I
The dolorous night peered Madonna-like into the open windows of the café. At the little round tables, their arms resting on the black lacquered tops, their fingers clinging forgetfully to the stems of glasses, sat groups of idle celebrants. The wail of the café orchestra lost itself in the night noises that drifted through the windows—the noises from the little summer lake below, the heavy patches of wood beyond, and the amorous laughter of young men and young women walking across the darkened hotel lawns or congregated in the pavilion above the boat-house.
Lucian Walters stared about him for a moment in the café, removing his eyes with difficulty from the curious creature who sat opposite him at one of the little black lacquered tables. The heavy brooding eyes of middle-aged women sitting stiff and immobile in all the pompous finery of their summer wardrobe, encountered his. The lachrymose gaze of middle-aged men drifted by him to the opened windows and the alluring night. A sad lot, laughing now and then, talking aloud, humming the simple melodies of the orchestra, sipping at their glasses. A miserable company, vaguely frightened by the stiff little dreams that scratched timidly at their souls. Here and there a youthful couple, confronting each other with wine-glasses in their fingers and sinning ruthlessly with their frantic eyes. The little artificial scene, so piquantly located in the midst of the solemn wilderness about them, faded again from Walter’s thought. His eyes with a start focused back upon the curious creature opposite him at the little table.
She looked like a cross between a macaw and a marionette. Luxurious, perverse, artificial, she sat facing him and the night about her, a sort of savagery in caricature. Her face was like a sentence full of unexpected adjectives—startling and meaningless. The bodice of her dress—curiously folded purples, golds and lavenders—was reminiscent of the Salome which Van Gogh never painted. Her skirt revealed no human lines, but spread about her in a flare of blue greens, ruffled and looped into the semblance of clumsy and exotic plumage. Her legs beneath its high hem stretched to the ground, straight and birdlike. They were encased in yellow silk embroidered with yellow rosettes above the ankles.
They seemed the finely chiseled effort of some amorous goldsmith’s art. The elaborated feet were stifly corseted in little lyre-like amber-colored shoes.
Walters contemplated her darkly. In his contemplation was contained the doubt and self-disgust of a man who at the age of thirty-four discovers himself unreasonably, irrationally, unintelligently, and hopelessly in love. Until five days ago he had regarded himself in the flattering light of a man of precocious sanity and unassailable humour. His sophistication in the matter of women had been one of his most cherished prides. He had, during the course of numerous and intricate amours, proved to his satisfaction certain axioms and paradoxes concerning the sex. And for a matter of eight years he had devoted himself to the writing of novels in which he had left no convention unturned and no illusion intact. To find himself thus, at the zenith of his prowess and the apex of his career, bewilderingly absorbed in the contemplation of a seventeen-year-old imbecile, a creature devoid of any known glimmering of intellect, charm, or cunning, was, accordingly, a matter which darkened his eye and filled him with deprecating oaths.
He contemplated now her hat. It was a challenge, a green and silver gesture flung across her copper-tinted hair. It rose obliquely from her left ear, to which was attached a large coral earring, and concluded with a piratical slant high over and beyond her opposite shoulder. It was incredible that the wearer of such a hat could be an imbecile—a persistent and indubitable imbecile. Strange and sinister thoughts were to be expected from such a hat as this—Borgian convulsions, Saturnalian philosophies. And yet he had determined since his arrival at The Dells five days ago that in all his life he had never encountered man or woman of such unwearying and spontaneous ignorance.
Lured to her by an inexplicable attraction, he had concentrated upon the creature, plumbed the shallows of her soul, vivisected her whims, turned her few pathetic mental processes inside out, and submitted them to the microscopic eye of his widely renowned masterly mind. He was, within two days of such activities, prepared to pronounce her coldly and conservatively an imbecile, a vain, empty-headed, vacant-souled little flapper of the most unengaging type. And having determined this to the entire satisfaction of his critical mind, he had forthwith and insanely discovered her more alluring, more irresistible than any woman he had known during an intelligently sybaritic life.
The whine of the café orchestra dissipated his painful meditations in a curious mist. For moments he sat staring at the girl opposite him, repeating in his mind her name, "Myra Lanier." The silent syllables affected him magically. He abandoned himself with the intensity of an amateur drunkard to the business in hand and poured forth a stream of lovesick inanities, amorous piffle. He was not more than half conscious of his words. He recovered as the last violin note quavered into silence and the cold laugh of a breathless youth dashing about somewhere in the night rocketed into the café. A wave of self-disgust overcame him. He turned miserably toward the open window, cursing to himself the orchestra, the wine he had consumed, the indescribable night, and the creature who was fast making as fatuous and whole-hearted an ass out of him as he had ever described in his own writings.
II
In the name of the thousand and one gods of sanity and upright living, how had he come by this thing, and why? What latent streak of idiocy or hereditary taint of imbecility had brought him, open- mouthed, shining-eyed, and giddy-headed, to the feet of a vapid little peacock; and he thirty-four, the author of three discriminating volumes and a man of aloof and sensitive poise! He turned his embittered smile upon her face, one side of which was concealed as by a carefully painted shadow. It was an arresting, impressionistic face of stenciled features, poster tints—provokingly immobile. There were visible only one of her eyes, one of her ears, one of her cheeks, an enigmatic section of her lips, and the whitened tip of her nose. It was not the face of an imbecile. Cleopatra would not have despised so mocking and esoteric a surface. Walters’ long fingers caressed nervously the stem of the tall conical glass before him. The memories of the past five days overwhelmed him with a loathing. The manner in which he had danced kittenish attendance upon her disgusting coquetries! The manner in which he had. . .Face or no face, the creature was an infant and a fool!
She sat with her elbows planted on the black lacquered top of the café table, her forearms in their tight lavender and gold sleeves tilted forward like embracing and exotic serpents. Her palms were pressed together, the pink and waxen fingers interlaced. Her nails glistened like rubies on the backs of her hands. Her chin was lifted, her whitened throat presented a line of moonlight. Her bosom made two little ivory buckles above the purples, golds and lavenders of her bodice.
Walters observed these things cautiously, holding his emotions well in check. He wondered dimly just what he had said a moment ago that had so animated her usually expressionless face. The revulsion he was experiencing had become familiar to him during the five days of his infatuation. Hard upon moments of groundless intoxication similar revulsions had overtaken him. He seized upon them with a low sort of joy. They were respites, lucid, wonderful intervals during which he could most satisfactorily curse and belabor himself.
He sat now elate. What sort of a callow, poppy-cocking idiot was he becoming! Spending five days of his precious holiday bouncing along in the wake of this half-witted, giggle-cursed, inanely stupid, and insanely clothed infant! Submitting himself to the insufferable horseplay and companionship of a pack of barely-weaned bull calves who were his rivals for the maiden’s accursed favor! Five days of mental and spiritual suicide! What, in the name of all the gods of fact and legend, had come over him? Arguing hotly with a mess of sleek-haired, grinning-faced undergraduates! Circumventing them by imbecile ruses! Sinking to the loathsome level of impassioned baby-talk! He, Lucien Walters! My God, the unmentionable idiocies, the horrifying banalities!
III
Myra’s familiar high-pitched girl’s voice came to him suddenly from across the table.
"I'm sorry," she was saying, "but I can't marry you. I'm only seventeen, y'know, and I don't want to marry yet."
She giggled. Walters waited stupidly for her to resume, moistening his lips and experiencing cold, blighting sensations in his stomach.
The giggle finished. Myra went on, suppressing with difficulty further and lustier giggles.
"You're really my first 'catch.' Nobody ever actually honest-Injun proposed to me before and asked my hand in marriage."
The giggles had their delighted way for the moment.
"Won't mama be proud. She's always telling me that no serious man would ever ask me to be his wife. Just wait till I tell her that that..."
Walters nodded his head solemnly as the object of his mad passion, overcome for the nonce by a strange and delicious mirth, choked, coughed, and gurgled an interruption.
"...that you did," she went on. "And nobody can say you ain't a serious man—even mama, who is so particular about such things. Because you are serious, aren't you, Lucian?"
"Yes," said Walters.
"I knew it," cried the creature with an air of triumph, "I could tell."
Again Walters nodded his head solemnly. It was just as well that she shouldn't marry him. He would undoubtedly end by murdering her within a week if she did. And he had actually proposed! Well, perhaps this final evidence of his utter depravity would serve to shock him back into reason. My God, what an abominable voice! Would she never reach an end to this morbid chatter of hers? He stared at her desperately, half hearing her further remarks.
When she had finally ended a peculiar depression seized upon his spirit. The irrational impulses he had learned to dread, as a victim of mania dreads the first approaches of his hallucination, were struggling back to life in his thought. Baffling, mysterious, luring, a creature of insidious and overpowering fascination—she sat confronting him.
He gazed at her miserably. His rapid thoughts beat passionately about her, like drunken moths hurling themselves into flame. She was as mysterious and provoking as a colored hieroglyph staring from a Pheenician ruin. She became, as he gazed, something daintily barbaric, something not quite a woman but a compound of exotic mysteries. He waited an instant after she had finished.
"But you must marry me," he answered slowly. "I can't live without you. Don't you see?"
Thank God it was a safe topic! And it was the one topic on which she showed the remotest vestiges of intelligence. Hadn’t she refused him! He stared about him at the stiff blurred figures lingering in the café, middle-aged women with heavy, brooding eyes, men with sad little secrets upon their faces. He would tear himself away. He had unquestionably stepped into some hideously enchanted atmosphere. He would pack his trunk and leave in the morning as early as possible. He was interrupted in his re- solves by a series of explosive giggles.
"I'm so sorry. Really so sorry. If there's anything I can do..."
One of the hands that stared like a vacant little white head above the gold and lavender arm reached across the black table top and touched his wrist. He felt a chaotic elation. Even the falsetto of the unceasing giggle which accompanied the gesture of the hand upon his wrist was powerless to affect him. He surged and soared, freed at last from the cruelties of his self-disgust, his revulsion, his critical anguish.
"Myra," he murmured, his voice become hoarse and choked. A heavy hand thumped him between his shoulder blades. The space about him became suddenly filled with violent howls. He perceived as in a mist the sprawling figures of four youths—the Bull Calves, the sleek-haired and grinning-faced creatures of the Dance Pavilion—his rivals! They were jumping around the table, hurling insults, convulsed in abominable laughters. One of them started singing the Wedding March from "Lohengrin." Another struck the attitude of an outraged parent and launched into a mock tirade against his "darter’s elopement."
Walters became conscious of the faces of his neighbors at the little tables. They were turned toward him, scowling, smiling appreciatively, laughing coarsely.
He staggered to his feet, extricated himself from the violent and horrible group that clustered about him and dashed headlong from the café. In his ears trailed the words, "We seen yuh—gosh ding it! We caught yuh!" And the joyous, hysterical laugh of a woman—Myra.
He reached the hotel after colliding fiercely with a forest of trees and barking his shins on a maze of croquet arches. Fronting the wide steps he ceased his plunging and pulled himself together. He mounted the steps with dignity. It was barely possible that his shame had not preceded him, and that the horrible scene in the café—why it was horrible he was unable to explain—was still unknown to the rocking-chair brigade on the dark veranda. He passed into the lobby without creating any further disturbance. A few minutes later he sat in his room overlooking the tops of vague and innumerable trees and the glint of the little lake below. He would pack at once and be off as early as possible.
And for the hundredth time in five days Lucian Walters contemplated himself and marveled. He wasn't in love. He had contracted a disease—a furious malady which had already unseated his reason and changed him from a shrewd, discriminating gentleman into an infatuated and imbecile schoolboy.
He undressed and lay in his bed, helplessly bewildered. Images of Myra floated before his weary eyes, Myra astride gorgeous-hued peacocks, Myra dancing before ivory idols, Myra riding in state upon elephants attended by himself in the guise of a bejeweled and wonderfully tunicated rajah. Her face, exaggerated in his fancies, became the mask of a priestess before the altars of Astarte.
He abandoned the notion of packing. He was in love. He had never been in love before. It was the fatuous whim of the gods who preside over such things to see that he should fall in love with a chattering, giggle-cursed, empty-headed imbecile seventeen years old. It was perhaps a divine punishment for his pride and prejudice in such matters.
He cursed, he tossed. And finally, as a silence settled upon the hotel and the wood noises racketed mysteriously outside, he fell asleep.
IV
It was early morning when Walters opened his eyes. He felt he had been violently drunk the night before. He remembered that he had asked Myra to marry him while sitting in the café. He sat up and experienced a sensation of emptiness in his heart. He remembered then that she had refused.
An hour later he had finished his breakfast and was walking mournfully about the gossip-echoing veranda. Men and women nodded with mysterious geniality at him.
"All the world loves a lover," he murmured grimly to himself.
He passed on to the lawn. He was, although not yet admitting it, heading for the boathouse and the bathing pier. He had, during the five previous days, painfully absented himself from this spot. Here the Bull Calves and Myra were wont to disport themselves during the forenoon, to splash water upon each other and leap and dive about. Being unable to swim and a man of peculiar sensitiveness in such matters, Walters had remained away.
He walked now with measured steps toward the flight of stairs that led to the foot of the hotel hill down to the bathing pier. Two or three figures were already on the scene. Myra and her companions had not yet arrived, however. He sauntered down the stairs in the grip of ungovernable impulses. To himself he repeated with the resignation of a suttee martyr, "What's the use? I'm in love. Why not own up? I can't escape it."
He arrived on the pier and sat down on a stone bench against the railing. Two feminine figures clothed in long capes appeared. His heart leaped toward them, and then leaped back again. Neither was Myra. They removed their long capes and stood, two shapely figures in their tight-fitting bathing suits.
Walters turned wearily away. His career was ruined. He would let this ungovernable infatuation run its course. He would overcome the creature and marry her. A damned fool and venomous destiny had ordained it. There was no escaping the inexplicable lure, the morbid fascination the imbecile exercised over him. Even now, as he sat and waited, his heart drummed in his ears and his head whirled.
Another figure was descending the flight of steps down the hill. It was Myra, her copper-tinted hair concealed beneath a violently green rubber cap, her figure hidden under a long voluminous cape. She approached down the pier and, spying him, came running to his side with the affected daintiness of a creature unaccustomed to bare feet.
"Going in? Oh, go get your things off. Come on. All the boys'll be here in a minute."
Walters cleared his throat twice and endeavored a remark. It failed. She was about to remove the voluminous cape. He stared brazenly, powerless to think or to conceal his emotion. With a mincing little step the creature separated herself from her single garment and stood before him, a slim, white-skinned girl, lithe-legged, lean-bodied, reed-throated. Under his gaze a blush crept into her cheeks.
Suddenly, as if awakened from a dream, Walters sprang to his feet, laughing. He walked without comment up the pier, turning once or twice to stare at the bewildered, shining figure of the nude girl. He mounted the stairs, chuckling and shaking his head. His brain seemed cleared of some horrible fume. He murmured to himself:
"What a funny kid! What a funny kid! Good Lord, I've been insane. I've been madly, horribly in love with a purple and gold dress and a green hat. Yes, sir. God, what a plot! What a plot!"
The brain of Lucien Walters exercised itself nimbly. Coldly and without a tremor it recalled the image of Myra in her ruteliant fabrics, garlanded and festooned in amazing colors—the dress with its unhuman lines, the curiously folded bodice of purples, golds, and lavenders, the green and silver hat, the yellow stockings, the amber-colored shoes.
"A sort of savagery in caricature," he muttered carefully—for "the sorrows of life must ever be the joys of art." A beauty that didn't reach to the skin. Mystery exotics, enigmas—born in a dressmaker's shop."
He turned on top of the hill and gazed toward the pier. There, dipping her toes coquettishly into the placid water of the lake, stood slightly inclined the naked figure of Myra Lanier. Walters smiled and nodded his head with vigor.
"What did I expect to see?" he abruptly questioned himself. "Something, something unimaginable? Not a bad-looking kid at that. A little too scrawny..."
He moved on, placing a cigarette between his lips.
"I'll call the story simply, 'Infatuation'," he announced abruptly to the trees, "and let them draw their inferences."