As Helgin sat now, in the boisterous and tawdrily glassy tearoom, he spoke to Blanche with the gracious casualness which he always publicly affected with women. It was a part of his jovially invincible pose to insinuate that he could have been a perfect libertine had he chosen to follow that denounced profession, and that his enormous sexual attractiveness was held in bondage only by his lack of desire and his ability to peer through the entire, violent fraud of sex itself. In the dream-world of his own making, through which he moved, loftily but genially immune to all criticisms, adulations, and importunities, women were the potential vassals whom he disdained to hire.
On the night previous to the present one, his second wife had departed on a visit to her family in a distant city, and he had telephoned Oppendorf and arranged a meeting, prodded by one of the irregular impulses in which his respect for the other man overcame his opposite feelings of envy and aversion. Now, he sat and chatted with Blanche while she listened with an almost abject attention. This great writer, whose pictures she had run across on the literary pages of newspapers, and in magazines, was actually seated beside her and speaking to her—it could scarcely be true! She recalled that Rosenberg had often lauded Helgin, and that a year previous she had read one of the latter man’s novels and had liked its “difficult,” thumb-twiddling style and disliked its patronizing, pitying attitude toward the feminine characters. Well, when men wrote about women, or women about men, they never seemed able to become quite fair to each other. They were always mushy and lenient, on one side, or sneering and unsympathetic on the other. She voiced this thought to Helgin, who advised her to cease searching for an unhappy medium. To him, she presented the figure of a worried, heavily questioning peasant girl, dressed and manicured for a more polite rôle, and he had a whim to lure her into expectant admirations and play with her stumbling hungers and wonderings. Usually, he did not waste his time on such girls—they were more to Oppendorf’s liking—but for the space of one night he could afford to risk the impending boredom in a more unassuming manner.
“You must get Oppie to compliment you,” he said, glancing in the poet’s direction. “He does it perfectly. Women cry for it, babies smile, old ladies jump out of their chairs. Come on, Oppie, say something about Miss Palmer’s hair. What does it remind you of? A startled ghost of dawn, the visible breath of afternoon?”
Oppendorf turned from his whisperings with Margaret, and smiled—a patient but slightly threatening smile.
“Are you ordering a tailormade suit or buying a box of cigars?” he asked, sweetly.
“The comparison isn’t quite fair to your poetry, Oppie,” Helgin answered, in the same sweet voice.
“Monseigneur Helgin, apostle of fairness, sympathy, and tolerance—know any other good ones, Ben?”—the poet’s smile shone like a sleeping laugh.
“Your hair is like a tortured midnight—that was a nice line, Oppie,” Helgin answered pensively, as he ignored the other man’s thrust.
“The actual phrase happens to be ‘transfigured midnight,’” Oppendorf said, in an ominously subdued voice. “You substituted the word tortured to make the line meaningless, of course.”
“Sa-ay, wasn’t that tormented night stuff in The Duke of Hoboken, Ben’s last novel?” Dora Ruvinsky asked, poking Oppendorf in the side.