His hands, which he was raising for a megaphone, never reached his face—other hands reached his face, however, hands held stiffly out from a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound body! He sank down suddenly upon the beggar’s abdomen, forcing out a sharp curse which faded into a groan.
“This beggar’ll take you home in his car!” shouted the little man who stood over him. “He’s got it parked around the corner.”
Turning his face toward the hot strip of sky which lowered over the city the little man began to laugh, with amusement at first, then loudly and triumphantly until his high laughter rang out in the quiet street with a weird, elfish sound, echoing up the sides of the tall buildings, growing shriller and shriller until people blocks away heard its eerie cadence on the air and stopped to listen.
Still laughing the little man divested himself of his coat and then of his vest and hurriedly freed his neck of tie and collar. Then he spat upon his hands and with a wild, shrill, exultant cry began to run down the dark street.
He was going to clean up New York, and his first objective was the disagreeable policeman on the corner!
They caught him at two o’clock, and the crowd which had joined in the chase were flabbergasted when they found that the ruffian was only a weeping little man in his shirt-sleeves. Someone at the station house was wise enough to give him an opiate instead of a padded cell, and in the morning he felt much better.
Mr. Cushmael, accompanied by an anxious young lady with crimson hair, called at the jail before noon.
“I’ll get you out,” cried Mr. Cushmael, shaking hands excitedly through the bars. “One policeman, he’ll explain it all to the other.”
“And there’s a surprise for you too,” added Edna softly, taking his other hand. “Mr. Cushmael’s got a big heart and he’s going to make you his day man now.”
“All right,” agreed Charles Stuart calmly. “But I can’t start till tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Because this afternoon I got to go to a matinee—with a friend.”
He relinquished his employer’s hand but kept Edna’s white fingers twined firmly in his.
“One more thing,” he went on in a strong, confident voice that was new to him, “if you want to get me off don’t have the case come up in the 35th Street court.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he answered with a touch of swagger in his voice, “that’s the judge I had when I was arrested last time.”
“Charles,” whispered Edna suddenly, “what would you do if I refused to go with you this afternoon?”
He bristled. Color came into his cheeks and he rose defiantly from his bench.
“Why, I’d—I’d——”
“Never mind,” she said, flushing slightly. “You’d do nothing of the kind.”
Love in the Night.
Saturday Evening Post (14 March 1925)
The words thrilled Val. They had come into his mind sometime during the fresh gold April afternoon and he kept repeating them to himself over and over: “Love in the night; love in the night.” He tried them in three languages—Russian, French and English—and decided that they were best in English. In each language they meant a different sort of love and a different sort of night—the English night seemed the warmest and softest with a thinnest and most crystalline sprinkling of stars. The English love seemed the most fragile and romantic—a white dress and a dim face above it and eyes that were pools of light. And when I add that it was a French night he was thinking about, after all, I see I must go back and begin over.
Val was half-Russian and half-American. His mother was the daughter of that Morris Hasylton who helped finance the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892, and his father was—see the Almanach de Gotha, issue of 1910—Prince Paul Serge Boris Rostoff, son of Prince Vladimir Rostoff, grandson of a grand duke—“Jimber-jawed Serge”—and third-cousin-once-removed to the czar. It was all very impressive, you see, on that side—house in St. Petersburg, shooting lodge near Riga, and swollen villa, more like a palace, overlooking the Mediterranean. It was at this villa in Cannes that the Rostoffs passed the winter—and it wasn’t at all the thing to remind Princess Rostoff that this Riviera villa, from the marble fountain—after Bernini—to the gold cordial glasses—after dinner—was paid for with American gold.
The Russians, of course, were gay people on the Continent in the gala days before the war. Of the three races that used southern France for a pleasure ground they were easily the most adept at the grand manner. The English were too practical, and the Americans, though they spent freely, had no tradition of romantic conduct. But the Russians—there was a people as gallant as the Latins, and rich besides! When the Rostoffs arrived at Cannes late in January the restaurateurs telegraphed north for the Prince’s favorite labels to paste on their champagne, and the jewelers put incredibly gorgeous articles aside to show to him—but not to the princess—and the Russian Church was swept and garnished for the season that the Prince might beg orthodox forgiveness for his sins. Even the Mediterranean turned obligingly to a deep wine color in the spring evenings, and fishing boats with robin-breasted sails loitered exquisitely offshore.
In a vague way young Val realized that this was all for the benefit of him and his family. It was a privileged paradise, this white little city on the water, in which he was free to do what he liked because he was rich and young and the blood of Peter the Great ran indigo in his veins. He was only seventeen in 1914, when this history begins, but he had already fought a duel with a young man four years his senior, and he had a small hairless scar to show for it on top of his handsome head.
But the question of love in the night was the thing nearest his heart. It was a vague pleasant dream he had, something that was going to happen to him someday that would be unique and incomparable. He could have told no more about it than that there was a lovely unknown girl concerned in it, and that it ought to take place beneath the Riviera moon.
The odd thing about all this was not that he had this excited and yet almost spiritual hope of romance, for all boys of any imagination have just such hopes, but that it actually came true. And when it happened, it happened so unexpectedly; it was such a jumble of impressions and emotions, of curious phrases that sprang to his lips, of sights and sounds and moments that were here, were lost, were past, that he scarcely understood it at all. Perhaps its very vagueness preserved it in his heart and made him forever unable to forget.
There was an atmosphere of love all about him that spring—his father’s loves, for instance, which were many and indiscreet, and which Val became aware of gradually from overhearing the gossip of servants, and definitely from coming on his American mother unexpectedly one afternoon, to find her storming hysterically at his father’s picture on the salon wall. In the picture his father wore a white uniform with a furred dolman and looked back impassively at his wife as if to say “Were you under the impression, my dear, that you were marrying into a family of clergymen?”
Val tiptoed away, surprised, confused—and excited. It didn’t shock him as it would have shocked an American boy of his age. He had known for years what life was among the Continental rich, and he condemned his father only for making his mother cry.
Love went on around him—reproachless love and illicit love alike. As he strolled along the seaside promenade at nine
