Page:Weird Tales Volume 09 Issue 02 (1927-02).djvu/8

150 think you have if you can find anything worth seeing at an afternoon reception."

reception was in full blast when we arrived at the Norman mansion in Tuscarora Avenue that afternoon. The air was heavy with the commingled odors of half a hundred different perfumes and the scent of hot-poured jasmine tea, while the clatter of cup on saucer, laughter, and buzzing conversation filled the wide hall and dining room. In the long double parlors the rugs had been rolled back and young men in frock coats glided over the polished parquetry in company with girls in provocatively short skirts to the belching melody of a saxophone and the drumming rhythm of a piano.

“Pardieu,” de Grandin murmured as he viewed the dancers a moment, “your American youth take their pleasures with seriousness, Friend Trowbridge. Behold their faces. Never a smile, never a laugh. They might be recruits on their first parade for all the joy they show—ah!" He broke off abruptly, gazing with startled, almost horrified, eyes after a couple whirling in the mazes of a foxtrot at the farther end of the room. “Nom d’un fromage,” he murmured softly to himself, “this matter will bear investigating, I think !”

“Eh, what’s that?” I asked, piloting him toward our hostess.

“Nothing; nothing, I do assure you,” he answered as we greeted Mrs. Norman and passed toward the dining room. But I noticed his round, blue eyes strayed more than once toward the parlors as we drank our tea and exchanged amiable nothings with a pair of elderly ladies.

"Pardon," de Grandin bowed stiffly from the hips to his conversational partner and turned toward the rear drawing room, “there is a gentlemen here I desire to meet, if you do not mind—that tall, distinguished one, with the young girl in pink."

“Oh, I guess you mean Count Czerny," a young man laden with an ice in one hand and a glass of non-Volstead punch in the other paused on his way from the dining room. “He’s a rare bird, all right. I knew him back in ’13 when the Balkan Allies were polishing off the Turks. Queer-lookin’ duck, ain’t he? First-class fightin’ man, though. Why, I saw him lead a bayonet charge right into the Turkish lines one day, and when he’d shot his pistol empty he went at the enemy with his teeth! Yes, sir, he grabbed a Turk with both hands and bit his throat out, hanged if he didn’t.”

"Czerny," de Grandin repeated musingly. “He is a Pole, perhaps?”

His informant laughed a bit shame-facedly. “Can’t say,” he confessed. “The Serbs weren’t asking embarrassing questions about Volunteers’ nationalities those days, and it wasn’t considered healthful for any of us to do so, either. I got the impression he was a Hungarian refugee from Austrian vengeance; but that’s only hearsay. Come along, I’ll introduce you, if you wish.”

I saw de Grandin clasp hands with the foreigner and stand talking with him for a time, and, in spite of myself, I could not forbear a smile at the contrast they made.

The Frenchman was a bare five feet four inches in height, slender as a girl, and, like a girl, possessed of almost laughably small hands and feet. His light hair and fair skin, coupled with his trimly waxed diminutive blond mustache and round, unwinking blue eyes, gave him a curiously misleading appearance of mildness. His companion was at least six feet tall, swarthy-skinned and black-haired, with bristling black mustaches and fierce, slate-gray eyes set beneath beetling black brows. His large nose was like the predatory beak of some