like a writer, that’s all. That’s how you boobs talk, isn’t it, Karl?”
“Always,” said Westguard gravely.
“Me for Mrs. Leeds,” remarked O’Hara frankly. “I’d ask her to marry me on the drop of a hat.”
“Well, I’ll drop no hat for you!” said Lacy. “And there’ll be plenty of lunatics in this town who’ll go madder than you or me before they forget Mrs. Leeds. Wait! Town is going to sit up and take notice when this new planet swims into its social ken. How’s that epigram, Karl?”
Westguard said thoughtfully: “There’ll be notoriety, too, I’m afraid. If nobody knows her everybody knows about that wretched boy she married.”
Quarren added: “I have always understood that the girl did not want to marry him. It was her mother’s doings.”
O’Hara scowled. “I also have heard that the mother engineered it.... What was Mrs. Leeds’s name? I forget — —”
“Strelsa Lanark,” said Quarren who never forgot anything.
“Ugh,” grunted Westguard. “Fancy a mother throwing her daughter at the head of a boy like Reggie Leeds! — as vicious and unclean a little whelp as ever — Oh, what’s the use? — and de mortius nihil — et cetera, cock-a-doodle-do!”
“That poor girl had two entire years of him,” observed Lacy. “She doesn’t look more than twenty now — and he’s been in — been dead two years. Good Heavens! What a child she must have been when she married him!”
Westguard nodded: “She had two years of him — and I suppose he seldom drew a perfectly sober breath.... He dragged her all over the world with him — she standing for his rotten behaviour, trying to play the game with the cards hopelessly stacked against her. Vincent Wier met them in Naples; Mallison ran across them in Egypt; so did Lydon in Vienna. They said it was heartbreaking to see her trying to keep up appearances — trying to smile under his nagging or his drunken insults in public places. Lydon told me that she behaved like a brick — stuck to Reggie, tried to shield him, excuse him, make something out of the miserable pup who was doing his best to drag her to his own level and deprave her. But I guess she was too young or too unhappy or something, because there’s no depravity in the girl who was here a few minutes ago. I’ll swear to that.”
After a moment Lacy said: “Well, he got his at last!”
“What was comin’ to him,” added O’Hara, with satisfaction.
Lacy added, curiously: “How can a man misbehave when he has such a woman for a wife?”
“I wonder,” observed Quarren, “how many solid citizens read the account in the papers and remained scared longer than six weeks?”
“Lord help the wives of men,” growled Westguard.... “If any of you fellows are dressing for dinner you’d better be about it.... Wait a moment, Rix!” — as Quarren, the last to leave, was already passing the threshold.
The young fellow turned, smiling: the others went on; Westguard stood silent for a moment, then:
“You’re about the only man I care for very much,” he said bluntly. “If I am continually giving yo
u the Bible and the Sword it’s the best I have to give.”
Quarren replied laughingly.
“Don’t worry, old fellow. I take what you say all right. And I really mean to cut out a lot of fussing and begin to hustle.... Only, isn’t it a wise thing to keep next to possible clients?”
“The people you train with don’t buy lots in Tappan-Zee Park.”
“But I may induce them to go into more fashionable enterprises — —”
“Not they! The eagle yells on every dollar they finger. If there’s any bleeding to be done they’ll do it, my son.”
“Lester Caldera has already asked me about acreage in Westchester.”
“Did he do more than ask?”
“No.”
“Did you charge him for the consultation?”
“Of course not.”
“Then he got your professional opinion for nothing.”
“But he, or others, may try to assemble several farms — —”
“Why don’t they then? — instead of dragging you about at their heels from house to house, from card-room to ball-room, from café to opera, from one week-end to the next! — robbing you of time, of leisure, of opportunity, of ambition — spoiling you — making a bally monkey of you! You’re always in some fat woman’s opera box or on some fat man’s yacht or coach, or doing some damn thing — with your name figuring in everything from Newport to Hot Springs — and — and how can you ever turn into anything except a tame cat!”
Quarren’s face reddened slightly.
“I’d be perfectly willing to sit in an office all day and all night if anybody would give me any business. But what’s the use of chewing pencils and watching traffic on Forty-second Street?”
“Then go into another business!”
“I haven’t any money.”
“I’ll lend it to you!”
“I can’t risk your money, Karl. I’m too uncertain of myself. If anybody else offered to stake me I’d try the gamble.” ... He looked up at Westguard, ashamed, troubled, and showing it like a boy. “I’m afraid I don’t amount to anything, Karl. I’m afraid I’m no good except in the kind of thing I seem to have a talent for.”
“Fetching and carrying for the fashionable and wealthy,” sneered Westguard.
Quarren’s face flushed again: “I suppose that’s it.”
Westguard glared at him: “I wish I could shake it out of you!”
“I guess the poison’s there,” said Quarren in a low voice. “The worst of it is I like it — except when I understand your contempt.”
“You like to fetch and carry and go about with your pocket full of boudoir keys!”
“People give me as much as I give them.”
“They don’t!” said the other angrily. “They’ve taken a decent fellow and put him in livery!”
Quarren bit his lip as the blood leaped to his face.
“Don’t talk that way, Karl,” he said quietly. “Even you have no business to take that tone with me.”
There was a silence. After a few moments Westguard came over and held out his hand. Quarren took it, looked at him.
“I tell you,” he said, “there’s nothing to me. It’s your kindness, Karl, that sees in me possibilities that never were.”
“They’re there. I’ll do my duty almost to the point of breaking our friendship. But — I’ll have to stop short of that point.”
A quick smile came over Quarren’s face, gay, affectionate:
“You couldn’t do that, Karl.... And don’t worry. I’ll cut out a lot of frills and try to do things that are worth while. I mean it, really. Don’t worry, old fellow.”
“All right,” said Westguard, smiling.
CHAPTER II
A masked dance, which for so long has been out of fashion in the world that pretends to it, was the experiment selected by Molly Wycherly for the warming up of her new house on Park Avenue.
The snowy avenue for blocks was a mass of motors and carriages; a platoon of police took charge of the vehicular mess. Outside of the storm-coated lines the penniless world of shreds and patches craned a thousand necks as the glittering costumes passed from brougham and limousine under the awnings into the great house.
Already in the new ball-room, along the edges of the whirl, masqueraders in tumultuous throngs were crowding forward to watch the dancers or drifting into the eddies and set-backs where ranks of overloaded gilt chairs creaked under jewelled dowagers, and where rickety old beaux impersonated tinselled courtiers on wavering but devoted legs.
Aloft in their rococo sky gallery a popular orchestra fiddled frenziedly; the great curtains of living green set with thousands of gardenias swayed in the air currents like Chinese tapestries; a harmonious tumult swept the big new ball-room from end to end — a composite uproar in which were mingled the rushing noise of silk, clatter of sole and heel, laughter and cries of capering maskers gathered from the four quarters of fashionable Gath to grace the opening of the House of Wycherly. They were all there, dowager, matron, débutante, old beaux, young gallant, dancing, laughing, coquetting, flirting. Young eyes mocked the masked eyes that wooed them; adolescence tormented maturity; the toothless ogled the toothsome. Unmasking alone could set right this topsy-turvy world of carnival.
A sinuous Harlequin, his skin-tight lozenge-patterned dress shimmering like the red and gold skin of a Malay snake, came weaving his way through the edges of the maelstrom, his eyes under the black half-mask glittering maliciously at the victims of his lathe-sword. With it he recklessly slapped whatever tempted him, patting gently the rounded arms and shoulders of nymph and shepherdess, using more vigour on the plump contours of fat and elderly courtiers, spinning on the points of his pump-toes, his limber lathe-sword curved in both hands above his head, leaping lithely over a chair here and there, and landing always as lightly as a cat on silent feet — a wiry, symmetrical figure under the rakish bi-corne, instinct with mischief and grace infernal.
Encountering a burly masker dressed like one of Cromwell’s ponderous Ironsides, he hit him a resounding whack over his aluminum cuirass, and whispered:
“That Ironside rig doesn’t conceal you: it reveals you, Karl! Out with your Bible and your Sword and preach the wrath to come!”
“It will come all right,” said Westguard. “Do you know how many hundred thousand dollars are wasted here to-night?... And yesterday a woman died of hunger in Carmine Street. Don’t worry about the wrath of God as long as people die of cold and hunger in the streets of Ascalon.”
“That’s not as bad as dying of inanition — which would happen to the majority here if they didn’t have things like this to amuse ‘em. For decency’s sake, Karl, pity the perplexities of the rich for a change!”
Westguard grunted something under his casque; then, adjusting his aluminum mask:
“Are you having a good time, Dicky? I suppose you are.”
“Oh, I’m gay enough,” returned the Harlequin airily— “but there’s never much genuine gaiety among the overfed.” And he slapped a passing gallant with his wooden sword, spun around on his toes, bent over gracefully and stood on his hands, legs twinkling above him in the air. Then, with a bound he was on his nimble feet again, and, linking his arm in the arm of the Cromwellian trooper, strolled along the ranks of fanning dowagers, glancing amiably into their masked faces.
“Same old battle-line,” he observed to his companion— “their jewels give them away. Same old tiaras, same old ladies — all fat, all fifty, all fanning away like the damned. Your aunt has on about a ton of emeralds. I think she does it for the purpose of banting, don’t you, Karl — —”
The uproar drowned his voice: Westguard, colossal in his armour, gazed gloomily around at the gorgeous spectacle for which his cousin Molly Wycherly was responsible.
“Westguard, colossal in his armour, gazed gloomily around at the gorgeous spectacle.”
“It’s monkey-shines like this that breed anarchists,” he growled. “Did you notice that rubbering crowd outside t
he police lines in the snow? Molly and Jim ought to see it.”
“Oh, cut it out, Karl,” retorted the Harlequin gaily; “there’ll be rich and poor in the world as long as the bally old show runs — there’ll be reserved seats and gallery seats and standing room only, and ninety-nine percent of the world cooling its shabby heels outside.”
“I don’t care to discuss the problem with you,” observed Westguard. After a moment he added: “I’m going to dance once or twice and get out.... I suppose you’ll flit about doing the agreeable and fashionable until daylight.”
“I suppose so,” said the Harlequin, tranquilly. “Why not? Also you ought to find material here for one of your novels.”
“A man doesn’t have to hunt for material. It’s in his bedroom when he wakes; it’s all around him all day long. There’s no more here than there is outside in the snow; and no less.... But dancing all night isn’t going to help your business, Ricky.”
“It won’t hurt any business I’m likely to do.”
“Isn’t your Tappan-Zee Park panning out?”
“Fizzling out. Nobody’s bought any building sites.”
“Why not?”
“How the deuce do I know, Karl! I don’t want to talk business, here — —”
He ceased speaking as three or four white masked Bacchantes in fluttering raiment came dancing by to the wild music of Philemon and Baucis. Shaking their be-ribboned tambourines, flowery garlands and lynx-skins flying from their shoulders, they sped away on fleet little feet, hotly pursued by adorers.
“Come on,” said the Harlequin briskly; “I think one of those skylarkers ought to prove amusing! Shall I catch you one?”
But he found no encouragement in the swift courtship he attempted; for the Bacchantes, loudly protesting at his interference, banged him over his head and shoulders with their resounding tambourines and danced away unheeding his blandishments.
“Flappers,” observed a painted and powdered clown whose voice betrayed him as O’Hara; “this town is overstocked with fudge-fed broilers. They’re always playin’ about under foot, spoilin’ your huntin’; and if you touch ’em they ki-yi no end.”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 582