"I see! With this and the locusts!"
He turned away toward the open window, through which came the incessant roar of traffic, the sound of motor horns, and now, for a moment, a chiming of bells from St. Patrick's Cathedral.
"Well, we must do all we know. We mustn't give away a single chance. The whole Metropolitan crowd is just crazy to down us, and we must put up the biggest fight we can. Leave it all to Crayford. He knows more than any living man about a boom. And he said just now Madame Sennier was a deed fool to have given us such a lift with her libel. There'll be a crowd of pressmen around at the theater about it to-night, you can bet. Here she comes! Get on your coat, and let's be off, or Crayford'll be raging."
Claude stood still for an instant, looking from Alston to Charmian, who walked in briskly, wearing a sealskin coat that reached to her heels, and buttoning long white gloves. Then he said, "I won't be a minute!" and went out of the room.
As he disappeared Charmian and Alston looked after him. Then Alston came nearer to her, and they began to talk in rather low voices.
"The fight is on!"
How Claude hated those words; how he hated the truth which they expressed! To-night, in New York, as he went to fetch his overcoat from the smart and brilliantly lit bedroom which was opposite to the sitting-room across a lobby, he wondered why Fate had led him into this situation, why he had been doomed to become a sort of miserable center of intrigue, recrimination, discussion, praise, blame, dissension. No man, surely, on the face of the earth had loved tranquillity more than he had. Few men had more surely possessed it. He had known his soul and he had been its faithful guardian once—but long ago, surely centuries ago! That he should be the cause of battle, what an irony!
Thinking with great rapidity, during this brief interval of loneliness, while he got ready to go out, a rapidity to which his fatigue seemed to contribute, giving it wings, Claude reviewed his life since the first evening at Elliot's house. Events and periods and details flashed by; his close friendship with Mrs. Mansfield (who had refused to come to America), his almost inimical acquaintance with Charmian, Mrs. Shiffney's capricious endeavors to get hold of him, the firmness of his refusals, the voyage to Algiers, his regret at missing the wonders of Africa, Charmian's return full of a knowledge he lacked, the dinner during which he had looked at her with new eyes.
(He took down from its hook his heavy fur coat bought for the bitter winter of New York.)
Chateaubriand's description of Napoleon, the little island in Mrs. Grahame's garden, the production of Jacques Sennier's opera—they were all linked together closely at this moment in a tenacious mind; with the expression in Charmian's eyes at the end of the opera, Oxford Street by night as he walked home, the spectral bunch of white roses on his table, the furtive whisper of the letter of love to Charmian as it dropped in the box, the watchful policeman, the noise of his heavy steps, the dying of the moonlight on the leaded panes of the studio, the scent of the earth as the dawn near drew.