CHAPTER I THE PARTNER

THE train, with a shrill whistle, pulled into Summering. For a moment the black coaches stood still in the silvery light of the uplands to eject a few vivid human figures and to swallow up others. Exacerbated voices called back and forth; then, with a puffing and a chugging and another shrill shriek, the dark train clattered into the opening of the tunnel, and once more the landscape stretched before the view unbroken in all its wide expanse, the background swept clean by the moist wind.

One of the arrivals, a young man pleasantly distinguished by his good dress and elastic walk, hurried ahead of the others and entered one of the hotel ’buses. The horses took the steep road leisurely. Spring was in the air. Up in the sky floated the white shifting clouds of May and June, light, sportive young creatures, playfully coursing the blue path of heaven, suddenly dipping and hiding behind the mountains, embracing and running away, crumpling up like handkerchiefs, elongating into gauzy scarfs, and ending their play by roguishly perching white caps on the mountain tops. There was unrest below, too, in the wind, which shook the lean trees, still wet from the rain, and set their limbs a-groaning softly and brought down a thousand shining drops. Sometimes a cool breath of snow descended from the mountains, and then there was a feel in the air both balmy and cutting. All things in the atmosphere and on the earth were in motion and astir with the ferment of impatience. The horses tossed their heads and snorted as they now trotted down a

descent, the sound of their bells jingling far ahead of them.

On arriving at the hotel, the young man made straight for the registry and looked over the list of guests. He was disappointed.

“What the deuce have I come here for?” he thought in vexation. “Stuck ’way up here on top of the mountain all alone, no company; why it’s worse than the office. I must have come either too early or too late. I never do have luck with my holidays. Not a single name do I know. If only there was a woman or two here to pick up a flirtation with, even a perfectly innocent one, if it must be, just to keep the week from being too utterly dismal.”

The young man, a baron not very high up in the country’s nobility, held a government position, and had secured this short vacation not because he required it particularly, but because his colleagues had all got a week off in spring and he saw no reason for making a present of his “week off” to the government. Although not without inner resources, he was a thoroughly social being, his sociability being the very quality for which his friends liked him and for which he was welcomed in all circles. He was quite conscious of his inability to stay by himself and had no inclination to meet himself, as it were, but rather avoided his own company, feeling not the least urge to become intimately acquainted with his own soul. He knew he required contact with other human beings to kindle his talents and stir up the warmth and exuberance of his spirits. Alone he was like a match in a box, frosty and useless.

He paced up and down the hall, completely out of sorts, stopping now and then irresolutely to turn the leaves of the magazines, or to glance at the newspapers, or to strike up a waltz on the piano in the music-room. Finally he sat down in a sulk and watched the growing dusk and the gray mist steal in patches between the fir-trees. After a long, vain, fretful hour he took refuge in the dining-room.

As yet only a few of the tables were occupied. He took them in at a swift glance. No use. No one he knew, except—he responded to the greeting listlessly—a gentleman to whom he had spoken on the train, and farther off a familiar face from the metropolis. No one else. Not a single woman to promise even a momentary adventure. He became more and more impatient and out of sorts.

Being a young man favored with a handsome face, he was always prepared for a new experience. He was of the sort of men who are constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to plunge into an adventure for the sake of its novelty, yet whom nothing surprises because, forever lying in wait, they have calculated every possibility in advance. Such men never overlook any element of the erotic. The very first glance they cast at a woman is a probe into the sensual, a searching, impartial probe that knows no distinction between the wife of a friend or the maid who opens the door to her house. One rarely realizes, in using the ready-made word “woman-hunter,” which we toss in contempt at such men, how true the expression is and how much of faithful observation it implies. In their watchful alertness all the passionate instincts of the chase are afire, the stalking, the excitement, the cruel cunning. They are always at their post, always ready and determined to follow the tracks of an adventure up to the very brink of the precipice, always loaded with

passion, not with the passion of a lover, but with the cold, calculating, dangerous passion of a gambler. Some of them are doggedly persevering, their whole life shaping itself, from this expectancy, into one perpetual adventure. Each day is divided for them into a hundred little sensual experiences—a passing look, a flitting smile, an accidental contact of the knees—and each year into a hundred such days, in which the sensual experience constitutes the ever-flowing, life-giving and quickening source of their existence.

There was no partner for a game here—that the baron’s experienced eye instantly detected. And there is nothing more exasperating than for a player with cards in his hands, conscious of his ability, to be sitting at the green table vainly awaiting a partner. The baron called for a newspaper, but merely ran his eyes down the columns fretfully. His thoughts were crippled and he stumbled over the words.

Suddenly he heard the rustling of a dress and a woman’s voice saying in a slightly vexed tone:

“Mais tais toi donc, Edgar.” Her accent was affected.

A tall voluptuous figure in silk crackled by his table, followed by a small, pale boy in a black velvet suit. The boy eyed the baron curiously, as the two seated themselves at a table reserved for them opposite to him. The child was making evident efforts to be correct in his behavior, but propriety seemed to be out of keeping with the dark, restless expression of his eyes.

The lady—the young man’s attention was fixed upon her only—was very much betoiletted and dressed with conspicuous elegance. She was a type that particularly appealed to the baron, a Jewess with a somewhat opulent figure, close to, though not yet arrived at, the borderline of overmaturity, and evidently of a passionate nature like his, yet sufficiently experienced to hide her temperament behind a veil of dignified melancholy. He could not see her eyes, but was able to admire the lovely curve of her eyebrows arching clean and well-defined above a nose delicate yet nobly curved and giving her face distinction. It was her nose that betrayed her race. Her hair, in keeping with everything else about her, was remarkably luxuriant. Her beauty seemed to have grown sated and boastful with the sure sense of the wealth of admiration it had evoked.

She gave her order in a very low voice and told the boy to stop making a noise with his fork, this with apparent indifference to the baron’s cautious, stealthy gaze. She seemed not to observe his look, though, as a matter of fact, it was his keen, alert vigilance that had made her constrained.

A flash lit up the gloom of the baron’s face. His nerves responded as to an underground current, his muscles tautened, his figure straightened up, fire came to his eyes. He was not unlike the women who require a masculine presence to bring out their full powers. He needed the stimulation of sex completely to energize his faculties. The hunter in him scented the prey. His eyes tried to challenge hers, and her glance crossed his, but waveringly without ever giving an occasional relaxation of the muscles round her mouth, as if in an incipient smile, but he was not sure, and the very uncertainty of it aroused him. The one thing that held out promise was her constant looking away from him, which argued both resistance and embarrassment. Then, too, the conversation that she kept up with her child encouraged him, being obviously designed for show, while her outward calm, he felt, was forced and quite superficial, actually indicating the commencement of inner agitation. He was a-quiver. The play had begun.

He made his dinner last a long while, and for a full half-hour, almost steadily, he kept the woman fixed with his gaze, until it had travelled over every line of her face and touched, unseen, every spot of her body.

Outside the darkness fell heavily, the woods groaned as if in childish fear of the large, rain-laden clouds stretching out gray hands after them. The shadows deepened in the room, and the silence seemed to press the people closer together. Under the dead weight of the stillness, the baron clearly noted that the mother’s conversation with her son became still more constrained and artificial and would soon, he was sure, cease altogether.

He resolved upon an experiment. He rose and went to the door slowly, looking past the woman at the prospect outside. At the door he gave a quick turn, as if he had forgotten something, and caught her looking at him with keen interest. That titillated him.

He waited in the hall. Presently she appeared, holding the boy’s hand and paused for a while to look through some magazines and show the child a few pictures. The baron walked up to the table with a casual air, pretending to hunt for a periodical. His real intention was to probe deeper below the moist sheen of her eyes and perhaps even begin a conversation.

The woman instantly turned away and tapped the boy’s shoulder.

“Viens, Edgar. Au lit.”

She rustled past the baron. He followed her with his eyes, somewhat disappointed. He had counted upon making the acquaintance that very evening. Her brusque manner was disconcerting. However, there was a fascination in her resistance, and the very uncertainty added zest to the chase. At all events he had found a partner, and the play could begin.

CHAPTER II QUICK FRIENDSHIP

THE next morning, on entering the hall, the baron saw the son of the beautiful Unknown engaged in an eager conversation with the two elevator boys, to whom he was showing pictures in a book by Du Chaillu. His mother was not with him, probably not having come down from her room yet.

The baron took his first good look at the boy. He seemed to be a shy, undeveloped, nervous little fellow, about twelve years old. His movements were jerky, his eyes dark and restless, and he made the impression, so often produced by children of his age, of being scared, as if he had just been roused out of sleep and placed in strange surroundings. His face was not unbeautiful, but still quite undecided. The struggle between childhood and young manhood seemed just about to be setting in. Everything in him so far was like dough that has been kneaded but not formed into a loaf. Nothing was expressed in clean lines, everything was blurred and unsettled. He was at that hobbledehoy age when clothes do not fit, and sleeves and trousers hang slouchily, and there is no vanity to prompt care of one’s appearance.

The child made a rather pitiful impression as he wandered about the hotel aimlessly. He got in everybody’s way. He would plague the porter with questions and then be shoved aside, for he would stand in the doorway and obstruct the passage. Apparently there were no other children for him to play with, and in his child’s need for prattle he would try to attach himself to one or other of the hotel attendants. When they had time they would answer him, but the instant an adult came along they would stop talking and refuse to pay any more attention to him.

It interested the baron to watch the child, and he looked on smiling as the unhappy little creature inspected everything and everybody curiously, while he himself was universally avoided as a nuisance. Once the baron intercepted one of his curious looks. His black eyes instantly fell, when he saw himself observed, and hid behind lowered lids. The baron was amused. The boy actually began to interest him, and it flashed into his mind that he might be made to serve as the speediest means for bringing him and his mother together. He could overcome his shyness, since it proceeded from nothing but fear. At any rate, it was worth the trial. So when Edgar strolled out of the door to pet, in his child’s need of tenderness, the pinkish nostrils of one of the ’bus horses, the baron followed him.

Edgar was certainly unlucky. The driver chased him away rather roughly. Insulted and bored, he stood about aimlessly again, with a vacant, rather melancholy expression in his eyes. The baron now addressed him.

“Well, young man, how do you like it here?” He attempted a tone of jovial ease.

The child turned fairly purple and looked up in actual alarm, drawing his arms close to his body and twisting and turning in embarrassment. For the first time in his life a stranger was the one to address him and not he the stranger.

“Oh,” he managed to stammer out, choking over the last words, “thank you. I—I like it.”

“You do? I’m surprised,” the baron laughed. “It’s a dull place, especially for a young man like you. What do you do with yourself all day long?”

Edgar was still too confused to give a ready answer. Could it be true that this stranger, this elegant gentleman, was trying to pick up a conversation with him—with him, whom nobody had ever before cared a rap about? It made him both shy and proud. He pulled himself together with difficulty.

“I read, and we do a lot of walking. Sometimes we go out driving, mother and I. I am here to get well. I was sick. I must be out in the sunshine a lot, the doctor said.”

Edgar spoke the last with greater assurance. Children are always proud of their ailments. The danger they are in makes them more important, they know, in the eyes of their elders.

“Yes, the sun is good for you. It will tan your cheeks. But you oughtn’t to be standing round the whole day long. A fellow like you ought to be on the go, running, jumping, playing, full of spirits, and up to mischief, too. It strikes me you are too good. With that big fat book under your arm you look as though you were always poking in the house. By jingo, when I think of the kind of fellow I was at your age, I used to raise the devil, and every evening I came home with torn knickerbockers. Don’t be so good, whatever you are.”

Edgar could not help smiling, and the consciousness of his own smile removed his fear. Now he was anxious to say something in reply, but it seemed self-assertive and impudent to answer this affable stranger, who spoke to him in such a friendly way. He never had been forward and was easily abashed, so that now he was in the greatest embarrassment from sheer happiness and shame. He would have liked to continue the conversation, but nothing occurred to him. Luckily the great yellow St. Bernard belonging to the hotel came up and sniffed at both of them and allowed himself to be petted.

“Do you like dogs?” asked the baron.

“Oh, very much. Grandma has one in her villa at Bains. When we stop there he stays with me the whole time. But that’s only in the summer when we go visiting.”

“We have a lot of dogs at home on our estate, a full two dozen, I believe. If you behave yourself here I’ll make you a present of one, brown with white ears, a pup still. Would you like to have it?”

The child turned scarlet with joy.

“I should say so.”

The words fairly burst from his lips in an access of eagerness. Then he caught himself up and stammered in distress and as if frightened:

“But mother won’t allow me to have a dog. She says she won’t keep a dog in the house. It’s too much of a nuisance.”

The baron smiled. The conversation had at last come round to the mother.

“Is your mother so strict?"

The child pondered and looked up for an instant as if to find out whether the stranger was to be trusted on such slight acquaintance.

“No,” he finally answered cautiously, “she’s not strict, and since I’ve been sick she lets me do anything I want. Maybe she’ll even let me keep a dog.”

“Shall I ask her?”

“Oh, yes, please do,” Edgar cried delightedly. “If you do I’m sure she’ll give in. What does he look like? White ears, you said? Can he do any tricks yet?”

“Yes, all sorts of tricks.” The baron had to smile at the sparkle of Edgar’s eyes. It had been so easy to kindle that light in them.

All at once the child’s constraint dropped away, and all his emotionalism, kept in check till then by fear, bubbled over. In a flash the shy, intimidated child of a minute before turned into a boisterous lad.

“If only his mother is transformed so quickly,” the baron thought. “If only she shows so much ardor behind her reserve.”

Edgar went at him with a thousand questions.

“What’s the dog’s name?”

“Caro.”

“Caro!” he cried happily, somehow having to answer every word with a laugh of delight, so intoxicated was he with the unexpectedness of having someone take him up as a friend. The baron, amazed at his own quick success, resolved to strike while the iron was hot, and invited the boy to take a walk with him. This put Edgar, who for weeks had been starving for company, into a fever of ecstasy.

During the walk the baron questioned him, as if quite by the way, about a number of apparent trifles, and Edgar in response blurted out all the information he was seeking, telling him everything he wanted to know about the family.

Edgar was the only son of a lawyer in the metropolis, who evidently came of a wealthy middle-class Jewish family. By clever, roundabout inquiries the baron promptly elicited that Edgar’s mother had expressed herself as by no means delighted with her stay in Summering and had complained of the lack of congenial company. He even felt he might infer from the evasive way in which Edgar answered his question as to whether his mother wasn’t very fond of his father that their marital relations were none of the happiest. He was almost ashamed at having been able to extract these family secrets from the unsuspecting child, for Edgar, very proud that anything he had to say could interest a grown-up person, fairly pressed confidences upon his new friend. His child’s heart beat with pride—the baron had put his arm on his shoulder while they were walking—to be seen in such close intimacy with a “man,” and gradually he forgot he was a child and talked quite unconstrainedly, as if to an equal.

From his conversation it was quite clear that he was a bright boy, in fact, a bit too precocious, as are most sickly children who spend much time with their elders, and his likes and dislikes were too marked. He took nothing calmly or indifferently. Every person or thing was discussed with either passionate enthusiasm or a hatred so intense as to distort his face into a mean, ugly look. There was something wild and jerky about his manner, accentuated perhaps by the illness he was just recovering from, which gave his talk the fieriness of fanaticism. His awkwardness seemed to proceed from the painfully suppressed fear of his own passion.