Black Oxen Part 5

"I felt rather a fool if the truth be told." Her eyes had a curious exploring look and Clavering felt unaccountably irritated, in spite of all that her words implied. "I'd have done the same if you had been old and withered. Served me right. I should have thought before I left the house to telephone for a watchman."

"Ah! Quite so. American men are famous for their gallantry, are they not? Myself, I have always liked them." The smile rose to her wise penetrating eyes, and Clavering colored like a schoolboy. Then it faded and her face looked suddenly rigid. "I wonder," she muttered, then turned her back abruptly. "You must not forget your c.o.c.ktail. And dinner has been announced."

Mr. Dinwiddie made a pretext of sipping his c.o.c.ktail as the three raised their gla.s.ses simultaneously to their hostess. She had declined to join them, with a little grimace. "Perhaps in time I may become American enough to like your strange concoctions, but so far I think c.o.c.ktails have a really horrid taste. Shall we go in?"

The Judge offered his arm with the formal gallant air he could a.s.sume at will and the other men followed at a discreet distance: her s.h.i.+mmering gown had a long tail. Mr. Dinwiddie's eyes seemed to bore into that graceful swaying back, but he was not the man to discuss his hostess until he had left her house, and Clavering could only wonder what conclusions were forming in that avid cynical old brain.

The dining-room, long and narrow, was at the back of the hall and extended along the entire width of the large house. Like the hall it was panelled and dark, an imposing room hung with family portraits. A small table at the end looked like a fairy oasis. It glittered and gleamed and the flowers were mauve, matching the tall wand-like candles.

"I do hope, Madame Zattiany," said Mr. Osborne, as he took a seat at her left, "that you won't succ.u.mb to the prevailing mania for white, and paint out this beautiful old walnut. Too many of our houses look entirely too sanitary. One feels as if he were about to be shown up to a ward, to be received by a hospital nurse with a warning not to speak too loud." There was no chill formality in his mien as he bent over his young and beautiful hostess.

"Ah, you forget this is Countess Zattiany's house," she said, smiling.

"But I will admit that if it were mine I should make few changes. White was quite _a la mode_ in London long before the war, but, myself, I never liked it."

Judge Trent sat opposite his hostess at the round table. She had placed Mr. Dinwiddie and Mr. Osborne on either side of her, smiling at Clavering. "I am sorry I do not know any young ladies," she said graciously, although there was a twinkle in her eye. "You look rather lonesome."

"Why should he?" growled Dinwiddie. "He is young and you are young. The rest of us are the ones to feel out of it."

"Not a bit of it! Not a bit of it!" exclaimed Judge Trent. "You forget that Madame Zattiany has lived in Europe since infancy. She's talked to elderly statesmen all her life."

"Well, we're not statesmen, the lord knows." Dinwiddie could always be relied on to make the obvious retort, thought Clavering, although it must be admitted that he was seldom with none at all. "But you must have seen more young men than old during the war, Madame Zattiany. I understand that Mary turned her palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital and that you were her chief a.s.sistant."

"That is quite true, and I had by no means confined myself before that to elderly statesmen; but I had almost forgotten what a young man on his feet looked like before the war finished. Or Society, for that matter.

My one temptation to enter Society here would be the hope of forming a relief organization--drive, do you call it?--for the starving children of Austria. Russian children are not the only pitiable objects in Europe, and after all, the children of civilized countries are of more value to the future of the world."

"Another drive!" Judge Trent groaned. "New York flees to cover at the word. Enter Society by all means, but to give your youth its rights.

You have been deprived of them too long."

"I shall never feel as young as that again. Nor will any girl who was merely sixteen at the beginning of the war ever be the same as your care-free young ladies here. I sit in the restaurants and watch them with amazement--often with anger. What right have they ...

however ... as for myself I shall not reenter the world for any but the object I have just mentioned. Luncheons! Dinners! b.a.l.l.s! I was surfeited before the war. And I have forgotten persiflage, small talk.

I am told that Americans avoid serious topics in Society. I, alas, have become very serious."

She swept her favored guests with a disarming smile. They understood.

There was no sting in her words for them.

Clavering spoke up eagerly. "Why should you bore yourself with social functions? If you want to raise money for the children I will not only start a drive in my column but take you to call on several powerful editors--or bring them here," he added hastily at the look of amazement in her eyes, "and they will be more than willing to help you. They have only to meet you----"

"That is all very well," interrupted Judge Trent, who, like the other elderly gentlemen, was glaring at the famous young columnist who daily laid down the law to his admiring readers. "But to raise money in large amounts you've got to have a committee, and no committee is of any use--for this sort of thing--without the names of fas.h.i.+onable women who are as well known to our democratic public, that daily devours the society columns, as the queens of the movies."

"Well--well--I do not know. I must think. It is not a step to take lightly."

Clavering intercepted a flash between her eyes and Judge Trent's and the old gentleman tightened his lips in a self-conscious smirk as he bent over his fish.

"d.a.m.n him!" thought Clavering. "He knows the whole truth and is laughing at us in his sleeve."

Madame Zattiany had turned the subject gracefully to European politics, and he watched her with a detached air. Trent's att.i.tude toward her amused him. It was more deferential and admiring than infatuated... .

Whatever her charm, she was no longer in her first youth, and only unripe fruit could sting that senescent palate. But the other two! Clavering smiled sardonically. Dinwiddie, hanging on her every word, was hardly eating. He was a very handsome man, in spite of his s.h.i.+ning pate and heavy white moustache. His features were fine and regular, his eyes, if rather prominent, were clear and blue, his skin clean, and his figure but little amplified. He was only sixty-two.

Osborne, who looked barely fifty, was personable and clever enough to attract any woman. He, too, was astonis.h.i.+ngly indifferent to the excellent dinner, and both these gentlemen had reached an age, where, if wary of excess for reasons of vanity and interior comfort, they derived their sincerest enjoyment at the table.

That she possessed s.e.x magnetism in a superlative degree in spite of her deliberate aloofness, Clavering had, of course, been conscious from the first. Had not every male first-nighter been conscious of it? There was a surfeit of beauty in New York. A stranger, even if invested with mystery, must possess the one irresistible magnet, combined with some unusual quality of looks, to capture and hold the interest of weary New Yorkers as she had done. Even the dramatic critics, who looked as if they hated everybody, had been seen to gaze upon her with rare approval.

But tonight Clavering had a glimpse of something more than a magnetism for which she was not responsible and to which she had seemed singularly indifferent. It was quite evident that he was watching charm in action.

She was sparkling and exerting herself, talking brilliantly and illuminatingly upon the chaos still known as Europe, and it was patent that her knowledge was not derived from newspapers or drawing-room gossip. Her personal acquaintance of public men had evidently been extensive before the war, and she had as manifestly continued to see those in and out of office in Vienna and Buda Pesth throughout all the later fluctuations. Her detestation of the old German militaristic party was unmitigated and she spoke of the late ruler of the Dual Empire and of his yearning heir with no respect whatever. With other intelligent people she believed Bolshevism to be an inevitable phase in a country as backward and ignorant as Russia, but, to his surprise, she regarded the Republican ideal of government as the highest that had yet been evolved from finite minds, still far from their last and highest stages of development. She believed that the only hope of the present civilization was to avert at any cost the successful rise of the proletariat to power until the governing and employing cla.s.ses had learned sufficient wisdom to conciliate it and treat it with the same impartial justice they now reserved for themselves. ("And to educate themselves along the lines laid down in 'The Mind in the Making,'" interpolated Clavering.) Otherwise any victory the ma.s.ses might achieve would be followed by the same hideous results as in Russia--in other words, the same results that had followed all servile uprisings since the dawn of history. When the underdog, who has never felt anything but an underdog, with all the misery and black injustice the word implies, finds himself on top he will inevitably torture and murder his former oppressors. He hasn't the intelligence to foresee the ultimate folly of his acts, or that the only hope of the world is equal justice for all cla.s.ses; he merely gratifies his primitive instinct for vengeance--precisely the same today, as during the first servile uprising of Rome--he butchers and slaughters and wrecks, and then sinks with his own weight, while what brains are left reconstruct civilization out of the ruins. "The trouble is that the reconstructing brains are never quite good enough, and after a time it is all to do over again... ."

This was by no means a monologue, but evoked in the give and take of argument with Mr. Osborne, who believed in never yielding an inch to the demands of labor, and with Mr. Dinwiddie, who, since his a.s.sociation with the Sophisticates, was looking forward vaguely toward some idealistic regeneration of the social order, although Socialism was rather out of date among them, and Bolshevism long since relegated to the attic.

But Clavering was not particularly interested in her political views, sound as they were. Foreign women of her cla.s.s, if not as liberal, always talked intelligently of politics. What interested him keenly was her deliberate, her quite conscious attempt to enslave the two men beside her, and her complete success. Occasionally she threw him a word, and once he fancied she favored him with a glance of secret amused understanding, but he was thankful to be on the outer edge of that glamorous crescent. It was enough to watch at a comparatively safe distance. Would his turn come next, or was she merely bent on so befuddling these old chaps that there would be no place left in their enraptured minds for suspicion or criticism? No doubt he was too rank an outsider... . She shot him another glance... . Was his to be the role of the sympathetic friend?

Then she began to draw Dinwiddie and Osborne out, and it struck him that her att.i.tude was not merely that of the accomplished hostess. They both talked well, they were intelligent and well-informed, and he was himself interested in what they had to say on the subject of national politics.

(The Judge, who had an unimpaired digestion, was attending strictly to his champagne and his dinner.) There was something of anxiety, almost of wistfulness, in her expression as she listened to one or the other doing his admirable best to entertain her. They had the charm of crisp well-modulated voices, these two men of her own cla.s.s; she had met no better-bred men in Europe; and their air was as gallant as it had been in their youth. He had a fleeting vision of what gay dogs they must have been. Neither had married, but they had been ardent lovers once and aging women still spoke of them with tender amus.e.m.e.nt. And yet only the sh.e.l.l had changed. They had led decent enough lives and no doubt could fall honestly and romantically in love today. In fact, they appeared to be demonstrating the possibility, with the eternal ingenuousness of the male. And yet nature had played them this scurvy trick. The young heart in the old sh.e.l.l. Grown-up boys with a foot in the grave. Dependent upon mind and address alone to win a woman's regard, while the woman dreamed of the man with a thick thatch over his brains and the responsive magnetism of her own years. Poor old fighting-c.o.c.ks! What a jade nature was ... or was it merely the tyranny of an Idea, carefully inculcated at the nativity of the social group, with other arbitrary laws, in behalf of the race? The fetish of the body. Stark materialism... . However, it was not as hard on them as on women outgrown their primary function.

Theirs at least the privilege of approach; and their deathless masculine conceit--when all was said, Nature's supreme gift of compensation--never faltered.

It crossed Clavering's mind that she was experimenting on her own account, not merely bewildering and enthralling these estimable gentlemen of her mother's generation. But why? Joining casually in the conversation, or quite withdrawn, he watched her with increasing and now quite impersonal interest. He almost fancied she was making an effort to be something more than the polite and amiable hostess, that she was deliberately striving to see them as men who had a perfect right to fascinate a woman of her age and loveliness. Well, it had happened before. Elderly men of charm and character had won and kept women fully thirty years their junior. Possibly she belonged to that distinguished minority who refused to be enslaved by the Ancient Idea, that iron code devised by fore-thinking men when Earth was young and scantily peopled... . Still--why this curious eagerness, this--it was indecipherable ... no doubt his lively imagination was playing him tricks. Probably she was merely sympathetic... . And then, toward the end of the dinner, her manner changed, although too subtly for any but the detached observer to notice it. To Clavering she seemed to go dead under her still animated face. He saw her eyes wander from Dinwiddie's bald head to Osborne's flattened cheek ... her lip curled, a look of fierce contempt flashed in her eyes before she hastily lowered the lids... . He fancied she was glad to rise from the table.

X

"Well?" he asked, as he and Dinwiddie were walking away from the house; Osborne had driven off with Judge Trent. "Do you still think her a base impostor?"

"Don't know what I think and don't much care. She can pack me in her trunk, as we boys used to say. She's a great lady and a charming woman; as little doubt about the first as the last. She's like Mary Ogden and she isn't. I suppose she might be merely a member of the same family--with several thousand ancestors where types must have reappeared again and again. If she wants New York Society, especially if she wants money for those starving children, I'll go the limit. But I'm going to find out about her all the same. I'll hunt up Harry Thornhill tomorrow--he's a recluse but he'll see me--and I'll get on the track of some Hungarian refugee. She can't be the usual rank impostor, that's positive. She has the same blood as Mary in her veins, and if she's Mary's daughter and wishes to keep it dark, that's her business. I'll never give her away."

"Well, good luck. Glad it went off so well."

They parted at the door of Mr. Dinwiddie's rooms and Clavering walked slowly home in an extremely thoughtful mood. He felt an uneasy distrust of the Countess Josef Zattiany, and he was not even sure that he liked her.

On the following Monday night, however, he was by no means averse from making a notable personal score. As Abbott, a dramatic critic, who happened to sit next to Madame Zattiany, made his usual hurried exit at the falling of the first curtain Clavering slipped into the vacant chair. She smiled a welcome, but it was impossible to talk in the noise. This was a great first-night. One of the leading actresses of America had returned in an excellent play, and her admirers, who appeared to be a unit, were clapping and stamping and shouting: handkerchiefs fluttered all over the house. When the curtain descended after the fifteenth recall and the lights went up and demonstration gave place to excited chatter, Madame Zattiany held out her hand toward Clavering.

"See! I have split my glove. I caught the enthusiasm. How generous your people are! I never heard such whole-souled, such--ah--unself-conscious response."

"Oh, we like to let go sometimes and the theatre is a safe place. One of the best things that can be said for New York, by the way, is its loyalty to two or three actresses no longer young. The whole country has gone crazy over youth. The most astonis.h.i.+ngly bad books create a furore because from end to end they glorify post-war youth at its worst, and the stage is almost as bad. But New Yorkers are too old and wise in the theatre not to have a very deep appreciation of its art, and they will render tribute to old favorites as long as they produce good plays."

"But that is very fine... . I go to the matinee a good deal and I am often very bored. And I have been reading your current novels with the desire to learn as well as to be amused. I wish so much to understand the country in which I was born. I have received much illumination!

It is quite remarkable how well most of your authors write--but merely well, that is. So few have individuality of style. And even in the best authors I find nearly all of the heroines too young. I had read many American novels before the war--they came to us in Tauchnitz--and even then I found this quite remarkable preoccupation with youth."

"Well--youth is a beautiful thing--is it not?" He smiled into her own beautiful face. "But, if you will notice, many of our novelists, capable of real psychology, carry their heroines over into their second youth, and you can almost hear their sigh of relief when they get them there."

"Yes, but they are still behind the European novelists, who find women interesting at any age, and their intelligent readers agree with them.

Young women have little psychology. They are too fluid."

"Quite right. But I am afraid we are too young a country to tolerate middle-aged heroines. We are steeped in conventionalism, for all our fads. We have certain cast-iron formulae for life, and a.s.sociate love with youth alone. I think we have a vague idea that autumnal love is rather indecent."

"And you--yourself?" She looked at him speculatively. "Are you too obsessed?"

"I? Good lord, no. I was in love with a woman of forty when I was seventeen."