Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 23
IN the beginning Mrs. Callendar had regretted the sudden indisposition of the great pianist she had engaged. It was, she said, embétant. But presently as the hour of the reception drew near, the things which old Sanson had said of his unknown prodigy began to have their effect and, being like most women of affairs, a gambler as well, she saw in the approach of the unknown substitute the possibility of an adventure. She was, in any case, willing to take the word of old Sanson; he was, when all was said and done, no humbug. He knew a performer when he saw one. He did not go about his studio in a coat of velveteen calling upon his pupils to address him as "Maestro." In a satisfactory way, he got down to brass tacks. What he had to offer must at least be interesting.
The drawing-room of the house on Murray Hill was enormous. It extended the full length of one side of the house, finishing in a little alcove where to-night space had been made for the performers, who sat shielded by a lacquered screen reaching almost to the ceiling. Before it a little place had been cleared and a small dais, covered with black velvet, erected to serve as a stage. There was a great piano at one side and then more cleared space reaching out to where the row of collapsible chairs had been placed for the guests.
The room itself was painted gray and high up near the ceiling hung in a row portraits of the Callendars, male and female, who had existed since the immigrating member, an honest Dutch chemist, founded a fortune in America by buying farms that lay north of Canal Street. The usual furniture had been pressed back against the sides of the room or removed entirely, but some of the pieces remained . . . chairs and sofas of gilt and salmon brocade, American adaptations of the monstrosities of Louis Philippe—the furniture of some preceding Mrs. Callendar. And in gilt cases of glass there ranged the famous Callendar collection of Chinese bric-à-brac . . . bowls and idols of jade, porphyry, and carved sandalwood, row upon row of tear bottles (it was for these that the collection was especially noted) in jade, ivory and porcelain. All these ornaments represented the second period in the fortunes of the Callendar family . . . the days when the clipper ships of Griswold and Callendar carried cargoes around the world from Singapore, Shanghai and Hong-Kong. The fortune was now in its third stage. The clipper ships had vanished and the money they once represented was now safe in the best stocks and bonds it was possible to buy.
The room had never been brought up to date. Indeed it had remained untouched since the Seventies, for Mrs. Callendar spent only a month or two of the year in New York and, being thrifty, had not found it necessary to alter anything. The caretaker, once a year when her mistress returned, sent for a small army of charwomen, dusted, cleaned and scrubbed the old house and engaged a corps of servants. The rest of the time it remained empty but solid, immersed in the quiet dignity which is acquired only by houses of great bankers, a symbol in the midst of less enormous and somber dwellings, of all that is enduring and respectable in a changing effervescent world.
At ten o'clock on this particular evening the lacquer screen concealed behind its shimmering walls the figure of a Russian tenor, a Javanese dancer (really a low caste Hindu woman who had her training in some brothel of Alexandria) and the unknown American girl whom Sanson recommended as a fine artist. They were entertainers, mountebanks, brought together only to divert a crowd of guests, who presently would arrive, jaded and somewhat torpid, from monstrous dinners of twenty courses held in houses from Washington Square as far north as the east Sixties. In the behavior of the three performers there was no great cordiality. They sat apart, without interest in each other; indeed there were in their manner unmistakable traces of jealousies as old as their very profession.
Sometimes the tiny dancer, with skin like café au lait satin, stirred restlessly, setting all her bangles into jangling motion, to address the Russian tenor in bad French. He was an enormous blond man with a chest like a barrel and hands that rested like sausages upon his knees, a man gauche in manner, a little like a bear let loose in a drawing-room . . . a mountain between the little Hindu woman and the American girl who sat a little apart, slim and tall as Artemis, her black hair wound low over a face that was pale with excitement. She knew no French and so, after the first exchange of "Goot eefning!" with her two weird companions, she lapsed into a silence which concentrated all its force upon a crevice in the lacquered screen. Thus she was able to see the whole length of the great drawing-room and witness the spectacle of the arriving guests.
At first there appeared only her employer, a squat, plump woman laced until her figure resembled the hour glass shape of the ladies in Renoir's pictures of bourgeois picnics at St. Cloud. From sources hidden in a veritable upholstery of satin and velvet, so cut as to emphasize all her most voluptuous curves, little ladders and tongues of jet sprang forth and glittered darkly at every motion of her tiny plump feet. The face too was plump and, despite a drooping eyelid (which in her youth might have been fascinating and now only made her appear to be in a constant state of sly observation), it must have been lovely, perhaps even subtle. The tight little mouth had an expression that was pleasant and agreeable. It was as if she said, "Ah, well. Nothing in this world surprises me. It will all come out right in the end."
The sleek black hair she wore pulled back into an uncompromising knot, though in front it was frizzed into a little bang which once might have passed for a weapon of coquetry. Over all this was flung the glittering sheen of jewels, prodigal, indecently Oriental in their extravagance. Above the fuzzy bang reared a tiara of emeralds and diamonds and beneath, sweeping over the mountainous curve of her bosom so that it entangled itself in the plastrons of diamonds fastened beneath, hung a necklace of emeralds. All these repeated their glitter in the rings on the plump hands emerging from long tight sleeves of black satin, which stretched perilously at each dominating gesture employed to direct the small army of servants. But all the jewels were a little dirty. It was probable that no money had been wasted in cleaning them in more than twenty years.
This, then, was the Mrs. Callendar, appearing to-night in grande tenue to receive a small and shrewdly picked list of guests at her only entertainment of the season. To Ellen, peering with breathless curiosity through the crack in the screen, this plump middle-aged woman must have appeared a highly bedizened figure of fun; for Ellen, having come freshly from the provinces, could have known nothing of all the glamour and power that lay concealed in the hour glass of velvet, satin, and soiled diamonds.
There was no secretary hired by this thrifty woman to send lists of her guests to the daily papers and see that her picture or paragraphs concerning her appeared once or twice a week. She did not even give twenty course dinners interrupted by false endings of Roman punch, nor circus entertainments like those of some women who filled the pages of the noisier journals with columns of diversion for shop girls. Through the barbaric spectacle of the late nineties and the early nineteen hundreds she made her way quietly and firmly, knowing perhaps that she was above these things, a power beyond power, living most of the year abroad, seeing only those persons who amused her (for she had learned long ago that in order to survive one must be selective). Indeed her name was more likely to appear upon the pages devoted to stocks and bonds than in the columns given over to what was known variously as the beau monde and the Four Hundred.
Queerest of all was the fact that behind this stout-willed dowager lay an impossibly romantic past.
In the early Seventies when the steam freighters were making their final inroads upon the business of the clipper ships, the house of Griswold and Callendar, Shippers, Importers and Bankers with offices in Liverpool, New York, Marseilles, Bombay and Shanghai, was already on a decline. Already the capital was being shifted into bonds. In these days there remains of this firm no importing business at all but only a great banking house with offices in Wall and Threadneedle Streets and the Boulevard Haussmann; but in the Seventies it was still a great shipping company whose ships circled the globe and dealt alike with Chinese, Indians, Frenchmen, Greeks, and the men of half a dozen other nations. In consequence of these dealings there arose from time to time many disputes, so that always there was some member of the firm on business in a distant quarter of the world. It was to Richard Callendar, the youngest and most vigorous member and the only Callendar in the firm, that most of this traveling fell; and so, in the course of time, he found himself in Constantinople on the business of settling claims with a crafty fellow, one Dikran Leopopulos, whose bank had offices in Calicut and Alexandria with the main house at the Golden Horn.
The contest between the two was drawn out, resolving itself at length into a battle between Yankee shrewdness and Levantine deceit. Leopopulos, a swarthy fellow with narrow green eyes, opened the engagement by an onslaught of hospitality. He entertained his young visitor in the most lavish and Oriental fashion. There were dinners to which the chic foreign world of Constantinople were invited . . . ambassadors, secretaries and their ladies, French, German, English and American, in the banker's palace in Pera; there were pique-niques beside the River of Sweet Waters, and moonlight excursions in caïques propelled by dark oarsmen, on the Bosphorus near the Greek banker's summer palace; and excursions in victorias to the ruins of Justinian's fortifications. He sought as a wily means of gaining his end to dazzle the blond, romantic young American, to coddle him by eastern luxury into a false bargain. And to make the entertainment complete, he brought from her seclusion his young daughter, a girl of eighteen, slim, dark, fresh from a French convent, dressed in the very latest modes from Paris, to preside over his entertainments. The girl's mother was dead, having swooned and later passed away of the heat and confusion at the great Exposition in Paris whither she had gone to visit, after many years, her great-aunts. For the wife of Leopopulos had been French, the daughter of an impoverished, moth-eaten Royalist, and in her child, the slim young Thérèse, there was much that was French . . . her wit, her self-possession, her sense of knowing her way about the world. But there was much too that was Levantine.
When at last the revels came to an end, there were bickerings and bargainings in which Yankee shrewdness, in the end, got the better of Levantine deceit. The green-eyed Leopopulos to hide his sorrow gave a farewell dinner aboard the young American's ship (a Griswold and Callendar clipper named Ebenezer Holt) and so, he believed, closed the incident. It was not until the following day, when a veritable army of fat Greek aunts and cousins, wailing and lamenting, burst at dawn into his green bedroom, that he learned the full extent of his sorrow. His daughter, the dark-eyed Thérèse, had sailed on the Ebenezer Holt as the bride of young Richard Callendar.
Thus Thérèse Callendar came to New York, a stranger out of the oldest of worlds entering into the newest, confused a little by her surroundings and by the primness of her husband's family, so like and yet so unlike the caution of her own Greek aunts and cousins. In those early days at long dinners in rooms hung with plush and ornamented with Canalettos and Cabanels, her sensations must have been very like those of an ancient Alexandrian, civilized, cultivated, and a little decadent among the more vigorous and provincial Romans of Cæsar's day. In that age of innocence she found it, no doubt, difficult going; for there was in New York no warm welcome for a foreign woman, no matter how great her beauty, her cultivation, or her charm; much less for a Greek from such a frontier as Constantinople, the capital of the cruel and abandoned Turk. An alien was a creature to be regarded as a curiosity, to be treated, unless he possessed a great title, politely but with suspicion. She was, to be sure, probably the first Greek who came to live on Manhattan's rocky island; but despite this and all the other barriers, she succeeded in the end, because she was, after all, older than any of them, more civilized, more fortified by those institutions which come only of an old race. In her French blood she was old, but in her Greek blood how much older! She was as old as the carved emerald which she wore always upon her little hand, now so plump with middle age, in a ring which legend had it survived the sack of Constantinople. In tradition she was as old as Justinian and Theodora. The family of Leopopulos was proud—so proud and so old that one no longer discussed its pride and age.
After two years she bore a son, and before the end of that year she became a widow when her ardent young husband, swimming in the surf off Newport, went in his reckless way too far out and never returned. The son she called Richard, after the father, and together with her he inherited the great Callendar fortune, to which was added with the passing of years the gold, the olive orchards, the vineyards, and the palaces of the green-eyed old Banker of Pera. But Thérèse Callendar never married again; she devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and to the husbanding of a great fortune which by shrewdness and will she had long since doubled and tripled. She was, in her soul, a Levantine; thrift and shrewdness were a part of her very flesh and bones. She lived here and there, always on the move, now in Constantinople, now in Paris, now in London, now in Cannes, now in New York, even making at times trips to such outlandish places as Bombay and Sumatra; a woman of sorts, of vast energy and sharp intelligence. And slowly as she passed down the corridor of the years the slim chic figure became an hour glass hung with jet and diamonds. Her eyes were no longer good and she was able to see now only with the aid of lorgnettes through which she stared with a petulant intensity into the faces of all her companions.
But she was rich; she was respected; she was fashionable. Indeed in those days of the Nineties and the early Nineteen Hundreds when European titles had not yet acquired a doubtful character, she achieved an added glamour through the unsought visits of bankrupt Royalist relatives, distant in relationship but much in need of American heiresses. And at least two of them took home as brides the respective daughters of an American nickel plate king and a wizard of Wall Street. They were gaudy days, less pleasant perhaps in the eyes of Thérèse Callendar than the quiet provinciality she had known in the beginning as the bride of Richard Callendar. This capital of the new world she knew, in the depths of her racial instinct, to be an awkward affair, flamboyant, yet timid; vulgar yet aspiring; arrogant but still a little fearful. It was the day of twenty course dinners and banquets at which the cost of feeding each guest was estimated in the daily press. The Greek woman knew that some day this city would come of age.
So Ellen, trembling with excitement in her hiding place behind the screen, must have caught a little of the smoldering magnificence that lay hidden in the plump corseted figure, for presently she forgot entirely the bearlike Russian tenor and the exotic dancer with her outlandish bangles. She had eyes only for Mrs. Callendar and the guests who had begun to arrive.
That wise hostess might have written an entire book on the subject of an amusing entertainment. From the procession of guests it was clear that she considered them a part of the evening's diversion, a kind of preliminary parade about the arena which provided variety and color. She understood that people came when you provided rich food and amusing types, the more preposterous the better.
A Tzigane orchestra, much in fashion, assembled itself presently and played an accompaniment to the grand march of arriving guests. Among the first were the Champion girls and their mother. These represented the old families. The two girls, already past their first youth, wore gowns made by Worth, cut low back and front, which fitted their thin bodies in the Princess style. But these gowns, Thérèse saw instantly, they had ruined; for in a moment of caution the deep V's, front and back, had been built up with modest inserts of lace and tulle, and short sleeves of similar material had been inserted to shield the upper portions of their white arms. They held themselves stiffly. Nothing of them remained exposed save the fact that they were virgins.
Close upon their heels, so close that the mother in her haste appeared to shuffle her daughters into a corner with the air of a hen covering her chicks from a hawk, came that elderly rake, Wickham Chase, and Mrs. Sigourney, the latter dressed tightly in black and diamonds rumored to be paste—thin, piercing and hard, too highly painted, a divorcée. (None but Thérèse Callendar would have dared to ask her.) And then Bishop Smallwood, whom Sabine Cane called "The Apostle to the Genteel," a Bishop with a See in the far West, who managed to divide his time between New York and Bar Harbor and Newport . . . a fat, pompous man with a habit of alluding too easily to "My wa'am friend Mrs. Callendar" and "My wa'am friend Mrs. Champion" and "My wa'am friend Mrs. So-and-so" ad infinitum through the lists of the wealthy and the fashionable. Trapped between the Scylla of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins and Charybdis of the questionable but very smart Mrs. Sigourney, the poor man found himself at once in an untenable position. Seeing this, the small eyes of his hostess glittered with a sinful light.
Next came the Honorable Emma Hawksby, a gaunt Englishwoman of some thirty-eight summers with a face like a horse, projecting teeth, and feet that appeared to better advantage in the hedgerows than in the ball room. To-night they emerged barge-like from beneath a very fancy gown of pink satin ornamented with sequins and yards of mauve tulle. It was in her direction that the anxious Mrs. Champion steered her two virgins. Was she not a cousin of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom?
And then the four Fordyce sisters, arriving unattended in a hollow square formation, large, dark, powerful girls ranging in age from twenty to thirty-one, filled with an inhuman energy and zeal for good works, the very first of those who struggled for the enfranchisement of women.
Then one or two nondescript bachelors, of the handy sort seen everywhere as conveniences, stuffed with food and wine taken at some monstrous dinner in the Thirties; and on their heels Mrs. Mallinson, who belonged in the category of Mrs. Champion and her virgins, but who had escaped years ago into the freedom of the literary world wherein she wrote long novels of society life. She was a hard woman and beginning to sag a little here and there so that she threw up against the ravages of decay bulwarks in the form of a black satin ribbon ornamented with diamonds about her dewlapped throat. She lived outside Paris in a small château, once the property of a royal mistress, and spoke with a French accent. Because she was literary, she was considered, in Mrs. Champion's mind, also Bohemian.
In her hiding place behind the painted screen, the dark eyes of Ellen Tolliver grew brighter and brighter. Behind her the Javanese dancer and the Russian tenor had relapsed into a condition of moribund indifference.
More and more guests filtered into the room, old, young, dowdy, respectable, smart, one or two even a little déclassée. They regarded each other for a time, slipping into little groups, gossiping for a moment, melting away into new and hostile clusters, whispering, laughing, sneering, until the whole room became filled with an animation which even the great dinners of two hours earlier could not suffocate.
With the arrival of Lorna Vale the excitement reached its peak; even the gipsies played more wildly. She was an actress! And in those days it was impossible to imagine an actress and the Champion virgins in the same room. The Bishop stared at her, somewhat furtively to be sure, and Mrs. Champion, quivering, again executed her swooping gesture of protection toward her two daughters. But Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps seeing in her an ally, pierced the surrounding phalanx of eager young men and found a place by her side. Each benefited by the contrast, for the one was large, an opulent beauty with tawny hair, and the other, thin as a hairpin, black and glittering.
Then, during a brief pause in the music, the wide doors opened again and there entered Sabine Cane and Mrs. Callendar's son Richard.
At their approach there was, even in that nervous, chattering throng, a sudden hush, a brief heightening of interest as if the crowd, like a field of wheat, had been swayed faintly for an instant by the swift eddy of a zephyr. Then all was noisy again. It was a demonstration of interest, polite, restrained, as it should have been at a gathering so fashionable, but a demonstration that could not be entirely disguised.
It was in the women that the excitement found its core . . . women who saw in the dark young man a great match for their daughters, girls who desired him for his fortune and his rakish good looks and found the legend of his wild living a secret and sentimental attraction; widows and spinsters who discerned in him matchmaking material of the first order. Beyond doubt the glittering Mrs. Sigourney and the tawny Lorna Vale held other ideas, not to be expressed in so polite an assemblage. He had been, after all, notoriously attentive to both though they were years older. But there was one element in the situation which raised the interest to the pitch of hysteria; it was his attention to Sabine Cane, a fact of growing importance which many a jet-hung bosom found hard to support.
She was a year or two older than Richard Callendar (every woman present could have told the very hour she made her entrance into society) and she was not, like most of young Callendar's women, an acclaimed beauty. Yet there were other qualities which set her aside from the commonplace round of marriageable girls. She was easily the most smartly dressed in all the room; there was about her clothes a breathless sort of perfection that bespoke the taste of an artist. In place of an overwhelming beauty, she had developed a wit that could be infinitely more disastrous. In this, she resembled Cleopatra, Madame de Staël and the Montespan. These things made her perilous and caused many an ambitious mother hours of sleeplessness.
A long nose, a generous mouth frankly painted, green eyes set a trifle too near each other, a mass of brick red hair and a marvelous figure . . . these things comprised the physical aspect of Sabine Cane, a combination that was changeable and a trifle bizarre and therefore, as Thérèse Callendar had observed more than once, enormously intrigante. But there was more than this, for in the green eyes there lay a light of humor and malice and beneath the brick red hair a brain which had a passion for the affairs of other people. What disconcerted her enemies most was her air of entering a room; she did not walk in, she made an entrance. It was as if such women as Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale did not exist. Lily Langtry or Cléo de Merode were less effective. To-night she wore a brilliant yellow dress with a wide full train. It was as if she understood shrewdly her ugliness and made capital of it.
Sabine knew things about these people who filled the drawing room—little bits of gossip, scraps of information picked up here and there in the course of her twenty-six years. She knew, for example, that Mrs. Champion (mother of the virgins and most rarefied of aristocrats) had a grandmother known as Ruddy Mary who in her first assault upon the social ranks had invited people to a monstrous ball by invitations written in red ink, and so gained a sobriquet that was now forgotten. She knew that Wickham Chase had a maternal grandfather who had been a Jewish pawnbroker and laid up the money which he now spent. She knew that the Honorable Emma Hawksby (niece of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom) was without a cent in the world and found an easy winter in New York by living off those who liked to speak of the dear Duke's cousin. "Honorable" was not a great title, but it went far enough in those days to keep the Honorable Emma in bed and board for the winter. She even knew that a brother of the Apostle to the Genteel had to be kept, at some expense to the Apostle, in an out of the way country town in order that he might not make a drunken spectacle of himself before the Apostle's many "wa'am friends."
Sabine kept a great many family skeletons in her clever memory and it was impossible to know the moment when she might bring them forth and rattle them in the most grisly fashion.
It was clear that her companion, shrewder than the well-fed young men about him, penetrating with those instincts which came to him from the plump bundle of satin and diamonds who stood receiving the guests, understood perfectly the atmospheric disturbance. He was young, clever, handsome in a fashion that was a little sinister, and very rich, so rich that the whispers of gossip that clustered about him—even the talk of Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale—made no difference. Mrs. Champion found him not entirely beneath consideration as a possible match for Margaret or Janey, the redoubtable virgins.
"Look at Boadicea and her daughters," Sabine whispered maliciously in his ear as they came abreast of this virtuous group.
Young Callendar was tall, with dark skin, closely cropped black hair and a wiry kind of strength that was an heritage of his green-eyed grandfather, the Banker of Pera. When Sabine said "Boadicea," he laughed and showed a row of fine teeth set white against an olive skin. It was this same dark skin which gave his eyes a look of strangeness. The eyes should have been brown or black; instead they were a clear gray and had a way of looking at a person as if they bored quite through him. People said he was fascinating or wild or vicious, according to their standards of such things. The women morbidly watched his greeting of Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale, but they discovered nothing. All the talk may only have been gossip. He was, after all, only twenty-four . . . a boy. But, of course, he had French and Greek blood and had lived on the continent. "That," said Mrs. Mallinson, the escaped novelist, with an old world air, "makes a difference."
Behind the screen, the Hindu dancer had begun to droop a little with boredom, like a dark flower turning on its stem. Close by her side the bear-like Russian tenor had fallen asleep, his enormous blond head bent forward against his rumpled shirt front; his enormous hands, bursting the seams of his civilized white kid gloves, hung limp between Herculean thighs clad in black broadcloth that would have benefited by a visit to the cleaners.
Only Ellen remained alert and nervous, peering through her crevice, all interest now in the handsome young man and the bizarre red-haired woman at his side. These, her instinct told her, were characters, individuals, powerful in the same fashion that the plump little woman covered with dirty diamonds was powerful. And deep down in her heart a tiny voice kept saying, "This is the great world. Some day I shall be on the other side of the screen, seated no longer with mountebanks."
Behind the screen she experienced a swift tumult of emotions, confused and ecstatic like the sensations she had known on sight of her first play in a real theater. The scene was glamorous, extravagant. Perhaps for an instant she caught a sense of what was really passing before her eyes; it may have been that she understood the spectacle even more clearly than any of the participants save only Thérèse Callendar . . . that these people were not gathered in the tomb-like room because they were drawn by any bond of affection, but rather because they had been summoned, each of them, to play his little rôle in a comedy of manners which the world called fashionable life. There was the Bishop who played a part quite his own (two bishops would have been too many and so, by giving the evening a clerical aspect, have dulled the edge of its chic). Mrs. Sigourney, wicked and painted, played the rôle of Sin, a fascinating and indispensable part, just as Mrs. Champion and her virgins as Virtue, Purity and Chastity, were her foil; and Mrs. Mallinson and Lorna Vale were the Muses of Literature and the Drama. Others stood for Family, and Wealth and what-not, while Mrs. Callendar, hidden behind the drooping lids of her near-sighted green eyes, understood all this and pulled the strings. She made for the piece an admirable showman.
Ellen, watching them, grew excited, and out of this excitement there emerged slowly a new ambition, which had nothing to do with a career in music. It was, rather, a passionate desire to conquer this world as well, so that she might fling her triumph back into the world of the Town; it would serve as an admirable weapon to flaunt in the faces of those who had mocked her poverty. For she had not yet escaped the Town; she had not even learned how difficult it would be ever to escape.
The Russian tenor was a dismal failure. Save for the fact that he was Russian and therefore wildly exotic, he would have been impossible, for he sang in a bleating voice a popular ballad or two by Tosti and a dreary bit of folk music, still half-caught in the mists of slumber. In the back of the room, seated against the wall so that the figures of the other guests rose in silhouette between them and the lights of the low stage, Richard Callendar and the ugly Sabine sat like naughty children, jeering. They were bored by such spectacles; they were interested only in the individuals which comprised it. They saw that the others were a little restless.
And then there was a brief hush broken presently by the music of the Tzigane orchestra augmented by drums and clarinets, rising slowly at first and then breaking into a crescendo of Arab music, filled with insinuating and sensual rhythms, accentuated by the beating of a tom-tom, and from behind the lacquered screen there arose a faint tinkling sound like the music of a million tiny bells heard from a great distance. Then as the music rose to a climax the sound grew suddenly more and more clear and from behind the screen sprang the Javanese dancer, gyrating, now bending low, now rising with a motion of a tawny lily swept by a breeze. It was a beautiful body, soft yet muscular, wild yet restrained. She wore the costume of a Burmese dancer, all gold with a towering hat like a pagoda made all of gold. Her breasts were covered with gold and her thighs, and on her hands she wore gauntlets of gold that ran out into long tapering pinnacles; but the rest of her was naked. The skin of café au lait satin glistened, voluptuous and extravagant. There were tiny gold bells on her wrists and ankles.
For an instant a faint gasp, barely audible, swept the little group seated on collapsible chairs. From her hiding place in the shadows Sabine Cane nudged her companion and whispered again, "Look at Boadicea!"
Before her eyes, between her and the dancer, Mrs. Champion had raised her fan; her daughters had done likewise. Between her and "his wa'am friend" Mrs. Mallinson, the Bishop stirred uneasily. Some leaned forward; others feigned indifference. One or two of the men assumed expressions of boredom. For none of them, save in brothels in Paris, had ever seen a woman dancing without tights, utterly naked.
Withdrawn a little from the others Thérèse Callendar sat staring at the dancer through her lorgnettes. She was immovable but interested, as if the barbaric music and the sight of the Hindu woman's naked body roused in her a train of dim racial memories. And slowly in another part of the room Sabine Cane became aware that Thérèse Callendar's son no longer had any interest in her. He no longer heard the malicious sallies she uttered in a whisper. He had risen now and was standing so that he might have a clearer view of the little dais bathed in light where the golden dancer swayed and whirled to the wild music of the Tziganes. Slowly his body stiffened and into the weird gray eyes there came a look of fierce concentration. The dark muscular hands, clasping the chair, so near to Sabine that she could have touched them, grew taut and white. It was not mere sensuality that was roused by the sight; Sabine, with her hard intelligence, must have known that it was something more profound, something that savored of a passionate and barbaric excitement, as if the man was stirred in the depths of his spirit. She must have understood then for the first time that he was of a race so different, so alien that there was a part of him forever beyond comprehension.
Sabine said nothing. Fascinated, she watched him quietly until, as the music died suddenly, the dancer stood motionless as a statue of bronze and gold. There was a ripple of embarrassed applause and she disappeared, then another hush and the nervous murmur of many voices. On her little throne Thérèse, like a plump Buddha, nodded her approval and beat her plump hands together. "C'est une vraie artiste," she murmured, leaning toward Mrs. Sigourney, in whose eyes there glittered the light of jealousy at being outdone in spectacularity by a hired entertainer.
In her corner Sabine said, "Beautiful!" To which young Callendar made no reply. He fingered his mustache and presently, smiling slowly, he murmured, "Mama shouldn't have done it. She has shocked some of them. This isn't Paris. Not yet!"
They were different from the others—Thérèse and her son.
While he was still speaking the gypsies deserted the stage, leaving it bare now save for the great piano. Again a brief hush and there emerged from behind the painted screen with a curious effect of abruptness and lack of grace a tall girl, very tall and very straight, with smooth black hair done in the style of Cléo de Merode and cheeks that were flushed. She wore a plain gown of black very tight and girdled with rhinestones that, shimmering, threw off shattered fragments of light as she walked. Her strong white arms were bared to the shoulder. There was pride in her walk, and assurance, yet these things hid a terror so overpowering that only those who sat quite near saw that her lip was bleeding where she had bitten it.
On her little throne Thérèse Callendar in cold blood waited. She wondered, doubtless, whether Sanson had failed her, and slowly she began to perceive that he had not. Somehow as she emerged from behind the screen, the American girl captured the imagination of her audience; it was as if she dominated them by some unreal power. They stirred and looked more closely. It was not altogether a matter of beauty, for the dancer who had preceded her was by all the rules far more beautiful. It was something beyond mere physical beauty. It emanated from her whole body, running outward, engulfing all the little audience. They became aware of her.
"Hm!" murmured Mrs. Callendar. "Here is something new. Something magnificent. A born actress . . . crude still, but with magnetism!" And she raised her lorgnettes and peered very hard with her short sighted little eyes.
To Richard Callendar, Sabine murmured, "Interesting! Who is she?"
"She's very handsome. . . . A discovery of Mama's."
And then, seating herself the girl began after a shower of liquid notes, to play, softly and suggestively, a Chopin valse, one that was filled with melody and simple rhythm. After the hot passion of the dancer she filled the great room with the effect of a soft wind infinitely cool and lovely, serene in its delicacy. She appeared presently to forget her fright and gave a performance that was beautiful not alone in sound but in manner as well. It may have been that old Sanson taught her that a great performance meant more than merely making beautiful sounds. All her face and body played their part in the poise, the grace of every movement, the sweep and the gesture. But it is more probable that she was born knowing these things, for they are a matter more of instinct than of training and lie thus beyond the realm of mere instruction.
There could be no doubt of the impression she made, yet in all the audience there was none, unless it was old Thérèse Callendar, who suspected that she had never before played in the presence of anything but a small town audience. There was in her performance the fire of wild Highland ancestors, the placidity of English lanes, the courage of men who had crossed mountains into a wilderness, perhaps even the Slavic passion of a dim ancestress brought from Russia to live among the dour Scots of Edinburgh, the hard, bright intelligence of Gramp, and the primitive energy of Hattie Tolliver. There was all the stifled emotion pent so long in a heart dedicated to secrecy, and the triumph of wild dreams; and there was too a vast amount of passion for that little company who believed in her, whom she dared not betray by failure . . . for Lily whose very gown she wore, and the withered Miss Ogilvie; for Gramp, and young Fergus who worshiped her with his eyes, for her gentle father and the fierce old woman in Shane's Castle; but most of all for that indomitable and emotional woman whom she must repay one day by forcing all the world to envy her.
When she had finished she was forced to return because overtones of all this wild emotion had filtered vaguely into the very heart of the restless, distracted audience on stiff collapsible chairs. They applauded; it was as if she had suddenly claimed them.
Then she played savagely the Revolutionary Prelude and disappeared behind the lacquered screen. There was a hush and then more talk and then a sudden excitement which began at the screen and ran in little ripples through all the stiff gathering. From the alcove there emerged the bass rumbling of the Russian, stirred suddenly into somnolent activity, and again a wild tinkling of little bells and a torrent of French in the shrill voice of the Javanese dancer. The screen parted and the dancer, half naked, covered only by the heavy gold ornaments and a wrapper of scarlet silk, emerged chattering French and gesticulating. She addressed Mrs. Callendar who stirred herself into a sudden dull glitter of movement. The son left the ugly Sabine and joined his mother, calm but with a fierce, bright look in his eyes. The American girl . . . the unknown pianist had fainted!