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Black and Silver
1
I was sitting only two tables away from where the man was stabbed. The restaurant was of course in immediate uproar; it was not easy to arrest the murderess, a big, stalwart Austrian woman with dyed red hair, who went mad with the realisation of what she had done, and lashed out with her bowie-knife and her fists and her feet until the waiters thought that it was a wildcat rather than a woman. Presently the police came in with their clubs, and beat down the excitement as well as the resistance. They will clear the place, I thought, and shut it up until the coroner arrives. For the man was dead as one of his own western steers; a big, bull-necked brute he was from Chicago, as we all learnt afterwards from the papers.
The idea of going recalled me to the purpose for which I had waited, dallying with liqueurs. Here was my chance to offer my escort to the solitary lady in the corner. She had come in when I was halfway through my meal, and her entry had produced a sensation even in that restaurant, inured to most bizarre events. It was not only that people turned to look at her. The maître d' hôtel found himself in front of her without appearing to get there, in the way that distinguishes the good maître d' hôtel from the bad one. The other waiters seemed to constitute themselves a bodyguard; they convoyed her to a little table in the corner, and almost before she was seated the wine steward had appeared with a marvellous Venetian glass tall and slim, a masterpiece, like a black opal, and a bottle of Hock that looked as if it might have been the loot of the cellar of Jamshid himself. The maître d' hôtel handed her the menu; she appeared to comprehend it at a glance; she marked two dishes with a tiny silver pencil; he bowed yet lower, and dematerialised. She had taken no notice of any of the fuss; she had not spoken a single word.
Now that she was left alone, I was able to get a good impression of her. She was not unusually tall, but her excessive slimness made her appear so. She had the figure of a young boy rather than that of a woman. Her face was small and delicate, pallid as the moon, with a certain veiled vigilance as if she saw all but disdained to notice it—it reminded me a little of a Frenchwoman of the vieille régime on a tumbril . . . or a throne. The mouth was exceptionally small and straight and thin.
But the astonishing part of her was her arms and hands. She wore a great hat of black radiating straws, supporting a mesh of adorable lace. It was set very far back on her head, showing fully a very high and intellectual forehead. On it, designed by no man-milliner, but by a true artist, was a gigantic silver spider, the hat being its web. Beneath it were locks of the palest ashen gold, neatly braided and looped, to cover the back of the neck. Her dress was of tight-fitting silk of that charcoal grey of which one can hardly say whether it is black or silver. This note was carried throughout her whole adornment. Her fan was of black paradise feathers in a chased silver frame.
Yet in all this nothing was more than a foil for those wonderful arms and hands. They were extravagantly long and fine. She was in evening dress with shoulder-straps only to the bodice, but her black gloves reached almost up to them. They were of the most intoxicating black kid, almost as fine as silk, and a tiny silver monogram at the top set off their perfect blackness. So long and thin was the hand that one felt instinctively that no bracelet could ever have stayed upon her wrist.
Her dinner was as extraordinary as herself. She had ordered caviar, then truffles à la serviette, then black coffee. She did not remove her gloved during the repast, and she looked neither to right nor left. I am bound to admit that she aroused my curiosity to the highest point. 'An intrigue, now, with that woman. . .' I did not finish the thought. It struck me, of course, that she might be a morphineuse; everything but her extreme neatness pointed to that conclusion. Yet no; her countenance expressed a settled melancholy, but was astonishingly reserved and self-controlled. Never had I seen a woman so perfectly grande dame as this one. Every line of her gave the lie to any hint of self-indulgence. The intensity of her suggested for a second that she might be an international spy; but she was clearly no adventuress. Conjecture revolved vainly in its orbit; all came back at last to the obvious truth: she was a lady.
Once during the fracas I looked across to her. I had hoped to see alarm; I would cross to her and reassure her. By no means; her tiny white teeth bit into her truffles, one by one, as if she were alone in the cafe; she lifted her glass and drank that noble Hock as steadily and as simply as the Priest consumes the Wine of the Sacrament. I have some experience of life: Eton, Oxford and the Indian Civil Service, until a certain fatal episode which threw me on the world and forced me to begin again from the beginning, on rather different lines. But I had never seen such absolute aplomb; it could only arise from a hereditary conviction that nothing can ever happen.
The police had begun to clear the cafe; I had prepared my little speech; I looked across—she had disappeared. On her table lay a twenty-dollar bill.
I am a man of resource; I segastuated myself in the neighbourhood of the maître d' hôtel. I prestidigitated ten dollars into his ever-ready hand. He did not need to await my question.
"It is the Countess Mierka Brzeckska," he said. "Her maid appeared one day, about a month ago, with that glass and a case of that Hock—Johannisberger Cabinet 1854—I have never seen its equal—and said that madame would sometimes lunch or dine here. This is her sixth visit. She never comes twice in one day. She never speaks a single word. She always pays with a twenty-dollar bill, though the cheque is rarely over five dollars. Yes, sir, about forty gentlemen have made enquiry. That is all I know.
"If they all give you ten dollars, you should be doing well."
"Thank you, sir, things are fair, fair." His voice sank to a whisper. "I got on to Bethlehem at 108. (They were 435 1/2 that day.) Do you think I should get out, sir?"
"When in doubt, take a profit," I answered, "and—whether in doubt or not—cut a loss. Good day!"
I thought I had got very little for my ten dollars. But the woman intrigued me hugely; as I turned into the Avenue I struck up my cane viciously on the sidewalk and swore to God to follow up the adventure. I dropped into the office of a society weekly whose editor was a clubfellow. Luckily he was in.
"No, dear man," he replied to my question. "I won't bore you with the scrap I know. We've had a 'par' or two, you know, nothing at all. It's as mysterious as the Origin of Evil. You take my tip and go right down to Pfeiffer of The Mercury; he's had a man on her these last two months. Know him, don't you?"
"Sure."
So off I went to Park Place in a taxi at a cost of four dollars and seventy-five cents—I was keen—and caught Pfeiffer just as he was leaving the office. We drifted into Hahn's for a drink.
"It's the curse of the office," he began, sipping his highball. "I put Jones on to her, then Jaeger, then Scott, now Fletcher, and, believe me, nothing doing. She has a suite at the Martha Washington, of all places, respectability and curl-papers to the n plus oneth degree; she never speaks, she never telephones, she gets no calls, she gets no letters. She lunches and dines out nearly all the time, always in the best places. She has an electric brougham, black and silver like herself, and the only thing the least bit fishy about it all is that it would take a racing car to catch that tiny runabout. I don't know any longer how many time my chaps have been thrown off by the plain speed of it. And often enough she makes long sprints late at night. Oh Yes! there's one other thing. She's not dumb; she sings to herself in the hotel to some kind of a guitar; always French songs, very sweet and innocent; 'pauvre Gaspard' and 'O mon Dieu vous m'avez blessé d'amour' and that sort of thing; but nearly every day that melancholy Provençal burthen 'Enseveli, tout mon espoir.' The French Embassy know nothing about her, and the Russian won't talk. Probably she's a Frenchwoman married to some damned Pole. Very likely he got killed in the war, and she's got the weeps over him. Anyhow, it's all as lively as one's own funeral, and I've got her complaint, for the old man, if he gets wind of all this, will think I'm getting too fat for my job."
And here it ended. For a month I neither saw nor heard any more of 'Black and Silver.'
2
Suddenly the luck turned, as luck will, I was in Sherry's with a party of friends, dining hastily, going on to a new play. She walked into the balcony, in all parts exactly as before. The staff were not as demonstrative as in the fashionable Bohemian cafe three blocks away, but they were even more devotional. It was the difference between Anglican and Catholic worship.
Almost before I had time to think, I was called to the telephone. Free for a moment of my friends, I got rid of the man who had rung me up with little ceremony, and walked to the front of the restaurant. There was the electric brougham, the chauffeur as funereal as the rest of the equipment, an old man, in a dead black, silver-braided uniform, with white hair and beard, and an expression like an undertaker.
I made up my mind in a second. I telephoned to Mahoney's. "Send me your fastest racing car to Sherry's within ten minutes," I said, "with a man that would hang on to the devil's own tail." He said that he had a car that would follow a monoplane across the Rocky Mountains, and I could have it before he rang off. (That is how Mahoney built up his business.)
I went back into Sherry's, told them that my call was from a dying uncle worth eighteen millions, and would they excuse me? They would. I went out; my car drove up in about five minutes; I gave the man his cue and settled down to wait.
Presently she came out. The brougham was at the door with matchless coordination; she stepped in without a word; she drove away. Up the Avenue we sped; through Central Park—and here the auto was put to it to keep track of the wonder-car up Lenox, across by Columbia University, through a curious and deserted quarter to the 'Grand Concourse,' through Van Cortlandt Park, back beneath the Elevated Railway and so on to Riverside Drive and into Broadway.
"Another foozle," said I, to myself, "she's going back to the Martha Washington. She's lost her husband, and a fast car helps her to forget, and that's all there's to it." But the car kept on steadily down Broadway, and at Madison Square turned once more into the Avenue. At Eighth Street it swung sharply to the right, and stopped dead.
She mounted the steps of a house only a few doors down from the Avenue. I was actually startled (by this time) to see her do something natural and normal. My car was drawn up on the other side of the street, two doors further on, as I had instructed. What she did was to take a latchkey from her bag, and open the door of the house. A miraculous silhouette she made, for the house was directly in the light of the street lamps, and the door was dead ivory white against the black of her dress. Her white flesh faded out; it was if she had become invisible, only the dress remaining. Like a snake in long grass, she gave one twist of her lithe body, and disappeared. I had expected it; I would not even curse; I told the chauffeur to go to Jack's' he put the clutch in . . .
"Stop!" I said.
There was no doubt about it. The door was still open, and across its blank lay, like a bar, her arm and hand.
My heart almost stopped. I could not think at all. My brain was dizzy by this time with the beating of the wings of my imagination. But by some primitive instinct I got out of the auto and began—mechanically, automatically—to cross the street.
Then I stopped. Hang it, what could I do? The position was impossible. Luckily no one was passing.
The arm remained motionless.
3
It could not have been a quarter of a minute; it seemed like hours. Ultimately primaeval manhood prevailed in me, I had almost said against me. Like a man in a dream I went up to the door; my hand closed upon her wrist. Instantly, yet very gently, the arm began to withdraw itself; the hand turned and caught my wrist delicately and subtly, a caress, yet a command; the door opened so that I could slip through it, and almost before I knew it I heard it close behind me. At the same moment the blackness became absolute, and I felt an arm about my neck. The thin straight mouth was put firmly on mine with extraordinary passion, yet deliberately and in cold blood, as if it were an effect of will, not of desire. There was no yielding in it, either to itself, or to another; it was imperious and formal, like a decree of execution signed by a king who loved mercy.
The long kiss ended; I raised my head—and started. There was no light of any kind, but a skeleton hung self-luminous in the air. She drew me towards it; I heard the bones clink as we brushed by, and felt the swaying of the velvet portières through which she led me. I could feel that I was in a large room, perhaps a studio, for there was a sense of bareness, perceptible even without sight. With perfect confidence she drew me steadily onwards; then we sank down upon a large leather covered armchair.
Somewhere, loudly and solemnly, a clock ticked. Time, yet one more emblem and signpost of mortality! She must have touched a secret switch; the room glimmered out in light. From a hundred cunningly concealed tubes radiating that ghastly glare of mercury vapour which photographers sometimes use in their studios, and which turns all reds to blues. The natural severity of her face added to the effect; she was a corpse, no doubt. I thought of Gautier's 'La Morte Amoureuse,' and a thousand other stories of the kind. I was tremendously excited, but not alarmed. This woman was evidently a détraquée with a peculiar fashion. Let her have her way! I had plenty of experience of such. After my first year in Port Said—following my misfortune—there was not much that I did not know. I fell in willingly with her caprice of silence.
The light showed me a large studio, a sculptor's, doubtlessly, for there were no canvases, and many statues stood about the room, mostly plasters of antiques. The armchair in which I sat, and on whose arm she hovered, was the only piece of furniture in the room, with one exception. Directly in front of me, about ten feet away, was a great coffin of black covered with a pall of woven silver. The foot was facing me; at the head stood two silver candlesticks. But instead of candles they held skulls, which now began to glow with the same infernal mercury-lamp light. It was all very harmless; a variation of the Caberet du Néant in private life. Such things rather amuse me.
I was recalled to myself with yet another start. Somehow, between the door and the chair, she had discarded her cloak; beneath it was but flimsy gossamer frou-frou; she was all hat and gloves and modelled whiteness. Her eyes fixed on mine with ghastly fire. I could feel her breath hissing between her teeth. Her right arm was about my neck; her left caressed me with ineffable skill and abandon. My imagination became almost a paroxysm; I really knew no longer anything, but that a great geyser-burst of mad, perverse, incomprehensible passion had surged up in me. I became as one delirious. A million impossible fancies raced through my brain.
Suddenly I woke. She had not moved, from the moment that we came to the chair on whose arm she sat; nay, scarce a muscle; yet now she slipped from me and the light went out. It was only for a moment; a rosy glow pervaded the room from lamps hung high; and she stood before me, the hat removed, her figure wrapped in a gorgeous mandarin coat, and the fantastic, the hashish-thrilled, the murderous hands bare. It was a revelation. Even the supposed coffin was seen for what it was—evidently—an unfinished piece of sculpture over which the dainty-fingered artist had thrown a shawl of silver embroidery.
But there was still another surprise in store for me. Just as I thought that she meant to lapse into human and natural behaviour, she merely led me to the door. Still in my maze, I yet was alive enough to passion to ask her when I should see her again. For the first and last time she spoke rapidly, incisively, with the calm of all finality, and just a touch of espièglerie to make it charming: 'Je ne me donne jamais deux fois.'
I found myself in the street. The brougham had vanished. I looked for my car. My man drove up. He laughed. I forgave him, for there was I, standing stockistly, like a fool—with a pair of long black kid gloves in my hand.
4
The next morning Mahoney called me up.
"Car O.K.?" he asked.
"Sure,: said I.
"None of my business," said he, "but you'd better know. You were followed home last night."
"Likely enough," I said, "the cops are on to that joint, by Hank, you bet your sweet life."
"Righto," he said, and rang off.
But that was not the end of it that day. I had a hot time of it in Wall Street standing off the bears, but we won out, and a dozen of us decided to celebrate the victory at the St. Regis. We got a bit soused, I'm afraid; anyhow, young van X. (let's call him that! Willie, his name is—the pet of our bunch—about the best family in Manhattan, and the richest) started in with a story—and by the Great Horn Spoon, it was my own story! Bar the direction of the drive—he had gone over to Long Island—word for word, the same. Except, too, that in dismissing him she had borrowed Voltaire's answer to his English fellow-experimenter: 'Once, a philosopher!'
To my amazement, the story fell perfectly flat. Van X. showed his annoyance. Oscar L. (the banker) put him wise. "I guess we've all been there, old sport. Don't care much for that sort of thing myself, but it's all right, once in a while. Damn queer stunt; sounds like a bet; anyhow, she's gone clean through this one burg. Some stunt."
I tried a little shikar at odd times, but to no purpose. Once I found her in Delmonico's; she ignored me. I noticed grimly that a certain young oil magnate followed her out very precipitately.
By-and-by the story was forgotten; I heard (I forget how) that she had left the Martha Washington. Pfeiffer printed a long story in the end, hinting all he dared hint, and hinting—jack high!—that he knew much more. The police raided the studio, too; but nothing was found. And so it ended; all the markings of a great romance and a great scandal—and nothing came of it.
But I always cherished the memory of the episode as one of the strangest and most enigmatic treasures of my mind.
Postscript
Well, gentlemen, here is the story as I wrote it, thinking it might suit some magazine. (I scribble at odd moments.) I am sorry to have to spoil it.
About three months after her disappearance I received a large, flat envelope, registered, from Montreal. It contained a photograph, and a printed circular offering to sell the negative. A printed circular! The photograph was excessively clear, and eminently recognisable. Perhaps there was no particular harm in it; but it would not have been quite encouraging to one's fiancée or one's wife, if one were encumbered with such! Well—don't know—be frank, it would hardly have multiplied one's invitations to social gatherings—bar crap game sin coloured circles! The price asked—filled in ink on a blank left purposely—was reasonable enough: five hundred dollars. I wonder what Van X. paid, and old Oscar L.! If only I had not had my little misfortune in India! Well, it saved money for once!
As it was, I replied:
I wonder if we shall ever play the nineteenth hole.
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