Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/15

Rh vey, come here! Did you ever see anything like this before?"

The ballroom! What pictures that one word calls up! Of fair women and brave men. Of laughter and love and glorious youth. Of the dreamy movements of an old-time waltz. And more than all, of Doris herself as she called for us: face flushed with excitement; laughing, joyous eyes. Futile pictures that can now exist only in the mind!

Inside was only a long room, barren of all furniture, and with a glistening floor smooth still in spite of twenty years accumulation of dust. At one end was a raised platform on which the musicians must have sat, and there (a strange sight indeed!) was an old-fashioned grand piano.

"Oh, Perry," called Doris, the irrepressible, "play something; let's dance."

Obediently I went to the piano. It was, of course, hopelessly out of tune, but still I could get some sort of melody out of it.

"What do you want?" I asked. "Stumbling?" Automatically my fingers played the opening chords, and then I involuntarily stopped. Stumbling seemed as sacrilegious as if played during church service. Without conscious volition my fingers ran over another tune, a melody of long ago, ever old and yet ever young, the immortal Blue Danube Waltz. And as I played it, the twenty years slipped away like a shadow.

The room is brilliantly lighted, and the floor packed. Beautiful women with quaint coiffures and quaintlier cut gowns glide dreamily down the floor in the arms of gallant youths. A huge old punch bowl stands over there in that corner dispensing merriment and good cheer to all. Suddenly there is a commotion at the door. A man rushes up frothing madly at the mouth.

"The bearded dwarf! The bearded dwarf!" he gasps, and then collapses. The man makes one more attempt to speak. His lips move slowly. "James

Almost immediately the merry-making ceases. The guests disappear. Boom! An overworked bass string snapped like a pistol shot. And I turned to face the present once more.

"Some dance, Perry!" said Doris. "We certainly enjoyed your playing. And I wouldn't have let you play anything else but the Blue Danube here. We couldn't have been so sacrilegious."

But for once I did not pay any attention to Doris. Would the man of my vision have said more if the piano string had not banished him forever?

I turned again to the piano. At any rate, let us go on with the dance. I wish I could picture it to you as vividly as I saw it then: a broad beam of light from the flashlight playing hide and seek with the semi-darkness of the room; the cacophonous discords emanating from that old piano; the black shadows lurking in every corner; and like two immortals from Olympus dancing—Doris and Nielson.

Whenever they glided into the rays of the flashlight which I had placed on the piano, it surrounded them with golden splendor, bathed them as the limelight caresses the dancers of the stage. Two gods from Olympus. I repeated: he with his splendid strength and virile manhood, and she with her laughing youth and joyous beauty. The musician at the piano faded into insignificance by contrast. What had I to offer her to compare with him? No, it was better thus, it was better thus. A scream from Doris broke the spell which surrounded them.

"Harvey!" and I could not help noting that it was he to whom she turned. "Look! There's something in the doorway."