第27章

Pagliacci was to be followed as usual by "Cavalleria." It was the swan song of the opera season.

In a part that he acted as well as he sang, Caruso had been permitted finally to retire, wringing wet, to his dressing room.

With all the dignity of a man of genuine feeling and sensitiveness he had taken call after call on the fall of the curtain and stood bent almost double before the increasing breakers of applause.Once more he had done his best in a role which demanded everything that he had of voice and passion, comedy and tragedy.Once more, although his soul was with his comrades in battle, he had played the fool and broken his heart for the benefit of his good friends in front.

In her box on the first tier Mrs.Cooper Jekyll, in a dress imaginatively designed to display a considerable quantity of her figure, was surrounded by a party which attracted many glasses.

Alice Palgrave was there, pretty and scrupulously neat, even perhaps a little prim, her pearls as big as marbles.Mrs.Alan Hosack made a most effective picture with her black hair and white skin in a geranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life.Mrs.Noel d'Oyly lent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely but all too ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel intimacy.Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with diamonds glistening in her hair like dew.Of the four men, Gilbert Palgrave, standing where he could be seen, might have been an illustration by Du Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen.

He made the other three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type, appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were--the young old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of the male and female spider.

Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm."Will you do something for me?" she asked.

Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness."It all depends whether it will upset any of my plans," she said.

"I wouldn't have asked you if I had thought that."Joan laughed."You've been studying my character, Alice.""I did that at school, my dear." Mrs.Palgrave spoke lightly, but it was plain to see that there was something on her mind."Don't go out to supper with Howard Cannon.Come back with me.I want to talk to you.Will you?"Joan had recently danced in Cannon's huge studio-apartment and been oppressed by its Gulliveresque atmosphere, and she had just come from the Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a characteristically dignified dinner had got on her nerves.Gilbert, she knew, was engaged to play roulette at the club, and none of her other new men friends was available for dancing.She hadn't seen anything of Martin for several days.She could easily oblige Alice under the circumstances.

So she said: "Yes, of course I will--just to prove how very little you really know about me.""Thank you," said Alice."I'll say that I have a headache and that you're coming home with me.Don't be talked out of it."A puzzled expression came into Joan's eyes, and she turned her shoulder to Palgrave, who was giving her his most amorous glances.

"It doesn't matter," she said, "but I notice that you are all beginning to treat me like a sort of moral weathercock.I wonder why?" She gave no more thought to the matter which just for the most fleeting moment had rather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music of Mascagni's immortal opera entirely ignoring the fact that Palgrave's face was within an inch of her shoulder and that Alan Hosack, on her other side, was whispering heavy compliments.

Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who had been her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she had given all her heart.In spite of the fact that she had been married a year and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made up New York society, Mrs.Palgrave was an optimist.

As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and drakes with the Commandments.She had accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human nature.Perhaps a little to her disappointment, she had soon discovered how grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was.She had returned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the war and had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known women whose names, in the public imagination, were associated with decadence and irresponsibility, were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross work and allied war charities; that the majority of the men who were popularly supposed to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked as hard as the average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes newly burst upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselves together as a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly an immense number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France and England.

Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old names of New York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heard of later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulance workers on the Western front.Beautiful girls had slipped quietly away from their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to work in Allied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not as full-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.