The Adventure of the Broken Mirror

by Ben Hecht

Who but Mallare could find interest in snaring game such as that?

 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE
BROKEN MIRROR

By BEN HECHT

Illustrated by Wallace Morgan

Ben Hecht is the outstanding figure among the nonconforming literary radicals. His recent novel, “Eric Dorn,” raised a furious storm of critical controversy, leaving in its wake such unexpected evidence as the enthusiastic praise of those literary veterans, Rupert Hughes and Cosmo Hamilton. This is the first magazine story that Hecht has published since the appearance of “Eric Dorn.”

THE uninspiring turquoise dress sat down. Mallare lighted a cigaret. They were on the balcony. Behind them the musicale spread its insistent boredom of lights, people, and noises.

At this period of his life Mallare had begun to crystallize. Literature and art had once preoccupied him. But his writing and painting had been no more than the decorative gestures of his ennui. Now at thirty-five he had rid himself of ambition. People said:

“Mallare? A most peculiar man. He has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything. But he never seems quite alive. He's too cynical.”

To look at Mallare was to think confusedly of evil. There was about him a precision of elegance, so that his clothes no less than the expression of his dark, sardonic face became part of a mask. Felicien Rops would have sketched him and captioned the drawing, “The Boulevard Satan.”

“He looks a bit too theatrical,” a vivacious young woman once complained. “He's fascinating but unsatisfactory, if you know what I mean. He makes love amazingly, but his kisses are like epigrams.”

Through a continual applause of comment and conjecture Mallare carried his pose like a man too letter-perfect in his part. He seemed languidly at peace with his destiny, ignorant of yesterdays and oblivious of to-morrows. A gleaming-eyed Paganini of phrases, he appeared intent upon nothing more than shrugging the hours gracefully away.

This evening was like other evenings except for an odd circumstance. He surveyed the girl on the balcony. During the early part of the evening's depressions, which had included the usual assaults upon Wagner, Chopin and Schubert, he had observed and inquired casually concerning her. The result had been a catalogue of adjectives including ugly, morbid, imbecilic and young. The odd circumstance attached to the evening, however, had been that he had felt an intangible lure about the creature. He had singled her out, talked to her and marveled gently at the inexplicable interest she appeared to arouse in him.

Now, as the summer night stirred a lace of sound through the garden below the balcony, he found an evasive amusement in her presence. He was aware that a number of tongues were wagging an obbligato of gossip to the boomings of Rabinoff, the most freely perspiring barytone in New York. They were concerned, these tongues, with the drollery of the scene on the balcony. Thus ... Fantazius Mallare, the Manhattan Mephistopheles, with a soul of spiderous ennui dripping his poisonous phrases for the enchantment of Rita Ramsey. And who but an oddity like Mallare could find any interest in snaring game such as that—a tongue-tied, trembling, little bag of skin and bones, an infantile nonentity, the despair of three leading dressmakers, and anathema to all toddlers, one-steppers, and surreptitious seducers east of the Alleghanies.

Mallare, smoking calmly in the late summer night, translated the chatterings of the room they had quitted into language more suited to his vanity. He found, as always a certain relish in supplying others with their opinions of him. He explained it:

“If I were dependent on the actual things people stutter about me, my pose would curl up and die. I have to invent my own criticism. It's part of the game. A stupid game, but what would you? We live in an inarticulate world. If I find a man who loathes me, I make haste to supply him with adjectives. If I find a woman who adores me, my vocabulary is at her disposal. As for people in general who stare at me as if I were a Goya crucifixion, I invent charming utterances for them and quote them to others. It would be immodest and unfair of me to sign all my own paradoxes.”

The girl on the balcony spoke.

“Mother told me you hunted lions.”

“Your mother is Mrs. Titus Ramsey?” Mallare looked down.

“Yes.”

“I think I did tell her that,” he sighed. “The woman with the red velvet? Yes, I always tell that to women who wear red velvet. Nevertheless, I don't hunt lions. In fact, I have no useless specialty at all except living.”

The girl nodded unintelligently. She raised her child's eyes to the sardonic features. Her lifeless face, offering itself like a death-mask to the infatuated moon, stirred an impulse in Mallare. He thought of her ... “a mask. A cross between a marionette and a sick macaw. An unconscious creature if there ever was one. Dead, I swear. A complete inanimation in blue silk.”

Aloud he said, “I'm thinking of you, do you mind? I would like to know you. I am, on the whole, tired of women.”

The girl's large eyes closed slowly. She sat empty of thought. From the room behind them Rabinoff's dissolving voice was informing Mrs. Winthrop's shamelessly inattentive guests....

“Doch wenn du sprichst, 'Ich liebe dich'
So muss ich weinen bitterlich....

The music brought a quaint distraction to Mallare. Through narrowed eyes he watched the serpentine bend of his cigaret smoke. He remained silently studying the wooden-looking body and pointed face of the girl. There was a thing there that sent an emotion through his veins—an emotion as fugitive as the tinsel of cigaret smoke under the moon.

HE had picked up informations about her He pieced them together idly. Since her daughter's childhood, Mrs. Titus Ramsey had utilized this inverted reproduction of herself as an anvil for her surplus energies. A process of character obliteration, which the belligerent woman fondly identified as parental guidance, had begun when Rita was still in the nursery. Obviously, an impulse to make of Rita a sort of virtuous addenda to her own disordered life had inspired Mrs. Ramsey. And she had had, if anything, too apt a pupil. The unlovely child had submitted to the psychopathic domination of her mother with a curious passiveness. She had grown almost as if of her own volition into a stringy-bodied, feminine cipher. At eighteen she had come out and received her official launching into the midst of a number of men and women who went to bed nightly with the shamelessly naked word, “exclusiveness.” And now, a virgin In caricature, a pathetic cartoon of youth, she drifted through the scenes of her mother's triumphs like some social somnambulist. A creature verging piquantly upon the subnormal. But there was one discordant adjective about her. The omniscient gentleman on the balcony smiled. He had got a sense of this. Under the vacuous layer of her personality there lived a languorous bitterness—a yawn in embryo.

MAALLARE waited for her to talk. He found himself idiotically eager for the sound of her voice. The girl, however, seemed to have lost even the parrot-like capacity for clichés which ordinarily she substituted for conversation.

A look of fear had entered her eyes and she sat staring at the bold moon, as if waiting for it to address her Mallare's thought busied itself with words she inspired ... “A thing to create. Nothing there but skin and bones and a bank account. Yet, one could introduce a soul. At least, the sort of soul one finds in women. What would she be like alive? Like the others, no doubt. A greedily amorous virgin. One of the pack of social grotesques who sin with their ankles and collect inhibitions. But one might try. An interesting transition—Galatea opening her eyes eh? Yes, her ugliness was an inspiration. Give it black instead of yellows and blues ... Such vacuity as hers needed no more than a hairdresser and three yards of black to transform it into an enigma....”

She had recovered her yesterday's clichés.

“Shall we return inside?” she asked. Mallare, arresting this train of thought, shook his head.

Terrified he heard himself calling: “Mallare, Mallare.”

“Not yet. You are too diverting. And besides, you are truthful. You would never tell a lie, would you?”

“Oh, no.”

“Then what idea beside the supposition that I was a lion hunter have you had of me?”

“That's all mother told me,” Rita answered. Mallare smiled at the unbelievable naïveté.

“Very good,” he said. “Very good. Then you haven't heard of my deplorable career as a Don Juan.”

“Don Juan?” her voice repeated childishly.

“A gentleman of fiction who made love too well,” he went on. “You have never heard of him?”

“Oh, no,” she answered hastily.

“That makes it very charming,” he smiled. “So frequently a man is loved not for himself but for his past. Women always rush to the remnant counter. Have you read anything?” he persisted softly.

“N-no,” she said. “Only ... I forget what.”

“Marvelous,” he smiled. “And you must promise me not to read in the future. In case I should fall in love with you—”

She stared with a diverting blankness. He might have said, “In case I should want to cut your head off,” and the stare would have been the same. He repeated.

“In case I should fall in love with you, I would be terribly embarrassed to find that your mind was not as virginal as your body. You know, modern young women enter upon their first love affair as a sequel. They have already given their dreams to the book stores. With women, before marriage, literature takes the place of love. After marriage it takes the place of hope.”

She wasn't listening. He wondered. He had obviously never experienced so unqualified a listener. One might as well be talking with a Japanese lantern. Nevertheless he went on, lured by the inexplicable fascination the girl's wooden body and dead face seemed to have achieved over him.

“You inspire me to confessions,” he was saying, “there's something simple about you. I feel at ease and seem to be talking almost to myself. Odd ... You're the only woman whose interest in me hasn't struck me as an uninteresting deception. But I was saying, a woman vanishes with her clothes. Men make love to their clothes and the whole business of passion is a species of bewildered fetishism. I have made love to a green hat. To a yellow parasol. To a jade girdle. When I was young I once was marvelously in love. Then I grew marvelously bored. Then I fell marvelously in love with another one. I was careful that she should be the antithesis of the first. As I recall, she spoke even another language. I found out in a month, however, that the antithesis did not survive. It rubbed off. And the rest have been like that. If you have loved one woman you have loved all women. The overture to the play may vary. Thank God it does. But the overture ended, the curtain up, and you find the play is always the same.”

Mallare paused in his rambling monologue arrested by the fastidious inattentiveness of the girl. Her child's eyes were staring toward the lantern-pitted dark of the garden below.

“Would you like to walk there?” he asked. He watched her shiver as she answered, “Yes.”

IN the garden Mallare allowed himself to succumb to the sentimental caress of the silences and scents. They walked arm in arm down the circuitous path. The girl seemed consumed by an inarticulate terror. He had made a resolve. He would bring her to life. He had intended starting before the week was over for a jaunt to London. But a jaunt to London was a jaunt to London, its diversions known in advance, its surprises already written down in the well-thumbed Baedeker of his soul. Whereas this curious one at his side ... He looked at her. Good! He was already experiencing the necessary hallucinations. A gentle vibration in his hands, a weak restlessness in his thought. He smiled. He flattered himself as a veteran of moods. He recognized with a graceful attentiveness the minor agitations the idiotic child beside him had brought into his head and veins. He continued to wonder, however, what there was about this inanimate, wooden-bodied creature that aroused him.

YES, he was already fancying something unusual in her silence. The word “elfin” occurred to him as he gazed at her stringy arms. Other hallucinations arrived, bowing themselves ironically into his heart. Very good. These were necessary and proper things—hallucinations. Without them women were impossible. With them even this Rita could become an enchantment, an elfin exotic dancing away with his heart.

“The cynical utilization of one's emotions,” this had always been a favorite sentence of his, “is man's only revenge against the incompetency of life.”

But to be ring-master in one's own heart one must first provide a troupe of performers. And the performers? They must be authentic and talented. Mallare knew their names—Desire, Sacrifice, Illusions of Unique Beauty, Charmingly Rouged Despairs. Walking beside the one he had called in his mind a cross between a marionette and a sick macaw, Mallare welcomed this excellent troupe with a self-Sadistic unction. He looked at Rita in the light of one of the swinging lanterns. She had withdrawn her fragile touch from his arm. The hallucination of charm filled him, charm as if the child-eyes looking up were argosies of dream. He remembered his first impressions with a shock.

He stood watching her, almost alarmed by the docility of her attitude. A delightful sense of having distracted this little wooden thing before him, of having brought a chaos into the placid emptiness of her mind, thrilled him.

“A man is never too bored to fall in love,” he muttered to himself, “but good Lord! Why this?” And he continued to look at the girl in astonishment of himself.

A murmur distracted. His eyes turned and saw the velveted figure of Mrs. Titus Ramsey moving meltingly beside a Vandyke. At the end of the path in the shadows the two figures paused. The white arms of the velveted one reached up and embraced the Vandyke. They remained riveted together for moments in the awkwardly convincing posture of sudden passion. Then they vanished again around the bend.

Mallare glanced hesitatingly at the daughter. Rita was still standing as if docilely entranced. Apparently the incident had escaped her.

But the girl's eyes had become too disturbingly fixed. He stared back with a mixture of cynicism and awe. Galatea awakening! She embraced him. His hands, startled by the abrupt intimacy, caressed her. He was conscious of shoulder blades and silk. “She saw her mother do that,” he thought. The hallucinations, however, had vanished with the contact. He kissed her perfunctorily and noticed that her lips were frigid. She remained in his arms like a wooden figure. There was no body to her, no warmth. A dead amorousness. He heard her whisper something unintelligible and she stepped away. He watched her without protest as she walked from him.

There was a stone bench and he sat down. Despite the amusement the girl's idiotic surrender had given him, he felt an inexplicable confusion in his thought.

“Now that she had left him he again thought of her as some one alluring. This disturbed. Perhaps it was an old creative impulse, the thing that used to keep him perspiring over his canvases and typewriter. The desire to animate her! Yes, that was it, of course. He desired to bring her to life, as one might desire to insert a vivifying adjective in a stupid sentence. Pygmalion. Svengali ... something like that. But he brushed the thing out of his mind. He was pleased to find himself with a diversion.

“I'll not go to London,” he smiled. “An excellent exercise in egoism—creating a soul in another.”

MALLARE walked feverishly through the electric tumult of Broadway. Four months had passed since Rita had embraced him in the garden the night of Mrs. Winthrop's musicale. And since that romantic event a terror had gradually taken possession of him.

His gleaming eyes started at the insanely illuminated buildings. A street of playing-cards, monstrous playing-cards. Kings and queens and jacks and aces scattering themselves out of an invisible sky. The scene aggravated the curious fear in his mind. The red, green and yellow hallelujahs bursting over the buildings were like some lunatic orchestration for the disorder in his thought.

He lowered his eyes stupidly to the little explosions of people on the pavements. Bah! A frightfully uninteresting spectacle—people. Then as he paused at a crossing he smiled unexpectedly. He would have to keep a hand on himself. Otherwise this fantastic business about Rita would knock him out. He would look up Marcia. In fact, he would make a very serious and very deliberate effort to bar this Rita obsession out of his mind. He shuddered at the memory of the pale thin creature.

Marcia was a soul in mild rebellion. Also very pretty. And, what was of arresting importance, sane. Mallare desired some one whose sanity no epigram could question. Marcia was beyond even epigram.

He climbed four flights of stairs. A door opened for him. Marcia's colorful face and bobbed hair reminded him pleasantly that there were a great many people in the world unlike him left—healthy-minded people full of polite deaths they identified as sanity.

“The diabolical Fantazius,” laughed Marcia. He entered the studio. Marcia was a photographer of distinction, so distinguished in fact that she signed her photographs in pencil. This was Broadway sanity.

“Dined?” he smiled, sinking onto an insidious couch. She struck him as unusually reserved. He recalled pensively that there had been a time when she would have flung herself at him. Drawing her to his side he tried to embrace her.

“Thanks, no,” she frowned. But I'll go eat with you.'

A HALF-HOUR later they sat in a comparatively quiet corner of the Club Royale. Mallare regarded her face gloomily. Marcia's eyes were focused upon the effulgent scene. Here dining was an art seemingly independent of biology. Each of the tables offered itself as a glittering poster of prosperity. Mallare turned his back on the scene.

“Angry?” he inquired. She shrugged her white shoulders.

“Oh, no. I've heard all the scandal, of course. I was wondering when you would come around and give me a chance to check up.”

“Scandal?” he smiled with irritation. “Absurd, There is no scandal.”

“Oh! What's more, I've seen her.”

“Rita Ramsey?”

“Of course. You do remember their names, don't you. Well, my dear Don, I offer congratulations, and pass me the salt, please.”

Mallare sighed.

“Did you like her?”

“An unusual person,” Marcia answered, “quite unusual. I mean it. And, good Lord! How did you do it?”

“What?”

“Don't be ridiculous. Your silence is distinctly amateurish. After all, I have certain claims on your confidences, if not your loyalty.”

She regarded him with sudden bitterness.

“It does seem like an interesting alliance,” she murmured.

Mallare appeared to relax. The woman's jealousy warmed his frantic depression to a momentary lull.

“It's not an alliance,” he said.

“You have positively collapsed, Fantazius. I never knew you so considerately banal about anybody before. Ah, it must be love.”

Mallare grinned and refused to carry the talk further. Their eating done, they left the place.

“I need excitement to-night,” he whispered to her, taking her arm. “Will you stick?” She nodded.

A performance at the theater dragged. Marcia studied the sardonic mask of her friend's face. Something had altered in it. She was aware that he was thinking. An intense preoccupation obliterated his usual smile. Several times during the performance his hand held her bare arm. His fingers gave her cool flesh the sense of an electric contact. He looked at her during the intermission and said softly: “I think I've gone somewhat mad.”

“A difficult pose to keep up,” she smiled. But she recalled the man's usual aplomb and grew nervous. Unquestionably something was preying on his mind.

Mallare led the way from the theater through the crowds. They walked in silence. Marcia's eyes watched him as her mind busied itself with conjectures She had heard the gossip concerning him and Rita. Particularly the girl. People were talking about the astounding change that had come over her and of her infatuation for Mallare.

“In here, what do you say?” Mallare asked suddenly. He had stopped in front of the Rendezvous, a supper-club where a segment of Manhattan came to exchange its gold for a surcease from ennui. They went inside and pushed up the stairs.

A tumult filled the compact room. Tables were crowded. Men and women were dancing. Women with banjo bodies and paper faces, women covered with scandals in silk and silver cloth, men and women like ornamental fragments of sin—these sipped at the cacophony of music and laughter with vacuous eyes. At the far end of the room in a little oasis of silence, Mallare and Marcia crowded in behind the backs of a group of sullen revelers.

“Do you like this?” he grinned. Marcia nodded.

“I like everything ... with you,” she said. “But, are you going to tell me about her? I'd forgotten for a moment my rôle.”

“Rita?” he said the name with a grimace of distaste.

A waiter took their order. He resumed,

“I'VE made up my mind to go away.”

“So you do love her,” she smiled.

“No, terror,” he said softly. “It should amuse you to see me terrified of a woman.”

“It does.”

“It's happened in four months,” he went on. “Suddenly, you see.”

“I should say that was plenty of time, Fantazius. Unless you've changed your technique.” He paid no attention.

“I met her at the Winthrops'. A miserable, colorless little mouse. Tongue-tied. Made out of wood.”

“Yes, I know. Her mother brought her up once.”

“I must tell somebody,” Mallare muttered after a pause. He looked at her with an incongruous appeal in his ironic eyes. Then he laughed.

“I want you to go away with me, Marcia,” he said.

“Oh, thanks. As a love cure, I suppose?”

“No. Terror, I told you. If it were five hundred or a thousand years back, it would be intelligible. One could blame the devil. But as it is—”

“They blame you,” she supplied. “But there's not much difference in that.”

“I know,” Mallare nodded, “the thing actually gives me a morbid impression of myself. I wouldn't be surprised to wake up any morning with a cloven hoof.”

He drank out of his glass and regarded the crowded scene. An orchestra filled the excited room with snorting musical innuendos.

“I had an idea at first,” Mallare began to mumble, as if to himself. Marcia leaned forward, drawn by the unhumorous light in his eyes. “It was nothing definite. A vague idea about transforming her, creating her. Ugly people inspire one at times. One says, 'I could dress that creature and with a little training she would be beautiful.'”

The music ended.

“I CHANGED her,' whispered Mallare.

“Yes, Sir Satan, go on. I could see something had happened to her. She's a credit to you, now.”

“I changed her,” Mallare repeated, his voice grown dull. “Words at first. I talked to her for weeks. The poor thing listened.”

“And your words fell like rain upon parched soil,” Marcia taunted. “And a flower sprang up.”

“Please,” he looked at her, “will you go away with me?”

“It depends,” she smiled, “on many things. For instance, do you love me?”

Mallare shook his head.

“But you did once,” she whispered.

“Yes. And we could enjoy our memories.”

She laughed noisily.

“Go on about Rita,” she said. His eyes darkened. The name seemed to bring back a tautness of manner that had for a moment left him.

“It wasn't the words alone,” he continued. “I was a sort of god to her. I transformed her. What did she seem like to you?”

“Rather curious,” Marcia answered, “like a ...”

“Like a Black Mass by Debussy,” Mallare interrupted angrily. “Like a satanic virgin. A quaint little vampire.” His voice lowered. “A terrible mirror ...” A boisterous laugh came from him. “I'm full of similes, metaphors and awful comparisons,” he exclaimed. “Yes, she's very charming. Her little world is aghast. I changed her. I created her.”

“But why this collapse, Mr. God? I should think—”

“But you don't know the story,” he mumbled. “It turned out quite logically up to that point. But the thing that appals ...” He drank from the glass in front of him. “Yes, appals. I'm appalled.”

His eyes turned vaguely toward the fanfare of faces around them.

“The thing that appals,” he murmured and stopped. “Didn't you notice anything appalling about her?” he asked abruptly.

“Appalling?” Marcia repeated. “Why, no, It was rather uncanny, the change in her. She talked a bit like you.

He seized upon the answer.

“Exactly,” he cried. “She talks like me. She dreams like me. She walks like me. Everything about her is me. You see, now?

His hand gripped her nude arm and his eyes stared feveredly at her. His voice had become strident.

“That's flattering, of course,” Marcia managed to say quietly. “But I don't see anything else.”

“Flattering! Good God!” She grew confused under his burning eyes

“I've created myself in her,” Mallare went on talking, a wild note in his voice. “Myself. It's not that she mimics me. That would be droll. But she's got me. Something of me has gone to her. And I've become like a curious incompletion. When we're together, I feel that she and I are the same one. Do you understand? There's something terrible in that.”

HE passed his hand over his head and his voice grew steadier.

“I knock around this filthy town trying to keep away from her and to straighten the thing out,” he resumed. “But there's something that draws me. A hideous obsession. A morbid necessity to see her. I must see her. I don't care for her. But she's become myself. I want to see myself. It's like vanity become a disease. I want to see her as a man might feel a terrible impulse to look continually into a mirror. That's it.”

Marcia stared at him.

“The pack are after her,” he was saying. “They dance around her as if she was some hellish magnet.”

“Oh, yes, Baron Montheim,” Marcia smiled, recovering a sense of reality. “He came up to my place, raving. He wants to marry her.”

Mallare nodded indignantly

“They all do.”

“And the whole trouble is,” she taunted in a matter-of-fact voice, “that you're consumed with jealousy.”

He smiled.

“You must believe me,” he said. “If she only would marry the pack of them, all of them, ten barons, I'd be saved. It's not that. But I'm ensnared. I've done a hideous thing. Or perhaps something has been done to me. As if one of me wasn't enough. Now there are two of me. You've got to come away. We'll go somewhere.”

“Come, Sir Satan,” she whispered, “you talk rather insanely.”

“And what is insanity?” he demanded angrily. “Merely the faculty of taking one's illusions seriously. You don't understand that when I look at her I see myself. Not some one like myself—but ... Fantazius Mallare. Ah, there's no reality to the thing. She's not a woman. It's repugnant even to touch her. You recall the legend of Narcissus. He stared at his image and fell in love with it. But he died when he sought to embrace it. Yes, I understand the legend in an ugly way. It would be death to embrace her. It would be ghastly. Yet she holds me as if I were a maniacal whim of hers. As if I were the reflection and she Narcissus.”

He paused and his eyes focused upon an animated group across the room. Marcia followed his stare and grew red.

“There she is,” Mallare whispered. They sat in silence and watched the black dress and white face of Rita Ramsey. Marcia's eyes grew calm and shrewd but a foreboding struck her at the first glimpse of the girl.

“I do understand,” she whispered at last. “She's become a little like you. Because you've dominated her. But the rest is sheer fancy. She's just a vivacious and rather striking looking child.”

Mallare seemed not to listen. His eyes were fastened upon the curious face of Rita.

“Good God! Can't you see?” he went on. “Eyes like panthers of disillusion. Can't you see? It's Mallare sitting there.”

He stood up. She noticed that Rita and her friends were also leaving. Holding his arm she followed through the press.

“It's no use,” he whispered in the street. “It's too late.”

Marcia stared frightenedly at his suddenly bloodshot eyes. He helped her into a cab.

“Excuse me,” he said, taking her hand, “I ...”

The cab door closed. Looking back out of the window Marcia caught a glimpse of Mallare moving quickly to the side of a thin, white-faced girl in a sable wrap.

“I'LL come in and talk for a while,” Mallare said. Their cab moved away and Rita nodded. They entered the marble lobby of the apartment building. He inquired after her mother as they mounted in the elevator.

“She's away,” said Rita. A light was burning in the large room. Mallare glanced at the elaborate incongruities which filled the chamber and gave it the air of a museum show-case. Rita had taken off her wrap. Mallare from behind his mask of wearied indifference studied her. It was an illusion, he told himself. A preposterous thing, a terror based entirely upon vanity. She was nothing but an idiotic child who had matured precociously under his guidance. This creature in soft black with the face of a perverse saint, with the gestures of some languid and melancholy siren, was an impossibility. She was watching him with a thin smile. He heard her say: “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

Her voice was caressing. It sounded in his ears like an echo in monotone, an echo of his own voice. A vivid sense of having spoken himself overcame him. He turned away.

“I don't know,” he muttered helplessly. “But I must tell you something.”

“Yes.”

He had fought against confession. As he stood now, memories of women he had known trooped like wordless wraiths through his thoughts. A blur of forgotten faces, forgotten passions.

“Rita,” he said quickly, “I must go away.”

“From me?” she smiled incredulously. “Oh, no. You mustn't.”

She approached him and placed her hands on his shoulders. A yielding amorousness warmed her manner.

“Don't,” he whispered.

“But you love me.”

“No.”

She shook her head and was silent till he looked at her. The wraiths in his thought vanished. Women he had known, women whose eyes had mirrored ecstasies and passions for him—she was like them. Another of them. He struggled to fix the idea in his mind. But it slipped away. He stared desperately into eyes that mirrored nothing. Instead he saw himself suddenly—a horrible shadow of himself leering abjectly toward him. And he heard words whose source became confused, words that were like unspoken thoughts dancing in his own head. But it was Rita talking.

“YOU lie about that,” she was saying. “Do you think I don't know? I know everything about you. You have made me this way. I think of no one, of nothing but you. The others whirl around in space. They have no outlines. Their words don't make sense. You are the only one who lives for me.”

Mallare shuddered. A fear that she would kiss him made him cold. Then the illusion of duality deepened into a terrifying emotion. His disordered eyes saw in the white face raised toward him his own features. It was a mirror held up and he was staring frantically into his eyes, eyes that seemed somehow to have a life of their own. And his own voice was whispering to him. He struggled to bring himself back to sanity, but an hysteria entered the spaces of his thought and twisted it out of his control.

Rita, a radiant smile lighting her pale face, raised her arms and embraced him. Her lips came to his and her thin body pressed itself passionately against him. Mallare stood for a moment with his eyes shut. He felt a coldness stiffening him. Then a grotesque elation shot a warm stream through his veins. Himself! The word was a violence in his mind. Why not? It was nothing but an idea, a distortion born of madness. She was in reality a woman. This other was his mind, a horrible fancy that he could play with a fever that had disordered his cynicism.

He threw his arms quickly around her. Why not? The query rang in his thought with a mocking temptation. What was there better than himself? He held the thing in his arms avidly and fought to open his eyes. A bewildering pain choked his heart. He was rising, rising on nightmare wings. The lips that were devouring him became a ghastly repulsiveness. Terrified he heard himself calling ... “Mallare ... Mallare...”

“Are you better now?” Rita was leaning over him. He looked up from the divan. Something had happened.

“You must have fainted,” she whispered. “You kept calling your own name and then you fell over and I put you here.”

“Thanks.” He sat up. A lassitude filled him. Perhaps the idiocy would end now. His head throbbed and his mind seemed crowded with a nausea.

“You will pardon me,” he muttered, lowering his eyes hurriedly. It was still there—the abominable mirror. “I'll go.”

“You mustn't,” she said, and sat down beside him. “There is something wrong. You must tell me what it is. You kept crying out your name and holding me so tightly I couldn't breathe or move. You never held me that way before. It made my head swim. But why did you keep saying 'Mallare ... Mallare'?”

He shook his head and sat up.

“Oh, I love you,” she whispered, and covered her face with her hands. “I think of you all the time.”

He stood up now and straightened himself. “I'll come again to-morrow,” he said

OUTSIDE, he walked quickly. A cold December night. He would think about something, about Rita. If she allowed this melodramatic absurdity to gain a further hold, he would unquestionably end in an asylum. He had obviously become the victim of an overmastering egoism. His life had become haunted with an hallucination of his own manufacture. The thing was unnatural and ... unmodern. He smiled tiredly. Metaphysic nonsense. Yet it existed. It was eating into him. He would marry the creature. But to marry her would be to go completely mad. An abominable madness. The embrace and the elation were more than a warning They were the fact. He had thought Rita himself and in the moment of surrender he had thrown his arms about an image—an impossible image of himself. Mallare shivered in the cold. The city looked ugly.

“I mustn't run away from it,” his mind told him. “It's a sort of penalty. I've played too long with myself. A juggler of insincerities, indeed. Ha, there's something wrong with her, not with me. A case of hypnosis. Yes, hypnosis. I'll have to study it. I've colored her. She was an effigy I brought her to life. I must return her somehow to ... an effigy. How?”

He walked now as if he had a purpose. His mind said: “Bosh ... fiddlesticks. Come out of it. The thing's a miserable pose.”

There came to him the sense of a lie. He was lying to himself. He intended to do something, but was concealing it. He intended to rid himself of this ego incubus. But he was hiding; like a man plunging his head into darkness, he was hiding from thoughts that spread bat wings inside him and scurried in and out of his mind.

He walked along with a reiterative curse on his lips.

THERE were a number of people who wondered what the devil had become of Fantazius Mallare. They said among themselves, “The man's gone somewhere, hasn't he? But he let nobody know. He was always a queer fellow, though.”

Perhaps Rita Ramsey knew. One might ask her. But one had to be careful. What a girl! Here was a dark miracle, indeed. A summer ago a colorless little nobody. And then, presto! here she was—a Circe in black, a strange woman whose eyes ... What was it Mallare had said? One must go to Mallare for similes. Her eyes are like the panthers of disillusion. Fancy any one but Mallare getting away with a remark like that at a dinner table.

It was pointed out here and there, by people with an eye for such detail, that Rita Ramsey was something like Mallare. Quite so; when one thought of it, it became rather noticeable. Mallare had, of course, overshadowed the girl. But he was gone. Hunting lions in Africa or somewhere, said Mrs. Titus Ramsey. But whatever there had been between him and Rita, his going away had not retarded the girl. Nobody within the memory of the oldest society editor had ever witnessed such an ascent. Up like a skyrocket, and without being able to dance, sing, play the piano or recite. She could talk, of course. There was only one person who had ever been known to talk like that—Mallare. But since he had chosen to vanish, Rita was just as good. She had a way of snuffing out women infinitely more beautiful than herself. Her smile, stamped monotonously across the challenging pallor of her face, had a way of deflating the most effulgent gowns. She was loathed for this. And not only for this but women also resented her talk. It was difficult to manage one's little set pieces in the superior explosions and shell bursts of the insufferable Rita. She could stamp herself upon the consciousness of a room, draw eyes to herself and function generally as an obliterator.

One could blame it on her black attire. She tried to look like a satanic nun. The thing was in deplorable taste, as if she were continually fitted out for a masquerade. It was taking an unmannerly advantage. One dressed decently and humanly and appeared at some very ordinary human function to find the Ramsey creature rigged out in costume. Of course, the costume or masquerade never varied. But that helped nothing. In fact, it made it worse. This continually unchanging soft black became a pose, a uniform. It became a part of the mystery. Everybody else always tried to do the decent thing and appear now and then in new dresses. Rita took advantage of this as she did of everything. Her soft black gown, her unvarying coiffure, her challenging pallor and her curious eyes—these were like a chord, a never changing insistent chord, sounding a tom-tom motif through the empty arpeggios of her world.

It was a nuisance altogether, this ascent of Rita Ramsey. There was only one relieving thing. This was the spectacle of Mrs. Titus Ramsey. The spectacle of that dominant social Rabelaisian reduced suddenly to a silence, even a malicious silence, by the poor little thing whom she had brow-beaten for a decade afforded one some amusement. And there was no denying it, within the memory of man Rita had been the first to deflate her mother. How did one explain this? Mallare, of course. He had done something to the girl. Probably hypnotized her.

There was the night of the Winthrop musicale almost a year ago. He had met her then and for some impossible reason devoted himself to her. A mésalliance between a satyr and a wallflower it had been then, or seemed to be. Well, Mallare at least was over with. People who went away seldom came back. They melted, or dissolved, or collapsed, or did something equally absurd. There had been others. Cynics were always unreliable. They usually went bankrupt and faded out as automobile salesmen in the hinterland. Vale Mallare.

AND then Mallare returned. It was late spring. He appeared one evening at the Barings'. There was a houseful. Some one said excitedly, “Have you seen Mallare? He's back.”

And, marvel of marvels, he was! The Paganini of phrases had returned, precisely elegant as of old. One had to marvel at the man. He had unquestionably improved. That is, grown worse. The devil himself could have made no more effective a figure. He gave one a chill, a delightful chill. His return was entirely a sensation.

“Where have I been?” smiled Mallare. “Closeted with my soul. Contemplating the infinities of boredom yet in store for me. Strengthening my moral fiber.”

Later he said, “No, I have not seen Rita yet. Is that so? I'm very glad to hear. Ah, yes, it is always very charming to seem a symbol of evil. I remember her very well. So she still wears black. A Mænad in mourning. A very curious girl.”

Rita arrived in mid-evening. This should have been another sensation. Mrs. Baring's guests became unnecessarily animated. For nothing happened. Rita and Mallare shook hands, They stood and talked. Any one might listen. They stood smiling at each other in an almost identical fashion. Except that Mallare's smile seemed stronger.

It was to be seen also that Rita was amazingly in love with the man. She followed him about, not wistfully but shamelessly, like an overjoyed child. As for Mallare there was nothing to be deduced from his mask. He had changed somewhat in that way. His face wore a rigid expression of indifference, as impervious to scrutiny as his patent leather shoes. Late in the evening he suddenly affixed himself to the punch bowl and drank a terrific lot of wine. Nevertheless, barring a slight slowness that came over him, he remained untouched.

The return of Mallare became a commonplace item. He recaptured without effort his old place. He was to be seen frequently and usually in the company of Rita. His attitude toward her inspired doubt. He conducted himself like an automaton in her presence. But she, that was another matter. Shameless was the only word. She circled around the burning eyes of Mallare like a black moth, her words buzzing sardonically in his ears.

And then the night of Mrs. Winthrop's musicale occurred. This was an established function and not to be ignored.

MALLARE smiled quietly down at the seated figure.

“This,” he said, “is our balcony, if you remember.”

Rita nodded.

“And I think Rabinoff will sing later,” Mallare added. “Only it is colder than it was last year.”

“Many things are colder,” Rita sighed. “You, for instance. You don't love me”

Mallare shook his head wearily.

“Quite wrong,” he said.

“I don't understand then,” she said. Her white face turned towards him and she noticed a slight shiver in his eyes as he looked down at her. “You once told me that when a man has loved one woman he has loved all women. Perhaps that's why you chose to remain disinterested in your emotions toward me.”

“No.” Mallare grinned suddenly. His eyes blazed at the girl. “Would you like to try the garden again?” he asked.

They arose and passed through the music room. It was cool in the garden. Rita leaned against him as they moved among the shadows.

“You've been avoiding me,” she started. “We haven't talked together since you've come back. Since you went away that night. Tell me, please.”

Her gesture implored. They had halted at a stone bench.

“Yes,” he muttered. “Let's sit down. I'll tell you now. It's very simple. I've gone mad.”

Rita stared at him, a smile dying in her eyes,

“Oh, no,” she said.

He nodded. “It's quite true,” he went on. “I thought at first it was an unconscious pose. You know, that is one of the penalties the poseur must pay. One may lose oneself in platitudes and become an ass. And one may also lose oneself in insincerities and go mad. One forgets, then, who one is, what one is. That seems to have happened to me. I find myself unable to decide intelligently whether my madness is an egotistic pretence or an authentic malady. I went away to study the question. I shot two lions.”

He laughed humorously.

“I owed that to several ladies who affect red velvet,” he smiled.

“And you decided you were really mad?” Rita inquired with an effort at mockery.

“Yes,”

“And the kind of madness you have decided upon, that would be interesting, too?”

“Yes. My particular mania is based on the hallucination that there are two of me. That I am one. That you are the other.”

Rita nodded.

“I understand something like that,” she whispered. The mask that Mallare had worn seemed to slip from him. His voice grew disordered and his hands, as if released from some dominant restraint began to fumble.

“I've waited,” he spoke. “It grew worse away from you. But I gained a hand on myself. Then when I came back....”

He paused and Rita felt his body tremble beside her.

“I can't go on any longer,” he muttered. “Even now as I talk the obsession becomes violent. Too violent. You are Mallare. Your face and slender body are somehow a distorted image of Mallare. And your eyes are mine. I can see out of them as I look at you. Very curious, is it not?”

He laughed desperately.

“And when I talk to you, when I hear you talk.... Yes, there are two of me. I have read twenty volumes of metaphysics. Unconvincing. There is no science in hallucination. I have figured that out. It's all here.”

He pointed to his head and sank back against the stone of the bench.

“I'm two pieces, Rita,” he whispered. “At night I die of longing to be near you. The moments we're apart are a torture. I feel incomplete, As if I were terribly naked, amputated. As if I were half asleep. I must go to you. But when I see you it becomes worse.”

Her hand reached for his. He withdrew it.

“No,” he said, “Ah, poor child. You don't understand yet. Long ago I read of a curious mania that once afflicted men. There was Tiberius, the Roman. There are legends of the Black Sabbath. A horrible orgy it was supposed to be in which men, through the aid of drugs and magic, detached themselves into two individuals. Each became a man and woman. An interesting legend though a bit horrible. Tiberius himself is credited with having been able to transform himself into a man and woman—the woman a shadow twin of himself, whom he loved. I fancy he had a madness like mine. For since the night I embraced you in your home it has seemed to me you are this shadow twin of mine. And when I held you, there was such a horror in my heart I thought I must die. It has been that way since. I rush to you in thought as if I must make you a part of myself in order to be complete. But the memory of our embrace....”

His voice died away and he shuddered.

“It's like being in love with a mirror,” she said softly “But I love you....”

“Damned ... damned,” muttered Mallare. He drew a tiny bottle from his pocket. Rita stared at his hand.

“My head breaks,” he whispered. “And to go on....”

Rita's eyes still watched his hand. Her body had grown silent as if life had left her. Finally she spoke.

“Don't,” she said. She reached and removed the thing from his fingers.

“Your madness is only the thing I inspire in you,” she said softly. “And you are too wonderful to die if ... if there is some other way.”

“I adore you,” he muttered, “but it's impossible. I'm gone too far. It has eaten away every defense in me.” Music came into the garden.

“They are dancing,” murmured Rita. She took his arm.

“You will kiss me now,” she said, “and to-morrow you will be cured.”

Her voice had become radiant. An ecstatic clamor was in her eyes. She drew him to his feet and her arms encircled him. They remained together, their lips hungrily together. Moments passed. Rita felt him suddenly limp, She stumbled toward the stone seat and Mallare slipped down. He lay with his head hanging back and his eyes opened in an ugly stare. She leaned over him. His breathing had grown faint and his lips were parted rigidly. Her hands moved tenderly over his head.

“My own,” she whispered. She stood regarding him. She remembered that in the moment before he had fallen he had whispered his own name hysterically in her ear. She waited until his breathing grew stronger and then stooping she kissed the forehead of the unconscious figure and walked away.

They were dancing inside. Men hurried to her as she appeared. They had missed her. Ah, in the garden with Mallare? The lucky devil! But would she dance now? Yes. The music sent its dolorous rhythms through the large room, Laughters sparkled. Bodies glided ardently into a charming pattern of movement. She would dance! This was a melodrama gesture she must commit. Her eyes blazed.... The dance ended. Refreshments.

Rita detached herself from the insistent groups. They would prepare now for the singing. Her mind became occupied with meaningless trifles She watched men bringing chairs into the room. Turning, she walked slowly toward the balcony. It was deserted.

The singing started. Rabinoff, He would sing songs she remembered. Rita removed a tiny bottle from her bodice and her eyes looked blankly at it. Mallare had held it in his hand.

Now Rabinoff was singing. Her cold fingers removed the silver top of the tiny bottle. A pungent odor almost like a perfume came out of it,

“Doch wenn du sprichst, 'Ich liebe dich'
So muss ich weinen bitterlich........”

She closed her eyes and raised the thing to her lips. Emptied, it fell to her dress and rolled down. The music came dreamily into the night. There was a moon that floated like a white mask... And Mallare. The song was ending and Mallare was coming to the balcony. Her eyes widened. There was something strange about Mallare. He was tall. He reached into the air and his face danced. His eyes blazed like two writhing bodies—two black bodies writhing under the strange noise of lights... He was coming to her, and his hands like monstrous talons were reaching...

A scream made the music room suddenly silent. Men jumped up. They scurried around and the women rose and looked frightenedly at each other.

The Baron Montheim, standing in the door of the balcony, cried, “Good God!”

Rita lay on the floor, her arms thrown out and her white face hidden in a tumble of hair. The Baron lifted her up quickly.

“Dead!” he exclaimed.

Mallare stood over the couch on which they had laid the slender figure. Eyes were furtively watching him. He leaned over and kissed the forehead of the girl and then straightened.

His face had again become a mask and he walked away with a curious spring in his step.