The Place of Honeymoons
there was nothing inviting in my facial expression. Come, let me have the
truth."
"I have a friend who knows Flora Desimone."
"Ah!" As if this information was a direct visitation of kindness from the
gods. "Then you know where the Calabrian lives? Give me her address."
There was a minute wrinkle above the unknown's nose; the shadow of a
frown. "She is very beautiful."
"Bah! Did she send you after me? Give me her address. I have come all the
way from Burma to see Flora Desimone."
"To see her?" She unguardedly clothed the question with contempt, but she
instantly forced a smile to neutralize the effect. Concerned with her own
defined conclusions, she lost the fine ironic bitterness that was in the
man's voice.
"Aye, indeed, to see her! Beautiful as Venus, as alluring as Phryne, I
want nothing so much as to see her, to look into her eyes, to hear her
voice!"
"Is it jealousy? I hear the tragic note." The certainty of her ground
became as morass again. In his turn he was puzzling her.
"Tragedy? I am an American. We do not kill opera singers. We turn them
over to the critics. I wish to see the beautiful Flora, to ask her a few
questions. If she has sent you after me, her address, my dear young lady,
her address." His eyes burned.
"I am afraid." And she was so. This wasn't the tone of a man madly in
love. It was wild anger.
"Afraid of what?"
"You."
"I will give you a hundred francs." He watched her closely and shrewdly.
Came the little wrinkle again, but this time urged in perplexity. "A
hundred francs, for something I was sent to tell you?"
"And now refuse."
"It is very generous. She has a heart of flint, Monsieur."
"Well I know it. Perhaps now I have one of steel."
"Many sparks do not make a fire. Do you know that your French is very
good?"
"I spent my boyhood in Paris; some of it. Her address, if you please." He
produced a crisp note for a hundred francs. "Do you want it?"
She did not answer at once. Presently she opened her purse, found a stubby
pencil and a slip of paper, and wrote. "There it is, Monsieur." She held
out her hand for the bank-note which, with a sense of bafflement, he gave
her. She folded the note and stowed it away with the pencil.
"Thank you," said Courtlandt. "Odd paper, though." He turned it over. "Ah,
I understand. You copy music."
"Yes, Monsieur."
This time the nervous flicker of her eyes did not escape him. "You are
studying for the opera, perhaps?"
"Yes, that is it."
The eagerness of the admission convinced him that she was not. Who she was
or whence she had come no longer excited his interest. He had the
Calabrian's address and he was impatient to be off.
"Good night." He rose.
"Monsieur is not gallant."
"I was in my youth," he replied, putting on his hat.
The bald rudeness of his departure did not disturb her. She laughed softly
and relievedly. Indeed, there was in the laughter an essence of mischief.
However, if he carried away a mystery, he left one behind.
As he was hunting for a taxicab, the waiter ran out and told him that he
had forgotten to settle for the wine. The lady had refused to do so.
Courtlandt chuckled and gave him a ten-franc piece. In other days, in
other circumstances, he would have liked to know more about the unknown
who scribbled notes on composition paper. She was not an idler in the Rue
Royale, and it did not require that indefinable intuition which comes of
worldly-wiseness to discover this fact. She might be a friend of the
Desimone woman, but she had stepped out of another sphere to become so. He
recognized the quality that could adjust itself to any environment and
come out scatheless. This was undeniably an American accomplishment; and
yet she was distinctly a Frenchwoman. He dismissed the problem from his
mind and bade the driver go as fast as the police would permit.
Meanwhile the young woman waited five or ten minutes, and, making sure
that Courtlandt had been driven off, left the restaurant. Round the corner
she engaged a carriage. So that was Edward Courtlandt? She liked his face;
there was not a weak line in it, unless stubbornness could be called such.
But to stay away for two years! To hide himself in jungles, to be heard of
only by his harebrained exploits! "Follow him; see where he goes," had
been the command. For a moment she had rebelled, but her curiosity was not
to be denied. Besides, of what use was friendship if not to be tried? She
knew nothing of the riddle, she had never asked a question openly. She had
accidentally seen a photograph one day, in a trunk tray, with this man's
name scrawled across it, and upon this flimsy base she had builded a dozen
romances, each of which she had ruthlessly torn down to make room for
another; but still the riddle lay unsolved. She had thrown the name into
the conversation many a time, as one might throw a bomb into a crowd which
had no chance to escape. Fizzles! The man had been calmly discussed and
calmly dismissed. At odd times an article in the newspapers gave her an
opportunity; still the frank discussion, still the calm dismissal. She had
learned that the man was rich, irresponsible, vacillating, a picturesque
sort of fool. But two years? What had kept him away that long? A weak man,
in love, would not have made so tame a surrender. Perhaps he had not
surrendered; perhaps neither of them had.
And yet, he sought the Calabrian. Here was another blind alley out of
which she had to retrace her steps. Bother! That Puck of Shakespeare was
right: What fools these mortals be! She was very glad that she possessed a
true sense of humor, spiced with harmless audacity. What a dreary world it
must be to those who did not know how and when to laugh! They talked of
the daring of the American woman: who but a Frenchwoman would have dared
what she had this night? The taxicab! She laughed. And this man was wax in
the hands of any pretty woman who came along! So rumor had it. But she
knew that rumor was only the attenuated ghost of Ananias, doomed forever
to remain on earth for the propagation of inaccurate whispers. Wax! Why,
she would have trusted herself in any situation with a man with those eyes
and that angle of jaw. It was all very mystifying. "Follow him; see where
he goes." The frank discussion, then, and the calm dismissal were but a
woman's dissimulation. And he had gone to Flora Desimone's.
The carriage stopped before a handsome apartment-house in the Avenue de
Wagram. The unknown got out, gave the driver his fare, and rang the
concierge's bell. The sleepy guardian opened the door, touched his
gold-braided cap in recognition, and led the way to the small electric
lift. The young woman entered and familiarly pushed the button. The
apartment in which she lived was on the second floor; and there was luxury
everywhere, but luxury subdued and charmed by taste. There were fine old
Persian rugs on the floors, exquisite oils and water-colors on the walls;
and rare Japanese silk tapestries hung between the doors. In one corner of
the living-room was a bronze jar filled with artificial cherry blossoms;
in another corner near the door, hung a flat bell-shaped piece of brass--a
Burmese gong. There were many photographs ranged along the mantel-top;
celebrities, musical, artistic and literary, each accompanied by a liberal
expanse of autographic ink.
She threw aside her hat and wraps with that manner of inconsequence which
distinguishes the artistic temperament from the thrifty one, and passed on
into the cozy dining-room. The maid had arranged some sandwiches and a
bottle of light wine. She ate and drank, while intermittent smiles played
across her merry face. Having satisfied her hunger, she opened her purse
and extracted the bank-note. She smoothed it out and laughed aloud.
"Oh, if only he had taken me for a ride in the taxicab!" She bubbled again
with merriment.
Suddenly she sprang up, as if inspired, and dashed into another room, a
study. She came back with pen and ink, and with a celerity that came of
long practise, drew five straight lines across the faint violet face of
the bank-note. Within these lines she made little dots at the top and
bottom of stubby perpendicular strokes, and strange interlineal
hieroglyphics, and sweeping curves, all of which would have puzzled an
Egyptologist if he were unused to the ways of musicians. Carefully she
dried the composition, and then put the note away. Some day she would
confound him by returning it.
A little later her fingers were moving softly over the piano keys;
melodies in minor, sad and haunting and elusive, melodies that had never
been put on paper and would always be her own: in them she might leap from
comedy to tragedy, from laughter to tears, and only she would know. The
midnight adventure was forgotten, and the hero of it, too. With her eyes
closed and her lithe body swaying gently, she let the old weary pain in
her heart take hold again.
CHAPTER III
THE BEAUTIFUL TIGRESS
Flora Desimone had been born in a Calabrian peasant's hut, and she had
rolled in the dust outside, yelling vigorously at all times. Specialists
declare that the reason for all great singers coming from lowly origin is
found in this early development of the muscles of the throat. Parents of
means employ nurses or sedatives to suppress or at least to smother these
infantile protests against being thrust inconsiderately into the turmoil
of human beings. Flora yelled or slept, as the case might be; her parents
were equally indifferent. They were too busily concerned with the getting
of bread and wine. Moreover, Flora was one among many. The gods are always
playing with the Calabrian peninsula, heaving it up here or throwing it
down there: _il terremoto_, the earthquake, the terror. Here nature
tinkers vicariously with souls; and she seldom has time to complete her
work. Constant communion with death makes for callosity of feeling; and
the Calabrians and the Sicilians are the cruellest among the civilized
peoples. Flora was ruthless.
She lived amazingly well in the premier of an apartment-hotel in the
Champs-Elysees. In England and America she had amassed a fortune. Given
the warm beauty of the Southern Italian, the passion, the temperament, the
love of mischief, the natural cruelty, the inordinate craving for
attention and flattery, she enlivened the nations with her affairs. And
she never put a single beat of her heart into any of them. That is why her
voice is still splendid and her beauty unchanging. She did not dissipate;
calculation always barred her inclination; rather, she loitered about the
Forbidden Tree and played that she had plucked the Apple. She had an
example to follow; Eve had none.
Men scattered fortunes at her feet as foolish Greeks scattered floral
offerings at the feet of their marble gods--without provoking the sense of
reciprocity or generosity or mercy. She had worked; ah, no one would ever
know how hard. She had been crushed, beaten, cursed, starved. That she had
risen to the heights in spite of these bruising verbs in no manner
enlarged her pity, but dulled and vitiated the little there was of it. Her
mental attitude toward humanity was childish: as, when the parent strikes,
the child blindly strikes back. She was determined to play, to enjoy life,
to give back blow for blow, nor caring where she struck. She was going to
press the juice from every grape. A thousand odd years gone, she would
have led the cry in Rome--"Bread and the circus!" or "To the lions!" She
would have disturbed Nero's complacency, and he would have played an
obbligato instead of a solo at the burning. And she was malice incarnate.
They came from all climes--her lovers--with roubles and lire and francs
and shillings and dollars; and those who finally escaped her enchantment