The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue Incident. Saltus Edgar
looked into Fanny's eyes. "If you want to know, because you are all so deuced prim."
"Ah!" and Fanny made a tantalizing little face, showing, as she did so, the point of her tongue. "Now tell me, what makes you think so?"
Across the table Annandale was talking to Sylvia Waldron. His manner was rather earnest, but his utterance had become a trifle thick.
"Oh, Arthur," the girl at last interrupted him. "Don't drink any more. You have had five glasses of champagne already."
Heroically Annandale put his glass down. "Since you wish it, I won't. But it does not hurt me. I can stand anything."
"I am afraid it may grow on you."
Annandale laughed. "Grow on me," he repeated. "I like that. Why, I am cultivating it."
Miss Waldron laughed too. "Yes, but you know you must not. I won't let you." Then at once, with that tact which was part of her, she changed the subject. "Doesn't Fanny look well tonight?"
"Very. She is the prettiest girl in New York. But you are the best and the dearest. What is more, you are an angel."
"To you I want to try to be."
"Only," resumed Annandale with a spark of the wit which is born of champagne, "don't try to be a saint – it is a step backward."
"Yes, Mrs. Loftus," Orr was saying, "Miranda is fat, very fat. All mediums are. The fatter they are the more confidence you may have."
Then there was more small talk. Courses succeeded each other. Sweets came and went. Presently Mrs. Loftus looked circuitously about and slowly arose. When she and the girls had gone and the men were reseated Loftus turned to Orr.
"Did the spook say anything else?"
Orr was selecting a cigar from a cabinet on wheels which a servant trundled about. He chose and lighted one before he replied. Then he looked at Loftus.
"Yes, she told me that she saw – " Orr paused. The cigar had gone out. He lighted it again. "She told me that she saw death hereabouts."
Loftus was also lighting a cigar. "Then I too am a spook," he replied. "I foretold that you would say something ghastly."
"But, my dear fellow," Orr rejoined, "truth is always that. People fancy that it is made of lace and pearls like a girl on her wedding day. It is not that at all. It is just what you call it. It is ghastly. Read history. Any reliable work is but a succession of groans. The more reliable it is the more groans there will be."
Annandale, who had been helping himself to brandy, interrupted. "Talking of reading things, I saw somewhere that after some dinner or other, when the women had gone, a chap began on a rather – well, don't you know, a sort of barnyard story and the host, who could not quite stomach it, said: 'Suppose we continue the conversation in the drawing-room?' So, Royal, what do you say? If Orr is going to shock us, suppose we do."
Loftus with a painted finger-tip flipped the ashes from his cigar.
"I fear that I have lost the ability to be shocked, but not the ability to be bored."
Yet presently, after another cigar and conscious perhaps that Fanny Price, though often exasperating, never bored, he returned with his guests to the drawing-room.
CHAPTER II
THE POCKET VENUS
"HOW do you like my hat?" said Fanny to Sylvia. Since the dinner a week had gone. The two girls were in Irving Place.
Irving Place is south of Gramercy Park. To the west are the multiple atrocities of Union Square, to the east are the nameless shames of Third avenue. Between the two Irving Place lies, a survival of the peace of old New York. At the lower end are the encroaching menaces of trade, but at the upper end, from which you enter Gramercy Park, there is a quiet, pervasive and almost provincial. It was here that Sylvia Waldron lived.
People take a house for six months or an apartment for a year and call it a home. That is a base use for a sacred word. A home is a place in which you are born, in which your people die and your progeny emerge. A home predicates the present, but particularly the past and with it the future. Any other variety of residence may be agreeable or the reverse, but it is not a home.
In Irving Place there are homes. Among them was the house in which Sylvia Waldron lived. It had been in her family for sixty years. In London a tenure such as that is common. In New York it is phenomenal.
To Sylvia the phenomenon was a matter of course. What amazed her were the migrations of others. Of Fanny, for instance. Each autumn Sylvia would say to her, "Where are you to be?" And Fanny, who at the time might be lodged in a hotel, or camping with a relative, or visiting at Tuxedo, or stopping in Westchester, never could tell. But by December the girl and her mother would find quarters somewhere and there remain until that acrobat, summer, turned handsprings into town and frightened them off.
Summer had not yet come. But May had and, with it, an eager glitter, skies of silk, all the caresses and surrenders of spring.
The season was becoming to Fanny. She fitted in it. She was a young Venus in Paris clothes – Aphrodite a maiden, touched up by Doucet. In her manner was a charm quite incandescent. In her voice were intonations that conveyed the sensation of a kiss. Her eyes were very loquacious. She could, when she chose, flood them with languors. She could, too, charge them with rebuke. You never knew, though, just what she would do. But you always did know what Sylvia would not.
Sylvia suggested the immateriality that the painters of long ago gave to certain figures which they wished to represent as floating from the canvas into space. You felt that her mind was clean as wholesome fruit, that her speech could no more weary than could a star, that her heart, like her house, was a home. She detained, but Fanny allured.
In spite of which or perhaps precisely because of their sheer dissimilarity the two girls were friends. But association weaves mysterious ties. It unites people who otherwise would come to blows. Fanny and Sylvia had been brought up together. The mesh woven in younger days was about them still, and on this particular noon in May they made a picture which, while contrasting, was charmful.
"You really like my hat?"
The hat was gray. The girl's dress was gray. The skirt was of the variety known as trotabout. The whole thing was severely plain, yet astonishingly smart. Sylvia was also in street dress. The latter was black.
They were in the parlor. For in New York there are still parlors. And why not? A parlor – or parloir – is a talking-place. Yet in this instance not a gay place. It was spacious, sombre, severe.
"And now," said Fanny, after the hat had been properly praised, "tell me when it is to be?"
"When is what to be?"
"You and Arthur?"
"Next autumn."
"I shall send a fish knife," said Fanny, savorously. "A fish knife always looks so big and costs so little. Though if I could I would give you a diamond crown."
"Give me your promise to be bridesmaid, and you will have given me what I want from you most."
"But what am I to wear? And oh, Sylvia, how am I to get it? I don't dare any more to so much as look in on Annette, or Juliette, or Marguerite. There are streets into which I can no longer go. I told Loftus that, and he said – so sympathetically too – 'Ah, is it memories that prevent you?' 'Rubbish,' I told him, 'it's bills.'"
"Fanny! How could you? He might have offered to pay them."
"If he had only offered to owe them!" Fanny laughed as she spoke and patted her perfect skirt.
"But he has other fish to fry. Do you know the other day I saw him – "
But what Fanny had seen was never told, or at least not then. Annandale was invading the parlor.
"Conquering hero!" cried Fanny. "I am here congratulating Sylvia."
"I congratulate myself that you are. I have a motor at the door, and I propose to take you both to Sherry's, afterward, if you like, to the races. There you may congratulate me."
"What is this about Sherry's?" Again