Adventure Magazine Cover — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

94. voice; but = had sense enough not to have confidence y impersonation. So I clapped a — se the annoying bell and let it ring until the operator concluded nobody cared to answer. The afternoon sun dragged itself out of sight. Twilight came on, filtering darkness into the room and giving all manner of strange shapes to familiar objects; but I sat still except at such times as I heard the elevator stop at the third floor, whereupon I hurried behind the curtains. This grew monotonous, for I was, as evening came and people began both returning to and leaving the house, obliged to jump up and down much like a jack-in-the-box in the hands of a delighted child. But I had no inclination to stand stiff-backed behind a curtain for an indefinite number of hours when I might sit, so each time I returned to the chair. Some people grow impatient when re- quired to wait, but they never make excel- lent poker-players; and the hours ticked away with me hardly looking at the watch. The house grew more quiet; the elevators ran less frequently. Nine o’clock gave way to ten, and ten was crowded out by eleven; midnight came, and a ragged moon—two- thirds seemingly eaten away by some hun- gry sky-monster—wandered across. the cloudy heavens; and with the aimless atten- tion of an idler I watched it until, warned by the clank of the closing elevator door, I slipped behind the curtains. It was after one o’clock; and Zoronna came in—but not alone. Remy Cantello was with her. Both of them were agitated and in a slightly quarrelsome mood that showed in their troubled restlessness and quick flashes of speech, though it soon ap- peared to me that Zoronna was acting her part. It was no doubt her intentness on the conversation, the rather prickly conversa- tion, with Cantello that caused her to over- look the absence of a maid and not to notice that no lights were burning. She switched them on and came into the room with a manner of petulant indifference. She removed her hat and tossed it care- lessly at the chair before my curtain, then jerked off her furs; and they never reached the chair but fell to the floor, and lay un- noticed. Her coat was swept from her shoulders and fell about her feet, though she seemed to have taken a step or two back- ward toward the chair with the nearly un- Adventure conscious intention of having it fall there, on top of the fragile hat of feathers, chiffon and velvet. She was vibrantly alert, and shook her head to settle the bobbed semi-curls, then turned toward Remy, who had slumped into a chair, hat and stick in his hands, without removing his light overcoat. Se “I TELL you,” he said, “Hur- Baus gronje’safool. So are you.” “And what are you, to say so?” “T can take liberties. He knows me.” “Am I then such a stranger to him?”’ “Don’t be an idiot, Zora. It’s all for your own good. I love you.” “T know. I know. I know!” she an- swered with careless cynicism, snapping a Cigaret-case and scratching a match. So it was that sentences and scraps of sentences rushed to and fro before anything came up that was of interest to me. I gathered that Cantello disapproved of cer- tain plans upon which Hurgronje had set his heart and in which he was not discouraged by Zoronna. They had evidently come from a meeting with the charlatan; and I listened patiently in the hope of hearing where he could be found, since I thought that accidental information would be more reliable than what I might extort. I did not learn as much as I would have liked, and nothing that seemed worth while for all the time I had lost—except that the time was of no value tome. With- out the tedium of relating what each said, I may put down that Cantello was urging her to run away with him, and advanced as the major part of his argument that Hur- gronje’s fortune was on the decline, that the loss of his precious collection of gems seemed to have given him a mad streak, that he was absolutely crazy to think he could swindle Sin Chang out of his opium monopoly, and was a lunatic to go to the trouble and ex- pense of fitting up a magnificent residence in the expectation of profitably taking up his “magic” and “esotericism” after he had settled accounts with the Chinaman. Cantello was no fool; at least not in all — respects. His reasoning was worth atten- tion; and he reproached Zoronna for seem- ing to have encouraged the Devil’s Master —as Cantello more or less ironically called him—in such plans. Zoronna, retorted that he had encouraged Hurgronje in a project more foolish than any of those; but Cantello replied that it was EoOmichbooks:co