"Come up here beside me."
He shook his head. He was highly entertained, but the mysterious game was hers and Weedie's. She gave an order, it seemed, in a foreign tongue, and the thing was managed. The interpreter had stepped from the car, and now gentle yet forcible hands lifted down Weedon Moore, and set him beside it and other hands as gently set up Jeffrey in his place. There he stood with her in a dramatic isolation, but so great was the carrying power of her mystery that he did not feel himself a fool. It was quite natural to be there for some unknown purpose, at one with her and that warmly breathing mass: for no purpose, perhaps, save that they were all human and meant the same thing, a general good-will. She went on speaking, and Jeffrey knew there was fire in her words. He bent to the interpreter beside the car and asked, at the man's ear:
"What is she saying?"
The interpreter turned and looked him in the face. They were not more than three inches apart, and Jeffrey, gazing into the passionate black eyes, tasting, as it were, the odour of the handsome creature and feeling his breath, was not repelled, but had a sudden shyness before him, as if the man's opinion of him were an attack on his inmost self, an attack of adoring admiration.
"What is she saying?" he repeated, and for answer the interpreter snatched one of Jeff's hands and seemed about to kiss it.
"For God's sake, don't do that," Jeff heard himself saying, and withdrew his hand and straightened at a safe distance from the adoring face, and he heard Madame Beattie going on in her fiery periods. Whatever she was saying, they loved it, loved it to the point of madness. They cheered her, and the interpreter did not check them, but cheered too. To Jeffrey it was all a medley of strange thoughts. Here he was, in the crowd and not of it, greatly moved and yet not as the others were, because he did not understand. And though the voice and the answering enthusiasm went on for a long time, and still he did not understand, he was not tired but exhilarated only. The moon, the drifting clouds, the dramatic voice playing upon the hearts of the multitude, their hot responses, all this gave him a sense of augmented life and the feel of his own past youth. Suddenly he fancied Madame Beattie's voice failed a little; something ebbed in it, not so much force as quality.
"That's all," she said, in a quick aside to him. "Let's go." She gave an order, in English now, and a figure started out of the crowd and cranked the car.
"We can't go in this," Jeffrey said to her. "This is Moore's car."
But Madame Beattie had seated herself majestically. Her feathers even were portentous in the moonlight, like the plumage of some gigantic bird. She gave another order, whereupon the man who had cranked the machine took his place in it, and the crowd parted for them to pass. Jeffrey was amused and dashed. He couldn't leave her, nor could they sail away in Weedon's car. He put a hand on her arm.
"See here, Madame Beattie," said he, "we can't do this. We must get out at the gate, at least."