The Crimson Tide: A Novel

Afterward Palla explained that she was a celebrated sociologist, but Jim remained shy of her.

Other people came in after dinner. Vanya seated himself at the piano and played from one of his unpublished scores. Ilse sang two Scandinavian songs in her fresh, wholesome, melodious voice–the song called Ygdrasil, and the Song of Thokk. Wardner had brought a violin, and he and Vanya accompanied Marya’s Asiatic songs, but with some difficulty on the sculptor’s part, as modern instruments are scarcely adapted to the sort of Russian music she chose to sing.

Marya had a way, when singing, which appeared almost insolent. Seated, or carelessly erect, her supple figure fell into lines of indolently provocative grace; and the warm, golden notes welling from her throat seemed to be flung broadcast and indifferently to her listeners, as alms are often flung, without interest, toward abstract poverty and not to the poor breathing thing at one’s elbow.

She sang, in her preoccupied way, one of her savage, pentatonic songs, more Mongol than Cossack; then she sang an impudent burlatskiya lazily defiant of her listeners; then a so-called “dancing song,” in which there was little restraint in word or air.

The subtly infernal enchantment of girl and music was felt by everybody; but several among the illuminati and the fair ultra-modernettes had now reached their limit of breadth and tolerance, and were becoming bored and self-conscious, when abruptly Marya’s figure straightened to a lovely severity, her mouth opened sweetly as a cherub’s, and, looking up like a little, ruddy bird, she sang one of the ancient Kolyadki, Vanya alone understanding as his long, thin fingers wandered instinctively into an improvised accompaniment:

I“Young tearsYour fears disguise;He is not coming!Sweet lipsLet slip no sighs;Cease, heart, your drumming!He is not coming,Lada! 1He is not coming.Lada oy Lada!“Gaze not in wonder,–Yonder no rider comes;Hark how the kettle-drumsMock his hoofs’ thunder;Hark to their thudding,Pretty breasts budding,–Setting the Buddhist bellsClanking and banging,–Wheels at the hidden wellsClinking and clanging!(Lada oy Lada!)Plough the flower under;Tear it asunder!“Young eyesIn swift surprise,What terror veils you?Clear eyes,Who gallops here?What wolf assails you?What horseman hails you,Lada!What pleasure pales you?Lada oy Lada!“Knight who rides boldly,May Erlik impale you,–Your mother bewail you,If you use her coldly!Health to the wedding!Joy to the bedding!Set all the Christian bellsSwinging and ringing–Monks in their stony cellsChanting and singing(Lada oy Lada!)Bud of the rose,Gently unclose!”

Marya, her gemmed fingers bracketed on her hips, the last sensuous note still afloat on her lips, turned her head so that her rounded chin rested on her bare shoulder; and looked at Shotwell. He rose, applauding with the others, and found a chair for her.

But when she seated herself, she addressed Ilse on the other side of him, leaning so near that he felt the warmth of her hair.

“Who was it wrestled with Loki? Was it Hel, goddess of death? Or was it Thor who wrestled with that toothless hag, Thokk?”

Ilse explained.

The conversation became general, vaguely accompanied by Vanya’s drifting improvisations, where he still sat at the piano, his lost gaze on Marya.

Bits of the chatter around him came vaguely to Shotwell–the birth-control lady’s placid inclination toward obstetrics; Wardner on concentration, with Palla listening, bending forward, brown eyes wide and curious and snowy hands framing her face; Ilse partly turned where she was seated, alert, flushed, half smiling at what John Estridge, behind her shoulder, was saying to her,–some improvised nonsense, of which Jim caught a fragment:

“If he who dwells in MidgardWith cunning can not floor her,What hope that Mistress WestgardWill melt if I implore her?“And yet I’ve come to Asgard,And hope I shall not bore herIf I tell Mistress WestgardHow deeply I adore her–”

Through the hum of conversation and capricious laughter, Vanya’s vague music drifted like wind-blown thistle-down, and his absent regard never left Marya, where she rested among the cushions in low-voiced dialogue with Jim.

“I had hoped,” she smiled, “that you had perhaps remembered me–enough to stop for a word or two some day at tea-time.”

He had had no intention of going; but he said that he had meant to and would surely do so,–the while she was leisurely recognising the lie as it politely uncoiled.

“Why won’t you come?” she asked under her breath.

“I shall certainly–”

“No; you won’t come.” She seemed amused: “Tell me, are you too a concentrationist?” And her beryl-green eyes barely flickered toward Palla. Then she smiled and laid her hand lightly on her breast: “I, on the contrary, am a Diffusionist. It’s merely a matter of how God grinds the lens. But prisms colour one’s dull white life so gaily!”

“And split it up,” he said, smiling.

“And disintegrate it,” she nodded, “–so exquisitely.”

“Into rainbows.”

“You do not believe that there is hidden gold there?” And, looking at him, she let one hand rest lightly against her hair.

“Yes. I believe it,” he said, laughing at her enchanting effrontery. “But, Marya, when the rainbow goes a-glimmering, the same old grey world is there again. It’s always there–”

“Awaiting another rainbow!”

“But storms come first.”

“Is another rainbow not worth the storm?”

“Is it?” he demanded.

“Shall we try?” she asked carelessly.

He did not answer. But presently he looked across at Vanya.

“Who is there who would not love him?” said Marya serenely.

“I was wondering.”

“No need. All love Vanya. I, also.”

“I thought so.”

“Think so. For it is quite true… Will you come to tea alone with me some afternoon?”

He looked at her; reddened. Marya turned her head leisurely, to hear what Palla was saying to her. At the sound of her voice, Jim turned also, and saw Palla bending near his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she was saying to Marya, “but Questa Terrett desires to know Jim–”

“Is it any wonder,” said Marya, “that women should desire to know him? Alas!–” She laughed and turned to Ilse, who seated herself as Jim stood up.

Palla, her finger-tips resting lightly on his arm, said laughingly: “Our youthful and tawny enchantress seemed unusually busy with you this evening. Has she turned you into anything very disturbing?”

“Would you care?”

“Of course.”

“Enough to come to earth and interfere?”

“Good heavens, has it gone as far as that!” she whispered in gay consternation. “And could I really arrive in time, though breathless?”

He laughed: “You don’t need to stir from your niche, sweetness. I swept your altar once. I’ll keep the fire clean.”

“You adorable thing–” He felt the faintest pressure of her fingers; then he heard himself being presented to Questa Terrett.

The frail and somewhat mortuary beauty of this slim poetess, with her full-lipped profile of an Egyptian temple-girl and her pale, still eyes, left him guessing–rather guiltily–recollecting his recent but meaningless disrespect.

“I don’t know,” she said, “just why you are here. Soldiers are no novelty. Is somebody in love with you?”

It was a toss-up whether he’d wither or laugh, but the demon of gaiety won out.

She also smiled.

“I asked you,” she added, “because you seem to be quite featureless.”

“Oh, I’ve a few eyes and noses and that sort–”

“I mean psychologically accentless.”

“Just plain man?”

“Yes. That is all you are, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid it is,” he admitted, quite as much amused as she appeared to be.

“I see. Some crazy girl here is enamoured of you. Otherwise, you scarcely belong among modern intellectuals, you know.”

At that he laughed outright.

She said: “You really are delightful. You’re just a plain, fighting male, aren’t you?”

“Well, I haven’t done much fighting–”

“Unimaginative, too! You could have led yourself to believe you had done a lot,” she pointed out. “And maybe you could have interested me.”

“I’m sorry. But suppose you try to interest me?”

“Don’t I? I’ve tried.”

“Do your best,” he encouraged her cheerfully. “You never can be sure I’m not listening.”

At that she laughed: “You nice youth,” she said, “if you’d talk that way to your sweetheart she’d sit up and listen… Which I’m afraid she doesn’t, so far.”

He felt himself flushing, but he refused to wince under her amused analysis.

“You’ve simply got to have imagination, you know,” she insisted. “Otherwise, you don’t get anywhere at all. Have you read my smears?”

“Smears?”

“Bacteriologists take a smear of something on a glass slide and slip it under a microscope. My poems are like that. The words are the bacteria. Few can identify them.”

“Are you serious?”

“Entirely.”

He maintained his gravity: “Would you be kind enough to take a smear and let me look?” he inquired politely.

“Certainly: the experiment is called ‘Unpremeditation.’”

She dropped one thin and silken knee over the other and crossed her hands on it as she recited her poem.

“UNPREMEDITATION.”“In the tube.Several,With intonation.Red, red, red.A square fabricOnce whiteWith intention.Soiled, soiled, soiled.Six hundred hundred millionSwarm like vermin,Without intention.Redder. Redder.Drip, drip, drip.A goes west,B goes east,C goes north,Pink, pink, pink.Two white squares.And a coat-sleeve.Without intention,Intonations.Pinker. Redder.Six hundred hundred million.Billions. Trillions.A week. Two weeks.Otherwise?Eternity.”

Jim’s features had become a trifle glassy. “You do skip a few words,” he said, “don’t you?”

“Words are animalculæ. Some skip, some gyrate, some sub-divide.”

He put a brave face on the matter: “If you’re not really guying me,” he ventured, “would you tell me a little about your poem?”

“Why, yes,” she replied amiably. “To put it redundantly, then, I have sketched in my poem a man in the subway, with influenza, which infects others in his vicinity.”

She rose, smiled, and sauntered off, leaving him utterly unable to determine whether or not he had been outrageously imposed upon. Palla rescued him, and he went with her, a little wild-eyed, downstairs to the nearly empty and carpetless drawing-room, where a music box was playing and people were already dancing.

Toward midnight, Marya, passing Jim on her way to the front door, leaned wide from Vanya’s arm:

“Let us at least discuss my rainbow theory,” she said, laughing, and her face a shade too close to his; and continued on, still clinging to the sleeve of Vanya’s fur-lined coat.

Ilse was the last to leave, with Estridge waiting behind her to hold her wrap.

She came up to Palla, took both her hands in an odd, subdued, wistful way.

After a moment she kissed her, and, close to her ear: “Wait, darling.”

Palla did not understand.

Ilse said: “I mean–wait before you ever take any step to–to prove any theory–or belief.”

Still Palla did not comprehend.

“With–Jim,” said Ilse in a low voice.

“Oh. Why, of course. But–it could never happen.”

“Why?”

Palla said honestly: “One reason is because he wouldn’t anyway.”

“You must not be certain.”

“I am. I’m absolutely certain.”

Ilse gazed at her, then laughed and pressed her hand. “Are you cold?” asked Palla.

“No.”

“I thought I felt you shiver, dearest.”

Ilse flushed and held out her arms for the sleeves of her fur coat, which Estridge was holding.

They went away together, leaving Palla alone with Shotwell, among the fading flowers.

CHAPTER XV

“So,” said Puma, “you are quite convinced he has much wealth. Yes?”

“You betcha,” replied Elmer Skidder. “That pious guy has got all kinds of it. Why, Alonzo D. Pawling can buy you and me like we were two subway tickets and then forget which pocket he put us in.”

“He also is a sport? Yes?”

“On the quiet. Oh, I got his number some years ago. Ran into him once in New York, where you used to knock three times and ring twice before they slid the panel on you.”

“A bank president?”

“Did you ever know one that didn’t?” grinned Skidder, inserting pearl studs in his shirt.

“It is very bad–for a shake-down,” mused Puma, smoothing his glossy top hat with one of Skidder’s silk mufflers.

“Aw, you can’t scare Alonzo D. Pawling. Say, Angy, what dames have you commandeered?”

“I ask Barclay and West. Also, they got another–Vanna Brown.”

“Pictures?”

“No, she has a friend.”

Skidder continued to attire himself in an over-braided evening dress; Puma, seated behind him, gazed absently at his partner’s features reflected in the looking glass.

“A theatre on Broadway,” he mused. “You say he has seemed interested, Elmer?”

“He didn’t run away screaming.”

“How did he behave?”

“Well, it’s hard to size up Alonzo D. Pawling. He’s a fly guy, Angy. What a man says at a little supper for four, with a peach pulling his Depews and a good looker sticking gardenias in his buttonhole, ain’t what he’s likely to say next day in your office.”

“You have accompany him to Broadway and you have shown him the parcel?”

“I sure did.”

“You explain how we can not lose out? You mention the option?”

Skidder cast aside his white tie and tried another, constructed on the butterfly plan.

“I put the whole thing up to him,” he said. “No use stalling with Alonzo D. Pawling. I know him too well. So I let out straight from the shoulder, and he knows the scheme we’ve got in mind and he knows we want his money in it. That’s how it stands to-night.”

Puma nodded and softly joined his over-manicured finger-tips:

“We give him a good time,” he said. “We give him a little dinner like there never was in New York. Yes?”

“You betcha.”

“Barclay is a devil. You think she please him?”

“Alonzo D. Pawling is some bird himself,” remarked Skidder, picking up his hat and turning to Puma, who rose with lithe briskness, put on his hat, and began to pull at his white gloves.

They went down to the street, where Puma’s car was waiting.

“I stop at the office a moment,” he said, as they entered the limousine. “You need not get out, Elmer.”

At the studio he descended, saying to Skidder that he’d be back in a moment.

But it was very evident when he entered his office that he had not expected to find Max Sondheim there; and he hesitated on the threshold, his white-gloved hand still on the door-knob.

“Come in, Puma; I want to see you,” growled Sondheim, retaining his seat but pocketing The Call, which he had been reading.

“To-morrow,” said Puma coolly; “I have no time–”

“No, now!” interrupted Sondheim.

They eyed each other for a moment in silence, then Puma shrugged:

“Very well,” he said. “But be quick, if you please–”

“Look here,” interrupted the other in a menacing voice, “you’re getting too damned independent, telling me to be quick! I had a date with you here at five o’clock. You thought you wouldn’t keep it and you left at four-thirty. But I stuck around till you ’phoned in that you’d stop here to get some money. It’s seven o’clock now, and I’ve waited for you. And I guess you’ve got enough time to hear what I’m going to say.”

Puma looked at him without any expression at all on his sanguine features. “Go on,” he said.

“What I got to say to you is this,” began Sondheim. “There’s a kind of a club that uses our hall on off nights. It’s run by women.”

Puma waited.

“They meet this evening at eight in our hall,–your hall, if you choose.”

Puma nodded carelessly.

“All right. Put them out.”

“What?”

“Put ’em out!” growled Sondheim. “We don’t want them there to-night or any other night.”

“You ask me to evict respectable people who pay me rent?”

“I don’t ask you; I tell you.”

Puma turned a deep red: “And whose hall do you think it is?” he demanded in a silky voice.

“Yours. That’s why I tell you to get rid of that bunch and their Combat Club.”

“Why have you ask me such a–”

“Because they’re fighting us and you know it. That’s a good enough reason.”

“I shall not do so,” said Puma, moistening his lips with his tongue.

“Oh, I guess you will when you think it over,” sneered Sondheim, getting up from his chair and stuffing his newspaper into his overcoat pocket. He crossed the floor and shot an ugly glance at Puma en passant. Then he jerked open the door and went out briskly.

Puma walked into the inner waiting room, where a telephone operator sat reading a book.

“Where’s McCabe?” he asked.

“Here he comes now, Governor.”

The office manager sauntered up, eating a slice of apple pie, and Puma stepped forward to meet him.

“For what reason have you permit Mr. Sondheim to wait in my office?” he demanded.

“He said you told him to go in and wait there.”

“He is a liar! Hereafter he shall wait out here. You understand, McCabe?”

“Yes, sir. You’re always out when he calls, ain’t you?”

Puma meditated a few moments: “No. When he calls you shall let me know. Then I decide. But he shall not wait in my office.”

“Very good, sir.” And, as Puma turned to go: “The police was here again this evening, sir.”

“Why?”

“They heard of the row in the hall last night.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Oh, the muss was all swept up–windows fixed and the busted benches in the furnace, so I said there had been no row as far as I knew, and I let ’em go in and nose around.”

“Next time,” said Puma, “you shall say to them that there was a very bad riot.”

“Sir?”

“A big fight,” continued Puma. “And if there is only a little damage you shall make more. And you shall show it to the police.”

“I get you, Governor. I’ll stage it right; don’t worry.”

“Yes, you shall stage it like there never was in all of France any ruins like my hall! And afterward,” he said, half to himself, “we shall see what we shall see.”

He went back to his office, took a packet of hundred dollar bills from the safe, and walked slowly out to where the limousine awaited him.

“Say, what the hell–” began Skidder impatiently; but Puma leaped lightly to his seat and pulled the fur robe over his knees.

“Now,” he said, in excellent humour, “we pick up Mr. Pawling at the Astor.”

“Where are the ladies?”

“They join us, Hotel Rajah. It will be, I trust, an amusing evening.”

About midnight, dinner merged noisily into supper in the private dining room reserved by Mr. Puma for himself and guests at the new Hotel Rajah.

There had been intermittent dancing during the dinner, but now the negro jazz specialists had been dismissed with emoluments, and a music-box substituted; and supper promised to become even a more lively repetition of the earlier banquet.

Puma was superb–a large, heavy man, he danced as lightly as any ballerina; and he and Tessa Barclay did a Paraguayan dance together, with a leisurely and agile perfection of execution that elicited uproarious demonstrations from the others.

Not a whit winded, Puma resumed his seat at table, laughing as Mr. Pawling insisted on shaking hands with him.

“You are far too kind to my poor accomplishments,” he said in deprecation. “It was not at all difficult, that Paraguayan dance.”

“It was art!” insisted Mr. Pawling, his watery eyes brimming with emotion. And he pressed the pretty waist of Tessa Barclay.

“Art,” rejoined Puma, laying a jewelled hand on his shirt-front, “is an ecstatic outburst from within, like the song of the bird. Art is simple; art is not difficult. Where effort begins, art ends. Where self-expression becomes a labour, art already has perished!”

He thumped his shirt-front with an impassioned and highly-coloured fist.

“What is art?” he cried, “if it be not pleasure? And pleasure ceases where effort begins. For me, I am all heart, all art, like there never was in all the history of the Renaissance. As expresses itself the little innocent bird in song, so in my pictures I express myself. It is no effort. It is in me. It is born. Behold! Art has given birth to Beauty!”

“And the result,” added Skidder, “is a ne plus ultra par excellence which gathers in the popular coin every time. And say, if we had a Broadway theatre to run our stuff, and Angelo Puma to soopervise the combine–oh boy!–” He smote Mr. Pawling upon his bony back and dug him in the ribs with his thumb.

Mr. Pawling’s mouth sagged and his melancholy eyes shifted around him from Tessa Barclay–who was now attempting to balance a bon-bon on her nose and catch it between her lips–to Vanna Brown, teaching Miss West to turn cart-wheels on one hand.

Evidently Art had its consolations; and the single track genius who lived for art alone got a bonus, too. Also, what General Sherman once said about Art seemed to be only too obvious.

A detail, however, worried Mr. Pawling. Financially, he had always been afraid of Jews. And the nose of Angelo Puma made him uneasy every time he looked at it.

But an inch is a mile on a man’s nose; and his own was bigger, yet entirely Yankee; so he had about concluded that there was no racial occasion for financial alarm.

What he should have known was that no Jew can compete with a Connecticut Yankee; but that any half-cast Armenian is master of both. Especially when born in Mexico of a Levantine father.

Now, in spite of Angelo Puma’s agile gaiety and exotic exuberances, his brain remained entirely occupied with two matters. One of these concerned the possibility of interesting Mr. Pawling in a plot of ground on Broadway, now defaced by several taxpayers.

The other matter which fitfully preoccupied him was his unpleasant and unintentional interview with Sondheim.

For it had come to a point, now, that the perpetual bullying of former associates was worrying Mr. Puma a great deal in his steadily increasing prosperity.

The war was over. Besides, long ago he had prudently broken both his pledged word and his dangerous connections in Mexico, and had started what he believed to be a safe and legitimate career in New York, entirely free from perilous affiliations.

Government had investigated his activities; Government had found nothing for which to order his internment as an enemy alien.

It had been a close call. Puma realised that. But he had also realised that there was no law in Mexico ten miles outside of Mexico City;–no longer any German power there, either;–when he severed all connections with those who had sent him into the United States camouflaged as a cinema promoter, and under instruction to do all the damage he could to everything American.

But he had not counted on renewing his acquaintance with Karl Kastner and Max Sondheim in New York. Nor did they reveal themselves to him until he had become too prosperous to denounce them and risk investigation and internment under the counter-accusations with which they coolly threatened him.

So, from the early days of his prosperity in New York, it had been necessary for him to come to an agreement with Sondheim and Kastner. And the more his prosperity increased the less he dared to resent their petty tyranny and blackmail, because, whether or not they might suffer under his public accusations, it was very certain that internment, if not imprisonment for a term of years, would be the fate reserved for himself. And that, of course, meant ruin.

So, although Puma ate and drank and danced with apparent abandon, and flashed his dazzling smile over everybody and everything, his mind, when not occupied by Alonzo D. Pawling, was bothered by surmises concerning Sondheim. And also, at intervals, he thought of Palla Dumont and the Combat Club, and he wondered uneasily whether Sondheim’s agents had attempted to make any trouble at the meeting in his hall that evening.

There had been some trouble. The meeting being a public one, under municipal permission, Kastner had sent a number of his Bolshevik followers there, instructed to make what mischief they could. They were recruited from all sects of the Reds, including the American Bolsheviki, known commonly as the I. W. W. Also, among them were scattered a few pacifists, hun-sympathisers, conscientious objectors and other birds of analogous plumage, quite ready for interruptions and debate.