CHAPTER XVII

I MEET NORA CAZENOVE

“Having carried what may be termed your technical exposition so far, why do you stop short at the really important issue?” I asked.

“Oh, come now!” he cried with ready raillery, “when a patient describes his symptoms to a doctor he does not pass to the next stage and name his disease.”

Amidst present perplexities and the confusion of quickly gathering memories of earlier years, there was one distinctive characteristic of Karl’s Mahatmalike faculty which stood out prominently. The exercise of his sixth sense never affected his gay personality. If he showed anger or concern it was wholly vicarious, a sympathetic sentiment inspired by certain facts which influenced the lives of others. Once, indeed, to my knowing, if not more frequently, he had obtained a reflex or sub-conscious knowledge of Maggie Hutchinson’s emotions. But even in this instance my theory apparently held good. Alas for romance and the first shaft of love! Five years ago he was not only ready, after a pang or two, to fall in with her decree of banishment, but to-day I was to meet his fiancée in a young woman of the market type! This contradictory, self-effacing attitude was, of course, brought out more pronouncedly than ever by the haphazard views he expressed on the chance, or, it might be, the certainty, of his own early death. To see Karl, the personification of manly strength and good health, sitting in my room, and hear him coolly endorsing his father’s heart-broken statement as to his approaching dissolution, was the most absurdly exasperating experience ever vouchsafed to me.

I know quite well that men and women of high degree--and by that I mean the true aristocracy of man, not the base metal so often stamped with misleading titles--will face unavoidable death with a sedateness, even a sober humor, which is the topmost rung of the long ladder climbed by human progress. A shipwreck, a battle, a lost cause--these are tangible things and excuse all. “This is the most glorious day of my life,” said the crippled Girondist, Sillery, when sentenced to death. “What, Valazé,” said Brissot to another, who fell in seeming faintness, “are you losing your courage?” “No, I am dying,” was the reply; Valazé had plunged a dagger into his heart. A British officer, about to be crucified by Chinese, was offered an easier death if he would admit that China was greater than England. His enemies knew some French but no English. His French was that of the provincial grammar school of other days, but he cried boldly: “La Hongleterre est la première nation de la monde!” They understood him, not being Frenchmen, and an enraged mandarin gave the signal for his instant execution. Well, you take off your hat to the memory of the brave, and you hope that, in similar straits, you would carry yourself with equal dignity.

But I do not think the man breathes who could gage Karl’s dispassionate mood in that hour. I admit that I was utterly befogged. I went into my bedroom to change my clothing. The door was open, and I heard Karl rise, approach the window, obviously with no more serious intent than a glance into the street, and begin to whistle. That might be the stoicism of despair. But the whistling changed to humming, and from humming he verted to singing:

For she was the Belle of New York, The subject of all the town talk. She made the whole Bowery Fragrant and flowery When she went out for a walk....

This was too much. I stuck my enraged head round the corner of the door. He stopped his lilting.

“By Jove!” he said, “you must be a lightning change artist.”

“Karl!” I cried indignantly, “for goodness’ sake jump into a hansom, go to your father, and tell him to dismiss from his mind the stupid nightmare with which you have managed to imbue him.”

“You have evidently missed the exact point of some of my remarks,” he retorted pleasantly. “I told you, among other things, that I wrestled with the problem of candor versus concealment some time ago.”

“But you cannot be in earnest. Either you are mad or I am.”

“Both, my dear fellow. Believe me, temporary insanity is largely on the increase. The average man cannot withstand the strain. I fancy you will find there is a quaint analogy between the number of maniacs per mille and the number of editions published each day by the evening newspapers. When the jaded intellect is called on, every few minutes, to watch three race meetings, six county cricket matches, and probably a test match, the war--there is always a war--the German Emperor, the yacht race, the latest scandal, the latest play--”

Pshaw! I let up, as Hooper would have said, and determined to drift with the tide into the realm of queer happenings. The change in my costume rendered the hotel’s restaurant approachable. Eat to-day I must, no matter who died to-morrow. Karl agreed to keep me company while I tackled the homeliest _plat_ which a £3,000 per annum chef would condescend to cook, and thus, unwittingly, was I advanced a stage in my inquiry.

We found the palatial apartment tenanted by late diners and early suppers. A waiter would have whisked us into an inconvenient corner, but Karl stayed him.

“Where is Jules?” he asked.

“Le voilà, m’sieur,” and the man indicated the bulky form of the head waiter in the far depths of white and gold.

Karl looked steadily across the little tables with their twos that were company and their threes that were not. Had he fired at Jules with an air-gun that ponderous person could not have wheeled round more readily. Moreover, he came straight to us, his broad face set in a wide grin.

“Ah, dere you are, M’sieur Karl!” he cried. “I alvays know ven you come in, is it not?”

“Always,” replied Karl, imperturbably. After compliments, I gave my order. The manner of Jules’ summoning was hidden from both the head waiter himself and his satellite.

“Is that what the women mean when they call you ‘The Magnet’?” I inquired.

He laughed, with that contagious merriment which sends ripples of content across his hearers’ faces whether they are in his company or not. But he took care that his answer reached no other ears than mine.

“No,” he said, “the women mean something quite different. At any ordinary distance I can attract practically any one whom I know. They come and talk to me, without being aware that I have summoned them. It is not a very remarkable feat when you realize that we all do something like that, in any church, or theater, or other place where people are gathered together. The magnetic effect is doubled, at least, when you use opera-glasses. Why?”

These red herrings drawn across the trail were useless.

“What _do_ the women mean?” I persisted.

“Ask ’em, my dear fellow. Perhaps they may explain. The dear creatures adore sensation. I am told that some of them will stick on a switchback railway until their purses are emptied. A woman’s nervous system is more refined than a man’s. That is why she likes swinging, or, to be accurate, being swung. It thrills her.”

Karl, in this bantering mood, was a revelation. Were I not really very much distressed and concerned by the statements made by him and his father I should have been somewhat annoyed with him. As it was, I determined to meet him on his own ground.

“You have evidently become quite a man about town since last I saw you,” I said.

“How have I earned that questionable distinction in your eyes?”

“On the _post hoc propter hoc_ principle. Your nickname, your philosophy, your light generalities about the opposite sex, are labels of the brand.”

“Ah! It has not struck you that both you and the women may be mistaken?”

I looked up quickly. The mocking laugh had gone. The grave, earnest face of the Karl of five years ago was before me. Nevertheless, his fencing had stirred within me the spirit of resistance.

“I am prepared to vouch for the fact that one woman knew you well enough not to be mistaken,” I said.

“May not her knowledge explain her attitude? Of course you are speaking of Maggie Hutchinson. Do not forget that she shut the door in my face.”

“If it be not treason to the Honorable Nora Cazenove, may I say that the door might yield to a resolute attack?”

For answer he leaned on the table, intertwined his fingers, and gazed at me straight in the eyes.

“Never was fortress besieged more patiently,” he said. “It is only within the past few weeks, that I have received any answer, and that is why--But surely you will agree with me that the full and explicit story of my life had better be deferred until a more convenient occasion.”

Now, lest I be accused of romancing, I shall not endeavor to analyze very closely the most curious and agreeable illusion which held me during the few seconds needed for the delivery of his protest. Instead of the crowded restaurant I saw a moonlit lake, with the terraces of an Italian garden rising in black and white lines of closely clipped hedges, gravel paths, smooth lawns, and broad stairs with curving balustrades. On the topmost and widest lawn, where the grass had the resemblance of a black carpet owing to the shadows cast by a castellated building in the background, three people were walking--actually in motion, that is--not in the fixed attitudes of a picture, but moving. Two were women, one dressed in black and the other in white, and the moonlight glinting on their robes had an effect worthy of Gustave Doré, so startling was the contrast, so instantly did they hold the eye. With them was a man, a tall man; but that was all I caught of the scene, for my ears were listening to Karl throughout, and the change in his voice brought back my scattered senses.

And a waiter spoke.

“Your fish, sir. Sole Colbert, sir.”

I think I must have gazed at him blankly, but Karl came to my assistance.

“Tell the chef we are in a hurry,” he said. “Then there will be no delay in the kitchen.”

The man quitted us. I stuck a needless fork into the amiable sole.

“Have you been hypnotizing me?” I demanded angrily.

“You may call it that if you like,” he said calmly. “You saw Maggie and her mother.”

“Did I!” I snapped. “And who was the man?”

“I do not know his name. I decline to listen. But I am fairly certain he is an Italian, of good birth, and he is madly in love with Maggie.”

I thawed. There was a reason for the trick he had played me.

“And she?” I demanded.

“Like me, she thinks that marriage is a duty.”

“There appears to be material for a neurotic novel in the present situation.”

“Far more. It may supply two tragedies. But why are you harpooning that unresisting fish?”

Again I resolved to drift. It was clear that Karl meant me to travel along the road he had already mapped out. So I ate my dinner, and drank a couple of glasses of wine, and kept asking myself how it was possible for my young friend to produce so easily a slight but distinct hypnosis in a veteran like me.

Then I remembered the poker-polarizing of the Mitre Hotel, and I dug my elbow into his ribs as a hansom carried us westwards.

“By Jove!” I cried, “I have it! Constantine’s death interfered, in some way, with the private telegnomy line Maggie and you had set up; but recent events have repaired the breakage. Constantine, living, supplied the earth contact for your ethereal wires. When he died you were forcibly separated, practically torn asunder, and his place had to be filled again before you could resume communication on the same basis as before.”

“You are not far wrong,” he said dryly. “But you have lived so much abroad that you forget the propriety due to the British hansom. If you wave your arms so excitedly, the policeman at the top of St. James’ Street will stop us, and I shall be compelled to magnetize him.”

“Could you?” I inquired irrelevantly.

“Ask the guv’nor what I did to the _douanier_ at the Gare du Nord who wished to confiscate a pound of the only tobacco the old man can smoke. I made him chalk a whole ship-load of luggage like an automaton. I have progressed somewhat since I left Oxford. Were it not for other less agreeable features, I could get a fair amount of amusement out of my powers of suggestion. It is not altogether puzzling when you come to reason it out. Granted that I am a sort of human magnet, I must obviously be able to control my fellow-men, especially those who are most susceptible to external influences.”

“When I extricate Maggie and you from your present dilemma I shall demand your aid for the utter squelching and making everlastingly ridiculous of some of my dearest enemies,” I said cheerfully.

“Better use me soon,” said he lightly, yet there was a chilling and somber significance in his words that recalled me to the reality of the peril of which he spoke so jestingly.

When we reached Lord Sandilands’ town house our cab took rank behind a score of broughams and other conveyances setting down guests at the striped canvas alley which shut off the sacred portal of fashion from the vulgar gaze. _Odi profanum vulgus et arceo_: “I hate the common rabble and keep it at a distance,” wrote Horace, who must have lived in the Berkeley Square of Old Rome. What stern barriers are those strips of canvas and lengths of red carpet.

We passed several gorgeous footmen (it is an old phrase, but the truth is ever thus) and two detectives, deposited our hats and coats somewhere, made our way up a flight of broad stairs, and my inquisitive eyes fell on a very handsome young woman, exquisitely dressed, but a trifle on the heavy side of the scale to my thinking, whose position, no less than the equal delight with which she welcomed all comers, proclaimed that this was the hostess, Nora Cazenove.

The conventional smile flew from her face as painted scenes grow mawkish in sunlight when she saw Karl. She blushed very prettily, and her very soul leaped to her eyes.

“I have been looking for you this hour or more,” she cried, and I half expected her to throw her splendid arms around his neck.

“I would have been here sooner were I not detained by the unexpected arrival of an old friend. Let me present him.”

She extended her hand to me.

“The older the friend of Karl’s the more pleased I am to see him,” she said.

“And now that I have met you I can only wonder that any friendship could have resisted the strain he must have felt during the last hour.”

There we stood, the three of us, two men and a woman, murmuring nice artificialities, bowing and smirking in the glare of a London drawing-room, while in an Italian garden, at that hour, three others, two women and a man, were talking of Heaven knows what topic, which, nevertheless, was indissolubly bound up with our trivial discourse.

For a fleeting instant I had a glimpse of some strong, imperishable, intangible bond which held together the hidden things of life. Then I heard Nora Cazenove’s aristocratic accents.

“Soon I shall be relieved from my present duty. Then you and I must have a nice long talk.”

So I passed on with the crowd.