The Spur of the Moment

IT was the Levisons’ first dinner in the little house they had taken at Neuilly. Though Mrs. Levison, as usual, called it ‘the little house we have just taken at Neuilly,’ it was not little for Neuilly. In fact it comfortably held the dinner party of eight people and, besides, Céleste the maid, an ancient Flemish sideboard of rare design, and a portrait of Mrs. Levison in three dimensions done in Chicago by a painter who had not ‘arrived.’ The wall spaces were white and bare, for it had been Mrs. Levison’s purpose when leaving Chicago, where her little dinners were almost famous, to blend in Paris the best of American and French effects in interiors.

The party of eight comprised everyone the Levisons knew in Paris and the young Georgian poet whom they had not met. Mrs. Victor Mactier brought the poet. But for him Mrs. Levison would have postponed the first of her little dinners until what she called their ‘little circle’ was larger. The poet, however, was so rarely in Paris, and was so exactly the kind of person Mrs. Levison liked to give dinners for, that she had decided to begin at once.

He was the Honorable Hugh Chisholm, M.P., third son of Baron Chisholm of Steffield Hall, Lincolnshire, former lieutenant R.F.A. — a bitter pacifist and partisan of the Second (not the Third) International. His last book had attracted great attention and had been published simultaneously in England and Chicago. It consisted of three long poems and a quatrain. The first was a realistic interpretation of the early morning walk from house to office of a prominent Methodist in a city supposed to be Birmingham, and his sudden death on the threshold of that office, caused by an old and necessarily concealed disease. The title of the poem was the name of the disease. The second poem was inspired by a Japanese print and was the longest of the three, with its title in Japanese script. The third described an incident of the Battle of Arras as afterward discussed at a London dinner party by two cabinet ministers and a bishop, and was called ‘Blood and Benedictine.’ The volume was completed by the quatrain, which was called ‘Man.’ Besides, he had had considerable success as a lecturer. On the platform he read his poems and that was all. Between readings — which he gave in a low sweet voice, which had an occasional hesitation like a stammer — he stood facing his audience in perfect silence. Sometimes a pause would last five minutes, but no sound from him ever broke it.

It was this silence which Mrs. Levison found so fascinating. It was not in any sense withdrawal — nothing of the pose of reverie. Rather it was immediate contemplation. Nevertheless at dinner it had to be broken, and following the poet’s eyes, which were fixed upon the flowers, Mrs. Levison did the breaking as gently as possible.

‘Are n’t the magnolias kind this year?’ she asked.

Mr. Chisholm turned his face slowly toward her. ‘Are they magnolias?’ he replied.

Mrs. Levison nodded. ‘They were sent to us from the South. ‘

‘Do you mean Brazil?’ asked the poet.

‘No,’ said Mrs. Levison; ‘the South of France.’

‘Brabraonne,’ murmured the poet.

Mrs. Levison nodded.

Mrs. Victor Mactier, who sat opposite, asked quietly: ‘How much a name is, really, is n’t it?’

Mrs. Mactier was temporarily separated from her husband, a young diplomat of attaché rank, because he had been ordered to Chile. It had been a bitter disappointment to her. She had married diplomacy dreaming, she said, of Vienna, of Paris, of Madrid, and all she had got was three years of Copenhagen, and then Chile. ‘Chile,’ she used to repeat in telling of it, ‘Chile,’ until her tiny seed-pearl bracelets rattled like chattering teeth. Her happiest memory was the coronation of the Tsar of Bulgaria, where her husband was an official spectator. She was a schoolgirl friend of Mrs. Levison, and when Mrs. Levison had decided to transfer her almost famous little dinners from Chicago to Paris Mrs. Mactier had come with her, fleeing from Chile.

Getting no response from the poet, Mrs. Mactier turned her question to the poet’s American publisher, an immense placid blond who sat next her. ‘Is n’t it, Mr. Lamar?’

‘It is in my business,’ replied Mr. Lamar.

‘Not in mine,’added Mr. Padraic Joynes across the table. ‘That is one thing I never had to spend a cent on and never will.’

The girl next to him turned in her lazy, almost insolent way to look at him. ‘What is your business?’ she asked.

‘Paper,’ replied Mr. Joynes.

‘What kind?’ she insisted. ‘News? Wall?’

‘All kinds,’ said Mr. Joynes briefly.

The girl was Lucita Wormeley. She was twenty-five and perfectly beautiful. When she was taking the part of a ruined Belgian nun in a war-charity cinema a certain great producer, who happened to see the picture, offered her twenty-five, fifty thousand, some said a half-million dollars a year to sign up with him. She played exquisitely the drums, a saxophone, and an organ; it was also said she could play a piano, but she denied this. She had been at one time engaged to the Earl of Streatham, but had refused to marry him unless she could retain her own name. He was killed, unmarried, at the second battle of Ypres, and left her his gold identity-disk, which she wore constantly now as a bracelet. It tinkled musically against her plate as she turned to speak to Mr. Padraic Joynes.

‘Then,’ she pointed out, ‘all of us have something to do with literature — except me.’

‘It’s my wife in our family,’ replied Mr. Joynes, ‘who attends to that.’ He paused to glance at his wife, who was looking at the poet. ‘What do you do?’ he added.

To Mr. Joynes’s surprise it was the poet on the other side of Miss Wormeley who answered.

‘She teaches dancing,’ said the poet.

‘Chissy disapproves,’ explained Miss Wormeley. ‘You see, I teach horses. He thinks it’s undignified for the horses.’

Mrs. Padraic Joynes, across the table, interrupted: ‘Mr. Chisholm has explained what he feels, I think, beautifully and completely in his “Houghnhms.” ‘

‘I never read it,’ said Miss Wormeley; ‘but then I hardly ever read Chissy’s things. They are so damned dirty.’

In the stillness which followed, Céleste the maid completed the round of the table with the potatoes. Once the delicate clash of the identity-disk of the Seventh Earl of Streatham against Lucita Wormeley’s fish plate sounded like the chime of a distant clock, accentuating the silence it so musically shivered. Céleste, withdrawing the potatoes from the left elbow of Mrs. Victor Mactier, was halfway to the pantry door. The gold clashed again with its eerie lightness, and as though with intent, like some fairy bugle preluding the entrance of Queen Mab.

And, as if in answer, from out the shadow behind the chair of Mr. Levison suddenly a voice spoke.

It was the voice of a man, distinctly, swiftly enunciating a command, and yet it was human speech of so completely different a kind from what it interrupted that it might have been a peal of thunder or the first notes of a violin. The listeners did not hear speech at all — they were conscious only of interruption. The eyes of the eight turned slowly, incredulously, but under an irresistible compulsion.

They saw in the doorway at the back of Mr. Levison’s chair a young man standing. He had advanced a step beyond the threshold to a position where, in the small dining-room at the edge of the candlelight, he could have laid a hand on Levison’s shoulder. He wore neat dark clothes, and had not removed a soft hat, set a trifle atilt. His arms were folded. In one hand, lying against his shoulder, he carried a pair of blackleather gauntlets with stiff cuffs. In the other, cuddled in the curve of his elbow like the head of a baby in the arms of a nurse, he held a small, blueblack automatic revolver. Slowly, as if drawn from immense distances by that irresistible compulsion, the eyes of the eight focused upon this queer shape in the shadow, covered, armed, suave, inexplicable — a shape that was like a man and yet was the embodied ghost of all they most dreaded, the visible form of all the dim hereditary terrors which their civilization had been created to suppress.

As the table was arranged Mrs. Levison faced him exactly. At her side the poet’s wistful gaze wandered across the magnolias. Lucita Wormeley had turned swiftly aside, as if to speak to her host. She looked startled, interested, and very beautiful. Levison was twisted about in his chair as if arrested at the very point of getting out of it. Mrs. Victor Mactier, the ornament of so many brilliant diplomatic functions, had grasped her throat as if to relieve some intolerable pressure there. She had, however, not worn her pearls. At her side the vast expanse of Lamar seemed covered with a rosy flush, like dawn upon snow. His mouth was open until the stiff linen of his collar bent under pressure. Beside him Mrs. Joynes, with the stiff gesture of a marionette, suddenly thrust a pair of short plump arms straight upright above her head. Her eyes alone were not turned upon the intruder, but fastened in frantic appeal upon her husband across the table, who, with a small boiled potato impaled upon a fork held rigidly before his face, slowly faded to a lifeless white.

Three times the voice spoke before there was any response from the group of eight people sitting at the table. It was the clear swift staccato speech of innumerable repetitions, like a stage juggler’s or a drill sergeant’s, official, rehearsed, impersonal.

It was the poet who answered first.

‘I have never learned French,’ said the poet.

Lucita Wormeley’s eyes freed themselves first from the hypnotic attraction and swept around the table. ‘He says,’ she translated, ‘to keep perfectly still.’

A convulsed sound in the throat of Mrs. Mactier, a tremor of Mrs. Joynes’s upright arms, a creak of a chair under some sudden change of pressure, seemed like a shiver running through the perfect immobility of her listeners.

‘Go on; go on,’ a man’s hoarse voice whispered from somewhere.

’He says,’ Miss Wormeley continued, after a pause filled by a repetition of that clipped official speech, like a little jet of sound thrown out of the shadow toward the light, ‘he says,’ she continued, ‘that the door is watched, the telephone cut, and that — that — there is — he has an — an associate — who is somewhere in here!’

‘Where? Where?’ repeated the hoarse whisper.

‘He says,’she began. Then she broke off. ‘Does nobody here speak French except me and the burglar?’ she inquired.

Mrs. Victor Mactier dropped her hands from her throat as if to free it for speech, and then groaned and clasped it again.

‘Céleste.’ It was Mrs. Levison who whispered the name.

A sharp command from the shadow answered the whisper.

’He wants,’ hastily resumed Miss Wormeley, ‘everything!’ She paused to listen intently. ‘Jewels,’ she began to repeat, ‘money, watches, shirt-studs, cuff-links.’

As she was speaking the door behind her chair creaked slightly. That unoiled hinge had been disagreeably audible frequently before. It was the only flaw in the service of this one of Mrs. Levison’s justly almost famous little dinners. It was Céleste, who had disappeared with the potatoes, who now reappeared as smoothly and quickly as ever, as if in the recesses of the pantry that soft whisper of her name had reached her alert ears. Alone in that company Céleste had in no way changed. The same soft-footed imperturbable serving maid who had disappeared returned, as if only to bring more potatoes. As before she carried a dish, but this dish was empty and larger and was covered with a black cloth. Swiftly and with the certainty of excellent training she presented the dish at the left elbow of Mrs. Levison.

’Madame!’ suggested Céleste.

The first murmur of complaint from that dinner party arose there. It was Mrs. Levison’s. It was only a whisper, but the bitterness of it might have withered the glorious magnolias to which she seemed to speak. ‘Céleste!’ murmured Mrs. Levison from out an immense despair.

‘Madame,’ answered Céleste.

With a desperate gesture Mrs. Levison tore from her green-silk breast a single pin and let it fall in the plate. Then she lifted her hand to the pearls at her throat.

‘Ah! No, madame,’ Céleste remonstrated.

She withdrew the plate, summoned by the voice of Mrs. Padraic Joynes. ‘Here, here!’ Mrs. Joynes had called. Strangely, the effect was one of grossly bad manners, as if the plate carried by Céleste held some delicacy impatiently awaited by the greed of Mrs. Joynes. Instead, almost instantly the black cloth was covered up, hidden, buried beneath a torrent of gems that poured from the heaving body of Mrs. Padraic Joynes. Diamonds, pearls, a ruby, more diamonds, an emerald, rings, pins, a bracelet, a necklace; they heaped the plate, tossed away by trembling fingers. And next upon this gleaming magnificence Mr. Lamar laid a gold watch, a leather wallet, a seal ring, an immense silver cigarette-case, and two small pearls torn from his rigid and immaculate shirt-front; and turning he presented through a gaping aperture a pink-silk undershirt to the gaze of Mrs. Victor Mactier, the habitué of coronations.

Across the table Miss Wormeley sat with her chin in her hands, her elbows on the cloth, her eyes on the magnificent fish-plate. At the last gesture of Mr. Lamar she smiled slightly.

‘Don’t,’ whispered Mr. Lamar, with a heavy frown, as he turned hastily to Mrs. Victor Mactier.

With a little shrug of disgust the wife of the brilliant young diplomat now in Chile let fall from her wrists two bracelets of seed pearls. ‘The real ones,’ she explained over her shoulder, ‘ are at Cartier’s. I am sorry.’

A gesture from the deferential Céleste cut her short; and lingeringly and in silence she let fall one by one upon the glittering pile a handful of rings. Then she sank, hands hanging, in her seat, colorless except for her dark-red lips, which showed like an old wound in her pallid face. For the brilliant Mrs. Victor Mactier was ‘through.’

Through the hands of Mr. Levison and Mr. Joynes the plate passed with scarcely a pause. Mr. Joynes, who had watched its approach with an air of indomitable resolution, placed his cupped hands over it an instant in a gesture almost of benediction. Then he thrust them out of sight beneath the table,

‘Merci, m’sieu,’ murmured Céleste, and placed the dish at the left elbow of Miss Wormeley.

Miss Wormeley spoke swiftly three French words to Céleste. She did not turn. Her chin still rested upon her clasped hands, while she gazed at the shirt-front of Mr. Lamar. Her neck and arms were bare. The great pile of rust-colored hair swept up from the curve of her neck to the top of her exquisitely poised head without ornament of any kind. Only at her wrist hung the thin gold chain linked to a tiny oval plate, the identity disk of the Seventh Earl of Streatham, killed at the second battle of Ypres, among the guns he would not live to surrender.

‘I have nothing,’ Miss Wormeley repeated in French. She spoke indifferently.

The eyes of the seven diners, in amazement at the delay, fastened upon her.

‘Mademoiselle,’ suggested the deferential Céleste in English, ‘the bracelet.'

‘Never!’

The single word was English and was quickly said, as it had to be, and the only gesture that accompanied it was a little tremor of her head.

Céleste turned doubtfully to the strange shape standing behind her.

‘Oh, Lucita!’ entreated the hoarse whisper of Mrs. Levison.

Theshadowy figure in the background hardly stirred, but the little dark-blue toy, nestled in his elbow like the head of a baby in the arms of a nurse, moved out toward the girl. In that room, where the bizarre was the precious, the little dark-blue tube had suddenly become the most precious. The tiny muzzle, black as a peephole into infinity, was directed toward the light, the shining silver, the big sweet magnolias. It was the point about which the whole composition resolved itself. From it all values were evolved. To its black reality all that was vulgar, bizarre, or meretricious in that room had, it seemed, paid tribute in that heaped and glittering plate. It was a sun — tiny, black — to a confused, unreal universe. And when the Force which controlled it moved, it was the Infinite, the Omnipotent, in that room which moved.

And Miss Wormeley defied it — the Infinite, the Omnipotent. That much was clear to everyone, though the words in which she voiced the defiance were incomprehensible, for it was the point at which language — the last invented and least perfected of human communications — ceased as a barrier to comprehension. Though of all that company not one could put into words what he heard, none failed to understand exactly what he saw — Miss Wormeley defying the Omnipotent.

Her manner of doing so was ugly, short, and awkward. She lifted her hands a little and dropped them. They smacked smartly on the table top. If that gesture had to be put into words it could only be expressed in some short, awkward, ugly idiom. ‘That’s flat!’ would most nearly give it. So, in accordance maybe with her creed and generation, the beautiful Miss Wormeley snapped her fingers at the Infinite and defied the Omnipotent with ‘That’s flat!’ Alone among them all she had not looked at the black spot pointing out toward the light like a ray of blackness. Perhaps she did not dare to. Certainly otherwise her attitude was impeccable.

It is an attitude which is generally acclaimed by poets and disliked by those spectators upon whom part of the punishment may easily fall. The poet, who sat at the side of Miss Wormeley, did not stir. His eyes had left the magnolias and were fixed upon her; but his muse was silent, for the author of ‘Man’ was here both a spectator and a poet. It was from across the table, from the chair where sat Mrs. Padraic Joynes, that the response came. The face of Mrs. Joynes was distorted; her fingers, which had so recently been stretched heavenward, clutched the table until the nails tore the cloth. The most painful emotions were tearing the soul of Mrs. Joynes: terror, hate, greed, jealousy. They blended now into one shrill outcry that she could not quite prevent from rising to a shriek.

‘You,’ demanded Mrs. Padraic Joynes, ‘give him that!’

Miss Wormeley seemed unaware of both the distorted body and the tortured soul of Mrs. Padraic Joynes. Her fingers lay lightly and steadily on the cloth and her eyes were fixed on them as if absorbed in admiration of their grace and color. If the occasion had been less grave it might have been said that she snubbed Mrs. Joynes.

And this view was accentuated by the interposition of their hostess; ‘You must, Lucita; we all have.’

But Mrs. Padraic Joynes, by nature rather indurate to snubs, was at that moment completely immune.

‘You,’ repeated Mrs. Joynes, ‘take it off her, do you hear?’

The second command was addressed to Céleste, who, half turned toward the directing figure in the background for instruction, seemed not to hear. Entirely oblivious to everything except that authority, Céleste ignored even the urgent call of her late master, Mr. Levison, who supported Mrs. Padraic Joynes with ‘Céleste, Céleste!’

For an instant the meditative gaze of the poet, fixed upon the hands of Miss Wormeley lying on the cloth, was lifted to the face of his host. Mr. Levison’s voice ceased. The poet resumed his scrutiny.

‘Take it off her!’

A second time Mrs. Padraic Joynes repeated her command, but now it was directed to her husband. Mrs. Joynes had risen and was leaning over the table. A finger, rather tremulous, was pointed at the face of Miss Wormeley. ‘Tear it off her, do you hear?’ she shrieked.

Obediently Mr. Joynes grasped Miss Wormeley’s arm — not the arm which wore the bracelet, which was the right, but the arm nearest to him, the left. Now Mr. Joynes had the hands of a very strong man rather out of condition. They were large, with short square fingers tipped with flat, square, shiny nails. Miss Wormeley’s arms and the magnolias were the most beautiful things in the room. Mr. Joynes grasped her left arm with one hand and was reaching confidently for the other, for at his touch Miss Wormeley had turned incredulously to look at him. It seemed as if she were paralyzed by the sudden contact, and unable to lift out of danger her left arm, encircled by the slim gold chain.

The eyes of the poet, which had seemed enchanted by the beauty of her arms, suddenly contracted as the hands of Mr. Padraic Joynes entered the field of his vision. Like Miss Wormeley he turned incredulously to look at Mr. Joynes’s face. Then, picking up the brimful glass of sauterne, he hurled wine and glass both exactly into the face of Mr. Joynes.

And as he did so he stammered, for even in his public readings Chisholm had a touch of that affliction: ‘You craw-craw-crawling slu-slug! ‘

The blow, which for so small a missile had astonishing power, had two immediate and directly opposite effects. It brought Mr. Joynes to the floor and the rest of the company at the same instant to their feet. Mr. Joynes, who, owing to his efforts to reach Miss Wormeley’s right arm, was at the moment of contact slightly off balance, fell forward, curiously like a man shot through the heart, so that for an instant he lay with his head on Miss Wormeley’s knees. She, rising, spilled him like a lap dog on to the floor under the table. The uprising of the others had been so exactly simultaneous that the general effect was that of a party rising gayly to drink a toast — a toast, say, to the absent guest, represented by the vacant chair of Mr. Joynes, which had remained undisturbed behind his plate.

It was a moment of tense and complete silence. They stood — the seven — staring at the empty place. In the presence of the disaster of his disappearance they stood helpless, awaiting the greater disaster of his reappearance. It was only indeed after the process of the reappearance had visibly begun that Mr. Lamar muttered hoarsely: ‘Help— help him up.’

But then Mr, Joynes was up. He presented a very unkempt appearance; he was wet and choking in his collar. He looked much more like a man who had been ducked than one who had been knocked down. And in addition to his ridiculous appearance he was the victim, the helpless victim, of a delusion. His first words betrayed his condition.

‘They,’ he said in a choked voice, ‘they have shot me’; and he sank into his chair.

Across the table Mrs. Mactier gave a short hysterical sob, instantly suppressed. Mr. Levison leaned toward him. ‘No, no, no, no,’he began to repeat.

A cry interrupted the iteration. The great bulk of Mr. Lamar had emitted a sound that was by comparison a squeal. ‘Look, look!’ he was crying in a light falsetto. ‘They’ve gone, they’ve gone!’

They had gone. Céleste and her mysterious accomplice — vanished completely. They had fled naturally and wisely; but it was a peculiarly cowardly flight, in as much as the situation from which they fled was of their making. They had chosen, from the mean motive of greed, to change an occasion equipped for the highest aspirations of the human spirit into a situation involving an entirely different equipment of that spirit; and then, having got out of it all their greed demanded, with the exception of one bracelet, they had fled.

This was cowardly; it was even a little insulting, for the abruptness of their flight implied a suggestion of disgust — as if, say, they had turned their backs on a too salacious play.

It was Mrs. Victor Mactier who, as the astounded company rushed in tumult into the hall, next perceived the situation and had Mr. Levison violently prevented from dashing forth for the police. ‘Stop him!' she commanded Mr. Lamar.

Mr. Lamar instantly and easily obeyed.

‘The police,’ she pointed out, ‘are stupid. We must know exactly what to tell them.’

Mr. Levison, at that moment halfway down the hall on his way to his own front door and the police, was by her command encircled firmly in the arms of Mr. Lamar.

Mrs. Levison, standing on the first step of the staircase in the hall, to see better over the heads of the little group massed there, caught his wildly roving glance. For Mr. Levison was overwrought; in his perturbed consciousness it seemed that having been once assaulted and robbed by his servants he was again being assaulted and robbed by his guests. Even of his own wife he seemed to inquire: ‘Are you in this?’

But Mrs. Levison stilled him with a

gesture. ‘Just a moment,’ she began, standing on the first step as on a platform. ‘I think that we should first get together here and make out a statement, because, you know, there will be reporters.'

‘Exactly,’agreed Mrs. Mactier. ‘Are we going to give interviews, rewards, and things like that?’

’In short,’ Mr. Lamar summed up in his normal voice, speaking easily over the head of Mr. Levison, upon whom he still kept a light precautionary hand, ‘do we want publicity or do we not?’

The necessary silence of reflection was profound and, like that first silence now so many sad hours ago, it was broken by the strange eerie music that had like a fairy bugle preluded the beginning of the situation — the delicate tinkling chime of the identitydisk of the late Earl of Streatham.

The effect of that sound upon the company was infuriating, maddening. They turned like a mob in miniature toward its source, a young girl in white, leaning lazily over the newel post.

‘Great God!’ called out a heavy voice from the ranks. ‘Keep that damn thing still!’

But Mrs. Levison was in control.

‘I take it,’ quickly proceeded her bright assured voice, the voice of a capable chairwoman shepherding her committee, ‘I take it that we do not.’