The Monster

The young Baronne de Fresnoy, abandoning Tempest, looked at him. With a wicked glitter in her big blue eyes she called:

“Musty! Are you thinking of me?”

The pasha was framing a reply, a reply perhaps rather bald, when Camille de Joyeuse also addressed him. Presently she stood up. The others imitated her. The gayeties of the table were abandoned for the brilliance of the salons beyond.

Tempest, who had accompanied Leilah Barouffska said, as she seated herself:

“Are you to remain in Paris?”

Before answering, she looked up at him, for he was standing. “Who can tell what one will do? But I fancy so. We have taken a house in the rue de la Pompe.”

“In the rue de la Pompe!” Tempest exclaimed. “That is where I live.” He smiled. The fact that they were neighbours seemed to constitute a bond. “Whereabouts in the rue de la Pompe?”

“Next to the church.”

“Do you find it convenient?”

A servant announced:

“Monsieur and madame Spencer-Poole!”

“You mean,” Leilah replied, “am I a Catholic? No, I am an Episcopalian. But my views, I fear, are not orthodox. I have got so far that I believe fully in the Vidyâ.”

She had cited the book at the dinner table but, at the time, distracted by Marie de Fresnoy, Tempest had not heard; now he exclaimed at it.

“The Vidyâ! Of all things! Why not the Upanishads?”

A servant announced:

“Madame la marquise de Charleroi!”

Leilah made a little gesture. “The Upanishads, too. I have great faith in them also. Their conceptions seem to me the most perfect that the human mind has evolved, that is, if it were a human mind that evolved them.”

A servant announced:

“Madame la princesse Orlonna!”

“What particularly impressed you in them?” Tempest asked.

“The demonstration that life is a laboratory in which the strength of the soul is tried.”

“And in the Vidyâ?”

“The fact that selfishness is the root of evil. That impressed me very much, primarily I suppose because it is true, but chiefly I think because I had not realized it before.”

Tempest nodded. Never had he heard a mondaine cite the Upanishads. In no drawing room had he ever heard the Vidyâ mentioned. In his life he had not dreamed of having a digest of each produced in an atmosphere dripping with frivolities. As he nodded he reconsidered this woman. From the first he had realized that she differed from the ordinary society type. Now he saw that she belonged to a superior world.

“Do you not admire them, too?” Leilah, who had also been considering him, inquired.

Tempest adjusted his monocle. “You see, you know, the Self, the All-Self, the One, the oneness of self with everything, the oneness of all things with One, these minor motifs of theirs I may admire but I do not grasp. On the contrary, there is a certain voluminous complexity about them that makes me gasp. None the less they advance certain ideas which, while curious to the few and to the many absurd, are yet so mathematically evident; the fact for instance – ”

A servant announced:

“His Highness monseigneur le prince Paul de Montebianco!”

“Monsieur Harris!”

The salons were becoming filled. The floor was swept by trains brief but brilliant. There was a multiplication of black coats, a renewed animation, a mounting murmur in which occasionally the name of a new arrival was lost.

The servant announced:

“Monsieur le vicomte and madame la vicomtesse de Helley-Quetgen!”

“Madame la princesse Zubaroff!”

“Monsieur d’Arcy!”

“Monsieur le comte Barouffski!”

The last of these, a large man, very fair, with grey-green eyes, had a studied manner which, however, his voice relieved. As he advanced and addressed Mme. de Joyeuse, it sounded supple and silken, as indeed most Slav voices do.

Already groups had formed. The corner in which Tempest stood before Leilah developed another. The Spencer-Pooles approached. With them was d’Arcy, a young man abominably good looking, famous for the prodigious variety of his affairs.

Tempest who had continued talking, who had even been expounding and who now felt that he had been holding forth, moved on. He wanted to smoke and being an habitué of the household, he knew where the smoking room was.

There, before an open fire, his hands behind his back, in that after-dinner attitude which some men assume, M. de Joyeuse stood. He was telling of a stag hunt that had been held at Monplaisir, his estate.

The duke was not an impressionist, his description lacked colour. But de Fresnoy, who had been present, resaw it all; the sheen of the horses, the green of the whippers-in, the pink coats of the sportsmen, the blue dolmans of the officers that had ridden over from a garrison near by, the verdure of the forest’s edge, the view, the scramble, the run, the quarry, the hallali of the huntsman, the leaping hounds, the fastidious ceremonial of the death and the sky of pale silk which draped with faint gold the magnificent brutality of the scene.

“It was just my luck to have missed it,” Silverstairs threw in.

De Joyeuse turned to him. “We count on you next autumn. And on you also, mon vieux,” he added to Tempest who had approached.

Tempest nodded. He was lighting a cigar. The operation concluded, he drew a chair beside Silverstairs. “Now, tell me all about Madame B.”

Silverstairs eyed him quizzingly. “She interests you?”

“Enormously.”

“Then look out for Barouffski whom she interests still more.”

Tempest shrugged his shoulders. “Was it her interest in Number One or Number One’s interest in her that declined?”

“You mean Verplank?”

“I suppose I do. Anyway I mean her first husband. Why were they divorced?”

“Why? But my dear Tempest, divorce in the States is what racing is with us, a national amusement. Everybody takes a hand in it.”