Flora yelled or slept, as the case might be; her parents were equally indifferent. They were too busily concerned with the getting of bread and wine. Moreover, Flora was one among many. The gods are always playing with the Calabrian peninsula, heaving it up here or throwing it down there: il terremoto, the earthquake, the terror. Here nature tinkers vicariously with souls; and she seldom has time to complete her work. Constant communion with death makes for callosity of feeling; and the Calabrians and the Sicilians are the cruellest among the civilized peoples. Flora was ruthless.
She lived amazingly well in the premier of an apartment-hotel in the Champs-Elysées. In England and America she had amassed a fortune. Given the warm beauty of the Southern Italian, the passion, the temperament, the love of mischief, the natural cruelty, the inordinate craving for attention and flattery, she enlivened the nations with her affairs. And she never put a single beat of her heart into any of them. That is why her voice is still splendid and her beauty unchanging. She did not dissipate; calculation always barred her inclination; rather, she loitered about the Forbidden Tree and played that she had plucked the Apple. She had an example to follow; Eve had none.
Men scattered fortunes at her feet as foolish Greeks scattered floral offerings at the feet of their marble gods – without provoking the sense of reciprocity or generosity or mercy. She had worked; ah, no one would ever know how hard. She had been crushed, beaten, cursed, starved. That she had risen to the heights in spite of these bruising verbs in no manner enlarged her pity, but dulled and vitiated the little there was of it. Her mental attitude toward humanity was childish: as, when the parent strikes, the child blindly strikes back. She was determined to play, to enjoy life, to give back blow for blow, nor caring where she struck. She was going to press the juice from every grape. A thousand odd years gone, she would have led the cry in Rome – “Bread and the circus!” or “To the lions!” She would have disturbed Nero’s complacency, and he would have played an obbligato instead of a solo at the burning. And she was malice incarnate. They came from all climes – her lovers – with roubles and lire and francs and shillings and dollars; and those who finally escaped her enchantment did so involuntarily, for lack of further funds. They called her villas Circe’s isles. She hated but two things in the world; the man she could have loved and the woman she could not surpass.
Arrayed in a kimono which would have evoked the envy of the empress of Japan, supposing such a gorgeous raiment – peacocks and pine-trees, brilliant greens and olives and blues and purples – fell under the gaze of that lady’s slanting eyes, she sat opposite the Slavonic Jove and smoked her cigarette between sips of coffee. Frequently she smiled. The short powerful hand of the man stroked his beard and he beamed out of his cunning eyes, eyes a trifle too porcine to suggest a keen intellect above them.
“I am like a gorilla,” he said; “but you are like a sleek tigress. I am stronger, more powerful than you; but I am always in fear of your claws. Especially when you smile like that. What mischief are you plotting now?”
She drew in a cloud of smoke, held it in her puffed cheeks as she glided round the table and leaned over his shoulders. She let the smoke drift over his head and down his beard. In that moment he was truly Jovian.
“Would you like me if I were a tame cat?” she purred.
“I have never seen you in that rôle. Perhaps I might. You told me that you would give up everything but the Paris season.”
“I have changed my mind.” She ran one hand through his hair and the other she entangled in his beard. “You’d change your mind, too, if you were a woman.”
“I don’t have to change my mind; you are always doing it for me. But I do not want to go to America next winter.” He drew her down so that he might look into her face. It was something to see.
“Bah!” She released herself and returned to her chair. “When the season is over I want to go to Capri.”
“Capri! Too hot.”
“I want to go.”
“My dear, a dozen exiles are there, waiting to blow me up.” He spoke Italian well. “You do not wish to see me spattered over the beautiful isle?”
“Tch! tch! That is merely your usual excuse. You never had anything to do with the police.”
“No?” He eyed the end of his cigarette gravely. “One does not have to be affiliated with the police. There is class prejudice. We Russians are very fond of Egypt in the winter. Capri seems to be the half-way place. They wait for us, going and coming. Poor fools!”
“I shall go alone, then.”
“All right.” In his dull way he had learned that to pull the diva, one must agree with her. In agreeing with her one adroitly dissuaded her. “You go to Capri, and I’ll go to the pavilion on the Neva.”
She snuffed the cigarette in the coffee-cup and frowned. “Some day you will make me horribly angry.”
“Beautiful tigress! If a man knew what you wanted, you would not want it. I can’t hop about with the agility of those dancers at the Théâtre du Palais Royale. The best I can do is to imitate the bear. What is wrong?”
“They keep giving her the premier parts. She has no more fire in her than a dead grate. The English-speaking singers, they are having everything their own way. And none of them can act.”
“My dear Flora, this Eleonora is an actress, first of all. That she can sing is a matter of good fortune, no more. Be reasonable. The consensus of critical opinion is generally infallible; and all over the continent they agree that she can act. Come, come; what do you care? She will never approach your Carmen…”
“You praise her to me?” tempest in her glowing eyes.
“I do not praise her. I am quoting facts. If you throw that cup, my tigress…”
“Well?” dangerously.
“It will spoil the set. Listen. Some one is at the speaking-tube.”
The singer crossed the room impatiently. Ordinarily she would have continued the dispute, whether the bell rang or not. But she was getting the worst of the argument and the bell was a timely diversion. The duke followed her leisurely to the wall.
“What is it?” asked Flora in French.
The voice below answered with a query in English. “Is this the Signorina Desimone?”
“It is the duchess.”
“The duchess?”
“Yes.”
“The devil!”
She turned and stared at the duke, who shrugged. “No, no,” she said; “the duchess, not the devil.”
“Pardon me; I was astonished. But on the stage you are still Flora Desimone?”
“Yes. And now that my identity is established, who are you and what do you want at this time of night?”
The duke touched her arm to convey that this was not the moment in which to betray her temper.
“I am Edward Courtlandt.”
“The devil!” mimicked the diva.
She and the duke heard a chuckle.
“I beg your pardon again, Madame.”
“Well,
