What Will People Say? A Novel
He forgot everything in the mystic pursuit and surrender of the dance,
the union and disunion of their bodies--her little feet companioning
his, the satin and steel of her tense sinews, the tender duality of her
breast against the rock of his, the flutter of her quick, warm breath on
his throat, the sorcery of her half-averted eyes tempting his lips
almost unbearably.
The light burned about them like a flaming rose. The other couples had
paused and retreated, staring at them; but they did not heed their
isolation. They swooped and careened and twirled till they were blurred
like a spinning top, till they were exhausted and wavering in their
flight.
At length he found that she was breathless, pale, squandered. She hung
all her weight on his arm, and grew so heavy that it ached.
And now, when he looked down at her, he saw that the operator had
inadvertently put upon them the green light. In Forbes' eyes it had a
sickly, cadaverous glimmer as of death and dissolution. He did not know
that she was about to swoon; but she was so gray and lifeless that he
was frightened. In the green, clammy radiance she looked as if she had
been buried and brought back to the daylight. She was horribly
beautiful.
Just in time the music came to an abrupt end, and the _danse macabre_
was done. But the floor still wheeled beneath his feet, and he staggered
as he held her limp and swaying body.
She shook the dizziness from her eyes, and put away his arm, but seized
it again. He supported her to the table and guided her to a seat. Then
he caught up a glass and put it to her wan mouth.
Ten Eyck, who had been watching them from his place, shoved a chair
against Forbes relaxing knees, and set a tall glass in his hand, saying:
"Gad, old man, you need a drink!"
Forbes took a gulp of a highball and sat staring at Persis. Ten Eyck was
quietly dipping his fingers into his own glass and flicking water on
Persis' face. She regained her self-control wonderingly. Her lips tried
pluckily to smile, though her eyes studied Forbes with a kind of
terrified anger--more at herself than at him. He met them with a gaze of
adoration and dread.
As his hot brow cooled, it seemed that an icy hand passed across it.
CHAPTER XV
The safety match that resists all other friction needs only the touch of
its peculiar mate to break into flame. And many chemical compounds,
including souls, change their behavior and expose their secret
identities when they meet just the right--or the just the
wrong--reagent.
Persis Cabot was the wonder of her world for being at the same time so
cordial and so cold, so lightly amused, so extravagant, and yet
apparently so immune to the follies of passion. She was thought to be
incapable of losing either her head or her heart. Mrs. Neff called her
"fireproof."
Willie Enslee was universally accepted as her fiance, simply because his
wealth and his family's prestige were greater than anybody's else in her
circle. This made him the logical candidate. Everybody knew that he was
mad about Persis in his petty way. But nobody expected Persis to fall
madly in love with Willie, or to let that failure keep her from marrying
him.
And now Forbes appeared from the wilderness and strange influences began
to work upon her. She began to study the man with increasing interest.
She resented his effect upon her, and could not resist it. He was like a
sharp knife, or a loaded revolver, or the edge of a cliff, quiet and
unpursuing, yet latent with danger, terrifying and therefore
fascinating.
Hitherto she had played with firearms and danced along abysses and
juggled daggers in many a flirtation, but always she had kept her poise
and felt no danger. Now she was just a trifle startled by a feeling of
insecurity.
Many men had made ferocious love to her, had tried to set up a
combustion in her heart, had threatened her with violence, with murder
and with suicide; and she had laughed at them, laughed them back to the
sanity she had never lost.
But this man Forbes made no campaign against her. If he pressed her too
hard in the dance he apologized at once. He seemed to be at her mercy,
and yet she felt that he brought with him some influence stronger than
both. He was like one of Homer's warriors attended by a clouded god or
goddess bent on his victory or his destruction--she could not tell
which. When she caught him gazing at her devouringly he looked away, yet
she found herself looking away, too, and breathing a little faster.
Scores of men had embraced her as she danced with them and some of them
had muttered burning love into her ear. But they left her cold. This man
said little or less, and he held her almost shyly; yet she felt a
strange kindling in his touch, saw in his eye a smoldering.
In this last dance with him a panic of helplessness had confounded her.
He had whirled her about till she had lost all sense of floor and
ceiling. She felt herself falling and spinning down the gulfs of space
in a nightmare of rapture. She would have swooned had he not seen how
white and lost she was and stopped short. She had felt that other people
were staring and making comments.
She was afraid to dance with him again. When she had regained her
self-control she made a pretext to escape out of the lateness of the
hour and the necessity of dressing for dinner and the opera.
There was an almost hysterical flippancy in her chatter. In spite of the
protestations of the three men, she insisted on paying the bill. It was
her own party, she said. The waiter looked sad at this, but what she
left on the plate tempered his despair of her sex.
She offered to drop Forbes and Ten Eyck at their destinations, and they
clambered into her car with Winifred and Bob. Forbes was all too soon
deposited at his hotel, where the footman and the starter hailed Persis
with affectionate homage and Forbes with a new courtesy because of her.
Forbes lingered at the curb to watch her away. As the landaulet sped
toward Fifth Avenue all he saw of her was the fluttering white
interrogation-mark.
CHAPTER XVI
Forbes was prompt at the Opera. Though it was barely half past seven, he
found the foyer already swarming with a bustling mob of women swaddled
in opera-cloaks, and prosperous-looking men overcoated and mufflered.
Everybody was making haste. Dinners had been gulped or skimped, and
there was evident desire not to miss a note.
Forbes knew nothing of the music except a vague echo of the ridicule on
which Wagner had ridden to the clouds. He was just as ignorant of the
poem, and though he bought a libretto from an unpromising vocalist in
the lobby, he had time only to skim the argument, and to learn with
surprise that Isolde was Irish, and her royal husband, Mark, a
Cornishman.
The head usher directed him up a brief flight of steps, and another
attendant unlocked a door marked with the name-plate of Lindsley Tait.
From the little anteroom where he hung up his hat and coat, Forbes saw
as through a telescope the vast curtain and the tremendous golden arch
of the proscenium; at its foot a pygmy orchestra settling into tune and
making oddly pleasant discords.
When Forbes stepped to the edge of the box, he seemed to be the entire
audience, another mad King of Bavaria come to witness a performance in
solitude. The famous red horseshoe stretched its length a hundred yards
or more on either side of him. In each of its little scallops a family
of empty chairs sat facing the stage in solemn silliness. The owners
were still filling chairs at dinner-tables.
But when Forbes took the next step forward he found a multitude. Above
him he saw other horseshoes in tiers dense with faces peering downward.
Below him a plain of Babel inhabited by the tops of heads, numberless
pates in long windrows, the men's skulls close-cropped or bald, and
their shoulders black; the women's elaborately coiffed, over an enormous
acreage of bared shoulders and busts.
Suddenly all the white-gloved hands fluttered in coveys with the show
and sound of innumerable agitated pigeons. Toscanini was picking his way
through the orchestra to the desk.
From the opening phrase of the Vorspiel Forbes became a Wagnerian. Those
first stifled moans of almost sullen desire so whelmed him that he
wondered how Persis and Mrs. Neff and her guests should dare to be late
and lose this precious expression. Before the opera had finished
breaking his heart on its eternal wheel of anguish, he wondered that any
one should care to submit to its intolerable beauty a second time.
Yet here were thousands thronging to its destroying blaze like fanatic
moths--moths that paid a high price to be admitted to the lamp, and
clamored to be consumed in its divine distress.
Forbes smiled at the universal lust for artistic and vicarious suffering
that has made other people's pathos the most lucrative of all forms of
entertainment.
The time was to come when he himself would pay dearly for the privilege
of great pain; when his mind would strive futilely to dissuade his heart
from clenching upon the thorn that made it bleed. Humanity has almost
always preferred strong emotions at any cost, to peace however cheap.
The prelude was one long stream of bitter-sweet honey, and it affected
Forbes as music had never affected him. He wondered how people could
ever have ridiculed or resisted this man Wagner. He wished that Persis
would come soon. He thought of her as "Persis"--or "Isolde"; he could
not think of her as Miss Cabot to this music.
The first act was ended and the long intermission almost over before she
arrived, with Enslee, followed immediately by Bob and Winifred, and last
of all by the hostess, Mrs. Neff.
Everybody greeted Forbes with the casual informality of old friendship,
except Willie Enslee, who nodded obliquely, and murmured:
"H' are yu, Mr. Ward."
Nobody corrected him, least of all Forbes, who was too much disgusted
with Willie's existence there to feel any minor resentment. The three
women fell to wrangling, altruistically, of course, over the two front
seats. Mrs. Neff was trying to bully Persis and Winifred into occupying
them. Winifred's demurrer was violent:
"If I sit there nobody can see the stage. You're such a little wisp I
can see round you or through you."
Persis preferred almost anything to a disturbance, and her protest was a
mere form.
Only the rising curtain brought the battle to a close. Persis dropped
into a chair on the right. Winifred pushed Mrs. Neff into the other, and
sat back of her. Willie annexed the chair behind Persis, Bob Fleming
took that aft of Winifred, and motioned Forbes to the center chair. Then
Mrs. Neff beckoned him to hunch forward into the narrow space between
her and Persis.
All along the horseshoe people were just arriving or returning from
visits among the boxes. There was much chatter. The orchestra might as
well have been wasting its sweetness on a crowded restaurant.
Forbes pretended to be looking over the audience on his right, but he
was looking at Persis. The music of the garden where Isolde awaited her
Tristan, and the far-off rumorous hunting-horns of the King, her
husband, were working a magic upon her. He could see its influence on
her face.
She wore brighter raiment than at the theater; her head-dress was more
imperious, and more jewelry glittered about her. When she breathed or
moved the diamonds at her ears, her throat, and in her corsage flashed
and dulled as if they had eyelids; the pearls had a veiled radiance.
She was a combination of beauty unadorned and most adorned. Despite her
trappings of gem and fabric, even more of her was candidly presented
than at the theater last night--or was it not a year ago? Surely he must
have known her for more than a day.