Edgar obeyed and went back to his seat, but kept on questioning the baron.
“Edgar,” his mother interposed, “don’t forget that the baron can do whatever he wants to do. Perhaps our company bores him.”
Now she included herself, and the baron noted with satisfaction that the rebuke directed to the child was really an invitation for a compliment to herself.
The hunter in him awakened. He was intoxicated, thoroughly excited at having so quickly come upon the right tracks and at seeing the game so close to the muzzle of his gun. His eyes sparkled, his blood shot through his veins. The words fairly bubbled from his lips with no conscious effort on his part. Like all men with pronouncedly erotic temperaments, he did twice as well, was twice himself when he knew a woman liked him, as some actors take fire when they feel that their auditors, the breathing mass of humanity in front of them, are completely under their spell.
Naturally an excellent raconteur, with great skill in graphic description, he now surpassed himself. Besides, he drank several glasses of champagne, ordered in honor of the new friendship. He told of hunting big game in India, where he had gone at the invitation of an English nobleman. The theme was well chosen. The conversation had necessarily to be about indifferent matters, but this subject, the baron felt, would excite the woman as would anything exotic and unattainable by her.
The one, however, upon whom the greater charm was exercised was Edgar. His eyes glowed with enthusiasm. He forgot to eat or drink and stared at the story-teller as if to snatch the words from his lips with his eyes. He had never expected actually to see a man who in his own person had experienced those tremendous things which he read about in his books—tiger hunts, brown men, Hindus, and the terrible Juggernaut, which crushed thousands of men under its wheels. Until then he had thought such men did not really exist and believed in them no more than in fairyland. A certain new and great feeling expanded his chest. He could not remove his eyes from his friend and stared with bated breath at the hands across the table that had actually killed a tiger. Scarcely did he dare to ask a question, and when he ventured to speak it was with a feverish tremor in his voice. His lively imagination drew the picture for each story. He saw his friend mounted high on an elephant caparisoned in purple, brown men to the right and to the left wearing rich turbans, and then suddenly the tiger leaping out of the jungle with gnashing teeth and burying its claws in the elephant’s trunk.
Now the baron was telling about something even more interesting, how elephants were caught by a trick. Old, domesticated elephants were used to lure the young, wild, high-spirited ones into the enclosure. The child’s eyes flashed. Then, as though a knife came cutting through the air right down between him and the baron, his mother said, glancing at the clock:
“Neuf heures. Au lit.”
Edgar turned white. To be sent to bed is dreadful enough to grown children at any time. It is the most patent humiliation in adult company, the proclamation that one is still a child, the stigma of being small and needing a child’s sleep. But how much more dreadful at so interesting a moment, when the chance of listening to such wonderful things would be lost.
“Just this one story, mother, just this one story about the elephants.”