CHAPTER I
Sadoul’s only experiences in love had been gross. The cynic in him admitted nothing better.
Saturnine, without delusions, he went about his business in life, doing no particular good, and with a capacity for harm limited only by his talents.
He had been a little of everything, and always clever—art student, medical student, reporter, critic, writer—intelligent, adroit.
His was a mordant pen and brilliant; and it was for sale.
The query, “Have you read Sadoul’s article in the Wasp?” or in the View Point, or in some one of many irregular publications, was not an uncommon question in the metropolis.
Sadoul on this or that had become fairly familiar to a talkative public. He had something to say about everything and anything. His personal convictions made no difference. And he always was interesting.
The second year after the war ended he went to France again. At the University of Paris he took courses in psychology and philology: in the Ecole de Médecine he attended lectures. Clinics where hypnosis induced supplanted anesthesia in minor operations fascinated him.
But life, there, taught him nothing nobler to expect of a world already proven sordid by personal experience.
He entertained no delusions concerning mankind, its friendship, or its love; he neither expected nor desired anything of it except the saturnine amusement which he extracted from it, and which was his principal form of pleasure.
Then Chance tripped him up. Needing an English stenographer one day, the American firm on the rue Colchas sent him a girl equipped to take dictation.
It appeared that she was equipped for more than that. Sadoul silently went mad about her.
A sort of still terror also took possession of the girl—the hopeless immobility of a doomed thing, conscious of menace, apparently unable to escape.
Resistance seemed to hold only along certain lines.
Otherwise there was no defence. She had stepped from reality into a dream.
At his inquiry she told him her story. She did not wish to do so.
There was a ball in the Latin Quarter given by Julian’s that evening. Sadoul took her. She wore pale, lunar green; which went with her red hair and deep green eyes.
She had little to say to Sadoul’s friends. So reticent, so dazed she seemed that some, troubled and perplexed by her youth and beauty, suspected her of an addiction to drugs.
As for Sadoul, he had gone completely mad over her. He became her shadow everywhere. And, save only for certain lines of resistance, he seemed to have utterly mastered her.
But those occult lines held. The conflict almost crazed him—so pliant, so yielding she seemed, so obedient had he made her in all excepting certain lines. His dark face greyed at times under the strain. He abased himself and begged; he grinned and told her what to expect if she ever tricked him. The lines held.
His impression upon her had already been made; he could stamp it no deeper; the girl was not in love with him. She never would be. And he knew it.
She seemed to be a passionless little thing, her beauty a golden chrysalis containing nothing—the Psyche within aborted.
In the Latin Quarter, lack of animation is unpopular. There was about her that innocent detachment one notices in the preoccupation of a nun. Invited, at first she went everywhere with Sadoul.
After a while they were seldom invited where pleasure was noisy and untrammelled.
Early in spring a cabled offer from New York brought Sadoul’s affairs to a climax.
For three days Sadoul beat at her very soul to club it into submission. Then he crawled and wept. The lines held.
Again he battered her with his implacable will till her bruised, stupefied mind gave up. But the lines held.
She was in a daze when the civil ceremony was performed. He cabled to New York, giving up his quarters at the Fireside Club, and requesting his friend Pockman to secure for him a furnished housekeeping apartment on Riverside Drive.
He was having his way with her—or tried to believe he was having it.
And then Destiny pulled an ugly face at him. For the girl utterly refused to submit to the religious ceremony. And the old lines still held.
Early summer in Paris is paradise. But it had become a hell to Sadoul. He walked the earth like a damned soul chained to its victim.
In July he secured passage for them both.