CHAPTER III
Long before the two had reached the top floor of the building in which the dinner was to be given, they had caught the hum of the merrymakers, the sound bringing a smile of satisfaction to Peter's face, but it was when he entered the richly colored room itself, hazy with cigarette smoke, and began to look into the faces of the guests grouped about him and down the long table illumined by myriads of wax candles that all his doubts and misgivings faded into thin air. Never since his school days, he told me afterwards, had he seen so many boisterously happy young fellows grouped together. And not only young fellows, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes, but older men with thoughtful faces, who had relinquished for a day the charge of some one of the important buildings designed in the distinguished architect's office, and had spent the night on the train that they might do honor to their Chief.
But it was when Morris, with his arm fast locked in his, began introducing him right and left as the “Guest of Honor of the Evening,” the two shaking hands first with one and then another, Morris breaking out into joyous salvos of welcome over some arrival from a distant city, or greeting with marked kindness and courtesy one of the younger men from his own office, that the old fellow's enthusiasm became uncontrollable.
“Isn't it glorious, Holker!” he cried joyously, with uplifted hands. “Oh, I'm so glad I came! I wouldn't have missed this for anything in the world. Did you ever see anything like it? This is classic, my boy—it has the tang and the spice of the ancients.”
Morris's greeting to me was none the less hearty, although he had left me but half an hour before.
“Late, as I expected, Major,” he cried with out-stretched hand, “and serves you right for not sitting in Peter's lap in the cab. Somebody ought to sit on him once in a while. He's twenty years younger already. Here, take this seat alongside of me where you can keep him in order—they were at table when I entered. Waiter, bring back that bottle—Just a light claret, Major—all we allow ourselves.”
As the evening wore away the charm of the room grew upon me. Vistas hazy with tobacco smoke opened up; the ceiling lost in the fog gave one the impression of out-of-doors—like a roof-garden at night; a delusion made all the more real by the happy uproar. And then the touches here and there by men whose life had been the study of color and effects; the appointments of the table, the massing of flowers relieving the white cloth; the placing of shaded candles, so that only a rosy glow filtered through the room, softening the light on the happy faces—each scalp crowned with chaplets of laurel tied with red ribbons: an enchantment of color, form and light where but an hour before only the practical and the commonplace had held sway.
No vestige of the business side of the offices remained. Peter pointed out to me a big plaster model of the State House, which filled one end of the room, and two great figures, original plaster casts, heroic in size, that Harding, the sculptor, had modelled for either side of the entrance of the building; but everything that smacked of T-square or scale was hidden from sight. In their place, lining the walls, stood a row of standards of red and orange silk, stretched on rods and supported by poles; the same patterns of banners which were carried before Imperial Caesars when they took an airing; and now emblazoned with the titles of the several structures conceived in the brain of Holker Morris and executed by his staff: the Imperial Library in Tokio; the great Corn Exchange covering a city block; the superb Art Museum crowning the highest hill in the Park; the beautiful chateau of the millionaire surrounded by thousands of acres of virgin forest; the spacious warehouses on the water front, and many others.
With the passing of the flagons an electric current of good fellowship flashed around the circle. Stories that would have been received with but a bare smile at the club were here greeted with shouts of laughter. Bon-mots, skits, puns and squibs mouldy with age or threadbare with use, were told with a new gusto and welcomed with delight.