But she resolutely put him out of her mind and opened her book.
The hall clock ticked loudly through the silence; slanting sun rays fell through the street grille, across the tessellated floor where flies crawled and buzzed.
The Prophet sat full in a bar of sunlight and gravely followed the movements of the flies as though specialising on the study of those amazing insects.
Tenants of Dragon Court passed out or entered at intervals, pausing to glance at their letter-boxes or requesting their keys.
Westmore came down the eastern staircase, like an avalanche, with a cheery:
Hello, Dulcie! Any letters? All right, old dear! If you see Mr. Mandel, tell him Ill be at the club!
Corot Mandel came in presently, and she gave him Westmores message.
Thanks, he said, not even glancing at the thin figure in the shabby dress too small for her. And, after peering into his letter-box, he went away with the indolent swing of a large and powerful plantigrade, gazing fixedly ahead of him out of heavy, oriental eyes, and twisting up his jet black, waxed moustache.
A tall, handsome girl called and enquired for Mr. Trenor. Dulcie returned her amiable smile, unhooked the receiver, and telephoned up. But nobody answered from Esmé Trenors apartment, and the girl, whose name was Damaris Souval, and whose profession varied between the stage and desultory sitting for artists, smiled once more on Dulcie and sauntered out in her very charming summer gown.
The shabby child looked after her through the sunny hallway, the smile still curving her lips a sensitive, winning smile, untainted by envy. Then she resumed her book, serenely clearing her youthful mind of vanity and desire for earthly things.
Half an hour later Esmé Trenor sauntered in. His was a sensitive nature and fastidious, too. Dinginess, obscurity everything that was shabby, tarnished, humble in life, he consistently ignored. He had ignored Dulcie Soane for three years: he ignored her now.
He glanced indifferently into his letter-box as he passed the desk. Dulcie said, with the effort it always required for her to speak to him:
Miss Souval called, but left no message.
Trenors supercilious glance rested on her for the fraction of a second, then, with a bored nod, he continued on his way and up the stairs. And Dulcie returned to her book.
The desk telephone rang: a Mrs. Helmund desired 82 to speak to Mr. Trenor. Dulcie switched her on, rested her chin on her hand, and continued her reading.
Some time afterward the telephone rang again.
Dragon Court, said Dulcie, mechanically.
I wish to speak to Mr. Barres, please.
Mr. Barres has not come in from luncheon.
Are you sure? said the pretty, feminine voice.
Quite sure, replied Dulcie. Wait a minute
She called Barress apartment; Aristocrates answered and confirmed his masters absence with courtly effusion.
No, he is not in, repeated Dulcie. Who shall I say called him?
Say that Miss Dunois called him up. If he comes in, say that Miss Thessalie Dunois will come at five to take tea with him. Thank you. Good-bye.
Startled to hear the very name against which her father had warned her, Dulcie found it difficult to reconcile the sweet voice that came to her over the wire with the voice of any such person her father had described.
Still a trifle startled, she laid aside the receiver with a disturbed glance toward the wrought-iron door at the further end of the hall.
She had no desire at all to call up her father at Grogans and inform him of what had occurred. The mere thought of surreptitious listening in, of eavesdropping, of informing, reddened her face. Also, she had long since lost confidence in the somewhat battered but jaunty man who had always neglected her, although never otherwise unkind, even when intoxicated.
No, she would neither listen in nor inform on anybody at the behest of a father for whom, alas, she had no respect, merely those shreds of conventional feeling 83 which might once have been filial affection, but had become merely an habitual solicitude.
No, her character, her nature refused such obedience. If there was trouble between the owner of the unusually sweet voice and Mr. Barres, it was their affair, not hers, not her fathers.
This settled in her mind, she opened another book and turned the pages slowly until she came to the lesson to be learned.
It was hard to concentrate; her thoughts were straying, now, to Barres.
And, as she leaned there, musing above her dingy school book, through the grilled door at the further end of the hall stepped a young girl in a light summer gown a beautiful girl, lithe, graceful, exquisitely groomed who came swiftly up to the desk, a trifle pale and breathless:
Mr. Barres? He lives here?
Yes.
Please announce Miss Dunois.
Dulcie flushed deeply under the shock:
Mr. Mr. Barres is still out
Oh. Was it you I talked to over the telephone? asked Thessalie Dunois.
Yes.
Mr. Barres has not returned?
No.
Thessalie bit her lip, hesitated, turned to go. And at the same instant Dulcie saw the one-eyed man at the street door, peering through the iron grille.
Thessalie saw him, too, stiffened to marble, stood staring straight at him.
He turned and went away up the street. But Dulcie, to whom the incident signified nothing in particular except the impudence of a one-eyed man, was not prepared 84 for the face which Thessalie Dunois turned toward her. Not a vestige of colour remained in it, and her dark eyes seemed feverish and too large.
You need not give Mr. Barres any message from me, she said in an altered voice, which sounded strained and unsteady. Please do not even say that I came or mention my name May I ask it of you?
Dulcie, very silent in her surprise, made no reply.
Please may I ask it of you? whispered Thessalie. Do you mind not telling anybody that I was here?
If you wish it.
I do. May I trust you?
Y-yes.
Thank you A bank bill was in her gloved fingers; intuition warned her; she took another swift look at Dulcie. The childs face was flaming scarlet.
Forgive me, whispered Thessalie And thank you, dear She bent over quickly, took Dulcies hand, pressed it, looking her in the eyes.
Its all right, she whispered. I am not asking you to do anything you shouldnt. Mr. Barres will understand it all when I write to him Did you see that man at the street door, looking through the grating?
Yes.
Do you know who he is? whispered Thessalie.
No.
Have you never before seen him?
Yes. He was here at two oclock talking to my father.
Your father?
My fathers name is Lawrence Soane. He is superintendent of Dragon Court.
What is your name?
Dulcie Soane.
Thessalie still held her hand tightly. Then with a quick but forced smile, she pressed it, thanking the girl for her consideration, turned and walked swiftly through the hall out into the street.
Dulcie, dreaming over her closed books in the fading light, vaguely uneasy lest her silence might embrace the faintest shadow of disloyalty to Barres, looked up quickly at the sound of his familiar footsteps on the pavement.
Hello, little comrade, he called to her on his way to the stairs. Didnt we have a jolly party the other evening? Im going out to another party this evening, but I bet it wont be as jolly as ours!
The girl smiled happily.
The girl smiled happily.
Any letters, Sweetness?
None, Mr. Barres.
All the better. I have too many letters, too many visitors. It leaves me no time to have another party with you. But we shall have another, Dulcie never fear. That is, he added, pretending to doubt her receptiveness of his invitation, if you would care to have another with me.
She merely looked at him, smiling deliciously.
Be a good child and well have another! he called back to her, running on up the western staircase.
Around seven oclock her father came in, steady enough of foot but shiny-red in the face and maudlin drunk.
That woman was here, he whined, an ye never called me up! I am b-bethrayed be me childer wurra the day
Please, father! If any one sees you
An phwy not! Am I ashamed o the tears I shed? 86 No, I am not. No Irishman need take shame along av the tears he sheds for Ireland God bless her where she shtands! wid the hob-nails av the crool tyrant foreninst her bleeding neck an
Father, please
That woman I warned ye of! She was here! Twas the wan-eyed lad who seen her
Dulcie rose and took him by his arm. He made no resistance; but he wept while she conducted him bedward, as the immemorial wrongs of Ireland tore his soul.
VII
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
The tremendous tragedy in Europe, now nearing the end of the second act, had been slowly shaking the drowsy Western World out of its snug slumber of complacency. Young America was already sitting up in bed, awake, alert, listening. Older America, more difficult to convince, rolled solemn and interrogative eyes toward Washington, where the wooden gods still sat nodding in a row, smiling vacuously at destiny out of carved and painted features. Eyes had they but they saw not, ears but they heard not; neither spake they through their mouths.
Yet, they that made them were no longer like unto them, for many an anxious idolater no longer trusted in them. For their old Gods voice was sounding in their ears.
The voice of a great ex-president, too, had been thundering from the wilderness; lesser prophets, endowed, however, with intellect and vision, had been warning the young West that the second advent of Attila was at hand; an officer of the army, inspired of God, had preached preparedness from the market places and had established for its few disciples an habitation; and a great Admiral had died of a broken heart because his lips had been officially sealed the wisest lips that ever told of those who go down to the sea in ships.
Plainer and plainer in American ears sounded the 88 mounting surf of that blood-red sea thundering against the frontiers of Democracy; clearer and clearer came the discordant clamour of the barbaric hordes; louder and more menacing the half-crazed blasphemies of their chief, who had given the very name of the Scourge of God to one among the degenerate litter he had sired.
Garret Barres had been educated like any American of modern New York type. Harvard, then five years abroad, and a return to his native city revealed him as an ambitious, receptive, intelligent young man, deeply interested in himself and his own affairs, theoretically patriotic, a good citizen by intention, an affectionate son and brother, and already a pretty good painter of the saner species.
A modest income of his own enabled him to bide his time and decline pot-boilers. A comparatively young father and an even more youthful mother, both of sporting proclivities, together with a sister of the same tastes, were his preferred companions when he had time to go home to the family rooftree in northern New York. His lines, indeed, were cast in pleasant places. Beside still waters in green pastures, he could always restore his city-tarnished soul when he desired to retire for a while from the battleground of endeavour.
The city, after all, offered him a world-wide battlefield; for Garret Barres was by choice a painter of thoroughbred women, of cosmopolitan men a younger warrior of the brush imbued with the old traditions of those great English captains of portraiture, who recorded for us the more brilliant human truths of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
From their stately canvases aglow, the eyes of the lovely dead look out at us; the eyes of ambition, of 89 pride, of fatuous complacency; the haunted eyes of sorrow; the clear eyes of faith. Out of the past they gaze those who once lived deathlessly recorded by Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller; by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Lawrence, Raeburn; or consigned to a dignified destiny by Stuart, Sully, Inman, and Vanderlyn.
When Barres returned to New York after many years, he found that the aspect of the city had not altered very greatly. The usual dirt, disorder, and municipal confusion still reigned; subways were being dug, but since the memory of man runneth, the streets of the metropolis have been dug up, and its market places and byways have been an abomination.
The only visible excitement, however, was in the war columns of the newspapers, and, sometimes, around bulletin boards where wrangling groups were no uncommon sight, citizens and aliens often coming into verbal collision sometimes physical promptly suppressed by bored policemen.
There was a preparedness parade; thousands of worthy citizens marched in it, nervously aware, now, that the Great Republics only mobile military division was on the Mexican border, where also certain Guard regiments were likely to be directed to reinforce the regulars pet regiments from the city, among whose corps of officers and enlisted men everybody had some friend or relative.
But these regiments had not yet entrained. There were few soldiers to be seen on the streets. Khaki began to be noticeable in New York only when the Plattsburg camps opened. After that there was an interim of the usual dull, unaccented civilian monotony, mitigated at rare intervals by this dun-coloured ebb and flow from Plattsburg.
Like the first vague premonitions of a nightmare the first ominous symptoms of depression were slowly possessing hearts already uneasy under two years burden of rumours unprintable, horrors incredible to those aloof and pursuing the peaceful tenor of their ways.
A growing restlessness, unbelief, the incapacity to understand selfishness, rapacity, self-righteousness, complacency, cowardice, even stupidity itself were being jolted and shocked into something resembling a glimmer of comprehension as the hunnish U-boats, made ravenous by the taste of blood, steered into western shipping lanes like a vast shoal of sharks.
And always thicker and thicker came the damning tales of rape and murder, of cowardly savagery, brutal vileness, degenerate bestiality clearer, nearer, distinctly audible, the sigh of a ravaged and expiring civilisation trampled to obliteration by the slavering, ferocious swine of the north.
Fires among shipping, fires amid great stores of cotton and grain destined for France or England, explosions of munitions of war ordered by nations of the Entente, the clumsy propaganda or impudent sneers of German and pro-German newspapers; reports of German meddling in Mexico, in South America, in Japan; more sinister news concerning the insolent activities of certain embassies all these were beginning to have their logical effect among a fat and prosperous people which simply could not bear to be aroused from pleasant dreams of brotherhood to face the raw and hellish truth.
For fifty years, remarked Barres to his neighbour, Esmé Trenor, also a painter of somewhat eccentric portraits, our national characteristic has been 91 a capacity for absorbing bunk and a fixed determination to kid ourselves. There really is a war, Trenor, old top, and were going to get into it before very long.