from strange places. Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phœbe Column were old friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the café, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.
About one o’clock they moved to Maxim’s, and two found them in Devinière’s. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties.
They were just through dancing and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware that some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually … a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their party intently. At Amory’s glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to Fred, who was just sitting down.
“Who’s that pale fool watching us?” he complained indignantly.
“Where?” cried Sloane. “We’ll have him thrown out!” He rose to his feet and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. “Where is he?”
Axia and Phœbe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other across the table, and before Amory realized it they found themselves on their way to the door.
“Where now?”
“Up to the flat,” suggested Phœbe. “We’ve got brandy and fizz—and everything’s slow down here to-night.”
Amory considered quickly. He hadn’t been drinking, and decided that if he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him to trot along in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking. So he took Axia’s arm and, piling intimately into a taxicab, they drove out over the hundreds and drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house…. Never would he forget that street…. It was a broad street, lined on both sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see, flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy and a key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of three and four room suites. He was rather glad to walk into the cheeriness of Phœbe’s living-room and sink onto a sofa, while the girls went rummaging for food.
“Phœbe’s great stuff,” confided Sloane, sotto voce.
“I’m only going to stay half an hour,” Amory said sternly. He wondered if it sounded priggish.
“Hell y’ say,” protested Sloane. “We’re here now—don’t le’s rush.”
“I don’t like this place,” Amory said sulkily, “and I don’t want any food.”
Phœbe reappeared with sandwiches, brandy bottle, siphon, and four glasses.
“Amory, pour ’em out,” she said, “and we’ll drink to Fred Sloane, who has a rare, distinguished edge.”
“Yes,” said Axia, coming in, “and Amory. I like Amory.” She sat down beside him and laid her yellow head on his shoulder.
“I’ll pour,” said Sloane; “you use siphon, Phœbe.”
They filled the tray with glasses.
“Ready, here she goes!”
Amory hesitated, glass in hand.
There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wind, and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass from Phœbe’s hand. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the café, and with his jump of astonishment the glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the café, neither the dull, pasty color of a dead man—rather a sort of virile pallor—nor unhealthy, you’d have called it; but like a strong man who’d worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory looked him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion, down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank, and he had steady gray eyes that moved slowly from one to the other of their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Amory noticed his hands; they weren’t fine at all, but they had versatility and a tenuous strength … they were nervous hands that sat lightly along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong … with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew…. It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to the end…. They were unutterably terrible….
He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia’s voice came out of the void with a strange goodness.
“Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory’s sick—old head going ’round?”
“Look at that man!” cried Amory, pointing toward the corner divan.
“You mean that purple zebra!” shrieked Axia facetiously. “Ooo-ee! Amory’s got a purple zebra watching him!”
Sloane laughed vacantly.
“Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?”
There was a silence…. The man regarded Amory quizzically…. Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear:
“Thought you weren’t drinking,” remarked Axia sardonically, but her voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms….
“Come back! Come back!” Axia’s arm fell on his. “Amory, dear, you aren’t going, Amory!” He was half-way to the door.
“Come on, Amory, stick ’th us!”
“Sick, are you?”
“Sit down a second!”
“Take some water.”
“Take a little brandy….”
The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to a livid bronze … Axia’s beseeching voice floated down the shaft. Those feet … those feet …
As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.
In the Alley.
Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on it and walked. Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps. They were like a slow dripping, with just the slightest insistence in their fall. Amory’s shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet ahead of him, and soft shoes was presumably that far behind. With the instinct of a child Amory edged in under the blue darkness of the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard seconds, once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After that he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he thought. His lips were dry and he licked them.
If he met any one good—were there any good people left in the world or did they all live in white apartment-houses now? Was every one followed in the moonlight? But if he met some one good who’d know what he meant and hear this damned scuffle … then the scuffling grew suddenly nearer, and a black cloud settled over the moon. When again the pale sheen skimmed the cornices, it was almost beside him, and Amory thought he heard a quiet breathing. Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were not behind, had never