Blue Voyage: A Novel by Conrad Aiken Read Free Book Online Page A

take a good look at him, gentlemen. I ask you, was there ever a more perfect specimen of the gentleman villain? One look is enough. Monocle and all. Raffles isn’t in it, nor Dracula, nor Heliogabalus. That bored Oxford manner, the hauteur —you know, those English go in for a hauteur— correct me, partner, if my French pronunciation isn’t all it should be—and the skillfully introduced little story of the hundred dollars lost to a New York con man——Well, I say no more.”
    “Oh, dry up, Silberstein,” said Hay-Lawrence, grinning uncomfortably.
    “See the guilty look?… That’s the only weakness of these English sharpers. They’re too proud and sensitive. Make personal remarks about them, and they’ll betray themselves every time … Now, Mr. Demarest here has the cold, unmoving New England face, the sacred cod; he conceals his feelings better even than the Englishman, simply because he hasn’t got any, Am I right, Mr. Demarest?”
    “Perfectly,” Demarest laughed. “As for you ——!”
    “Well?”—calmly staring. “What about me?”
    “The Sphinx, beside you, has as mobile a face as an ingénue!”
    Silberstein played a card, reached his hand (cigar-holding) for the trick, then drew back as if stung.
    “Ouch. He fooled me. He saved that up.”
    “Yes. I saved it up,” said Demarest, tapping the trick on the edge.
    “Now that we’re so well acquainted, Mr. Demarest, I should like to ask you about that young lady—the term may be taken to have some latitude—to whom you were talking just now. I wouldn’t call her a beauty, exactly—but I think it could be said with some justice that her appearance is very remarkable.”
    “The Welsh Rarebit?”
    “Ha!” cried Silberstein, rolling his large head back and half closing his eyes appreciatively. “Ha! is that what you call her? Welsh Rarebit is good, is very, very good. Welsh Rarebit she is … And what about her, if I may ask without seeming to be too impertinent?”
    “Peggy Davis. A widow of one month—so she says. Returning from Providence, where her husband died, to Wales. Her handsome brother—a miner—will meet her at the dock.”
    “Yes?… It sounds fairly circumstantial?… It convinces you?”
    “The damndest face I ever saw,” said Hay-Lawrence. “It makes me ill to look at her.”
    “You mean”—the Major lifted off his pince-nez and endeavored to look fiercely out of gentle brown eyes, under a brow beetling but more academic than military—“the queer-looking girl who sat over there talking with the musician?… She looked to me like hot stuff!… He he .” He put on his pince-nez, bridling and blushing, looking naughtily from one to the other of the bridge players.
    “Go to it, Major,” breathed Silberstein smokily. “We give you a free hand—go as far as you like. Only I feel it’s my duty, as one hideously experienced, to warn you that she will probably see you coming … Ha!” He took a puff at his cigar, shut narrow eyes ecstatically, and then, while the others laughed, gave another “Ha!”
    “I’m no chicken myself,” said the Major. “I haven’t spent two years in Constantinople for nothing.”
    “Have you got any photos of your harem?” asked Demarest.
    The Major quivered with delight at so much attention. “No,” he giggled, “not this year’s.”
    “I suppose,” said Silberstein, “you Orientals change the houris in your harems—(By Godfrey doesn’t that run off nicely?—houris in your harems! Have you a little houri in your harem?)—as often as we poor stick-in-the-muds change the goldfish in our finger bowls. What’s a houri more or less? And you must develop a very fine, a very subtle taste in those matters.”
    “Smubtle,” suggested Demarest.
    “Score two for Mr. Demarest. Yes, you Oriental potentates must be full of smubtleties. Thank you for that word, Mr. Demarest—a permanent addition to my vocabulary … A smubtle allusion! Good.”
    “The poker player is mad