Chambers Robert William
The Danger Mark
Half a mile farther on Delancy, labouring along on his snow-shoes, suddenly halted, detaining Geraldine with a quick touch on the shoulder.
"There's something in that clearing," he whispered.
Miller had seen it, too; Duane motioned Rosalie forward to join Delancy, and, side by side, they crept ahead, keeping a clump of scrub hemlock between them and the edge of the clearing. It was the Green Pass feed-ground, a rocky strip of pasture climbing upward toward Lynx Peak; and there, clean cut against the snowy background, three dark objects were moving, trotting nervously here and there, nosing, nuzzling, tunnelling the snow with long, sharp muzzles.
Duane and Geraldine silently unslung their field-glasses.
"They're boar," he said.
"Two-year-olds," she nodded. "I do hope they will get one each. Duane, ought I to have shot that other one?"
"Of course, you generous child! Otherwise he'd have gone clear away. That was a cracking shot, too—clean through the backbone at the base of the skull.... Look at Rosalie! She's unstrapped her snow-shoes and she and Delancy are crawling on all-fours!"
Kemp had now joined the stalkers; he was a wise old hunter, and Duane and Geraldine, keeping very still, watched the operations side by side.
For half an hour Rosalie lay motionless in the snow on the forest's edge, and Geraldine was beginning to fret at the prospect of her being too benumbed by the cold to use her rifle, when Duane touched her on the arm and drew her attention to a fourth boar.
The animal came on from behind Rosalie and to Delancy's right—a good-sized, very black fellow, evidently suspicious yet tempted to reconnoitre the feeding-ground.
"Oh, dear, oh, dear!" she whispered; "what a shot Delancy has! Why doesn't he see him! What on earth is Kemp about? Why, the boar is within ten feet of Delancy's legs and doesn't see or wind him!"
"Look!"
Kemp had caught sight of the fourth boar. Geraldine and Duane saw his dilemma, saw him silently give Rosalie the signal to fire at the nearest boar in the open, then saw him turn like a flash and almost drag Delancy to his feet.
"Kill that pig, now!" he thundered—"unless you want him hackin' your shins!"
The boar stood in his tracks, bristling, furious, probably astounded to find himself so close to the only thing in all the forest that he feared and would have preferred to flee from.
Under such conditions boars lose their heads; there was a sudden clatter of tusks, a muffled, indescribable sound, half squeal, half roar; a fountain of feathery snow, and two shots close together. Then a third shot.
Rosalie, rather pale, threw another cartridge in as Delancy picked himself out of a snow-bank and looked around him in astonishment.
"Well done, young lady!" cried Kemp, running a fistful of snow over the blade of his hunting-knife and nodding his admiration. "I guess it's just as well you disobeyed orders and let this funny pig have what was coming to him. Y' ain't hurt, are ye, Mr. Grandcourt?"
"No; he didn't hit me; I tripped on that root. Did I miss him?"
"Not at all," said Duane, kneeling down while Miller lifted the great fierce head. "You hit him all right, but it didn't stop him; it only turned him. Here's your second bullet, too; and Rosalie, yours did the business for him. Good for you! It's fine, isn't it, Geraldine?"
Grandcourt, flushing heavily, turned to Rosalie and held out his hand. "Thank you," he said; "the brute was right on top of me."
"Oh, no," she said honestly, "he'd missed you and was going straight on. I don't know how on earth I ever hit him, but I was so frightened to see you go over backward and I thought that he'd knocked you down, and I was perfectly furious–"
She gave a little sob of excitement, laughed unsteadily, and sat down on a fallen log, burying her face in her hands.
They knew enough to let her alone and pretend not to notice her. Geraldine chattered away cheerfully to the two men while the keepers drew the game. Delancy tried to listen to her, but his anxious eyes kept turning toward Rosalie, and at length, unable to endure it, he went over and sat down beside her, careless of what others might infer.
"How funny," whispered Geraldine to Duane. "I had no idea that Delancy was so fond of her. Had you?"
He started slightly. "I? Oh, no," he said hastily—too hastily. He was a very poor actor.
Gravely, head bent, she walked forward beside him after Grandcourt had announced that he and Rosalie had had enough and that they wished Kemp to take them and their game to the sleigh.
Once, looking back, she saw the procession moving in the opposite direction through the woods, Kemp leading, rope over his shoulder, dragging the dead boar across the snow; Grandcourt, both rifles slung across his back, big arm supporting Rosalie, who walked as though very tired, her bright head drooping, her arm resting on his shoulder.
Geraldine looked up at Duane thoughtfully, and he supposed that she was about to speak, but her gaze became remote; she shifted her rifle, and walked on.
Before they came to the wild, shaggy country below Cloudy Mountain she said:
"I've been thinking it over, Duane. I can see in it nothing that can concern anybody except themselves. Can you?"
"Not a thing, dear.... I'm sorry I suggested his coming. I knew about this, but I clean forgot it when I asked you to invite him."
"I remember, now, your consternation when you realised it," she said, smiling. "After all, Duane, if it is bound to happen, I don't mind it happening here.... Poor, lonely little Rosalie!… I'm depraved enough to be glad for her—if it is really to be so."
"I'm glad, too.... Only she ought to begin her action, I think. It's more prudent and better taste."
"You said once that you had a contempt for divorce."
"I never entertain the same opinion of anything two days in succession," he said, smiling. "When there is any one moral law that can justly cover every case which it is framed to govern, I'll be glad to remain more constant in my beliefs."
"Then you do believe in divorce?"
"To-day I happen to."
"Duane, is that your attitude toward everything?"
"Everything except you," he said cheerfully. "That is literally true. Even in my painting and in my liking for the work of others, I veer about like a weather-vane, never holding very long to one point of view."
"You're very frank about it."
"Why not?"
"Isn't it a—a weakness?"
"I don't think so," he said so simply that she tucked her arm under his with a soft, confidential laugh.
"You goose; do you suppose I think there is a weak fibre in you? I've always adored the strength in you—even when it was rough enough to bruise me. Listen, dear; there's only one thing you might possibly weaken on. Promise you won't."
"I promise."
"Then," she said triumphantly, "you'll take first shot at the big boar! Are you angry because I made you promise? If you only knew, dear, how happy I have been, saving the best I had to offer, in this forest, for you! You will make me happy, won't you?"
"Of course I will, you little trump!" he said, encircling her waist, forgetful of old Miller, plodding along behind them.
But it was no secret to old Miller, nor to any native in the country-side for a radius of forty miles. No modern invention can equal the wireless celerity that distributes information concerning other people's business throughout the rural wastes of this great and gossipping nation.
She made him release her, blushing hotly as she remembered that Miller was behind them, and she scolded her lover roundly, until later, in a moment of thoughtlessness, she leaned close to his shoulder and told him she adored him with every breath she drew, which was no sillier than his reply.
The long blue shadows on the snow and the pink bars of late sunlight had died out together. It had grown warmer and grayer in the forest; and after a little one or two snow-flakes came sifting down through the trees.
They had not jumped the big silver boar, nor had they found a trace of him among the trails that crossed and recrossed the silent reaches of the forest. Light was fading to the colourless, opaque gray which heralded a snow-storm as they reached the feeding-ground, spread out their fur coats, and dropped, belly down, to reconnoitre.
Nothing moved among the oaks. They lay listening minute after minute; no significant sound broke the silence, no dead branch cracked in the hemlocks.
She lay close to him for warmth, chin resting on his shoulder, her cheek against his. Their snow-shoes were stuck upright in a drift behind them; beside these squatted old Miller, listening, peering, nostrils working in the wind like an old dog's.
They waited and watched through a fine veil of snow descending; in the white silence there was not a sound save the silken flutter of a lonely chickadee, friendly, inquiring, dropping from twig to twig until its tiny bright eyes peered level with Geraldine's.
Evidently the great boar was not feeding before night. Duane turned his head restlessly; old Miller, too, had become impatient and they saw him prowling noiselessly down among the rocks, scrutinising snow and thickets, casting wise glances among the trees, shaking his white head as though communing with himself.
"Well, little girl," breathed Duane, "it looks doubtful, doesn't it?"
She turned on her side toward him, looking him in the eyes:
"Does it matter?"
"No," he said, smiling.
She reached out her arms; they settled close around his neck, clung for a second's passionate silence, released him and covered her flushed face, all but the mouth. Under them his lips met hers.
The next instant she was on her knees, pink-cheeked, alert, ears straining in the wind.
"Miller is coming back very fast!" she whispered to her lover. "I believe he has good news!"
Miller was coming fast, holding out in one hand something red and gray—something that dangled and flapped as he strode—something that looked horrible and raw.
"Damn him!" said the old man fiercely, "no wonder he ain't a-feedin'! Look at this, Miss Seagrave. There's more of it below—a hull mess of it in the snow."
"It's a big strip of deer-hide—all raw and bleeding!" faltered the girl. "What in the world has happened?"
"His work," said Miller grimly.
"The—the big boar?"
"Yes'm. The deer yard over there. He sneaked in on 'em last night and this doe must have got stuck in a drift. And that devil caught her and pulled her down and tore her into bits. Why, the woods is all scattered with shreds o' hide like this! I wish to God you or Mr. Mallett could get one crack at him! I do, by thunder! Yes'm!"
But it was already too dusky among the trees to sight a rifle. In silence they strapped up the coats, fastened on snow-shoes, and moved out along the bare spur of the mountain, where there was still daylight in the open, although the thickening snow made everything gray and vague.
Here and there a spectral tree loomed up among the rocks; a white hare's track, paralleled by the big round imprints of a lynx, ran along the unseen path they followed as Miller guided them toward Westgate.
Later, outlined in the white waste, ancient apple-trees appeared, gnarled relics of some long-abandoned clearing; and, as they passed, Duane chanced to glance across the rocks to the left.
At first he thought he saw something move, but began to make up his mind that he was deceived.
Noticing that he had halted, Geraldine came back, and then Miller returned to where he stood, squinting through the falling flakes in the vague landscape beyond.
"It moved; I seen it," whispered Miller hoarsely.
"It's a deer," motioned Geraldine; "it's too big for anything else."
For five minutes in perfect silence they watched the gray, flat forms of scrub and rock; and Duane was beginning to lose faith in everybody's eyes when, without warning, a huge, colourless shape detached itself from the flat silhouettes and moved leisurely out into the open.
There was no need to speak; trembling slightly, he cleared his rifle sight of snow, steadied his nerves, raised the weapon, and fired.
A horrid sort of scream answered the shot; the boar lurched off among the rocks, and after him at top speed ran Duane and Miller, while Geraldine, on swift skis, sped eastward like the wind to block retreat to the mountain. She heard Duane's rifle crack again, then again; heard a heavy rush in the thicket in front of her, lifted her rifle, fired, was hurled sideways on the rocks, and knew no more until she unclosed her bewildered eyes in her lover's arms.
A sharp pain shot through her; she gasped, turned very white, and lay with wide eyes and parted lips staring at Duane.
Suddenly a penetrating aroma filled her lungs; with all her strength she pushed away the flask at her lips.
"No! No! Not that! I will not, Duane!"
"Dear," he said unsteadily, "you are very badly hurt. We are trying to carry you back. You must let me give you this–"
"No," she sobbed, "I will not! Duane—I—" Pain made her faint; her grasp on his arm tightened convulsively; with a supreme effort she struck the flask out of his hand and dropped back unconscious.
CHAPTER XXIII
SINE DIE
The message ran:
"My sister badly hurt in an accident; concussion, intermittent consciousness. We fear spinal and internal injury. What train can you catch?
Scott Seagrave."
Which telegram to Josiah Bailey, M.D., started that eminent general practitioner toward Roya-Neh in company with young Dr. Goss, a surgeon whose brilliancy and skill did not interfere with his self-restraint when there were two ways of doing things.
They were to meet in an hour at the 5.07 train; but before Dr. Bailey set out for the rendezvous, and while his man was still packing his suit-case, the physician returned to his office, where a patient waited, head hanging, picking nervously at his fingers, his prominent, watery eyes fixed on vacancy.
The young man neither looked up nor stirred when the doctor entered and reseated himself, picking up a pencil and pad. He thought a moment, squinted through his glasses, and continued writing the prescription which the receipt of the telegram from Roya-Neh had interrupted.
When he had finished he glanced over the slip of paper, removed his gold-rimmed reading spectacles, folded them, balanced them thoughtfully in the palm of his large and healthy hand, considering the young fellow before him with grave, far-sighted eyes:
"Stuyvesant," he said, "this prescription is not going to cure you. No medicine that I can give you is going to perform any such miracle unless you help yourself. Nothing on earth that man has invented, or is likely to invent, can cure your disease unless by God's grace the patient pitches in and helps himself. Is that plain talk?"
Quest nodded and reached shakily for the prescription; but the doctor withheld it.
"You asked for plain talk; are you listening to what I'm saying?"
"Oh, hell, yes," burst out Quest; "I'm going to pull myself together. Didn't I tell you I would? But I've got to get a starter first, haven't I? I've got to have something to key me up first. I've explained to you that it's this crawling, squirming movement on the backs of my hands that I can't stand for. I want it stopped; I'll take anything you dope out; I'll do any turn you call for–"
"Very well. I've told you to go to Mulqueen's. Go now!"
"All right, doctor. Only they're too damn rough with a man. All right; I'll go. I did go last winter, and look where I am now!" he snarled suddenly. "Have I got to get up against all that business again?"
"You came out in perfectly good shape. It was up to you," said the doctor, coldly using the vernacular.
"How was it up to me? You all say that! How was it? I understood that if I cut it out and went up there and let that iron-fisted Irishman slam me around, that I'd come out all right. And the first little baby-drink I hit began the whole thing again!"
"Why did you take it? You didn't have to."
"I wanted it," retorted Quest angrily.
"Not badly enough to make self-control impossible. That's what you went up there for, to get back self-control. You got it but didn't use it. Do you think there is any sort of magic serum Mulqueen or I or anybody under Heaven can pump into you that will render you immune from the consequences of making an alcohol sewer of yourself?"
"I certainly supposed I could come out and drink like a gentleman," said the young man sullenly.
"Drink like a—what? A gentleman? What's that? What's drinking like a gentleman? I don't know what it is. You either drink alcohol or you don't; you either swill it or you don't. Anybody can do either. I'm not aware that either is peculiar to a gentleman. But I know that both are peculiar to fools."
Quest muttered, picking his fingers, and cast an ugly side look at the physician.
"I don't know what you just said," snapped Dr. Bailey, "but I'll tell you this: alcohol is poison and it has not—and never had—in any guise whatever, the slightest compensating value for internal use. It isn't a food; it's a poison; it isn't a beneficial stimulant; it's a poison; it isn't an aid to digestion; it's a poison; it isn't a life saver; it's a life taker. It's a parasite, forger, thief, pander, liar, brutalizer, murderer!
"Those are the plain facts. There isn't, and there never has been, one word to say for it or any excuse, except morbid predisposition or self-inculcated inclination, to offer for swallowing it. Now go to your brewers, your wine merchants, your champagne touts, your fool undergraduates, your clubmen, your guzzling viveurs—and they'll all tell you the contrary. So will some physicians. And you can take your choice. Any ass can. That is all, my boy."
The young man glowered sulkily at the prescription.
"Do I understand that this will stop the jumps?"
"If you really believe that, you have never heard me say so," snapped Dr. Bailey.
"Well, what the devil will it do?"
"The directions are there. You have my memorandum of the régime you are to follow. It will quiet you till you get to Mulqueen's. Those two bits of paper, however, are useless unless you help yourself. If you want to become convalescent you can—even yet. It won't be easy; it will hurt; but you can do it, as I say, even yet. But it is you who must do it, not I or that bit of paper or Mulqueen!
"Just now you happen to want to get well because the effect of alcohol poison disturbs you. Things crawl, as you say, on the back of your hand. Naturally, you don't care for such phenomena.
"Well, I've given you the key to mental and physical regeneration. Yours is not an inherited appetite; yours is not one of those almost foredoomed and pitiable cases. It's a stupid case; and a case of gross self-indulgence in stupidity that began in idleness. And that, my son, is the truth."
"Is that so?" sneered Quest, rising and pocketing the prescription.
"Yes, it is so. I've known your family for forty years, Stuyvesant. I knew your parents; I exonerate them absolutely. Sheer laziness and wilful depravity is what has brought you here to me on this errand. You deliberately acquired a taste for intoxicants; you haven't one excuse, one mitigating plea to offer for what you've done to yourself.
"You stood high in school and in college; you were Phi Beta Kappa, a convincing debater, a plausible speaker, an excellent writer of good English—by instinct a good newspaper man. Also you were a man adapted by nature to live regularly and beyond the coarser temptations. But you were lazy!"
Dr. Bailey struck his desk in emphasis.
"The germ of your self-indulgence lay in gross selfishness. You did what pleased you; and it suited you to do nothing. I'm telling you how you've betrayed yourself—how far you'll have to climb to win back. Some men need a jab with a knife to start their pride; some require a friend's strong helping arm around them. You need the jab. I'm trying to administer it without anæsthetics, by telling you what some men think of you—that it is your monstrous selfishness that has distorted your normal common sense and landed you where you are.
"Selfishness alone has resulted in a most cruel and unnatural neglect of your sister—your only living relative—in a deliberate relapse into slothful and vicious habits; in neglect of a most promising career which was already yours; in a contemptible willingness to live on your sister's income after gambling away your own fortune.
"I know you; I carried you through teething and measles, my son: and I've carried you through the horrors of alcoholic delirium. And I say to you now that, with the mental degeneration already apparent, and your naturally quick temper, if you break down a few more cells in that martyred brain of yours, you'll end in an asylum—possibly one reserved for the criminal insane."
A dull colour stained the pasty whiteness of Quest's face. For several minutes he stood there, his fingers working and picking at each other, his pale, prominent eyes glaring.
"That's a big indictment, doctor," he said at last.
"Thank God you think it so," returned the doctor. "If you will stand by your better self for one week—for only one week—after leaving Mulqueen's, I'll stand by you for life, my boy. Come! You were a good sport once. And that little sister of yours is worth it. Come, Stuyvesant; is it a bargain?"
He stepped forward and held out his large, firm, reassuring hand. The young fellow took it limply.
"Done with you, doctor," he said without conviction; "it's hell for mine, I suppose, if I don't make my face behave. You're right; I'm the goat; and if I don't quit butting I'll sure end by slapping some sissy citizen with an axe."
He gave the doctor's hand a perfunctory shake with his thin, damp fingers; dropped it, turned to go, halted, retraced his steps.
"Will it give me the willies if I kiss a cocktail good-bye before I start for that fresh guy, Mulqueen?"
"Start now, I tell you! Haven't I your word?"
"Yes—but on the way to buy transportation can't I offer myself one last–"
"Can't you be a good sport, Stuyve?"
The youth hesitated, scowled.
"Oh, very well," he said carelessly, turned and went out.
As he walked along in the slush he said to himself: "I guess it's up the river for mine.... By God, it's a shame, for I'm feeling pretty good, too, and that's no idle quip!… Old Squills handed out a line of talk all right-o!… He landed it, too.... I ought to find something to do."
As he walked, a faint glow stimulated his enervated intelligence; ideas, projects long abandoned, desires forgotten, even a far echo from the old ambition stirring in its slumber, quickened his slow pulses. The ghost of what he might have been, nay, what he could have made himself, rose wavering in his path. Other ghosts, long laid, floated beside him, accompanying him—the ghosts of dead opportunities, dead ideals, lofty inspirations long, long strangled.
"A job," he muttered; "that's the wholesome dope for Willy. There isn't a newspaper or magazine in town where I can't get next if I speak easy. I can deliver the goods, too; it's like wiping swipes off a bar–"
In his abstraction he had walked into the Holland House, and he suddenly became conscious that he was confronting a familiarly respectful bartender.
"Oh, hell," he said, greatly disconcerted, "I want some French vichy, Gus!" He made a wry face, and added: "Put a dash of tabasco in it, and salt it."
A thick-lipped, ruddy-cheeked young fellow, celebrated for his knowledge of horses, also notorious for other and less desirable characteristics, stood leaning against the bar, watching him.
They nodded civilly to one another. Quest swallowed his peppered vichy, pulled a long face and said:
"We're a pair of 'em, all right."
"Pair of what?" inquired the thick-lipped young man, face becoming rosier and looking more than ever like somebody's groom.
"Pair of bum whips. We've laid on the lash too hard. I'm going to stable my five nags—my five wits!"—he explained with a sneer as the other regarded him with all the bovine intelligence of one of his own stable-boys—"because they're foundered; and that's the why, young four-in-hand!"
He left the bar, adding as he passed:
"I'm a rotting citizen, but you"—he laughed insolently—"you have become phosphorescent!"
The street outside was all fog and melting snow; the cold vichy he had gulped made him internally uncomfortable.
"A gay day to go to Mulqueen's," he muttered sourly, gazing about for a taxicab.
There was none for hire at that moment; he walked on for a while, feeling the freezing slush penetrate his boot-soles; and by degrees a sullen temper rose within him, revolting—not at what he had done to himself—but at the consequences which were becoming more unpleasant every moment.
As he trudged along, slipping, sliding, his overcoat turned up around his pasty face, his cheeks wet with the icy fog, he continued swearing to himself, at himself, at the slush, the cold vichy in his belly, the appetite already awakened which must be denied.
Denied?… Was he never to have one more decent drink? Was this to be the absolute and final end? Certainly. Yet his imagination could not really comprehend, compass, picture to himself life made a nuisance by self-denial—life in any other guise except as a background for inertia and indulgence.
He swore again, profanely asking something occult why he should be singled out to be made miserable on a day like this? Why, among all the men he knew, he must go skulking about, lapping up cold mineral water and cocking one ear to the sounds of human revelry within the Tavern.
As for his work—yes, he ought to do it.... Interest in it was already colder; the flare-up was dying down; habitual apathy chilled it to its embers. Indifference, ill-temper, self-pity, resentment, these were the steps he was slowly taking backward. He took them, in their natural sequence, one by one.
Old Squills meant well, no doubt, but he had been damned impertinent.... And why had Old Squills dragged in his sister, Sylvia?… He had paid as much attention to her as any brother does to any sister.... And how had she repaid him?
Head lowered doggedly against the sleet which was now falling thickly, he shouldered his way forward, brooding on his "honour," on his sister, on Dysart.
He had not been home in weeks; he did not know of his sister's departure with Bunny Gray. She had left a letter at home for him, because she knew no other addresses except his clubs; and inquiry over the telephone elicited the information that he had not been to any of them.
But he was going to one of them now. He needed something to kill that vichy; he'd have one more honest drink in spite of all the Old Squills and Mulqueens in North America!
At the Cataract Club there were three fashion-haunting young men drinking hot Scotches: Dumont, his empurpled skin distended with whiskey and late suppers, and all his former brilliancy and wit cankered and rotten with it, and his slim figure and clean-cut face fattened and flabby with it; Myron Kelter, thin, elegant, exaggerated, talking eternally about women and his successes with the frailer ones—Myron Kelter, son of a gentleman, eking out his meagre income by fetching, carrying, pandering to the rich, who were too fastidious to do what they paid him for doing in their behalf; and the third, Forbes Winton, literary dilettante, large in every feature and in waistcoat and in gesture—large, hard, smooth—very smooth, and worth too many millions to be contradicted when misstating facts to suit the colour of his too luxuriant imagination.
These greeted Quest in their several and fashionably wearied manners, inviting his soul to loaf.
Later he had a slight dispute with Winton, who surveyed him coldly, and insolently repeated his former misstatement of a notorious fact.
"What rot!" said Quest; "I leave it to you, Kelter; am I right or not?"
Kelter began a soft and soothing discourse which led nowhere at first but ended finally in a re-order for four hot Scotches.
Then Dumont's witty French blood—or the muddied dregs which were left of it—began to be perversely amusing at Quest's expense. Epigrams slightly frayed, a jest or two a trifle stale, humorous inversions of well-known maxims, a biting retort, the originality of which was not entirely free from suspicion, were his contributions to the festivities.
Later Kelter's nicely modulated voice and almost affectionate manner restrained Quest from hurling his glass at the inflamed countenance of Mr. Dumont. But it did not prevent him from leaving the room in a vicious temper, and, ultimately, the Cataract Club.
The early winter night had turned cold and clear; sidewalks glittered, sheeted with ice. He inhaled a deep breath and expelled a reeking one, hailed a cab, and drove to the railroad station.
Here he bought his tickets, choosing a midnight train; for the journey to Mulqueen's was not a very long one; he could sleep till seven in the car; and, besides, he had his luggage to collect from the hotel he had been casually inhabiting. Also he had not yet dined.
Bodily he felt better, now that the vichy had been "killed"; mentally his temper became more vicious than ever as he thought of Dumont's blunted wit at his expense—a wit with edge enough left to make a ragged, nasty wound.
"He'll get what's coming to him some day," snarled Quest, returning to his cab; and he bade the driver take him to the Amphitheatre, a restaurant resort, wonderful in terra-cotta rocks, papier-maché grottos, and Croton waterfalls—haunted of certain semi-distinguished pushers of polite professions, among whom he had been known for years.
The place was one vast eruption of tiny electric lights, and the lights of "the profession," and the demi-monde. Virtue and its antithesis disguised alike in silk attire and pearl collars, rubbed elbows unconcernedly among the papier-maché grottos; the cascades foamed with municipal water, waiters sweated and scurried, lights winked and glimmered, and the music and electric fans annoyed nobody.
In its usual grotto Quest found the usual group, was welcomed automatically, sat down at one of the tables, and gave his order.
