第23章

"The time when we have to get into this melee or become the pariah dog among countries.I don't profess to any knowledge of international affairs, but any fool can see that our sham neutrality will be the most costly piece of political blundering ever perpetrated in history.Here we are in 1915.The war's nine months old.For every day we stand aside we shall eventually pay a year's bill.""That's all too deep for me," said Joan."And anyway, I shan't be asked to pay anything.What shall we do now?""What would you like to do? Go on to the Ritz and dance?" He had a sudden desire to hold this girl in his arms.

"Why not? I'm on the verge of getting fed up with this place.Let's give civilization a turn.""I think so." He beckoned to his waiter." The check," he said.

"Sharp's the word, please."

The Crystal Room was not content with one band.Even musicians must sometimes pause for breath, and anything like a break in the jangle and noise might bring depression to the diners who had crowded in to dance.As soon, therefore, as the left band was exhausted, the one on the right sprang in with renewed and feverish energy.Whatever melody there might have been in the incessant ragtime and fox trots was lost beneath the bang and clang of drum and cymbals, to which had been added other more ingenious ear tortures in the shape of rattles and whistles.Broken-collared men and faded women struggled for elbow room like a mass of flies caught on sticky paper.There was something both heathenish and pathetic in the whole thing.The place was reekingly hot.

"Come on," said Joan, her blood stirred by the movement and sound.

Palgrave held her close and edged his way into the crowd between pointed bare elbows and tightly clasped hands.

"They call this dancing!" he said.

"What do you call it?"

"A bullfight in Hades." And he laughed and put his cheek against her hair and held her young slim body against his own.What did he care what it was or where they were? He had all the excuse that he needed to get the sense and scent of her.His utter distaste of being bruised and bumped, and of adding himself to a heterogeneous collection of people with no more individuality than sheep, who followed each other from place to place in flocks after the manner of sheep, left him.This girl was something more than a young, naive creature from the country, childishly keen to do everything and go everywhere at fever heat--something more than the very epitome of triumphant youth as clean and sweet as apple blossoms, with whom to flirt and pose as being the blase man of the world, the Mr.Know-All of civilization, a wild flower in a hot house.Attracted at once by her exquisite coloring and delicious profile, and amused by her imperative manner and intolerant point of view, he had now begun to be piqued and intrigued by her insurgent way of treating marriage and of ignoring her husband--by her assumption of sexlessness and the fact that she was unmoved by his compliments and looked at him with eyes in which there was no remote suggestion of physical interest.

And it was this attitude, new to him hitherto on his easy way, that began to challenge him, to stir in him a desire to bring her down to his own level, to make her fall in love and become what he called human.He had given her several evenings, and had put himself out to cater to her eager demand to see life and burn the night away in crowds and noise.He had treated her, this young, new thing, as he was in the habit of treating any beautiful woman with whom he was on the verge of an affair and who realized the art of give and take.

But more than ever she conveyed the impression of sex detachment to which he was wholly unaccustomed.He might have been any inarticulate lad of her own age, useful as a companion, to be ordered to fetch and carry, dance or walk, go or come.At that moment there was no woman in the city for whom he would undergo the boredom and the bruising and the dementia of such a place as the one to which she had drawn him.He was not a provincial who imagined that it was the smart thing to attend this dull orgy and struggle on a polished floor packed as in a sardine tin.Years ago he had outgrown cabaret mania and recovered from the fascination of syncopation.And yet here he was, once more, against all his fastidiousness, playing the out-of-town lad to a girl who took everything and gave nothing in return.It was absurd, fantastic.He was Gilbert Palgrave, the man who picked and chose, for whose attentions many women would give their ears, who stood in satirical aloofness from the general ruck; and as he held Joan in his arms and made sporadic efforts to dance whenever there was a few inches of room in which to do so, using all his ingenuity to dodge the menace of the elbows and feet of people who pushed and forced as though they were in a subway crush, he told himself that he would make it his business from that moment onward to lay siege to Joan, apply to her all his well-proved gifts of attraction and eventually make her pay his price for services rendered.

He had just arrived at this cold-blooded determination when, to his complete astonishment and annoyance, a strong, muscular form thrust itself roughly between himself and Joan and swept her away.