Part 12

Finally, in the hurried parenthesis between these weightier matters, he extracted from her the promise to meet him in Paris in March—March at the latest—and give him a week, a whole week. “It will be so much easier, then, of course,” she agreed. “It’s the deadest season of the year in Paris. There’ll be nobody to bother us, and we can really settle down to work—” her lovely eyes kindled at the thought—“and I can give you all the papers you need, and tell you everything you want to know.”

With that he had to be content, and he could afford to be—now. He rose to take leave; but suddenly she rose also, a new eagerness in her eyes. She moved toward the door with him, and there her look detained him.

“And Donald’s book too; you can get to work with Donald at the same time, can’t you?” She smiled on him confidentially. “He’s told me that you’ve promised to help him out—it’s so angelically good of you! I do assure you he appreciates it immensely. Perhaps he’s a little too modest about his own ability; but it _is_ a terrible burden to have had imposed on him, isn’t it, just as he and I were having our first real holiday! It’s been a nightmare to him all these months. Reading all those letters and manuscripts, and deciding—. Why don’t authors do those things for themselves?” She appealed to French, half indignantly. “But after all,” she concluded, her smile deepening, “I understand that you should be willing to take the trouble, in return for the precious thing he’s given you.”

French’s heart gave a frightened thump: her smile had suddenly become too significant.

“The precious thing?”

She laughed. “Do you mean to say you’ve forgotten it already? Well, if you have, I don’t think you deserve it. The portrait of Mrs. Morland—the _only_ one, apparently! A signed drawing of Horace’s; it’s something of a prize, you’ll admit. Donald tells me that you and he made the discovery of the sketch-book together. I can’t for the life of me imagine how it ever escaped those harpies of dealers. You can fancy how they went through everything ... like detectives after finger-prints, I used to say! Poor me—they used to have me out of bed every day at daylight! How furious they’d be if they knew what they’ve missed!” She paused and laughed again, leaning in the doorway in one of her long Artemis-attitudes.

French felt his head spinning. He dared not meet her eyes, for fear of discovering in them the unmasked cupidity he fancied he had once before detected there. He felt too sick for any thought but flight; but every nerve in him cried out: “Whatever she says or does, she shall never never have that drawing back!”

She said and did nothing; which made it even more difficult for him. It gave him the feeling that if he moved she would move too—with a spring, as if she herself were a detective, and suspected him of having the treasure in his pocket (“Thank God I haven’t!” he thought). And she had him so entirely at her mercy, with all the Fingall dates and documents still in her hold; there was nothing he could do but go—pick up the portmanteau with the drawing in it, and fly by the next train, if need be!

The idea traversed him in a flash, and then gave way again to the desolating sense of who she was, and what it was that they were manœuvring and watching each other about.

That was the worst of all—worse even than giving up the drawing, or renouncing the book on Fingall. He felt that he must get away at any cost, rather than prolong their silent duel; and, sick at heart, he reached out for the door-knob.

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed, her hand coming down on his wrist.

He forced an answering smile. “No?”

She shook her head, her eyes still on his. “You’re not going like that.” Though she held him playfully her long fine fingers seemed as strong as steel. “After all, business is business, isn’t it? We ordinary mortals, who don’t live in the clouds among the gods, can’t afford to give nothing for nothing.... _You_ don’t—so why should I?”

He had never seen her so close before, and as her face hovered over him, so warm, persuasive, confident, he noted in it, with a kind of savage satisfaction, the first faint lines of age.

“So why should I?” she repeated gaily. He stood silent, imprisoned; and she went on, throwing her head back a little, and letting her gaze filter down on him through her rich lowered lashes: “But I know you’ll agree with me that it’s only fair. After all, Donald has set you the example. He’s given you something awfully valuable in return for the favour you’re going to do him—the immense favour. Poor darling—there never was anybody as generous as Donald! Don’t be alarmed; I’m not going to ask you to give me a present on _that_ scale.” She drew herself up and threw back her lids, as if challenging him. “You’d have difficulty in finding one—anybody would!”

French was still speechless, bewildered, not daring to think ahead, and all the while confusedly aware that his misery was feeding some obscure springs of amusement in her.

“In return for the equally immense favour I’m going to do you—coming back to Paris in March, and giving you a whole week—what are you going to give _me_? Have you ever thought about _that_?” she flung out at him; and then, before he could answer: “Oh, don’t look so miserable—don’t rack your brains over it! I told you I wasn’t grasping—I’m not going to ask for anything unattainable. Only, you see—” she paused, her face grown suddenly tender and young again—“you see, Donald wants so dreadfully to have a portrait of me, one for his very own, by a painter he really admires; a _likeness_, simply, you see, not one of those wild things poor Horace used to do of me—and what I want is to beg and implore you to ask Jolyesse if he’ll do me. I can’t ask him myself: Horace despised his things, and was always ridiculing him, and Jolyesse knew it. It’s all very well—but, as I used to tell Horace, success does mean something after all, doesn’t it? And no one has been more of a success than Jolyesse—I hear his prices have doubled again. Well, that’s a proof, in a way ... what’s the use of denying it? Only it makes it more difficult for poor me, who can’t afford him, even if I dared to ask!” She wrinkled her perfect brows in mock distress. “But if _you_ would—an old friend like you—if you’d ask it as a personal favour, and make him see that for the widow of a colleague he ought to make a reduction in his price—really a _big_ reduction!—I’m sure he’d do it. After all, it’s not my fault if my husband didn’t like his pictures. And I should be so grateful to you, and so would Donald.”

She dropped French’s arm and held out both her shining hands to him. “You _will_—you really will? Oh, you dear good man, you!” He had slipped his hands out of hers, but she caught him again, this time not menacingly but exuberantly.

“If you could arrange it for when I’m here in March, that would be simply perfect, wouldn’t it? You can, you think? Oh, bless you! And mind, he’s got to make it a full-length!” she called after him joyfully across the threshold.

VELVET EAR-PADS

I

Professor Loring G. Hibbart, of Purewater University, Clio, N. Y., settled himself in the corner of his compartment in the Marseilles-Ventimiglia express, drew his velvet ear-pads from his pocket, slipped them over his ears, and began to think.

It was nearly three weeks since he had been able to indulge undisturbed in this enchanting operation. On the steamer which had brought him from Boston to Marseilles considerable opportunity had in truth been afforded him, for though he had instantly discovered his fellow-passengers to be insinuating and pervasive, an extremely rough passage had soon reduced them to inoffensiveness. Unluckily the same cause had in like manner affected the Professor; and when the ship approached calmer waters, and he began to revive, the others revived also, and proceeded to pervade, to insinuate and even to multiply—since a lady gave birth to twins as they entered the Mediterranean.

As for the tumultuous twenty-four hours since his landing, the Professor preferred not to include them in his retrospect. It was enough that they were over. “All I want is _quiet_,” he had said to the doctors who, after his alarming attack of influenza, followed by bronchial pneumonia, had ordered an immediate departure for warmer climes; and they had thrust him onto an excursion-steamer jammed with noisy sight-seers, and shipped him to a port whither all the rest of the world appeared to be bound at the same moment! His own fault, perhaps? Well—he never could plan or decide in a hurry, and when, still shaken by illness, he had suddenly been told that he must spend six months in a mild climate, and been faced with the alternatives of southern California or southern France, he had chosen the latter because it meant a more complete escape from professional associations and the terror of meeting people one knew. As far as climate went, he understood the chances to be equal; and all he wanted was to recover from his pulmonary trouble and employ his enforced leisure in writing a refutation of Einstein’s newly published book on Relativity.

Once the Professor had decided on the south of France, there remained the difficulty of finding, in that populous region, a spot quiet enough to suit him; but after much anxious consultation with colleagues who shared his dread of noise and of promiscuous human intercourse, he had decided on a secluded _pension_ high up in the hills, between Monte Carlo and Mentone. In this favoured spot, he was told, no dogs barked, cocks crew or cats courted. There were no waterfalls, or other sonorous natural phenomena, and it was utterly impossible for a motor (even with its muffler knocked off) to ascend the precipitous lane which led to the _pension_. If, in short, it were possible to refute Einstein’s theory, it was in just such a place, and there only, that the feat might be accomplished.

Once settled in the train, the Professor breathed more freely. Most of his fellow-passengers had stayed on the ship, which was carrying them on to swarm over a succession of other places as he had just left them swarming over Marseilles. The train he got into was not very crowded, and should other travellers enter the compartment, his ear-pads would secure him from interruption. At last he could revert to the absorbing thought of the book he was planning; could plunge into it like a diver into the ocean. He drew a deep breath and plunged....

Certainly the compartment had been empty when the train left Marseilles—he was sure of that; but he seemed to remember now that a man had got in at a later station, though he couldn’t have said where or when; for once he began to think, time vanished from him as utterly as space.

He became conscious of the intruding presence only from the smell of tobacco gradually insinuating itself into his nostrils. Very gradually; for when the Professor had withdrawn into his inner stronghold of Pure Reason, and pulled up the ladder, it was not easy for any appeal to reach him through the channel of the senses. Not that these were defective in him. Far from it: he could smell and see, taste and hear, with any man alive; but for many years past he had refrained from exercising these faculties except in so far as they conduced to the maintenance of life and security. He would have preferred that the world should contain nothing to see, nothing to smell, nothing to hear; and by negativing persistently every superfluous hint of his visual, auditive or olfactory organs he had sheathed himself in a general impenetrability of which the ear-pads were merely a restricted symbol.

His noticing the whiff of tobacco was an accident, a symptom of his still disorganized state; he put the smell resolutely from him, registered “A Man Opposite,” and plunged again into the Abstract.

Once—about an hour later, he fancied—the train stopped with a jerk which flung him abruptly out of his corner. His mental balance was disturbed, and for one irritating instant his gaze unwillingly rested on silver groves, purple promontories and a blue sea. “Ugh—_scenery_!” he muttered; and with a renewed effort of the will he dropped his mental curtain between that inconsequent jumble of phenomena and the absolutely featureless area in which the pure intellect thrones. The incident had brought back the smell of his neighbour’s cigarette; but the Professor sternly excluded that also, and the train moved on....

Professor Hibbart was in truth a man of passionately excitable nature: no one was ever, by temperament, less adapted to the lofty intellectual labours in which his mind delighted. He asked only to live in the empyrean; but he was perpetually being dragged back to earth by the pity, wrath or contempt excited in him by the slipshod course of human affairs. There were only two objects on which he flattered himself he could always look with a perfectly unseeing eye; and these were a romantic landscape and a pretty woman. And he was not absolutely sure about the landscape.

Suddenly a touch, soft yet peremptory, was laid on his arm. Looking down, he beheld a gloved hand; looking up he saw that the man opposite him was a woman.

To this awkward discovery he was still prepared to oppose the blank wall of the most complete imperception. But a sharp pinch proved that the lady who had taken hold of his arm had done so with the fixed determination to attract his attention, at the cost of whatever pain or inconvenience to himself. As she appeared also to be saying something—probably asking if the next station were the one at which she ought to get out—he formed with soundless lips the word “Deaf,” and pointed to his ears. The lady’s reply was to release his wrist, and with her free hand flick off an ear-pad.

“Deaf? Oh, no,” she said briskly, in fluent but exotic English. “You wouldn’t need ear-pads if you were. You don’t want to be bothered—that’s all. I know the trick; you got it out of Herbert Spencer!”

The assault had nearly disabled the Professor for farther resistance; but he rallied his wits and answered stonily: “I have no time-table. You’d better consult the guard.”

The lady threw her spent cigarette out of the window. As the smoke drifted away from her features he became uneasily aware that they were youthful, and that the muscles about her lips and eyes were contracted into what is currently known as a smile. In another moment, he realized with dismay, he was going to know what she looked like. He averted his eyes.

“I don’t want to consult the guard—I want to consult _you_,” said the lady.

His ears took reluctant note of an intonation at once gay and appealing, which caressed the “You” as if it were a new pronoun rich in vowels, and the only one of its kind in the world.

“Eeee-you,” she repeated.

He shook his averted head. “I don’t know the name of a single station on this line.”

“Dear me, don’t you?” The idea seemed to shock her, to make a peculiar appeal to her sympathy. “But I do—every one of them! With my eyes shut. Listen: I’ll begin at the beginning. Paris—”

“But I don’t _want_ to know them!” he almost screamed.

“Well, neither do I. What I want is to ask you a favour—just one tiny little enormous favour.”

The Professor still looked away. “I have been in very bad health until recently,” he volunteered.

“Oh, I’m so glad—glad, I mean,” she corrected herself hastily, “that you’re all right again now! And glad too that you’ve been ill, since that just confirms it—”

Here the Professor fell. “Confirms what?” he snapped, and saw too late the trap into which he had plunged.

“My belief that you are predestined to help me,” replied his neighbour with joyful conviction.

“Oh, but that’s quite a mistake—a complete mistake. I never in my life helped anybody, in any way. I’ve always made it a rule not to.”

“Not even a Russian refugee?”

“Never!”

“Oh, yes, you have. You’ve helped _me_!”

The Professor turned an ireful glance upon her, and she nodded. “I am a Russian refugee.”

“You?” he exclaimed. His eyes, by this time, had definitely escaped from his control, and were recording with an irrepressible activity and an exasperating precision the details of her appearance and her dress. Both were harmonious and opulent. He laughed incredulously.

“Why do you laugh? Can’t you _see_ that I’m a refugee; by my clothes, I mean? Who has such pearls but Russian refugees? Or such sables? We have to have them—to sell, of course! You don’t care to buy my sables, do you? For you they would be only six thousand pounds cash. No, I thought not. It’s my duty to ask—but I didn’t suppose they would interest you. The Paris and London jewellers farm out the pearls to us; the big dressmakers supply the furs. For of course we’ve all sold the originals long ago. And really I’ve been rather successful. I placed two sets of silver fox and a rope of pearls last week at Monte Carlo. Ah, that fatal place! I gambled away the whole of my commission the same night.... But I’m forgetting to tell you how you’ve already helped me....”

She paused to draw breath, and in the pause the Professor, who had kept his hand on his loosened ear-pad, slipped it back over his ear.

“I wear these,” he said coldly, “to avoid argument.”

With a flick she had it off again. “I wasn’t going to argue—I was only going to thank you.”

“I can’t conceive for what. In any case, I don’t want to be thanked.”

Her brows gathered resentfully. “Why did you _ask_ to be, then?” she snapped; and opening a bejewelled wrist-bag she drew forth from a smother of cigarette papers and pawn-tickets a slip of paper on which her astonished companion read a phrase written in a pointed feminine hand, but signed with his own name.

“_There!_”

The Professor took the paper and scanned it indignantly. “This copy of ‘The Elimination of Phenomena’ was presented by Professor Loring G. Hibbart of Purewater University, Clio, N. Y., to the library of the American Y. M. C. A. Refugee Centre at Odessa.

“A word of appreciation, sent by any reader to the above address, would greatly gratify Loring G. Hibbart.”

“_There!_” she repeated. “Why did you ask to be thanked if you didn’t want to be? What else does ‘greatly gratify’ mean? I couldn’t write to you from Odessa because I hadn’t the money to buy a stamp; but I’ve longed ever since to tell you what your book did for me. It simply changed my whole life—books do sometimes, you know. I saw everything differently—even our Refugee Centre! I decided at once to give up my lover and divorce my husband. Those were my two first Eliminations.” She smiled retrospectively. “But you mustn’t think I’m a frivolous person. I have my degree as a Doctor of Philosophy—I took it at sixteen, at the University of Moscow. I gave up philosophy the year after for sculpture; the next year I gave up sculpture for mathematics and love. For a year I loved. After that I married Prince Balalatinsky. He was my cousin, and enormously wealthy. I need not have divorced him, as it turned out, for he was soon afterward buried alive by the Bolsheviks. But how could I have foreseen it? And your book had made me feel—”

“Good gracious!” the author of the book interrupted desperately. “You don’t suppose _I_ wrote that rubbish about wanting to be thanked, do you?”

“Didn’t you? How could I tell? Almost all the things sent from America to the refugee camp came with little labels like that. You all seemed to think we were sitting before perfectly appointed desks, with fountain pens and stamp-cases from Bond Street in our pockets. I remember once getting a lip-stick and a Bernard Shaw calendar labelled: ‘If the refugee who receives these would write a line of thanks to little Sadie Burt of Meropee Junction, Ga., who bought them out of her own savings by giving up chewing-gum for a whole month, it would make a little American girl very happy.’ Of course I was sorry not to be able to write to little Sadie.” She broke off, and then added: “Do you know, I was sure you were my Professor as soon as I saw your name on your suit-case?”

“Good Lord!” groaned the Professor. He had forgotten to remove the obligatory steamer-labels! Instinctively he reached out a hand to tear off the offending member; but again a gesture of the Princess’s arrested him. “It’s too late now. And you can’t surely grudge me the pleasure of thanking you for your book?”

“But I _didn’t_ ask—”

“No; but I wanted to. You see, at that time I had quite discarded philosophy. I was living in the Actual—with a young officer of Preobrajensky—when the war broke out. And of course in our camp at Odessa the Actual was the very thing one wanted to get away from. And your book took me straight back into that other world where I had known my only pure happiness. Purity—what a wonderful thing it is! What a pity it is so hard to keep; like money, and everything else really valuable! But I’m thankful for any little morsel of it that I’ve had. When I was only ten years old—”

But suddenly she drew back and nestled down into her lustrous furs. “You thought I was going to tell you the story of my life? No. Put your ear-pads on again. I know now why you wear them—because you’re planning a new book. Is it not so? You see I can read your thoughts. Go on—do! I would rather assist at the birth of a masterpiece than chatter about my own insignificant affairs.”

The Professor smiled. If she thought masterpieces were born in that way—between railway stations, and in a whirl of prattle! Yet he was not wholly angry. Either because it had been unexpectedly agreeable to hear his book praised, or because of that harmonious impression which, now that he actually saw her, a protracted scrutiny confirmed, he began to feel more tolerantly toward his neighbour. Deliberately, his eyes still on hers, he pushed the other ear-pad away.

“Oh—” she said with a little gasp. “Does that mean I may go on talking?” But before he could answer, her face clouded. “I know—it only means that I might as well, now that I’ve broken in on your meditations. I’m dreadfully penitent; but luckily you won’t have me for long, for I’m getting out at Cannes, and Cannes is the next station. And that reminds me of the enormous little favour I have to ask.”

The Professor’s face clouded also: he had a nervous apprehension of being asked favours. “My fountain pen,” he said, regaining firmness of tone, “is broken.”