The Monster. Saltus Edgar
jest followed, and presently, in the contagion of it almost the entire table joined.
The delicately toxic fare, the slightly emotionalising wines, loosened tongues, robbing them of discretion, and, before the servants, as though the latter were deaf and dumb, hosts and guests revealed their naked minds.
“It is rotten to talk in that way before these men,” Tempest exclaimed. “They get their wages with lessons in anarchy thrown in. It’s too much.”
“I had not heard,” Leilah replied. “I was thinking of that friend of yours whom you never met.”
Tempest laughed. “The one who said we should wish things to be as they are? Ah, well! I am afraid I am not up to that yet.”
“Nor I. But who was he, if one may ask? Not Aristotle?”
“No, but, by the way, do you know whom Aristotle is supposed to be, or rather to have become? Herbert Spencer! An occultist told me. He told me also such a curious story. You have heard, have you not, of Apollonius of Tyana? Then you may remember it is said of him that he healed the sick, raised the dead, knew all things save the caresses of women, and spoke every language including that of colours. Well, the occultist told me that Jesus was a rabbi who surrendered his entity to the Christ, and afterward reappeared here as Apollonius. He said, too, that he was not crucified. Crucifixion, you know, is merely the symbol of initiation.”
“And whom did he say was the Christ?”
“An envoy from a higher sphere.”
Leilah inclined her head. “Yes, and there have, I believe, been others. From zeniths or from nadirs unknown to us, from planes, let us say, where all beatitudes are as usual as all shames are common here, spirits commissioned to regenerate the hearts of man pass into the slums of space. Confident, with a crown of light they come, only to return with one of thorns.”
Tempest turned squarely in his chair. “That is a singularly beautiful idea!”
Again Leilah inclined her head. “It is beautiful. It is beautiful to think that earthward from some chromatic star the soul of Krishna may have sunk. But the idea is not mine. I found it in the Vidyâ.”
This last statement was lost. Mme. de Fresnoy was insisting on Tempest’s attention. Meanwhile a cygnet, its plumage replaced, a pond lily in its ochre beak, had been presented, carved and served. A salad, known as Half-Mourning, a composition of artichoke hearts and Piedmontese truffles, had departed with it. Now sweets had come, pastry light as a caress, volatile as an essence, that pastry of which the art is known only to the Oriental and the occasional cordon bleu.
Devoutly, with an air of invoking the Prophet, the Turk was absorbing it.
The young Baronne de Fresnoy, abandoning Tempest, looked at him. With a wicked glitter in her big blue eyes she called:
“Musty! Are you thinking of me?”
The pasha was framing a reply, a reply perhaps rather bald, when Camille de Joyeuse also addressed him. Presently she stood up. The others imitated her. The gayeties of the table were abandoned for the brilliance of the salons beyond.
Tempest, who had accompanied Leilah Barouffska said, as she seated herself:
“Are you to remain in Paris?”
Before answering, she looked up at him, for he was standing. “Who can tell what one will do? But I fancy so. We have taken a house in the rue de la Pompe.”
“In the rue de la Pompe!” Tempest exclaimed. “That is where I live.” He smiled. The fact that they were neighbours seemed to constitute a bond. “Whereabouts in the rue de la Pompe?”
“Next to the church.”
“Do you find it convenient?”
A servant announced:
“Monsieur and madame Spencer-Poole!”
“You mean,” Leilah replied, “am I a Catholic? No, I am an Episcopalian. But my views, I fear, are not orthodox. I have got so far that I believe fully in the Vidyâ.”
She had cited the book at the dinner table but, at the time, distracted by Marie de Fresnoy, Tempest had not heard; now he exclaimed at it.
“The Vidyâ! Of all things! Why not the Upanishads?”
A servant announced:
“Madame la marquise de Charleroi!”
Leilah made a little gesture. “The Upanishads, too. I have great faith in them also. Their conceptions seem to me the most perfect that the human mind has evolved, that is, if it were a human mind that evolved them.”
A servant announced:
“Madame la princesse Orlonna!”
“What particularly impressed you in them?” Tempest asked.
“The demonstration that life is a laboratory in which the strength of the soul is tried.”
“And in the Vidyâ?”
“The fact that selfishness is the root of evil. That impressed me very much, primarily I suppose because it is true, but chiefly I think because I had not realized it before.”
Tempest nodded. Never had he heard a mondaine cite the Upanishads. In no drawing room had he ever heard the Vidyâ mentioned. In his life he had not dreamed of having a digest of each produced in an atmosphere dripping with frivolities. As he nodded he reconsidered this woman. From the first he had realized that she differed from the ordinary society type. Now he saw that she belonged to a superior world.
“Do you not admire them, too?” Leilah, who had also been considering him, inquired.
Tempest adjusted his monocle. “You see, you know, the Self, the All-Self, the One, the oneness of self with everything, the oneness of all things with One, these minor motifs of theirs I may admire but I do not grasp. On the contrary, there is a certain voluminous complexity about them that makes me gasp. None the less they advance certain ideas which, while curious to the few and to the many absurd, are yet so mathematically evident; the fact for instance – ”
A servant announced:
“His Highness monseigneur le prince Paul de Montebianco!”
“Monsieur Harris!”
The salons were becoming filled. The floor was swept by trains brief but brilliant. There was a multiplication of black coats, a renewed animation, a mounting murmur in which occasionally the name of a new arrival was lost.
The servant announced:
“Monsieur le vicomte and madame la vicomtesse de Helley-Quetgen!”
“Madame la princesse Zubaroff!”
“Monsieur d’Arcy!”
“Monsieur le comte Barouffski!”
The last of these, a large man, very fair, with grey-green eyes, had a studied manner which, however, his voice relieved. As he advanced and addressed Mme. de Joyeuse, it sounded supple and silken, as indeed most Slav voices do.
Already groups had formed. The corner in which Tempest stood before Leilah developed another. The Spencer-Pooles approached. With them was d’Arcy, a young man abominably good looking, famous for the prodigious variety of his affairs.
Tempest who had continued talking, who had even been expounding and who now felt that he had been holding forth, moved on. He wanted to smoke and being an habitué of the household, he knew where the smoking room was.
There, before an open fire, his hands behind his back, in that after-dinner attitude which some men assume, M. de Joyeuse stood. He was telling of a stag hunt that had been held at Monplaisir, his estate.
The duke was not an impressionist, his description lacked colour. But de Fresnoy, who had been present, resaw it all; the sheen of the horses, the green of the whippers-in, the pink coats of the sportsmen, the blue dolmans of the officers that had ridden over from a garrison near by, the verdure of the forest’s edge, the view, the scramble,