The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure.

by Rex Beach.

THE CRIMSON GARDENIA

I

The royal yacht had anch.o.r.ed amid a thunder of cannon, and the king had gone ash.o.r.e. The city was bright with bunting; a thousand whistles blew.

Up through the festooned streets His Majesty was escorted between long rows of blue-coated officers, behind which the eager crowds were ma.s.sed for mile upon mile. Thin wire cables were stretched along the curbs, to hold the people back, but these threatened to snap before the weight of the mult.i.tude.

In the neighborhood of the raised pavilion where the queen and her maids of honor waited, the press was thickest; here rows of stands had been erected that groaned beneath their freight, while roof-tops and windows, trees and telegraph-poles, were black with cl.u.s.tered humanity.

The king was tall and dark; a long beard hid his face. But the queen was young and blushing, and her waiting-women were fairer than springtime flowers. To a crashing martial air, she handed him a sparkling goblet in which he pledged her happiness, while the street rocked to the roar of many voices, and in the open s.p.a.ces youths, grotesquely costumed, danced with goblin glee.

Mr. Roland Van Dam secretly thought it all quite fine and inspiriting, but he was too highly schooled to allow himself much emotion. He had been hard put to obtain seats, and had succeeded only through the efforts of a friend, the Duke of Cotton; therefore, he felt, the members of his party might have shown at least a perfunctory appreciation. But they were not the appreciative kind, and their att.i.tude was made plain by Eleanor Banniman's languid words:

"How dull! It's nothing like the carnival at Nice, and the people seem very common."

Her father was dozing uncomfortably, with his two lower chins telescoped into his billowing chest; Mrs. Banniman complained of the heat and the glare, and predicted a headache for herself. Near by, the rest of the party were striving to conceal their lack of interest by guying the crowd below. Van Dam had been the one to suggest this trip to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, and he felt the weight of entertainment bearing heavily upon him. In consequence, he a.s.sumed a sprightly interest that was very far from genuine.

"This sort of thing awakens something medieval inside of one, don't you know," he said.

Miss Banniman regarded him with a bland lack of comprehension; her mother moaned weakly, the burden of her complaint being, as usual:

"Why _did_ we leave Palm Beach?"

"All those dukes and things make me feel as if it were real," Van Dam explained further. "They say this Rex fellow is a true king during Mardi Gras week, and those chaps in masks are quite like court jesters. Maybe they sing of wars and love and romance--and all that rot."

"I dare say life was just as uninteresting in olden days as it is now,"

Eleanor remarked. "Love and romance exist mainly in books, I fancy. If they ever did exist, we've outgrown them, eh, Roly?"

Being a very rich and a very experienced young woman, Miss Banniman prided herself upon her lack of illusion. To be sure, she occasionally permitted Roland to kiss her in celebration of their engagement, but such caresses left her unperturbed; her pulses had never been stirred.

She looked upon marriage as a somewhat trying, although necessary, inst.i.tution. Van Dam, being equally modern and equally satiated by life's blessings, shared her beliefs in a vague way.

Manifestly, no lover could allow such an a.s.sertion as this to go unchallenged, so he rose to the defense of romance, only to hear her say:

"Nonsense! Do be sensible, Roly. Such things aren't done nowadays."

"What things aren't done?"

"Oh, those crude, primitive performances we read about in novels. Nice people don't fall in love overnight, for instance. They don't allow themselves to hate, and be jealous, and to rage about like wild animals any more."

"The idea! Your father is a perfect savage, at heart," said Mrs.

Banniman. She nodded at her sleeping husband, who was roused at that moment by a fly that had strayed into his right nostril. Mr. Banniman sneezed, half opened his eyes, and murmured a feeble anathema before dozing off again. It was plain that he was not greatly enjoying the Mardi Gras.

"All men are primitive," said Roly, quoting some forgotten author, at which Eleanor eyed him languidly.

"Could you love at first sight and run off with a girl?"

"Certainly not. I'd naturally have to know something about her people--"

"Were you ever jealous?"

"You've never given me an occasion," he told her, gallantly.

"Did you ever hate anybody?"

"Um-m--no!"

"Ever been afraid?"

"Not exactly."

"Revengeful?"

"Certainly not."

She smiled. "It's just as I said. Respectable people don't allow themselves to be harrowed by crude emotions. I hate my modiste when she fails to fit me; I was jealous of that baroness at the Poinciana--the one with all those gorgeous gowns; I'm afraid of flying-machines; but that is as deep as such things go, nowadays--in our set."

Van Dam was no hand at argument, and he had a great respect for Miss Banniman's observation; moreover, he had been discussing something of which he possessed no first-hand knowledge. Therefore, he said nothing further. No one had a greater appreciation of, or took a keener pleasure in, life's unruffled placidity than the young society man. No one had a denser ignorance of its depths, its hidden currents, and its uncharted channels than he; for adventure had never come his way, romance had never beckoned him from rose-embowered balconies. And yet, as the world goes, he was a normal individual, save for the size of his income. He had not lost interest in life; he was merely interested in things which did not matter. That, after all, is quite different.

There were times, nevertheless, when he longed vaguely for something thrilling to happen, when he regretted the Oslerization of romance and the commercializing of love. Of course, adventure still existed; one could hunt big game in certain hidden quarters, if one chose. Van Dam detested stuffed heads, and it took so much time to get them. These unformed desires came to him only now and then, and he felt ashamed of them, in an idle way.

Now that the parade had pa.s.sed, the visitors lost no time in leaving, and a dignified stampede toward the hotel occurred, for the gentlemen were thirsty and the ladies wished to smoke. It was due to their haste, perhaps, that Van Dam became separated from them and found himself drifting along Ca.n.a.l Street alone in a densely packed crowd of merrymakers. A masked woman in a daring Spanish dress chucked him under the chin; her companion showered him with confetti. A laughing Pierrot whacked him with a noisy bladder; boys and girls in ragged disguises importuned him for pennies. A very, very shapely female person, in what appeared to be the beginnings of a bathing suit, laughed over her shoulder, inviting him, with eyes that danced.

"My word!" murmured the New-Yorker. "This is worth while."

Ahead of him, he caught a glimpse of Miss Banniman's aigrettes and the ponderous figure of her father. But the gaiety of the carnival crowd had infected him, and he was loath to leave it for the Grunewald, whither his friends were bound with the unerring directness of thirsty millionaires. It was a brilliant, gorgeous afternoon; the streets were alive with color. Somewhere through this crowd, the young man idly reflected, adventure--even romance--might be stalking, if such things really existed. So he decided to linger. To be quite truthful, Van Dam's decision was made, not with any faintest idea of encountering either romance or adventure, but because a slight indigestion made the thought of a gin-fizz or a julep unbearable at the moment.

As he continued to move with the throng, the b.u.t.t of badinage and the target for impudent glances, he felt a desire to be of it and in it. He yielded himself to a most indiscreet impulse. a.s.suring himself that he was un.o.bserved, he stepped into a store, purchased a plain black domino and mask, donned them, and then fell in with the procession once more, dimly amused at his folly, vaguely surprised at his impropriety.

But now that he was one of the revelers he was no longer an object of their attentions; they paid no heed to him, and he soon became bored. He engaged himself in conversation with an old flower-woman, and, as she had only a solitary gardenia left in her tray, he bought it in order that she might go home. He pinned the blossom on the left breast of his domino, and wandered to the nearest corner to watch the crowds flow past.

He had been there but a moment when a girl approached and stood beside him. She was pet.i.te, and yet her body beneath its fetching Norman costume showed the rounded lines of maturity; at the edge of her mask her skin gleamed smooth and creamy; her eyes were very dark and very bright. As Mr. Van Dam was a very circ.u.mspect young man, not given to the slightest familiarity with strangers, he confined his attentions to an inoffensive inventory of her charms, and was doubly startled to hear her murmur:

"You came in spite of all, m'sieu'!"

A French girl, he thought. No doubt one of those Creoles he had heard so much about. Aloud, he said, with a bow:

"Yes, mademoiselle. I have been looking for some one like you."

Her eyes flashed to the white gardenia on his breast, then up to his own. "You were expecting some one?"

"I was. A girl, to guide me through the carnival."

"But you are early. Did you not receive the warning?"