The Monster

A servant announced:

“His Excellency, Mustim Pasha!”

The man who entered was short and stout. He had a full black beard, and the appearance, slightly Hebraic, which Turks possess. After M. de Joyeuse had greeted him, he saluted the duchess.

Beyond, on a sofa, Violet Silverstairs sat talking to the Baronne de Fresnoy, a young woman who looked very much as might a statuette of Tanagra, to which Grévin had given two big blue circles for eyes, and a small pink one for mouth, but a statuette articulated, perhaps, by Eros, and costumed, certainly, by the Rue de la Paix – though a shade less artistically than Lady Silverstairs, who always seemed to have just issued from some paradise inhabited solely by poet-modistes, and who, in addition, possessed what Mme. de Fresnoy lacked, a face delicately and rarely patrician.

Adjacently was her sister, Aurelia, a girl with a face like an opening rose, and a frock of such astonishing simplicity that it looked both virginal and ruinous. This young person had the loveliest eyes imaginable. In them and about an uncommonly bewitching mouth was an expression quite ideally ingénue which, when least expected, it amused her to transform into one of extreme effrontery.

On one side of her was Lord Buttercups, an English youth, small, snubnosed, stupid. On the other lounged a Roman, Prince Farnese, a remarkably fine-looking pauper.

Turning from the girl’s sister to the Turk, the young baroness called:

“Here, Musty, come and make love to us.”

The Asiatic was about to abandon Mme. de Joyeuse, when doors at the farther end of the room were thrown open, and the duchess put a hand on his arm.

At table, Tempest, who had taken Leilah Barouffska out, found his seat indicated beside her. At his left was Mme. de Fresnoy, whom he detested. He turned to the American. At the moment some preoccupation, a nostalgia or a regret, contracted the angle of her mouth. The contraction gave her the expression which those display who have deeply suffered either from some long malady or from some perilous constraint.

Mechanically, Tempest considered a dish which a footman, his hands gloved in silk, was presenting. When he again turned to the American, it was as though a curtain had fallen or risen. Her face had lighted, and it was with an entirely worldly air that she put before him this unworldly question:

“Do you believe in fate?”

Tempest laughed. “Not on an empty stomach. I believe then in nothing but virtue.”

Leilah put down her spoon. “It seems to me that our lives are sketched in advance. It may be that we have the power to amplify incidents or to curtail them, but the events themselves remain unchanged. They are there in our paths awaiting us. Though why they are there – ”

As was usual with her, she spoke with little pauses, in a voice that caressed the ear. Now she stopped and raised the spoon, in which was almond soup.

Tempest took a sip of Madeira. “A pal of mine, a chap I never met for a number of reasons, though particularly, I suppose, because he died two thousand years ago, well, he told me that we should wish things to be as they are. I have no quarrel with fate. But if you have, or do have – ”

A maître d’hôtel, after presenting a carp that had been arranged as though swimming in saffron, was supervising its service.

“Padapoulos,” exclaimed the young Baronne de Fresnoy, whom the sight of the fish had, perhaps, excited, “Padapoulos told me that he dined best on an orchid soup, a mousse of aubergine, and the maxims of Confucius.”

“Padapoulos,” the legate of the Sublime Porte gravely commented, “is a poet, and a Greek. Add those two things together, and you get – you get – ”

“Nothing to eat!” the young baroness, with an explosion of little laughs, threw at him. “Musty!” she cried. “Whom were you with at the Variétés last night? I saw you. Yes, I did. Oh, Musty, who would have thought that you would be unfaithful to me!”

“These Roumis!” the Turk mentally exclaimed. “If a wife of mine talked in that way I would have her impaled.”

Beyond, across an opulent bosom, de Joyeuse and Silverstairs were talking sport. They delighted in things that men have always loved, the pursuit of prey, the joy of killing, the murderous serenity of the woods.

Farther up was Aurelia. As before, she had Buttercups on one side, Farnese on the other. She poked at the former.

“That horrid de Fresnoy woman is trying to flirt with you, Parsnips. Now, don’t deny it. I don’t blame her. You are too good-looking. When we are married – if we ever are – I’ll make you wear a veil. You sha’n’t go out except in a closed carriage. Yes, and with some big, fat, strapping woman to look after you.”

Beatifically the youth considered her. “Couldn’t you do that?”

Delicately Aurelia raised a fork. “I shall have my own affairs to attend to.” For a second she nibbled. “I have a few on my hands as it is.”

Buttercups stabbed at his plate. “I, too, may have business of my own.”

“Business! Business!” The girl repeated. “You are so commercial just like all the nobility. If you were not a peer you would be mistaken for one. It’s quite painful.”

“That may b-be,” Buttercups spluttered. “But this idea of yours of going on the stage is quite as p-painful to me.”

He hesitated, then, as though uttering a great moral truth, threw out:

“It’s so dreadful to have your name in the papers!”

“And still more dreadful not to!” the girl threw back. She turned to Farnese. “You do nothing but eat!”

With large, melancholy, inconstant eyes the Italian looked at her. “It is my one consolation since you became engaged to that imbecile.”

Aurelia pecked at her food. “One always feels quite safe with an imbecile, and that is so restful. Try it and see.”

“I’d like to try it with you.”

Aurelia put down her fork. “Am I your idea of an imbecile? You are flattering, if insincere.”

Again the Roman covered her with his eyes. “It is rather difficult to be the one and not the other. But I am perfectly sincere in saying that you are my idea of perfection.”

“Thanks, but, then, you are not mine.”

“And might one ask what yours is?”

Dreamily, with an air of innocence that was infinite, Aurelia looked at him. “You will think it childish of me, perhaps, but, like all young girls – like all young and inexperienced girls – I have an ideal. A mere maiden’s fancy, no doubt, and yet one which I cherish so. It is a vision which at times I have of a blind man, a deaf mute, a divine creature, invalid and octogenarian, who would not know what I did and would not care.”

Pausing, she dropped her eyes and sadly shook her head. “You will tell me that he don’t exist.”

“He might be manufactured,” Farnese cheerfully replied.

Then he, too, paused, drank of the wine before him, and, perhaps stimulated by it, whispered:

“Believe me, I feel as though I could cut my throat for you.”

Maliciously Aurelia looked up. “When a man does not feel that way he has no feeling at all. One might even say that he is quite heartless.”

Across the table, Tempest, turning again to Leilah, said: “Monsieur Barouffski is not here to-night.”

At the remark, instantly in her face its former expression of constraint appeared.

“No, he is to join us later.”

At the other end, where the duchess sat, everybody was laughing. The lady had been giving an account of a recent bankruptcy, that of Lord Auld Reekie.

“Heavens!” Violet Silverstairs exclaimed. “What will become of Bobbles!”

Bobbles was Lady Auld Reekie, a fair young craft of light timber and many sails.

Camille de Joyeuse, summoning her diligent smile, replied: “She will go into the hands of a receiver.”

Another jest followed, and presently, in the contagion of it almost the entire table joined.

The delicately toxic fare, the slightly emotionalising wines, loosened tongues, robbing them of discretion, and, before the servants, as though the latter were deaf and dumb, hosts and guests revealed their naked minds.

“It is rotten to talk in that way before these men,” Tempest exclaimed. “They get their wages with lessons in anarchy thrown in. It’s too much.”

“I had not heard,” Leilah replied. “I was thinking of that friend of yours whom you never met.”

Tempest laughed. “The one who said we should wish things to be as they are? Ah, well! I am afraid I am not up to that yet.”

“Nor I. But who was he, if one may ask? Not Aristotle?”

“No, but, by the way, do you know whom Aristotle is supposed to be, or rather to have become? Herbert Spencer! An occultist told me. He told me also such a curious story. You have heard, have you not, of Apollonius of Tyana? Then you may remember it is said of him that he healed the sick, raised the dead, knew all things save the caresses of women, and spoke every language including that of colours. Well, the occultist told me that Jesus was a rabbi who surrendered his entity to the Christ, and afterward reappeared here as Apollonius. He said, too, that he was not crucified. Crucifixion, you know, is merely the symbol of initiation.”

“And whom did he say was the Christ?”

“An envoy from a higher sphere.”

Leilah inclined her head. “Yes, and there have, I believe, been others. From zeniths or from nadirs unknown to us, from planes, let us say, where all beatitudes are as usual as all shames are common here, spirits commissioned to regenerate the hearts of man pass into the slums of space. Confident, with a crown of light they come, only to return with one of thorns.”

Tempest turned squarely in his chair. “That is a singularly beautiful idea!”

Again Leilah inclined her head. “It is beautiful. It is beautiful to think that earthward from some chromatic star the soul of Krishna may have sunk. But the idea is not mine. I found it in the Vidyâ.”

This last statement was lost. Mme. de Fresnoy was insisting on Tempest’s attention. Meanwhile a cygnet, its plumage replaced, a pond lily in its ochre beak, had been presented, carved and served. A salad, known as Half-Mourning, a composition of artichoke hearts and Piedmontese truffles, had departed with it. Now sweets had come, pastry light as a caress, volatile as an essence, that pastry of which the art is known only to the Oriental and the occasional cordon bleu.

Devoutly, with an air of invoking the Prophet, the Turk was absorbing it.

The young Baronne de Fresnoy, abandoning Tempest, looked at him. With a wicked glitter in her big blue eyes she called:

“Musty! Are you thinking of me?”

The pasha was framing a reply, a reply perhaps rather bald, when Camille de Joyeuse also addressed him. Presently she stood up. The others imitated her. The gayeties of the table were abandoned for the brilliance of the salons beyond.

Tempest, who had accompanied Leilah Barouffska said, as she seated herself:

“Are you to remain in Paris?”

Before answering, she looked up at him, for he was standing. “Who can tell what one will do? But I fancy so. We have taken a house in the rue de la Pompe.”

“In the rue de la Pompe!” Tempest exclaimed. “That is where I live.” He smiled. The fact that they were neighbours seemed to constitute a bond. “Whereabouts in the rue de la Pompe?”

“Next to the church.”

“Do you find it convenient?”

A servant announced:

“Monsieur and madame Spencer-Poole!”

“You mean,” Leilah replied, “am I a Catholic? No, I am an Episcopalian. But my views, I fear, are not orthodox. I have got so far that I believe fully in the Vidyâ.”

She had cited the book at the dinner table but, at the time, distracted by Marie de Fresnoy, Tempest had not heard; now he exclaimed at it.

“The Vidyâ! Of all things! Why not the Upanishads?”

A servant announced:

“Madame la marquise de Charleroi!”

Leilah made a little gesture. “The Upanishads, too. I have great faith in them also. Their conceptions seem to me the most perfect that the human mind has evolved, that is, if it were a human mind that evolved them.”

A servant announced:

“Madame la princesse Orlonna!”

“What particularly impressed you in them?” Tempest asked.

“The demonstration that life is a laboratory in which the strength of the soul is tried.”

“And in the Vidyâ?”

“The fact that selfishness is the root of evil. That impressed me very much, primarily I suppose because it is true, but chiefly I think because I had not realized it before.”

Tempest nodded. Never had he heard a mondaine cite the Upanishads. In no drawing room had he ever heard the Vidyâ mentioned. In his life he had not dreamed of having a digest of each produced in an atmosphere dripping with frivolities. As he nodded he reconsidered this woman. From the first he had realized that she differed from the ordinary society type. Now he saw that she belonged to a superior world.

“Do you not admire them, too?” Leilah, who had also been considering him, inquired.

Tempest adjusted his monocle. “You see, you know, the Self, the All-Self, the One, the oneness of self with everything, the oneness of all things with One, these minor motifs of theirs I may admire but I do not grasp. On the contrary, there is a certain voluminous complexity about them that makes me gasp. None the less they advance certain ideas which, while curious to the few and to the many absurd, are yet so mathematically evident; the fact for instance – ”

A servant announced:

“His Highness monseigneur le prince Paul de Montebianco!”

“Monsieur Harris!”

The salons were becoming filled. The floor was swept by trains brief but brilliant. There was a multiplication of black coats, a renewed animation, a mounting murmur in which occasionally the name of a new arrival was lost.

The servant announced:

“Monsieur le vicomte and madame la vicomtesse de Helley-Quetgen!”

“Madame la princesse Zubaroff!”

“Monsieur d’Arcy!”

“Monsieur le comte Barouffski!”

The last of these, a large man, very fair, with grey-green eyes, had a studied manner which, however, his voice relieved. As he advanced and addressed Mme. de Joyeuse, it sounded supple and silken, as indeed most Slav voices do.

Already groups had formed. The corner in which Tempest stood before Leilah developed another. The Spencer-Pooles approached. With them was d’Arcy, a young man abominably good looking, famous for the prodigious variety of his affairs.

Tempest who had continued talking, who had even been expounding and who now felt that he had been holding forth, moved on. He wanted to smoke and being an habitué of the household, he knew where the smoking room was.

There, before an open fire, his hands behind his back, in that after-dinner attitude which some men assume, M. de Joyeuse stood. He was telling of a stag hunt that had been held at Monplaisir, his estate.

The duke was not an impressionist, his description lacked colour. But de Fresnoy, who had been present, resaw it all; the sheen of the horses, the green of the whippers-in, the pink coats of the sportsmen, the blue dolmans of the officers that had ridden over from a garrison near by, the verdure of the forest’s edge, the view, the scramble, the run, the quarry, the hallali of the huntsman, the leaping hounds, the fastidious ceremonial of the death and the sky of pale silk which draped with faint gold the magnificent brutality of the scene.

“It was just my luck to have missed it,” Silverstairs threw in.

De Joyeuse turned to him. “We count on you next autumn. And on you also, mon vieux,” he added to Tempest who had approached.

Tempest nodded. He was lighting a cigar. The operation concluded, he drew a chair beside Silverstairs. “Now, tell me all about Madame B.”

Silverstairs eyed him quizzingly. “She interests you?”

“Enormously.”

“Then look out for Barouffski whom she interests still more.”

Tempest shrugged his shoulders. “Was it her interest in Number One or Number One’s interest in her that declined?”

“You mean Verplank?”

“I suppose I do. Anyway I mean her first husband. Why were they divorced?”

“Why? But my dear Tempest, divorce in the States is what racing is with us, a national amusement. Everybody takes a hand in it.”

“The right or the left?”

“Both I fancy. Though in the case of Madame B. I have an idea that the right turned out to be wrong.”

Tempest flicked the ashes from his cigar. “I may compliment you, Silverstairs. You have a manner of expressing yourself which is highly cryptic. But now, to an every day sort of chap like myself, would you mind being less abstruse?”

“I should feel sordid if I refused. Verplank is a very good sort, whereas this Barouffski is a rotter.”

Tempest bowed. “Thank you for descending to my level. The long and short of it is that she has made a mess of it. Well, most people do. I don’t wonder now that over the soup she talked about fate.”

“Oh, as for that, after certain experiences of my own, with which, pray do not be alarmed, I have no intention of boring you, I have stopped wondering at anything at all.”

“Silverstairs, in ceasing to be cryptic, do not become Spartan. My cousin told me that Joyeuse hunted with this, with What’s-his-name, with – er – ”

“With Verplank?”

“Yes, that he had hunted with him in the States. And that reminds me. What have you decided about that horse?”

Silverstairs pulled at his straw-coloured moustache. “I’ll let you know to-morrow. When are you to be at home?”

“Any time after two.”

Silverstairs nodded. “Very good, I will drop in on you.”

From beyond, blue and vibrant, came the upper notes of a violin. In the now crowded salons a Roumanian, the rage of the season, a youth, very pale, with melancholy eyes, flowing hair and the waist of a girl, was executing a fantasy of his own.

De Joyeuse flicked a speck from his sleeve, threw back his noble and empty head, gave a circular look of inquiry, a little gesture of invitation, and accompanied by his friends, sauntered to the rooms without.

There, Barouffski after saluting Mme. de Joyeuse had engaged her briefly in talk. But her attention had been attracted rather than claimed by the Montebiancan prince, a young man extremely gentlemanly and equally modest who, with that diffidence which royals and poets share, stood bashfully at her side.

Barouffski, bowing again, passed on. During his short and entirely fragmentary conversation with Mme. de Joyeuse, his eyes had rummaged the room.

Leilah, meanwhile, rising from the sofa where she had been seated, moved with the inflammatory d’Arcy into the salon beyond.

Barouffski would have followed. But the young Baronne de Fresnoy addressed him. Perversely, with sudden glimpses of little teeth and an expression of glee in her piquant face, she asked:

“Was it you who performed that high act of gallantry at Longchamps to-day?”

“Was it I who did what?” Barouffski surprisedly exclaimed.

“What was it?” asked Aurelia, who with Buttercups in tow, had approached.

But Mme. de Fresnoy waved at her. “Go away my dear, it is not for an ingénue.”

“Ah then, but you see,” Aurelia indolently interjected, “I am tired of being an ingénue. An ingénue is supposed to be in a state of constant surprise and that is so exhausting.”

None the less, with Buttercups still in tow she betook herself to a corner where she was promptly joined by Farnese.

Then at once to Barouffski, to Mustim Pasha, to the Helley-Quetgens, to others that stood about, the young baroness related a morsel of gossip, the report of which had been brought her but a moment before, a story that had one of the reigning demireps for heroine and for hero a man unidentified by the baronne’s informant, the tale of an assault committed before all Paris, before all Paris that is, that happened to be at the races that day; an extravaganza in which the heroine, erupting suddenly on the pelouse before the Grand Stand, had, with her parasol, struck the hero over the head and had been about to strike him again, when he, pinioning her arms with his own, had to the applause of everybody, prevented the second assault by kissing her through her veil; after which releasing the lady, he had raised his hat and strolled away.

“Was it you, Barouffski?” Mme. de Fresnoy, the narrative at an end, inquired. “Was it?”

“I? Nonsense! Why should you ask?”

“It would be just like you, you know. Besides, I hear that the man was tall and good-looking.”

“You are exceedingly complimentary. But the world is peopled with tall, good-looking men.”

“Pas tant que ça,” laughed the baroness. “Well, if it was not you, perhaps it was that man who is just coming in.”

Involuntarily Barouffski turned, while a footman bawled:

“Monsieur Verplank!”