There were Axia Marlowe and Ph?be Column, from the Summer Garden show, Fred Sloane and Amory.
The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like Dionysian revellers.
“Table for four in the middle of the floor,” yelled Phoebe. “Hurry, old dear, tell ’em we’re here!”
“Tell ’em to play
‘Admiration’!” shouted Sloane. “You two order; Ph?be and I are going to shake a wicked calf,” and they sailed off in the muddled crowd.
Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and watched.
“There’s Findle Margotson, from New Haven!” she cried above the uproar. “ ’Lo, Findle!
Whoo-ee!”
“Oh, Axia!” he shouted in salutation. “C’mon over to our table.”
“No!” Amory whispered.
“Can’t do it, Findle; I’m with somebody else!
Call me up tomorrow about one o’clock!”
Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty’s, answered incoherently and turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer around the room.
“There’s a natural damn fool,” commented Amory.
“Oh, he’s all right.
Here’s the old jitney waiter.v If you ask me, I want a double Daiquiri.”
“Make it four.”
The crowd whirled and changed and shifted.
They were mostly from the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl.
On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any.
About three-fourths of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from strange places.
Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind.
Fred Sloane and Phoebe 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 cafe, 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 Deviniere’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 nearby table was looking at him.
He turned and glanced casually... a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a littleapart 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 Ph?be 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 Ph?be. “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 Ph?be’s living-room and sink onto a sofa, while the girls went rummaging for food.
“Ph?be’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.”
Ph?be 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.