The Streets of Ascalon
She considered him, interested, her eyes full of smiling curiosity, perfectly conscious of the swift challenge of his lifted glass.
After a few seconds' hesitation she struck the ringing rim of her glass against his:
"To our new friendship, Monsieur Harlequin!" she said lightly – "with every sporting chance, worldly hazard, and heavenly possibility in it!"
For the first time the smile faded from his face, and something in his altered features arrested her glass at her very lips.
"How suddenly serious you seem," she said. "Have I said anything?"
He drained his glass; after a second she tasted hers, looked at him, finished it, still watching him.
"Really," she said; "you made me feel for a moment as though you and I were performing a solemn rite. That was a new phase of you to me – that exceedingly sudden and youthful gravity."
He remained silent. Into his mind, just for a second, and while in the act of setting the glass to his lips, there had flashed a flicker of pale clairvoyance. It seemed to illumine something within him which he had never believed in – another self.
For that single instant he caught a glimpse of it, then it faded like a spark in a confused dream.
He raised his head and looked gravely across at Strelsa Leeds; and level-eyed, smiling, inquisitive, she returned his gaze.
Could this brief contact with her have evoked in him a far-buried something which had never before given sign of existence? And could it have been anything resembling aspiration that had glimmered so palely out of an ordered and sordid commonplace personality which, with all its talent for frivolity, he had accepted as his own?
Without reason a slight flush came into his cheeks.
"Why do you regard me so owlishly?" she asked, amused. "I repeat that you made me feel as though we were performing a sort of solemn rite when we drank our toast."
"You couldn't feel that way with such a thoroughly frivolous man as I am. Could you?"
"I'm rather frivolous myself," she admitted, laughing. "I really can't imagine why you made me feel so serious – or why you looked as though you were. I've no talent for solemnity. Have you?"
"I don't think so," he said. "What a terrible din everybody is making! How hot and stifling it is here – with all those cloying gardenias… A man said, this evening, that this sort of thing makes for anarchy… It's rather beastly of me to sit here criticising my host's magnificence… Do you know – it's curious, too – but I wish that, for the next hour or two, you and I were somewhere alone under a good wide sky – where there was no noise. It's an odd idea, isn't it, Mrs. Leeds. And probably you don't share it with me."
She remained silent, thoughtful, her violet-gray eyes humorously considering him.
"How do you know I don't?" she said at last. "I'm not enamoured of noise, either."
"There's another thing," he went on, smiling – "it's rather curious, too – but somehow I've a sort of a vague idea that I've a lot of things to talk to you about. It's odd, isn't it?"
"Well you know," she reminded him, "you couldn't very well have a lot of things to talk to me about considering the fact that we've known each other only an hour or so."
"It doesn't seem logical… And yet, there's that inexplicable sensation of being on the verge of fairly bursting into millions of words for your benefit – words which all my life have been bottled up in me, accumulating, waiting for this opportunity."
They both were laughing, yet already a slight tension threatened both – had menaced them, vaguely, from the very first. It seemed to impend ever so slightly, like a margin of faintest shadow edging sunlight; yet it was always there.
"I haven't time for millions of words this evening," she said. "Won't some remain fresh and sparkling and epigrammatic until – until – "
"To-morrow? They'll possibly keep that long."
"I didn't say to-morrow."
"I did."
"I'm perfectly aware of the subtle suggestion and subtler flattery, Mr. Quarren."
"Then, may I see you to-morrow?"
"Utterly impossible – pitiably hopeless. You see I am frank about the heart-rending disappointment it is to me – and must be to you. But after I am awake I am in the hands of Mrs. Lannis. And there's no room for you in that pretty cradle."
"The next day, then?"
"We're going to Florida for three weeks."
"You?"
"Molly and Jim and I."
"Palm Beach?"
"Ultimately."
"And then?"
"Oh! Have you the effrontery to tell me to my face that you'll be in the same mind about me three weeks hence?"
"I have."
"Do you expect me to believe you?"
"I don't know – what to expect – of you, of myself," he said so quietly that she looked up quickly.
"Mr. Quarren! Are you a sentimental man? I had mentally absolved you from that preconception of mine – among other apparently unmerited ideas concerning you."
"I suppose you'll arise and flee if I tell you that you're different from other women," he said.
"You wouldn't be such an idiot as to tell me that, would you?"
"I might be. I'm just beginning to realise my capacity for imbecility. You're different in this way anyhow; no woman ever before induced me to pull a solemn countenance."
"I don't induce you! I ask you not to."
"I try not to; but, somehow, there's something so – so real about you– "
"Are you accustomed to foregather with the disembodied?"
"I'm beginning to think that my world is rather thickly populated with ghosts – phantoms of a more real world."
He looked at her soberly; she had thought him younger than he now seemed. A slight irritation silenced her for a moment, then, impatiently:
"You speak cynically and I dislike it. What reason have you to express world-weary sentiments? – you who are young, who probably have never known real sorrow, deep unhappiness! I have little patience with a morbid view of anything, Mr. Quarren. I merely warn you – in the event of your ever desiring to obtain my good graces."
"I do desire them."
"Then be yourself."
"I don't know what I am. I thought I knew. Your advent has disorganised both my complacency and my resignation."
"What do you mean?"
"Must I answer?"
"Of course!" she said, laughing.
"Then – the Harlequin who followed you up those stairs, never came down again."
"Oh!" she said, unenlightened.
"I'm wondering who it was who came down out of that balcony in the wake of the golden dancer," he added.
"You and I – you very absurd young man. What are you trying to say?"
"I – wonder," he said, smiling, "what I am trying to say."
CHAPTER III
Sunshine illuminated the rose-silk curtains of Mrs. Leeds's bedroom with parallel slats of light and cast a frail and tremulous net of gold across her bed. The sparrows in the Japanese ivy seemed to be unusually boisterous, and their persistent metallic chatter disturbed Strelsa who presently unclosed her gray eyes upon her own reflected features in the wall-glass opposite.
Face still flushed with slumber, she lay there considering her mirrored features with humorous, sleepy eyes; then she sat up, stretched her arms, yawned, patted her red lips with her palm, pressed her knuckles over her eyelids, and presently slipped out of bed. Her bath was ready; so was her maid.
A little later, cross-legged on the bed once more, she sat sipping her chocolate and studying the morning papers with an interest and satisfaction unjaded.
Coupled with the naïve curiosity of a kitten remained her unspoiled capacity for pleasure, and the interest of a child in a world unfolding daily in a sequence of miracles under her intent and delighted eyes.
Bare of throat and arm and shoulder, the lustrous hair shadowing her face, she now appeared unexpectedly frail, even thin, as though the fuller curves of the mould in which she was being formed had not yet been filled up.
Fully dressed, gown and furs lent to her something of a youthful maturity which was entirely deceptive; for here, in bed, the golden daylight revealed childish contours accented so delicately that they seemed almost sexless. And in her intent gray eyes and in her undeveloped mind was all that completed the bodily and mental harmony – youth unawakened as yet except to a confused memory of pain – and the dreamy and passionless unconsciousness of an unusually late adolescence.
At twenty-four Strelsa still looked upon her morning chocolate with a healthy appetite; and the excitement of seeing her own name and picture in the daily press had as yet lost none of its delightful thrill.
All the morning papers reported the Wycherlys' house-warming with cloying detail. And she adored it. What paragraphs particularly concerned herself, her capable maid had enclosed in inky brackets. These Strelsa read first of all, warm with pleasure at every stereotyped tribute to her loveliness.
The comments she perused were of all sorts, even the ungrammatical sort, but she read them all with profound interest, and loved every one, even the most fulsome. For life, and its kinder experience, was just beginning for her after a shabby childhood, a lonely girlhood, and a marriage unspeakable, the memory of which already had become to her as vaguely poignant as the dull recollection of a nightmare.
So her appetite for kindness, even the newspaper variety, was keen and not at all discriminating; and the reaction from two years' solitude – two years of endurance, of shrinking from public comment – had developed in her a fierce longing for pleasure and for play-fellows. Her fellow-men had responded with an enthusiasm which still surprised her delightfully at moments.
The clever Swedish maid now removed the four-legged tray from her knees; Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent on her newspapers, satisfying a natural curiosity concerning what the world thought about her costume of the night before, her beauty, herself, and the people she knew. At last, agreeably satiated, she lowered the newspaper and lay back, dreamy-eyed, faintly smiling, lost in pleasant retrospection.
Had she really appeared as charming last night as these exceedingly kind New York newspapers pretended? Did this jolly world really consider her so beautiful? She wished to believe it. She tried to. Perhaps it was really true – because all these daily paragraphs, which had begun with her advent into certain New York sets, must really have been founded on something unusual about her.
And it could not be her fortune which continued to inspire such journalistic loyalty and devotion, because she had none – scarcely enough money in fact to manage with, dress with, pay her servants, and maintain her pretty little house in the East Eighties.
It could not be her wit; she had no more than the average American girl. Nor was there anything else in her – neither her cultivation, attainments, nor talents – to entitle her to distinction. So apparently it must be her beauty that evoked paragraphs which had already made her a fashion in the metropolis – was making her a cult – even perhaps a notoriety.
Because those people who had personally known Reginald Leeds, were exceedingly curious concerning this young girl who had been a nobody, as far as New York was concerned, until her name became legally coupled with the name of one of the richest and most dissipated scions of an old and honourable New York family.
The public which had read with characteristic eagerness all about the miserable finish of Reginald Leeds, found its abominable curiosity piqued by his youthful widow's appearance in town.
It is the newspapers' business to give the public what it wants – at least that appears to be the popular impression; and so they gave the public all it wanted about Strelsa Leeds, in daily chunks. And then some. Which, in the beginning, she shrank from, horrified, frightened, astonished – because, in the beginning, every mention of her name was coupled with a glossary in full explanation of who she was, entailing a condensed review of a sordid story which, for two years, she had striven to obliterate from her mind. But these post-mortems lasted only a week or so. Except for a sporadic eruption of the case in a provincial paper now and then, which somebody always thoughtfully sent to her, the press finally let the tragedy alone, contenting its intellectual public with daily chronicles of young Mrs. Leeds's social activities.
A million boarding houses throughout the land, read about her beauty with avidity; and fat old women in soiled pink wrappers began to mention her intimately to each other as "Strelsa Leeds" – the first hall-mark of social fame – and there was loud discussion, in a million humble homes, about the fashionable men who were paying her marked attention; and the chances she had for bagging earls and dukes were maintained and combated, below stairs and above, with an eagerness, envy, and back-stairs knowledge truly and profoundly democratic.
Her morning mail had begun to assume almost fashionable proportions, but she could not yet reconcile herself to the idea of even such a clever maid as her own assuming power of social secretary. So she still read and answered all her letters – or rather neglected to notice the majority, which invested her with a kind of awe to some and made others furious and unwillingly respectful.
Letters, bills, notes, invitations, advertisements were scattered over the bedclothes as she lay there, thinking over the pleasures and excitement of last night's folly – thinking of Quarren, among others, and of the swift intimacy that had sprung up between them – like a witch-flower over night – thinking of her imprudence, and of the cold displeasure of Barent Van Dyne who, toward daylight, had found her almost nose to nose with Quarren, absorbed in exchanging with that young man ideas and perfectly futile notions about everything on top, inside, and underneath the habitable globe.
She blushed as she remembered her flimsy excuses to Van Dyne – she had the grace to blush over that memory – and how any of the dignity incident to the occasion had been all Van Dyne's – and how, as she took his irreproachable arm and parted ceremoniously with Quarren, she had imprudently extended her hand behind her as her escort bore her away – a childish impulse – the innocent coquetry of a village belle – she flushed again at the recollection – and at the memory of Quarren's lips on her finger-tips – and how her hand had closed on the gardenia he pressed into it —
She turned her head on the pillow; the flower she had taken from him lay beside her on her night table, limp, discoloured, malodorous; and she picked it up, daintily, and flung it into the fireplace.
At the same moment the telephone rang downstairs in the library. Presently her maid knocked, announcing Mr. Quarren on the wire.
"I'm not at home," said Strelsa, surprised, or rather trying to feel a certain astonishment. What really surprised her was that she felt none.
Her maid was already closing the door behind her when Strelsa said:
"Wait a moment, Freda." And, after thinking, she smiled to herself and added: "You may set my transmitter on the table beside me, and hang up the receiver in the library… Be sure to hang it up at once."
Then, sitting up in bed, she unhooked the receiver and set it to her ear.
"Mr. Quarren," she began coldly, and without preliminary amenities, "have you any possible excuse for awaking me at such an unearthly hour as mid-day?"
"Good Lord," he exclaimed contritely, "did I do that?"
She had no more passion for the exact truth than the average woman, and she quibbled:
"Do you think I would say so if it were not true?" she demanded.
"No, of course not – "
"Well, then!" An indignant pause. "But," she added honestly, "I was not exactly what you might call asleep, although it practically amounts to the same thing. I was reposing… Are you feeling quite fit this morning?" she added demurely.
"I'd be all right if I could see you – "
"You can't! What an idea!"
"Why not? What are you going to do?"
"There's no particular reason why I should detail my daily duties, obligations, and engagements to you; is there? – But I'm an unusually kind-hearted person, and not easily offended by people's inquisitiveness. So I'll overlook your bad manners. First, then, I am lunching at the Province Club, then I am going to a matinée at the Casino, afterward dropping in for tea at the Sprowls, dining at the Calderas, going to the Opera with the Vernons, and afterward, with them, to a dance at the Van Dynes… So, will you kindly inform me where you enter the scene?"
She could hear him laugh over the telephone.
"What are you doing just now?" he asked.
"I am seated upon my innocent nocturnal couch, draped in exceedingly intimate attire, conversing over the telephone with the original Paul Pry."
"Could anything induce you to array yourself more conventionally, receive me, and let me take you to your luncheon at the Province Club?"
"But I don't wish to see you."
"Is that perfectly true?"
"Perfectly. I've just thrown your gardenia into the fireplace. Doesn't that prove it?"
"Oh, no. Because it's too early, yet, for either of us to treasure such things – "
"What horrid impertinence!"
"Isn't it! But your heavenly gift of humour will transform my impudence into a harmless and diverting sincerity. Please let me see you, Mrs. Leeds – just for a few moments."
"Why?"
"Because you are going South and there are three restless weeks ahead of me – "
This time he could hear her clear, far laughter:
"What has my going to Florida to do with your restlessness?"
"Your very question irrevocably links cause and effect – "
"Don't be absurd, Mr. Quarren!"
"Absurdity is the badge of all our Guild – "
"What Guild do you belong to?"
"The associated order of ardent suitors – "
"Mr. Quarren! You are becoming ridiculous; do you know it?"
"No, I don't realise it, but they say all the rest of the world considers suitors ridiculous – "
"Do you expect me to listen to such nonsense at such an hour in the morning?"
"It's half past twelve; and my weak solution of nonsense is suitable to the time of day – "
"Am I to understand that the solution becomes stronger as the day advances?"
"Exactly; the solution becomes so concentrated and powerful that traces of common-sense begin to appear – "
"I didn't notice any last night."
"Van Dyne interfered."
"Poor Mr. Van Dyne. If you'd been civil to him he might have asked you to the dance to-night – if I had suggested it. But you were horridly rude."
"I? Rude?"
"You're not going to be rude enough to say it was I who behaved badly to him, are you? Oh, the shocking vanity of man! No doubt you are thinking that it was I who, serpent-like, whispered temptation into your innocent ear, and drew you away into a corner, and shoved palms in front of us, and brought silver and fine linen, and rare fruits and sparkling wines; and paid shameless court with an intelligent weather-eye always on the watch for a flouted and justly indignant cavalier!"
"Yes," he said, "you did all those things. And now you're trying to evade the results."
"What are the results?"
"A partly demented young man clamouring to see you at high-noon while the cold cruel cause of his lunacy looks on and laughs."
"I'm afraid that young man must continue to clamour," she said, immensely amused at the picture he drew. "How far away is he at this moment?"
"In the Legation, a blithering wreck."
"Why not in his office frantically immersed in vast business enterprises and cataclysmic speculations?"
"I'm rather afraid that if business immerses him too completely he will be found drowned some day."
"You promised —said that you were going to begin a vigorous campaign," she reminded him reproachfully. "I asked it of you; and you agreed."
"I am beginning life anew – or trying to – by seeking the perennial source of daily spiritual and mundane inspiration – "
"Why won't you be serious?"
"I am. Were you not the source of my new inspiration? Last night did something or other to me – I am not yet perfectly sure what it was. I want to see you to be sure – if only for a – moment – merely to satisfy myself that you are real – "
"Will one moment be enough?"
"Certainly."
"One second – or half a one?"
"Plenty."
"Very well – if you promise not to expect or ask for more than that – "
"That is terribly nice of you!"
"It is, overwhelmingly. But really I don't know whether I am nice or merely weak-minded. Because I've lingered here gossiping so long with you that I've simply got to fly like a mad creature about my dressing. Good-bye – "
"Shall I come up immediately?"
"Of course not! I expect to be dressing for hours and hours – figuratively speaking… Perhaps you might start in ten minutes if you are coming in a taxi."
"You are an angel – "
"That is not telephone vernacular… And perhaps you had better be prompt, because Mrs. Lannis is coming for me – that is, if you have anything to – to say – that – "
She flushed up, annoyed at her own stupidity, then felt grateful to him as he answered lightly:
"Of course; she might misunderstand our informality. Shall I see you in half an hour?"
"If I can manage it," she said.
She managed it, somehow. At first, really indifferent, and not very much amused, the talk with him had gradually aroused in her the same interest and pleasurable curiosity that she had experienced in exchanging badinage with him the night before. Now she really wanted to see him, and she took enough trouble about it to set her deft maid flying about her offices.
First a fragrant precursor of his advent arrived in the shape of a great bunch of winter violets; and her maid fastened them to her black fox muff. Then the distant door-bell sounded; and in an extraordinarily short space of time, wearing her pretty fur hat, her boa, and carrying a muff that matched both, with his violets pinned to it, she entered the dim drawing-room, halting just beyond the threshold.
"Are you not ashamed," she said, severely, "to come battering at my door at this hour of the day?"
"Abjectly."
They exchanged a brief handshake; she seated herself on the arm of a sofa; he stood before the unlighted fireplace, looking at her with a half smiling half curious air which made her laugh outright.
"Bien! C'est moi, monsieur," she said. "Me voici! C'est moi-même!"
"I believe you are real after all," he admitted.
"Do I seem different?"
"Yes – and no."
"How am I different?"
"Well, somehow, last night, I got the notion that you were younger, thinner – and not very real – "
"Are you presuming to criticise my appearance last night?" she asked with mock indignation. "Because if you are, I proudly refer you to the enlightened metropolitan morning press."
"I read all about you," he said, smiling.
"I am glad you did. You will doubtless now be inclined to treat me with the respect due to my years and experience."
"I believe," he said, "that your gown and hat and furs make a charming difference – "
"How perfectly horrid of you! I thought you admired my costume last night!"
"Oh, Lord," he said – "you were sufficiently charming last night. But now, in your fluffy furs, you seem rather taller – less slender perhaps – and tremendously fetching – "
"Say that my clothes improve me, and that in reality I'm a horrid, thin little beast!" she exclaimed, laughing. "I know I am, but I haven't finished growing yet. Really that's the truth, Mr. Quarren. Would you believe that I have grown an inch since last spring?"
"I believe it," he said, "but would you mind stopping now? You are exactly right."
"You know I'm thin and flat as a board!"
"You're perfect!"
"It's too late to say that to me – "
"It is too early to say more."
"Let's don't talk about myself, please."
"It has become the only subject in the world that interests me – "
"Please, Mr. Quarren! Are you actually attempting to be silly at this hour of the day? The wise inanities of midnight sound perilously flat in the sunshine – flatter than the flattest champagne, which no bread-crumbs can galvanise into a single bubble. Tell me, why did you wish to see me this morning. I mean the real reason? Was it merely to find out whether I was weak-minded enough to receive you?"
