The talkers

George Derring, Julian Fairless, and Harry Stayr organized the Fireside Club in New York to gratify the instincts of the slovenly well-to-do. Limited membership and a long waiting-list told its successful story.

Derring also had financed the big new building on 57th Street, where the Fireside occupied the entire second floor.

The remainder of the building harboured members in apartments of one to three rooms. Some apartments had studios attached.

The Fireside Club was the common meeting-ground. Members could sprawl there in evening dress or bath-robe and slippers, all day and all night if they liked.

Men with an inclination to conversation and a disinclination for work seemed to compose the bulk of membership. Which gave to the Fireside that intellectual allure so impressive among the mindless millions.

The glamour of genius played about the Fireside like St. Anthony’s fire; its Thinkers and its Talkers found its exclusive luxury a paradise.

But a few common and irreverent folk characterised it as an intellectual doldrums where talent lay becalmed; or a maelstrom of talk where creative energy was sucked under and ultimately engulfed.

In midsummer a majority of the Fireside wandered far and wide in that restless quest for satisfaction characteristic of those who talk much and do little.

But always a sprinkling remained to loaf about the club. From which retreat, having dined well, the dusky tropic brilliancy of Manhattan’s streets lured them into endless wanderings through a thousand and one Metropolitan Nights.

Early in spring Sadoul had cabled from Paris that he was giving up his apartment there on May first. So somebody else moved in on that date.

Derring returned in June from a gastronomic tour of European Ritz’s. He mentioned meeting Julian Fairless in Paris, but had not seen Sadoul.

Before Sadoul returned, Julian Fairless brought back a budget of gossip, including news of him. Only a small percentage of Talkers are doers. Fairless was industriously both.

To a question from Stayr he replied that Paris, the Latin Quarter, and Julian’s were about the same as ever. A similar and dingy crowd infested the schools; similar masters gave similar instruction. All the unkempt ruck and reek of the atelier was there; massiers, models, blague, noise—nothing had changed except the individuals composing the mess.

Fairless, an incessant Talker, gossiped on without encouragement. Which is the instinct of the true Talker.

So-and-so was dead—killed at Verdun; so-and-so goes on crutches; old Clifford has a studio in the Court of the Dragon; Rowden died at Mons; Creed, now wealthy, lives in the Parc Monçeau and paints no more; the Beaux Arts is below par this year, and “our men” appear to be the pick; etc., etc. So Fairless chattered on and on, talking the talk of the Talkers.

He was still at breakfast, eating a soft-boiled egg out of its own shell, in the rather dirty English fashion.

“I sold several pictures to profiteers,” he continued; “Paris is lousy with nouveau riche. Derring bought two from me——”

Stayr remonstrated: “Derring isn’t nouveau riche.”

“Oh, no, but he played about with them. He wanted to see Julian’s. I took him over. He was disgusted with the models. Besides, he kept his hat on and they bawled him out.”

Fairless wallowed in a finger-bowl, dried his celebrated scarab ring:

“I saw quite a lot of Casimir Sadoul. He was doing philology at the University, but he associated mostly with Julian men.... He had a girl; went about everywhere with her. That’s a new idea for him, eh?”

“I suppose Sadoul did not wish to be conspicuous in the Quarter,” suggested Mortimer Lyken.

“This affair was conspicuous. Fancy the contrast!—that big, blackish, beetle-browed ruffian hooked up to a red-headed slip of a thing, so bashful that you got no more out of her than yes and no.”

“Did she really belong to Sadoul?” asked Stayr.

“Apparently. He behaved savagely if you looked at her. Somebody told me he got her by hypnotising her.”

“He knows how,” remarked Pockman. “He’s done it for me.”

“Bunk,” murmured Stayr, “—wasn’t it?”

“Well,” returned Pockman with his pallid smirk and hunching up his wide, bony shoulders, “I’ve performed minor operations on patients with Sadoul’s aid, inducing hypnosis instead of anesthesia.”

“The devil!” exclaimed Lyken. “That was Charcot’s graft.”

Fairless chattered on: “All the fellows concluded that Sadoul had some sort of hold on her. She seemed too pretty and refined to fall for a big, swarthy brute like Sadoul. She really was an exquisite little thing, Harry—such features, such skin, such hands and hair—-and the fellows all wild to paint her—and old Sadoul foxy and sardonic.... They say the souls of the damned cast no shadows. I fancy Sadoul’s girl still has a chance: he certainly was her shadow—always at her heels, always on the job.... Somebody said he had threatened to kill her if she ever fooled him. But I think Sadoul’s more likely to beat up the man in the case.”

Fairless got up from the table.

“Now, if you fellows care to see what I brought back——”

A few of the other men rose and followed Fairless upstairs to his studio where Angelo, his factotum, had already placed the first picture upon an easel.

As usual, all the elements of popularity were apparent in the picture—a typical Julian Fairless canvas, full of that obvious charm so attractive to an obvious public, so acceptable to the professional critic.

Fairless lit a cigarette and sat down to chat with Sidney Pockman, who didn’t care for pictures.

“Where did Sadoul get that girl you mentioned?” he inquired, the smirk still stamped on his flat, colourless face.

“In Paris.”

“How did she happen to be there?”

“Oh, a story of sorts. She and mama were living in London when the Huns dropped bombs. Mama was blown into unpleasant gobs all over the house. Then it was canteen work in Paris. Then no job. Then Sadoul ran into her. That’s the story.”

“She’s English?”

“American, I believe. I couldn’t tell by her speech. She’s a dumb youngster.”

“What’s he going to do with her? Marry her?”

“Well, I don’t know, Pockman. I fancy it’s high time—if he means to do it at all.”

“Oh, that sort?”

“She doesn’t look it. She’s so dumb she seems almost drugged. Maybe it’s true he’s obtained some sort of hold on her. I don’t know.”

“I had a letter from Sadoul last week,” said Pockman. “He must be on his way back here by this time.”

Fairless nodded inattentively, motioning Angelo to take away the picture and replace it by another.

Pockman seemed to grin at the new picture—or perhaps his pallid smirk was habitual.

“What do you get for that kind of painting?” he inquired.

“Five thousand.”

“Did it take you very long?”

“Two mornings.”

Pockman laughed: “Yours is a soft graft, Julian.”

“So is yours, you pill-rolling fakir!”

“Not very soft, so far. But it ought to be when I succeed in grafting the nymphalic gland to a corpse and break fifty-fifty with the New Testament.”

“Isn’t Voronoff grafting glands and things?”

“Some glands; not the nymphalic. And that’s the whole problem, because it governs——” Pockman hesitated, shrugged: “—Well, adios, Julian! Much obliged for a view of your new pictures. Hope you sting the profiteers.”

“You bet,” nodded Fairless complacently.

But July is too late for an “exhibition.” Besides, the great American profiteer had been rolling in art since the war ended, and, now satiated after an orgy of antique-buying during the past winter and spring, had begun to build bungalows. October or the middle of November would see the town crawling again with newly rich. There was plenty of time to prepare pasture for absent cattle—ample time for Julian Fairless to plan his show. Besides, he desired a vacation at Greenwich, in the vicinity of Veronica Weld.

It was there, early in August, that Fairless again ran across Pockman entering the railroad station.

Among other items of gossip he learned that Sadoul had returned to New York, bringing with him his red-headed companion, and, furthermore, that the red-headed one had suddenly disappeared within the first week.

“Sadoul’s a bad actor if you do things to him,” added Pockman. “He’s as vindictive as hell. I’m wondering what will happen if he ever finds a man with her.... Or finds her again, even alone.”

“What’s Sadoul doing?” inquired Fairless, pleasantly entertained with the account of another man’s misfortune.

“Oh, he’s writing his free-lance stuff, as usual, and hanging around my laboratory.”

“Grouching?”

“No; he’s rather quiet. I wouldn’t care to be the Johnny in the case.... Or the girl, either.”

Fairless shrugged; then, inattentive: “Where are you bound for? Town?”

“I came up here to get a gland.”

“A what?”

“That young fellow who was killed here yesterday in the motor accident.... You heard? Well, he proved a healthy subject, and his nymphalic gland was of no further use to him. So I came up to get it.”

“What good is a dead man’s gland?” demanded Fairless.

“The gland isn’t dead.”

“What!”

“Not at all. I’ve got it in this grip packed in ice. I can keep it alive for weeks in a refrigerator.”

“What for?”

“Graft it on some senile subject and add twenty years to his life.”

“It’s rather a loathsome business, yours,” said Fairless frankly.

“Not at all. You’ll need a new gland yourself some day. When you do, give me a ring.”

Pockman smirked at the disgusted painter, picked up his satchel, and stalked off at a stiff, crazy gait characteristic of him. Stayr always said it reminded him of Holbein’s Dance of Death.

When Pockman reached New York he telephoned Sadoul from his laboratory:

“Come on over; I’ve got a lively nymphalic on ice. Some gland, believe me, Sadoul.”

But Sadoul seemed incurious and morose, and Pockman could not persuade him.

So the latter continued to examine and caress his rather ghastly acquisition, and Sadoul’s powerful, bony fingers drove his pen through a mordant article destined to stimulate a moribund periodical in the senile stage, kept alive only by Derring’s money.

Sadoul’s and Pockman’s remedies for inanition were, after all, similar: gall and gland to stimulate the decrepit and delay ultimate dissolution.

Derring, financing The Revolt to please a rather handsome woman with bobbed hair, had found himself let in for a deal of trouble.

She of the bobbed hair suggested that Sadoul “put a kick into the damn thing.” Derring, at Newport, wired assent.

Sadoul, in seething silence, gave himself to the job with a fierce persistence which made The Revolt smoke enough to attract attention.

But it was all smoke: the fire itself smouldered in Sadoul, not in the magazine. All that long summer and autumn Sadoul watched and waited and burned. His olive skin and black eyes grew more shadowy; one noticed his teeth under the crisp beard when he smiled.

He was usually at the Fireside Club in the evenings, but he lived elsewhere—in a big, handsome housekeeping apartment, according to Julian Fairless, taken, probably, on account of the red-headed one, now vanished.

Twice, already, since her disappearance, Sadoul mistook others with auburn tresses for the slender runaway for whom his smouldering gaze was always searching amid the multitudes by night and day.

The third time there was no mistake. They met face to face on Fifth Avenue, the red-headed one and Casimir Sadoul.

“Where have you been?” said Sadoul, smiling and offering his hand. But his dark skin had turned greyish.

After the first startled glance, reassured by his smile and offered hand, the girl seemed inclined to meet the issue with laughing and youthful defiance.

She told him frankly that she had been bored; that she desired to enjoy herself like a modern girl, and meant to do so.

“The modern girl,” said Sadoul, laughing, “is one who is determined to have a good time in the world, no matter at what cost.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” she conceded. “The trouble is that I don’t know how to begin.”

“Haven’t you begun in all these months?” he inquired, fixing his black eyes on her.

She laughed, made a childish face at him, mocked him in friendly fashion.

“I’m not going to let you resume your way with me,” she said.

“Will you let me lunch with you, Gilda?”

“Why, yes. It’s nearly one, now. It’s quite agreeable to see you again. I’ve sometimes wondered how it would seem....”

The Ritz was only a block away.

She was a piquant figure in her furs; and the touch of turquoise to her hat made her red hair redder and her white skin whiter as she faced the November east-wind beside Sadoul.

The raw air smelled of snow, but no flakes fell.

“So—you’re having a good time,” said Sadoul, showing his teeth in a sudden smile.

“I told you I haven’t learned how, yet.”

“Will you let me try again?”

“Not—that way,” she said, colouring.

“No; that was a mistake, Gilda.”

She laughed in surprise and relief: “So you admit it?” she cried.

“I’ve got to, haven’t I? You left me flat.”

“I had to.”

She was animated and friendly at luncheon—perfectly frank as always heretofore, not untruthful, not evasive, but gaily declining information concerning her recent career and her present domicile.

“It’s none of your business,” she said decisively. “I can always find you if I care to.”

This attitude seemed to amuse him. He appeared to her to be very much changed, and decidedly for the better.

He said: “George Derring is giving a dance at his studio apartment tonight. If you care to come you’ll have one of those ‘good times’ you’re always wishing for.”

“Who is George Derring?”

“An intellectual panhandler.”

“What?”

“A beggar begs food from door to door; Derring, brainless and resourceless, begs his daily modicum of amusement from friend to friend.... He’s very rich. He has to be.”

“That sounds more like you,” she said with an uneasy smile.

“Oh, no; I’m off that stuff. Gilda, you’d better come to Derring’s dance. It will be gay—a masked affair. All the men dress as kings; all the women as queens. You have that wonderful green costume you wore at the Julian ball, haven’t you?”

She nodded. Her eyes, which were emerald green, widened.

“I’d like to go,” she said.

“Very well. But where am I to call for you?”

At that she laughed outright. “I’ll take a taxi and drive to your apartment. But I shall not go in.”

He made no attempt to persuade her. They fixed the hour amicably; she told him in her frank way that if he followed her and attempted to spy on her, she’d move elsewhere.

So, when luncheon ended, he lifted his hat and turned away, leaving her to find her own taxi. Which she did, and drove to the matinée for which she had a ticket, but where, alas! nobody awaited her.

For, even after all these months alone, and free to seek pleasure where she wished, the acme, so far, of the “good time” so ardently desired by her was a matinée; and the most delirious dissipation a drive on Fifth Avenue all alone in a small limousine car hired and steered entirely by herself.

Sadoul’s face was ghastly when he entered Pockman’s laboratory, and the latter noticed it and commented.

“Gilda Greenway is coming to Derring’s party with me,” he said.

“Oh, is she back?”

“No. I met her on the street.”

Pockman cast a stealthy glance at Sadoul, then continued to filter the contents of one test-tube into another.

“You were—er—glad to see her?” he inquired.

“Yes.”

“Well,” said Pockman, “you have a funny way of showing it. I’d run if I met you in a dark alley.... Hand me that smeared slide, will you—and that bowl of Reakirt’s solution——”