Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/130

114 flew towards the figure with a pas de cancan; one arm tightened round his neck like a lasso.

Then his frozen quiet left him; there was a sort of fight between them.

An oath in his own tongue burst from him, but she twisted her fingers below his arms and dragged him towards the table, meeting every effort at resistance with a kiss. His head swam as he saw her face come close to him, its crooked mouth open, and the blank in her line of even teeth which was supposed to be a charm; her coarse hair seemed to singe his neck as it brushed upon him, and in a moment he was pushed into a chair at the table and received a handful of red rose-petals in his face from a woman opposite.

Dufour was murmuring some apologies about forgetting the appointment. He had been away; had come back in time for this supper, long arranged—a farewell to his old manner and his old loves; but Wladislaw barely listened. When "La Coquelicotte" sat upon his knee, he threatened to strike her, and then bethought him with shame that she was a woman.

He took a glass that was pushed to him, and drank to steady himself. It was Chartreuse they had given him—Chartreuse, more deadly and more insidious than pure spirit and in a very little while his head failed him, and he remembered nothing after. Perhaps it was as well. The wild laughter and indecent jokes surged up hotter than before; every one strove to forget the stun of that terrible moment, when, at the jarring scrape of the curtain-rings upon their rod, the white figure of the Christ had interrupted them; when it had seemed, indeed, that the last day had come, that judgment and retribution, harsher than all hell to those taken in their sinning, had fallen on them as they shrieked and howled like human swine amid the refuse of their feast.