She gives a cry of alarm and cowers back.
"Julia ?" he whispers questioningly.
She turns in fright the other way, giving him her back.
He comes around before her again.
"Madam, will you lower your scarf?"
"Let me be, or I'll call for help."
He reaches up and flings it aside.
A pair of terrified blue eyes, stranger's eyes, are staring taut at him, aghast.
Her escort comes back at a run, raises his stick threateningly. "Here, sir!" Brings it down once or twice, then discarding it as unsatisfactory, strikes out savagely with his unaided arm.
Durand goes staggering back and sprawls upon the sidewalk.
He makes no move to resist, nor to rise again and retaliate. He lies there extended, on the point of one elbow, passive, spent, dejected. The wild look dies out of his face.
"Forgive me," he sighs. "I thought you were-someone else."
"Come away, Dan. The man must be a little mad."
"No, I'm not mad, madam," he answers her with frigid dignity. "I'm perfectly sane. Too sane."
22
In the front parlor of Madame Jessica's house on Toulouse Street, there was a vivacious evening party going on. Madame Jessica's parlor was both expansive and expensively furnished. The furniture was ivory-white, touched with gold, in the Empire style; the upholstery was crimson damask brocade. Brussels carpeting covered the parquetry floor, and the flickering gas tongues above, in nests of crystal, were like an aurora borealis.
A glossy haired young man sat at the rosewood piano, running over Chopin's "Minute Waltz" with a light but competent touch. One couple were slowly pivoting about in the center of the room, but more absorbed in one another's conversation than in dancing. Two others were on the sofa together, sipping champagne and engaged in sprightly chat. Still a third couple stood together, near the door, likewise lost to their surroundings. Always two by two. The young ladies were all in evening dress. The men were not, but at least all were well groomed and gentlemanly in aspect.
All was decorum, all was elegance and propriety. Madame was strict that way. No voices too loud, no laughter too blaring. None left the room without excusing themselves to the rest of the company.
A colored maid, whose duty it was to announce new arrivals, opened one of the two opposite pairs of parlor-doors and announced: "Mr. Smith." No one smiled, or appeared to pay any attention.
Durand came in, and Madame Jessica crossed the room to greet him cordially in person, arm extended, her sequins winking as she went.
"Good evening, sir. How nice of you to come to see us. May I introduce you to someone?"
"Yes," Durand said quietly.
Madame fluttered her willow fan, put a finger to the corner of her mouth, surveyed the room speculatively, like a good hostess seeking to pair off only those among her guests with the greatest affinity.
"Miss Margot is taken up for the moment--" she said, eying the sofa in passing. "How about Miss Fleurette? She's unescorted." She indicated the opposite pair of doors, leading deeper into the house, which had partially and unobtrusively drawn apart. A tall brunette was standing there, as if casually, in passing by.
"No."
Madame did something with her fan, and the brunette turned and disappeared. A more buxom, titian-haired young woman took her place in the opening.
"Miss Roseanne, then?" Madame suggested enticingly.
He shook his head.
Madame flickered her fan and the opening fell empty.
"You're difficult to please, sir," she said with an uncertain smile.
"Is that--all? Is there--no one else?"
"Not quite. There's our Miss Juliette. I believe she's having a tête-a-tête. If you'd care to wait a few minutes--"
He sat down alone, in a large chair in the corner.
"May I send you over some refreshments ?" Madame asked, bending attentively over him.
He opened his money-fold, passed some money to her.
"Champagne for everyone else. Don't send any over to me."
A colored butler moved among the guests, refilling glasses. The other young men turned, one by one, saluted with their glasses, and bowed an acknowledgement to him. He gravely bowed in return.
Madame must have been favorably impressed, she evidently decided to hasten Miss Juliette's arrival, in some unknown behind-the. scenes manner.
She came back presently to promise: "She'll be down directly. I've sent up word there's a young man down here asking for her."
She left him, then returned to say: "Here she is now. Isn't she just lovely? Everyone's simply mad about her, I declare!"
He saw her in the doorway. She stood for a moment, looking around, trying to identify him.
She was blonde.
She was beautiful.
She was about seventeen.
She was someone else.
Madame bustled over, led her forward through the room, an arm affectionately about her waist.
"Right this way, honey. May I present--"
She gasped. The beautiful creature's eyes opened wide, at the first rebuff she had ever received in her short but crowded life. A puzzled silence momentarily fell upon the animated room.
His chair was empty. The adjacent door, the door leading out, was just closing.
23
Mardi Gras. A city gone mad. A fever that seizes the town every year, on the last Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. "Fat Tuesday." Over and over, for fifty-three years now, since 1827, when the first such celebration started spontaneously, no one knows how. A last fling before the austerities of Lent begin, as though the world of human frailty were ending, never to renew itself. Bacchanalia before recantation, as if to give penance a good hearty cause.
There is no night and there is no day. The lurid glare of flambeaux and of lanterns along Canal and Royal and the other downtown streets makes ruddy sunlight at midnight; and in the daytime the shops are closed, nothing is bought and nothing is sold. Nothing but joy, and that's to be had free. For eight years past, the day has already been a legal holiday, and since that same year, 1872, the Legislature has sanctioned the wearing of masks on the streets this one day.
There is always music sounding somewhere, near or far; as the strains of one street band fade away, in one direction, the strains of another approach, from somewhere else. There are always shouts and laughter to be heard, though they may be out of sight for a moment, around some corner or behind the open windows of some house. Though there may be a lull, along some given street, at some given moment, the Mardi Gras is going on just as surely somewhere else just then; it never stops.
It was during such a momentary lull that the motionless figure stood in a doorway sheltered beneath a gallery, along upper Canal Street. The air was still hazy and pungent with smoky pitch-fumes, the ground was littered with confetti, paper serpentines, shredded balloon skins looking like oddly colored fruit-peelings, a crushed tin horn or two; even a woman's slipper with the heel broken off. The feet of an inebriate protruded perpendicularly from a doorway, the rest of him hidden inside it. Someone had tossed a wreath of flowers, as a funereal offering is placed at the foot of a bier, and deftly looped it about his upturned toes.
But this other figure, in its own particular doorway, was sober, erect. It had donned a papier-mâché false face, out of concession to the carnival spirit; otherwise it was in ordinary men's suiting. The false face was grotesque, a frozen grimace of unholy glee, doubly grotesque in conjunction with the wearied, forlorn, spent posture of the figure beneath it.
A distant din that had been threatening for several moments suddenly burst into full volume, as it came around a corner, and a long chain, a snake dance, of celebrants came wriggling into view, each member gripping waist or shoulders of the person before him. The Mardi Gras was back; the pause, the breathing space, was over.