II

In the room Fitzjerald entered on the second floor were three women and five men, all but one seated in various postures at a long refectory table of beautiful medieval design, reproduced by craftsmen in the shop below. The linen upon it was craft woven. The candles that lighted it were in iron holders, hand wrought. Around it instead of chairs were benches of the same design, each one long enough for two to be seated.

At the head of the board, sideways to it, was Jael Saint-Leon. She had finished eating and was smoking a cigarette through a long blue tube held in a clenched hand. Her elbow rested on the table and her forearm was rigidly vertical; when she thought of the cigarette she moved her head to reach it. Otherwise than in this arm her body seemed quite relaxed. She was gazing idly through her smoke at the second figure on her right.

That was a spherical little man with small features in a large face and an immense head perfectly bald. He was eating and had no perception of lesser things. His face hung low over his plate and he made murmuring, cajoling sounds to his food, as if it were alive. Dr. Rabba, writer of histories. He had written scores of them—histories of the world, of religion, of races, of science, and lately in ten volumes a history of history—all perfectly sound and empty. He was a prodigious hack containing millions of facts. He had no fame at all on the literary plane. One of his several pseudonyms was better known than his own name. His recreation was a passionate interest in talk of revolution. He was useful in this company as a selfreciting encyclopedia, and was neglected as all encyclopedias are. To the conversation he had nothing but historical facts to contribute; and as everyone had learned not to start that torrent and as he was too shy to break it unasked, his rôle was that of listener, which was very agreeable, for very often the talk was about revolution.

He had, however, one amusing office. When the mysterious power had been present that did sometimes lift them high above their cynicism, their boredom, their sophisticated despair, their weariness of facts, and when the human instrument of this power, usually a visitor, had revealed a vision of perfectible man living in a perfect state, a state of nature perhaps, delivered from his wicked institutions, there came after the climax always an embarrassing moment. There was no curtain; no way of theatrical exit. There they sat staring helplessly at one another. Then it was Dr. Rabba who let them down. They would hear him saying in gentle voice, the same in which he addressed his food: “Massacre! Massacre! A little blood. It is ugly. It is soon over. They are not so many after all. You laugh. It is history. I know.”

A moment later he, too, would laugh and look around with merry eyes.

Beyond Dr. Rabba sat Dwind, a socialist teacher of economics in the Lothian College of Social Science, which Jael Saint-Leon supported. His eyelids were thin but very tired and he lifted his head to see. The wonder was that a person so anaemic could think so fiercely. He had written many books and was the leading exponent of the doctrine in the country. He talked little, and made always an irritated sound. He appeared to be the only one listening to Grinling, opposite, who was saying there was no such thing as true American liberalism.

Grinling was a Harvard man, under thirty-five, who toyed with the heroic notion of disrecommending his country by cutting himself off from it. Meanwhile, holding that chastisement in reserve, he acted as associate editor of a weekly journal of radical opinion. He was a brilliant writer.

At the end of the table, aloof, was a young man with much upright hair named Semicorn. He had been lumberjack, hobo, editor of an I. W. W. newspaper in Seattle. Having served a term in the Federal prison at Leavenworth for seditious utterances in war time, he came to New York and appeared at the Lothian College. To his surprise he was seized to the heart of a distinguished group of people who thought it monstrous in principle that one should be punished for any political utterance whatever, and had organized a society, with funds, offices, counsel, agents and publicity experts, for the jealous protection of free speech. Among them was a banker who undertook to see that the young man Semicorn, their instance and hero, should want for nothing. He was serious, a little timid among high foreheads, and awed by the company in which he flourished, perhaps because he could not talk without getting red and losing his grammar. But he made his patrons almost as uneasy as they made him.

The fifth man, the only one not at the board, was De Grouse, second son of a banker by an ancient line. It was supposed that in him the family talent had failed. At least it was that he turned contemptuously from the money trade and preferred the life of a literary artist. He evolved an obscure, precious manner of writing and found some vogue for it in magazines of that taste. He was musical, and wrote at first about music, then about literature and at length about life. His judgments, embossed, cold, intricately strange, were all alike because his interest was not in the thing but in his own sensations about it. He was content to have turned out to be a rosy, waxy, abdominal man, still young. He was at this moment reclining backward on a couch, his short legs crossed, one hand in his trousers pocket, the other, because of the ring, lying palm down and a little spread at his side. Dividing him at the equator was a fine gold chain.

The two women, besides Jael, were near her at the head of the table. The one on her right, her secretary and constant companion, was Miss Lillibridge.

Fitzjerald once asked Jael in the hearing of a large company, including the object of his remark, why out of all the world she had taken to be her henchwoman a person so alarmingly distractive.

Jael answered, “Yes, isn’t she pretty. She is my hair shirt.”

Miss Lillibridge was perfectly oblivious. Everyone else was embarrassed and Fitzjerald was deeply sorry, for they all knew what Jael meant. Her satellite had everything that she had not.

The other woman was a Russian, a refugee, princess somebody, whose name no one could pronounce or spell twice the same way. The remedy was to call her Madame, with a strong French accent, and that did very well. She was tall, very thin and spoke only in a fever of excitement, no matter what the subject was. She had come to her English roundabout, through German and French, and made the sound “zee” for “th” incurably. Voluble, yet she might be silent through an entire evening, merely turning her hot black eyes quickly from one speaker to another, maybe not listening at all, just gazing. Her experiences had been melodramatic, some in her imagination and some really. She got them mixed up. She had faced a firing squad. If she forgot to say she had been shot and left there for dead and was reminded of the omission by one who had heard it before she would say, “Oh, yes; zat ozer time,” and go right on. She had killed a man. She got part way out of Russia on a troop train, riding with the soldiers, and walked the rest of it. Many times she had slept in the trenches. Having somehow some money, she kept a very nice apartment up-town. It was never locked for fear some wandering Russian, especially one drunk, might be unable to get in. Sometimes in the morning there would be ten or twelve on the floor, very comfortable. The janitor was scandalized and told the landlord; even the police were interested. But they had all been made to understand zat zese were her children. Besides, what else could zey do?