The Moonlit Way: A Novel

“But – ”

“Wait! I don’t wish it to know me!”

“But if you – ”

The girl’s slight gesture checked him, although her smile became humorous and friendly:

“Please! We need not discuss my future. Only the past!” She laughed: “How it all comes back to me now, as you speak – that crazy evening of ours together! What children we were – two years ago!”

Smilingly she clasped her hands together on the table’s edge, regarding him with that winning directness which was a celebrated part of her celebrated personality; and happened to be natural to her.

“Why did I not recognise you immediately?” she demanded of herself, frowning in self-reproof. “I am stupid! Also I have, now and then, thought about you – ” She shrugged her shoulders, and again her face faltered subtly:

“Much has happened to distract my memories,” she 48 added carelessly, impaling a strawberry, “ – since you and I took the key to the fields and the road to the moon – like the pair of irresponsibles we were that night in June.”

“Have you really had trouble?”

Her slim figure straightened as at a challenge, then became adorably supple again; and she rested her elbows on the table’s edge and took her cheeks between her hands.

“Trouble?” she repeated, studying his face. “I don’t know that word, trouble. I don’t admit such a word to the honour of my happy vocabulary.”

They both laughed a little.

She said, still looking at him, and at first speaking as though to herself:

“Of course, you are that same, delightful Garry! My youthful American accomplice!.. Quite unspoiled, still, but very, very irresponsible … like all painters – like all students. And the mischief which is in me recognised the mischief in you, I suppose… I did surprise you that night, didn’t I?.. And what a night! What a moon! And how we danced there on the wet lawn until my skirts and slippers and stockings were drenched with dew!.. And how we laughed! Oh, that full-hearted, full-throated laughter of ours! How wonderful that we have lived to laugh like that! It is something to remember after death. Just think of it! – you and I, absolute strangers, dancing every dance there in the drenched grass to the music that came through the open windows… And do you remember how we hid in the flowering bushes when my sister and the others came out to look for me? How they called, ‘Nihla! Nihla! Little devil, where are you?’ Oh, it was funny – funny! And to see him come out on the lawn – do you remember? He looked so fat and 49 stupid and anxious and bad-tempered! And you and I expiring with stifled laughter! And he, with his sash, his decorations and his academic palms! He’d have shot us both, you know…”

They were laughing unrestrainedly now at the memory of that impossible night a year ago; and the girl seemed suddenly transformed into an irresponsible gamine of eighteen. Her eyes grew brighter with mischief and laughter – laughter, the greatest magician and doctor emeritus of them all! The immortal restorer of youth and beauty.

Bluish shadows had gone from under her lower lashes; her eyes were starry as a child’s.

“Oh, Garry,” she gasped, laying one slim hand across his on the table-cloth, “it was one of those encounters – one of those heavenly accidents that reconcile one to living… I think the moon had made me a perfect lunatic… Because you don’t yet know what I risked… Garry!.. It ruined me – ruined me utterly – our night together under the June moon!”

“What!” he exclaimed, incredulously.

But she only laughed her gay, undaunted little laugh:

“It was worth it! Such moments are worth anything we pay for them! I laughed; I pay. What of it?”

“But if I am partly responsible I wish to know – ”

“You shall know nothing about it! As for me, I care nothing about it. I’d do it again to-night! That is living – to go forward, laugh, and accept what comes – to have heart enough, gaiety enough, brains enough to seize the few rare dispensations that the niggardly gods fling across this calvary which we call life! Tenez, that alone is living; the rest is making the endless stations on bleeding knees.”

“Yet, if I thought – ” he began, perplexed and troubled, “ – if I thought that through my folly – ”

“Folly! Non pas! Wisdom! Oh, my blessed accomplice! And do you remember the canoe? Were we indeed quite mad to embark for Paris on the moonlit Seine, you and I? – I in evening gown, soaked with dew to the knees! – you with your sketching block and easel! Quelle déménagement en famille! Oh, Garry, my friend of gayer days, was that really folly! No, no, no, it was infinite wisdom; and its memory is helping me to live through this very moment!”

She leaned there on her elbows and laughed across the cloth at him. The mockery began to dance again and glimmer in her eyes:

“After all I’ve told you,” she added, “you are no wiser, are you? You don’t know why I never went to the Fountain of Marie de Médicis – whether I forgot to go – whether I remembered but decided that I had had quite enough of you. You don’t know, do you?”

He shook his head, smiling. The girl’s face grew gradually serious:

“And you never heard anything more about me?” she demanded.

“No. Your name simply disappeared from the billboards, kiosques, and newspapers.”

“And you heard no malicious gossip? None about my sister, either?”

“None.”

She nodded:

“Europe is a senile creature which forgets overnight. Tant mieux… You know, I shall sing and dance under my sister’s name here. I told you that, didn’t I?”

“Oh! That would be a great mistake – ”

“Listen! Nihla Quellen disappeared – married some fat bourgeois, died, perhaps,” – she shrugged, – “anything 51 you wish, my friend. Who cares to listen to what is said about a dancing girl in all this din of war? Who is interested?”

It was scarcely a question, yet her eyes seemed to make it so.

“Who cares?” she repeated impatiently. “Who remembers?”

“I have remembered you,” he said, meeting her intently questioning gaze.

“You? Oh, you are not like those others over there. Your country is not at war. You still have leisure to remember. But they forget. They haven’t time to remember anything – anybody – over there. Don’t you think so?” She turned in her chair unconsciously, and gazed eastward. “ – They have forgotten me over there – ” And her lips tightened, contracted, bitten into silence.

The strange beauty of the girl left him dumb. He was recalling, now, all that he had ever heard concerning her. The gossip of Europe had informed him that, though Nihla Quellen was passionately and devotedly French in soul and heart, her mother had been one of those unmoral and lovely Georgians, and her father an Alsatian, named Dunois – a French officer who entered the Russian service ultimately, and became a hunting cheetah for the Grand Duke Cyril, until himself hunted into another world by that old bag of bones on the pale and shaky nag. His daughter took the name of Nihla Quellen and what money was left, and made her début in Constantinople.

As the young fellow sat there watching her, all the petty gossip of Europe came back to him – anecdotes, panegyrics, eulogies, scandals, stage chatter, Quarter “divers,” paid réclames – all that he had ever read and heard about this notorious young girl, now seated there 52 across the table, with her pretty head framed by slender, unjewelled fingers. He remembered the gems she had worn that June night, a year ago, and their magnificence.

“Well,” she said, “life is a pleasantry, a jest, a bon-mot flung over his shoulder by some god too drunk with nectar to invent a better joke. Life is an Olympian epigram made between immortal yawns. What do you think of my epigram, Garry?”

“I think you are just as clever and amusing as I remember you, Nihla.”

“Amusing to you, perhaps. But I don’t entertain myself very successfully. I don’t think poverty is a very funny joke. Do you?”

“Poverty!” he repeated, smiling his unbelief.

She smiled too, displayed her pretty, ringless hands humorously, for his inspection, then framed her oval face between them again and made a deliberate grimace.

“All gone,” she said. “I am, as you say, here on my uppers.”

“I can’t understand, Nihla – ”

“Don’t try to. It doesn’t concern you. Also, please forget me as Nihla Quellen. I told you that I’ve taken my sister’s name, Thessalie Dunois.”

“But all Europe knows you as Nihla Quellen – ”