In moments of respite he saw, gliding through the heated glare, gaily-clad forms; they danced; yet for all the dancing, for all the colors, they were more sinister than merry, they were incomparably more grievous than gay. A tray of beer glasses was held before him, but he waved it aside. “Champagne,” he muttered. The husky voices commended him; a bare arm crept around his neck, soft, stifling; the red silk form was like a blot of blood on the gloom; it spread over his arm like a tide of blood welling from his torn heart.
He thought at intervals, when the piano was silent, that he could distinguish the sound of low, continuous sobbing; and the futility of grief afforded a contemptuous amusement. “It's fierce,” a shrill voice pronounced. “They ought to have took her somewhere else; this is a decent place.” A second hotly silenced this declaration. In the jumble of talk which followed he heard the title “captain” pronounced authoritatively, conclusively imposing an abrupt lull. Men entered. With an effort which taxed his every resource of concentration he saw that there were two; he distinguished two tones—one deliberate, coldly arrogant, the other explosive, iterating noisy assertions. Peering through the film before his eyes, Anthony saw that the first, insignificant in stature, exactly and fashionably dressed, had a countenance flat and dark, like a Chinaman's; the other was a fleshy young man in an electric blue suit, his neck swelling in a crimson fold above his collar, who gesticulated with a fat, white hand.
Anthony felt the attention of the room centered upon himself, he heard disconnected periods; “... to the eyes. Good fellow... threw friend out—one of them lawyer jags, too dam' smart.” A voice flowed, thick and gummy like molasses, from the redness at his side, “He's my fellow; ain't you, Raymond?”
A wave of deathly sickness swept up from the shuddering void and enveloped him. He summoned his dissipated faculties, formed his cold lips in readiness to pronounce fateful words, when he was diverted by the sharp impact of a shutting door, he heard with preternatural clearness a bolt slip in its channel. The young man in the blue suit had disappeared. Again the sobbing, low and distinct, rose and fell upon his hearing.
There was a general stir in the room; the form beside him rose; and he was lunging to his feet when, in the act of moving, he became immovable; he stood bent, with his hands extended, listening; he turned his head slowly, he turned his dull, straining gaze from side to side. Then he straightened up as though he had been opened by a spring.
“Who—who called?” he demanded. “Who called me—Anthony?”
In the short, startled silence which followed the room grew suddenly clear before him, the mist dissolved before a garish flood of gaslight that fell upon a grotesque circle of women in shapeless, bright apparel; he saw haggard, youthful countenances on which streaks of paint burned like flames; he saw eyes shining and dead like glass marbles; mouths drawn and twisted as though by torture. He saw the fragile, fashionably dressed youth with the flat face. No one of them could have called him in the clear tone that had swept like a silver stream through the miasma of his consciousness.
Again he heard it. “Anthony!” Its echo ran from his brain in thrills of wonder, of response, to the tips of his fingers. “Anthony!” Oh, God! he knew now, beyond all question, all doubt, that it was the voice of Eliza. But Eliza was dead. It was an inexplicable, a cunning and merciless jest, at the expense of his love, his longing.... “Anthony!” it came from above, from within.
A double, sliding door filled the middle of the wall, and, starting forward, he fumbled with its small, brass handles. A sudden, subdued commotion of curses, commands, arose behind him; hands dragged at his shoulders; an arm as thin and hard as steel wire closed about his throat. He broke its strangling hold, brushed the others aside. The door was bolted. Yes, it came from beyond; and from within came the sobbing that had hovered continuously at the back of his perception.
He shook the door viciously; then, disregarding the hands tearing at him from the rear, burst it open with his shoulder. He staggered in, looking wildly about.... It had, after all, been only a freak of his disordered mind, an hallucination of his pain. The room was empty but for the young man in electric blue, now with his coat over the back of a chair, and a girl with a torn waist, where her thin, white shoulder showed dark, regular prints, and a tangle of hair across her immature face.