What Will People Say? Part 17

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 pa.s.sion. 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d or G.o.ddess 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.e.x.

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 m.u.f.flered.

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 mult.i.tude. 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 l.u.s.t 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 friends.h.i.+p, except Willie Enslee, who nodded obliquely, and murmured:

"H' are yu, Mr. Ward."

n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

Her bodice would have seemed to be shamelessly low, had it not been as high as almost any other there. This was one of those common yet amazing sessions where thousands of women of every age and cla.s.s agree to display as much of their skins as the police will allow, and far more than their husbands and fathers approve.

But Forbes had not yet reached the stage where a man resents the publication of his charmer's charms. He was still hardly more than a fascinated student of Persis. He found her a most engrossing text.

She was so thoroughly alive--terribly alive all over! Wordsworth's phrase would have suited Forbes' understanding of her: she "felt her life in every limb." Her brows now moved sinuously, and now relaxed as Isolde sang of her longing and quenched the torch for a signal to her lover. One moment Persis' eyelids throbbed with excitement; the next they fell and tightened across her eyes. Accesses of emotion swelled her nostrils and made her lips waver together. Her throat arched and flexed and was restless; and her lovely disparted bosom filled and waned.

If she sat with clasped hands, the fingers seemed to convene and commune. She was incessantly thrusting back her hair and stroking her temples, or her forearms. Her knees were always exchanging places one above the other; her feet crossed, uncrossed, and seemed unable to settle upon precedence.

If she had been a child she would have been called fidgety, but all her motions were discreet and luxurious. She was like a lotos-eater stirring in sleep and just about to open her eyes.

The second act of the opera proved to be hardly more than a prolonged duet. The rapture of it outlasted Forbes' endurance; it did not bore him, it wore him out. He grew weary of eavesdropping on these two. He was jealous to love and be loved on his own account.

The woman next him was becoming more beautiful every moment. He felt a craving to touch her--with reverence; to link arms in comrades.h.i.+p, and to clench hands with her when the music stormed the peaks.

An aura seemed to transpire mistily from his pores to meet the aureole that s.h.i.+mmered about her.

His mood was far above any thought of flirtation, or evil desire. He was too knightly at heart to dream of adventure against her sacred isolation. But he wished and wished that he knew her better; had known her longer. Unconsciously he plagiarized the sigh of Johanna Ambrosius'

poem: "_Ach, hatt' ich fruher dich geseh'n!_"

But Fate can play the clown as well as the tragedian, and accomplish as much by an absurd accident as by elaborate glooms.