Part 4

"Please! We need not discuss my future. Only the past!" She laughed: "How it all comes back to me now, as you speak--that crazy evening of ours together! What children we were--two years ago!"

Smilingly she clasped her hands together on the table's edge, regarding him with that winning directness which was a celebrated part of her celebrated personality; and happened to be natural to her.

"Why did I not recognise you immediately?" she demanded of herself, frowning in self-reproof. "I _am_ stupid! Also I have, now and then, thought about you----" She shrugged her shoulders, and again her face faltered subtly:

"Much has happened to distract my memories," she added carelessly, impaling a strawberry, "--since you and I took the key to the fields and the road to the moon--like the pair of irresponsibles we were that night in June."

"Have you really had trouble?"

Her slim figure straightened as at a challenge, then became adorably supple again; and she rested her elbows on the table's edge and took her cheeks between her hands.

"Trouble?" she repeated, studying his face. "I don't know that word, trouble. I don't admit such a word to the honour of my happy vocabulary."

They both laughed a little.

She said, still looking at him, and at first speaking as though to herself:

"Of course, you are that same, delightful Garry! My youthful American accomplice!... Quite unspoiled, still, but very, very irresponsible ... like all painters--like all students. And the mischief which is in me recognised the mischief in you, I suppose.... I _did_ surprise you that night, didn't I?... And what a night! What a moon! And how we danced there on the wet lawn until my skirts and slippers and stockings were drenched with dew!... And how we laughed! Oh, that full-hearted, full-throated laughter of ours! How wonderful that we have lived to laugh like that! It is something to remember after death. Just think of it!--you and I, absolute strangers, dancing every dance there in the drenched grass to the music that came through the open windows.... And do you remember how we hid in the flowering bushes when my sister and the others came out to look for me? How they called, 'Nihla! Nihla! Little devil, where are you?' Oh, it was funny--funny! And to see _him_ come out on the lawn--do you remember? He looked so fat and stupid and anxious and bad-tempered! And you and I expiring with stifled laughter! And he, with his sash, his decorations and his academic palms! He'd have shot us both, you know...."

They were laughing unrestrainedly now at the memory of that impossible night a year ago; and the girl seemed suddenly transformed into an irresponsible gamine of eighteen. Her eyes grew brighter with mischief and laughter--laughter, the greatest magician and doctor emeritus of them all! The immortal restorer of youth and beauty.

Bluish shadows had gone from under her lower lashes; her eyes were starry as a child's.

"Oh, Garry," she gasped, laying one slim hand across his on the table-cloth, "it was one of those encounters--one of those heavenly accidents that reconcile one to living.... I think the moon had made me a perfect lunatic.... Because you don't yet know what I risked.... Garry!... It ruined me--ruined me utterly--our night together under the June moon!"

"What!" he exclaimed, incredulously.

But she only laughed her gay, undaunted little laugh:

"It was worth it! Such moments are worth anything we pay for them! I laughed; I pay. What of it?"

"But if I am partly responsible I wish to know----"

"You shall know nothing about it! As for me, I care nothing about it. I'd do it again to-night! That is living--to go forward, laugh, and accept what comes--to have heart enough, gaiety enough, brains enough to seize the few rare dispensations that the niggardly gods fling across this calvary which we call life! _Tenez_, that alone is living; the rest is making the endless stations on bleeding knees."

"Yet, if I thought--" he began, perplexed and troubled, "--if I thought that through my folly----"

"Folly! _Non pas!_ Wisdom! Oh, my blessed accomplice! And do you remember the canoe? Were we indeed quite mad to embark for Paris on the moonlit Seine, you and I?--I in evening gown, soaked with dew to the knees!--you with your sketching block and easel! _Quelle demenagement en famille!_ Oh, Garry, my friend of gayer days, was that really folly! No, no, no, it was infinite wisdom; and its memory is helping me to live through this very moment!"

She leaned there on her elbows and laughed across the cloth at him. The mockery began to dance again and glimmer in her eyes:

"After all I've told you," she added, "you are no wiser, are you? You don't know why I never went to the Fountain of Marie de Medicis--whether I forgot to go--whether I remembered but decided that I had had quite enough of you. You don't know, do you?"

He shook his head, smiling. The girl's face grew gradually serious:

"And you never heard anything more about me?" she demanded.

"No. Your name simply disappeared from the billboards, kiosques, and newspapers."

"And you heard no malicious gossip? None about my sister, either?"

"None."

She nodded:

"Europe is a senile creature which forgets overnight. _Tant mieux_.... You know, I shall sing and dance under my sister's name here. I told you that, didn't I?"

"Oh! That would be a great mistake----"

"Listen! Nihla Quellen disappeared--married some fat bourgeois, died, perhaps,"--she shrugged,--"anything you wish, my friend. Who cares to listen to what is said about a dancing girl in all this din of war? Who is interested?"

It was scarcely a question, yet her eyes seemed to make it so.

"Who cares?" she repeated impatiently. "Who remembers?"

"I have remembered you," he said, meeting her intently questioning gaze.

"You? Oh, you are not like those others over there. Your country is not at war. You still have leisure to remember. But they forget. They haven't time to remember anything--anybody--over there. Don't you think so?" She turned in her chair unconsciously, and gazed eastward. "--They have forgotten me over there--" And her lips tightened, contracted, bitten into silence.

The strange beauty of the girl left him dumb. He was recalling, now, all that he had ever heard concerning her. The gossip of Europe had informed him that, though Nihla Quellen was passionately and devotedly French in soul and heart, her mother had been one of those unmoral and lovely Georgians, and her father an Alsatian, named Dunois--a French officer who entered the Russian service ultimately, and became a hunting cheetah for the Grand Duke Cyril, until himself hunted into another world by that old bag of bones on the pale and shaky nag. His daughter took the name of Nihla Quellen and what money was left, and made her debut in Constantinople.

As the young fellow sat there watching her, all the petty gossip of Europe came back to him--anecdotes, panegyrics, eulogies, scandals, stage chatter, Quarter "divers," paid reclames--all that he had ever read and heard about this notorious young girl, now seated there across the table, with her pretty head framed by slender, unjewelled fingers. He remembered the gems she had worn that June night, a year ago, and their magnificence.

"Well," she said, "life is a pleasantry, a jest, a bon-mot flung over his shoulder by some god too drunk with nectar to invent a better joke. Life is an Olympian epigram made between immortal yawns. What do you think of _my_ epigram, Garry?"

"I think you are just as clever and amusing as I remember you, Nihla."

"Amusing to _you_, perhaps. But I don't entertain myself very successfully. I don't think poverty is a very funny joke. Do you?"

"Poverty!" he repeated, smiling his unbelief.

She smiled too, displayed her pretty, ringless hands humorously, for his inspection, then framed her oval face between them again and made a deliberate grimace.

"All gone," she said. "I am, as you say, here on my uppers."

"I can't understand, Nihla----"

"Don't try to. It doesn't concern you. Also, please forget me as Nihla Quellen. I told you that I've taken my sister's name, Thessalie Dunois."

"But all Europe knows you as Nihla Quellen----"

"Listen!" she interrupted sharply. "I have troubles enough. Don't add to them, or I shall be sorry I met you again. I tell you my name is Thessa. Please remember it."

"Very well," he said, reddening under the rebuke.

She noted the painful colour in his face, then looked elsewhere, indifferently. Her features remained expressionless for a while. After a few moments she looked around at him again, and her smile began to glimmer:

"It's only this," she said; "the girl you met once in your life--the dancing singing-girl they knew over there--is already an episode to be forgotten. End her career any way you wish, Garry,--natural death, suicide--or she can repent and take the veil, if you like--or perish at sea--only end her.... Please?" she added, with the sweet, trailing inflection characteristic of her.

He nodded. The girl smiled mischievously.

"Don't nod your head so owlishly and pretend to understand. You don't understand. Only two or three people do. And I hope they'll believe me dead, even if you are not polite enough to agree with them."

"How can you expect to maintain your incognito?" he insisted. "There will be plenty of people in your very first audience----"

"I had a sister, did I not?"

"_Was_ she your sister?--the one who danced with you--the one called Thessa?"

"No. But the play-bills said she was. Now, I've told you something that nobody knows except two or three unpleasant devils--" She dropped her arms on the table and leaned a trifle forward:

"Oh, pouf!" she said. "Don't let's be mysterious and dramatic, you and I. I'll tell you: I gave that woman the last of my jewels and she promised to disappear and leave her name to me to use. It was my own name, anyway, Thessalie Dunois. Now, you know. Be as discreet and nice as I once found you. Will you?"

"Of course."

"'Of course,'" she repeated, smiling, and with a little twitch of her shoulders, as though letting fall a burdensome cloak. "Allons! With a free heart, then! I am Thessalie Dunois; I am here; I am poor--don't be frightened! I shall not borrow----"

"That's rotten, Thessa!" he said, turning very red.

"Oh, go lightly, please, my friend Garry. I have no claim on you. Besides, I know men----"

"You don't appear to!"

"Tiens! Our first quarrel!" she exclaimed, laughingly. "This is indeed serious----"

"If you need aid----"

"No, I don't! Please, why do you scowl at me? Do you then wish I needed aid? Yours? Allez, Monsieur Garry, if I did I'd venture, perhaps, to say so to you. Does that make amends?" she added sweetly.

She clasped her white hands on the cloth and looked at him with that engaging, humorous little air which had so easily captivated her audiences in Europe--that, and her voice with the hint of recklessness ever echoing through its sweetness and youthful gaiety.

"What are you doing in New York?" she asked. "Painting?"

"I have a studio, but----"

"But no clients? Is that it? Pouf! Everybody begins that way. I sang in a cafe at Dijon for five francs and my soup! At Rennes I nearly starved. Oh, yes, Garry, in spite of a number of obliging gentlemen who, like you, offered--first aid----"

"That is absolutely rotten of you, Thessa. Did I ever----"

"No! For goodness' sake let me jest with you without flying into tempers!"

"But----"

"Oh, pouf! I shall not quarrel with you! Whatever you and I were going to say during the next ten minutes shall remain unsaid!... Now, the ten minutes are over; now, we're reconciled and you are in good humour again. And now, tell me about yourself, your painting--in other words, tell me the things about yourself that would interest a friend."

"Are you?"

"Your friend? Yes, I am--if you wish."

"I do wish it."

"Then I am your friend. I once had a wonderful evening with you.... I'm having a very good time now. You were _nice_ to me, Garry. I really was sorry not to see you again."

"At the fountain of Marie de Medicis," he said reproachfully.

"Yes. Flatter yourself, monsieur, because I did _not_ forget our rendezvous. I might have forgotten it easily enough--there was sufficient excuse, God knows--a girl awakened by the crash of ruin--springing out of bed to face the end of the world without a moment's warning--yes, the end of all things--death, too! Tenez, it was permissible to forget our rendezvous under such circumstances, was it not? But--I did _not_ forget. I thought about it in a dumb, calm way all the while--even while _he_ stood there denouncing me, threatening me, noisy, furious--with the button of the Legion in his lapel--and an ugly pistol which he waved in the air--" She laughed:

"Oh, it was not at all gay, I assure you.... And even when I took to my heels after he had gone--for it was a matter of life or death, and I hadn't a minute to lose--oh, very dramatic, of course, for I ran away in disguise and I had a frightful time of it leaving France! Well, even then, at top speed and scared to death, I remembered the fountain of Marie de Medicis, and you. Don't be too deeply flattered. I remembered these items principally because they had caused my downfall."

"I? I caused----"

"No. _I_ caused it! It was I who went out on the lawn. It was I who came across to see who was painting by moonlight. That began it--seeing you there--in moonlight bright enough to read by--bright enough to paint by. Oh, Garry--and you were _so_ good-looking! It was the moon--and the way you smiled at me. And they all were dancing inside, and _he_ was so big and fat and complacent, dancing away in there!... And so I fell a prey to folly."

"Was it really our escapade that--that ruined you?"

"Well--it was partly that. Pouf! It is over. And I am here. So are you. It's been nice to see you.... Please call our waiter." She glanced at her cheap, leather wrist watch.

As they rose and left the dining-room, he asked her if they were not to see each other again. A one-eyed man, close behind them, listened for her reply.

She continued to walk on slowly beside him without answering, until they reached the rotunda.

"Do you wish to see me again?" she enquired abruptly.

"Don't you also wish it?"

"I don't know, Garry.... I've been annoyed in New York--bothered--seriously.... I can't explain, but somehow--I don't seem to wish to begin a friendship with anybody...."

"Ours began two years ago."

"Did it?"

"Did it not, Thessa?"

"Perhaps.... I don't know. After all--it doesn't matter. I think--I think we had better say good-bye--until some happy hazard--like to-day's encounter--" She hesitated, looked up at him, laughed:

"Where is your studio?" she asked mischievously.

The one-eyed man at their heels was listening.

V

IN DRAGON COURT

There was a young moon in the southwest--a slender tracery in the April twilight--curved high over his right shoulder as he walked northward and homeward through the flare of Broadway.

His thoughts were still occupied with the pleasant excitement of his encounter with Thessalie Dunois; his mind and heart still responded to the delightful stimulation. Out of an already half-forgotten realm of romance, where, often now, he found it increasingly difficult to realise that he had lived for five happy years, a young girl had suddenly emerged as bodily witness, to corroborate, revive, and refresh his fading faith in the reality of what once had been.

Five years in France!--France with its clear sun and lovely moon; its silver-grey cities, its lilac haze, its sweet, deep greenness, its atmosphere of living light!--France, the dwelling-place of God in all His myriad aspects--in all His protean forms! France, the sanctuary of Truth and all her ancient and her future liberties; France, blossoming domain of Love in Love's million exquisite transfigurations, wherein only the eye of faith can recognise the winged god amid his camouflage!

* * * * *

Wine-strong winds of the Western World, and a pitiless Western sun which etches every contour with terrible precision, leaving nothing to imagination--no delicate mystery to rest and shelter souls--had swept away and partly erased from his mind the actuality of those five past years.

Already that past, of which he had been a part, was becoming disturbingly unreal to him. Phantoms haunted its ever-paling sunlight; its scenes were fading; its voices grew vague and distant; its hushed laughter dwindled to a whisper, dying like a sigh.

Then, suddenly, against that misty tapestry of tinted spectres, appeared Thessalie Dunois in the flesh!--straight out of the phantom-haunted void had stepped this glowing thing of life! Into the raw reek and familiar dissonance of Broadway she had vanished. Small wonder that he had followed her to keep in touch with the vanishing past, as a sleeper, waking against his will, strives still to grasp the fragile fabric of a happy dream.

Yet, in spite of Thessalie, in spite of dreams, in spite of his own home-coming, and the touch of familiar pavements under his own feet, the past, to Barres, was utterly dead, the present strange and unreal, the future obscure and all aflame behind a world afire with war.

For two years, now, no human mind in America had been able to adjust itself to the new heaven and the new earth which had sprung into lurid being at the thunderclap of war.

All things familiar had changed in the twinkling of an eye; all former things had passed away, leaving the stunned brain of humanity dulled under the shock.

Slowly, by degrees, the world was beginning to realise that the civilisation of Christ was being menaced once again by a resurgence from that ancient land of legend where the wild Hun denned;--that again the endless hordes of barbarians were rushing in on Europe out of their Eastern fastnesses--hordes which filled the shrinking skies with their clamour, vaunting the might of Baal, cheering their antichrist, drenching the knees of their own red gods with the blood of little children.

It seemed impossible for Americans to understand that these things could be--were really true--that the horrors the papers printed were actualities happening to civilised people like themselves and their neighbours.

Out of their own mouths the German tribes thundered their own disgrace and condemnation, yet America sat dazed, incredulous, motionless. Emperor and general, professor and junker, shouted at the top of their lungs the new creed, horrible as the Black Mass, reversing every precept taught by Christ.

Millions of Teuton mouths cheered fiercely for the new religion--Frightfulness; worshipped with frantic yells the new trinity--Wotan, Kaiser and Brute Strength.

Stunned, blinded, deafened, the Western World, still half-paralysed, stirred stiffly from its inertia. Slowly, mechanically, its arteries resumed their functions; the reflex, operating automatically, started trade again in its old channels; old habits were timidly resumed; minds groped backward, searching for severed threads which connected yesterday with to-day--groped, hunted, found nothing, and, perplexed, turned slowly toward the smoke-choked future for some reason for it all--some outlook.

There was no explanation, no outlook--nothing save dust and flame and the din of Teutonic hordes trampling to death the Son of Man.

So America moved about her worn, deep-trodden and familiar ways, her mind slowly clearing from the cataclysmic concussion, her power of vision gradually returning, adjusting itself, little by little, to this new heaven and new earth and this hell entirely new.

The _Lusitania_ went down; the Great Republic merely quivered. Other ships followed; only a low murmur of pain came from the Western Colossus.

But now, after the second year, through the thickening nightmare the Great Republic groaned aloud; and a new note of menace sounded in her drugged and dreary voice.

And the thick ears of the Hun twitched and he paused, squatting belly-deep in blood, to listen.

* * * * *

Barres walked homeward. Somewhere along in the 40's he turned eastward into one of those cross-streets originally built up of brownstone dwelling houses, and now in process of transformation into that architectural and commercial miscellany which marks the transition stage of the metropolis anywhere from Westchester to the sea.

Altered for business purposes, basements displayed signs and merchandise of bootmakers, dealers in oriental porcelains, rare prints, silverware; parlour windows modified into bay windows, sheeted with plate-glass, exposed, perhaps, feminine headgear, or an expensive model gown or two, or the sign of a real-estate man, or of an upholsterer.

Above the parlour floors lived people of one sort or another; furnished and unfurnished rooms and suites prevailed; and the brownstone monotony was already indented along the building line by brand-new constructions of Indiana limestone, behind the glittering plate-glass of which were to be seen reticent displays of artistic furniture, modern and antique oil paintings, here and there the lace-curtained den of some superior ladies' hair-dresser, where beautifying also was accomplished at a price, alas!

Halfway between Sixth Avenue and Fifth, on the north side of the street, an enterprising architect had purchased half a dozen squatty, three-storied houses, set back from the sidewalk behind grass-plots. These had been lavishly stuccoed and transformed into abodes for those irregulars in the army of life known as "artists."

In the rear the back fences had been levelled; six corresponding houses on the next street had been purchased; a sort of inner court established, with a common grass-plot planted with trees and embellished by a number of concrete works of art, battered statues, sundials, and well-curbs.

Always the army of civilisation trudges along screened, flanked, and tagged after by life's irregulars, who cannot or will not conform to routine. And these are always roaming around seeking their own cantonments, where, for a while, they seem content to dwell at the end of one more aimless etape through the world--not in regulation barracks, but in regions too unconventional, too inconvenient to attract others.

Of this sort was the collection of squatty houses, forming a "community," where, in the neighbourhood of other irregulars, Garret Barres dwelt; and into the lighted entrance of which he now turned, still exhilarated by his meeting with Thessalie Dunois.

The architectural agglomeration was known as Dragon Court--a faience Fu-dog above the electric light over the green entrance door furnishing that priceless idea--a Fu-dog now veiled by mesh-wire to provide against the indiscretions of sparrows lured thither by housekeeping possibilities lurking among the dense screens of Japanese ivy covering the facade.

Larry Soane, the irresponsible superintendent, always turned gardener with April's advent in Dragon Court, contributions from its denizens enabling him to pepper a few flower-beds with hyacinths and tulips, and later with geraniums. These former bulbs had now gratefully appeared in promising thickets, and Barres saw the dark form of the handsome, reckless-looking Irishman fussing over them in the lantern-lit dusk, while his little daughter, Dulcie, kneeling on the dim grass, caressed the first blue hyacinth blossom with thin, childish fingers.

Barres glanced into his letter-box behind the desk, above which a drop-light threw more shadows than illumination. Little Dulcie Soane was supposed to sit under it and emit information, deliver and receive letters, pay charges on packages, and generally supervise things when she was not attending school.