Death Takes a Bow (2 page)

Of the three people in the room, Mr. North knew only one, the lion himself. Victor Leeds Sproul wore dinner clothes as if they were tweeds, and as if they were intended to be tweeds. One felt, instinctively, that if any disparity existed, it was the fault of the man who had first decided that dinner clothes were not to be made of tweed. Mr. Sproul was merely correcting an ancient error. When Mr. Sproul wore a dinner jacket, it became of tweed, and had better.

Mr. Sproul was taller and broader than ordinary. He, standing and putting down a glass on a polished table created to add impersonality to the detached surroundings of a speakers' room, loomed above Mr. North. He also loomed on either side of Mr. North. And if Mr. North, faced in the immediate future by an audience, lacked confidence, Mr. Sproul had confidence enough for two. It was clear that Mr. Sproul was going to enjoy lecturing, not only this evening but during the tour which stretched ahead.

Mr. Sproul was the lion and looked it. He was more impressive, more assured, even than Mr. North remembered him from meetings during recent weeks—meetings at the office, when Mr. Sproul, sitting beside Mr. North's desk, seemed somehow to leave Mr. North sitting beside it; meetings for luncheon, at which Mr. Sproul somehow became the host and made Mr. North feel at home. (He had managed, somehow, to make Mr. North feel at home in his own club, where before he had always felt a little away from home.)

He loomed above Mr. North now, with reddish hair bristling in suitable profusion, and reached out a hand.

“Mr
. North!” he said, and somehow made it sound like the tag line of an anecdote. It was as if Sproul had been telling a story to which the entrance of Mr. North was the pay-off; as if Mr. North had entered only to pay off, only to complete a story already told. Mr. North felt, as he had felt before, as if he were essentially a figment of Mr. Sproul's imagination.

And yet, he thought, saying “Hello, Sproul,” to the lion, Mr. Sproul did not really have a great deal of imagination. As Mr. Sproul's publisher, Mr. North could take his oath to that. There had been novels from Mr. Sproul and, without knowing the people Mr. Sproul had known, you could be almost certain that people Mr. Sproul had known appeared almost verbatim in the novels, which had, without being particularly interesting, a feeling of obvious reality. You could almost see the people whose lives Mr. Sproul had borrowed squirming uneasily on the pages to which Mr. Sproul had pinned them.

They had, since Mr. Sproul had spent so much of his life in Paris, been novels with a Paris background and, chiefly, they had been about people who had spent most of their lives in Paris but had been born elsewhere. There was a novel about a Parisian actress, born in Budapest, who had an affair—an
affaire
, really—with an American born in Sioux City. There had been a novel about a dancer, born in Warsaw, who had had an affair with an Englishman born in Shanghai, who succeeded where another American, born in Buffalo this time, had failed. The novels were extremely continental. They were not, however, extremely successful.

Townsend Brothers had, in fact, been considering the polite relinquishment of Mr. Sproul as an author when
That Was Paris
came along. This one was not a novel. As nearly as anything, it was biography, but it was a biography of a city as well as of Victor Leeds Sproul, and it came in time to be the obituary of the city and of a period. And it caught on; prodigiously it caught on. And Victor Leeds Sproul, in no wise astonished, found himself sharing with Elliot Paul the role of a beautiful city's biographer. Mr. Sproul's book glittered rather more than Mr. Paul's, being set in more tinseled places, and it was not so real, but it served. Townsend Brothers beamed on Mr. Sproul and forgot that they had been thinking of polite relinquishment. And Y. Charles Burden sent Mr. Sproul a telegram. A few days later, and this was indeed tribute, Mr. Burden followed his telegram, although in the ordinary course of events Mr. Burden's telegrams were not harbingers but summonses.

Mr. Burden was lean and saturnine and by common agreement—an agreement to which Mr. Burden was vociferously a party—the best lecture agent in the business. Mr. Burden took on only winners. Mr. Burden was a winner himself, and looked it; he was a well-groomed lion in his own right. Confronting his elegance, most prospective clients quailed and grew small, realizing that they, by comparison, were pathetically unfitted for the exposed life, to which Mr. Burden was, so regally, summoning them. This attitude on the part of clients comported with Mr. Burden's desires, making it easier to apportion what Mr. Burden called the “split.” (Now and then, thinking it over after contracts were signed, Mr. Burden's more perspicacious clients suspected that they were what had been split.) Mr. Burden offered, when the prospective client was softened by his presence, a forty-five-fifty-five cut of fees, the fifty-five going to Mr. Burden. In exchange, he pointed out, he paid all expenses, except, of course, hotel bills and meals. And, naturally enough, travel expenses too trifling to be itemized, like cab and subway fares, and railroad fares of less than a couple of dollars. It surprised Mr. Burden's clients somewhat, afterward, to discover how frequently they, if resident in New York, were booked for lectures in New York.

But Mr. Sproul, and this Mr. Burden admitted on confronting him, was a bigger kettle offish. Mr. Sproul was de luxe, and Mr. Burden told him so. Mr. Sproul was suitable for a grand tour, opening in New York at Today's Topics Club and going on across the continent by easy and profitable stages. And Mr. Sproul would get a sixty-forty split.

“Sixty,” Mr. Sproul had said—he had told Mr. North of this with beaming amusement. “To me.”

Mr. Burden had been startled and hurt; had almost heatedly described overhead and permanent organizations and the high cost of riding on trains. Mr. Sproul had been expansive and assured, and had actually got fifty-five per cent. He was pleased, and his pleasure had seeped through his account of the interview. Mr. North did not tell him that Mr. Burden had, on occasion, been known to pay sixty, but this small fact Mr. North had treasured.

He treasured it now, looking up at Victor Leeds Sproul and waiting for Mr. Sproul to get around to introducing him to the two women. There should, Mr. North realized, have been only one woman—the program chairman. That would be—Mr. North searched his memory madly for a name which had been there a second before—that would be Mrs. Paul Williams. It was she who had suggested that, on this first lecture, so widely advertised and so, in all respects, important, a representative of Mr. Sproul's publishers might care to be on hand and introduce the lion. This suggestion had brought Mr. North to his present state, and during the negotiations he had received several letters of confirmation from Mrs. Williams and written several letters, also of confirmation, to her. He had also spoken to her early that day on the telephone, further confirming the already woefully confirmed.

“I'm Mrs. Williams, Mr. North,” she said now, still confirming. Mr. North retrieved his hand from Mr. Sproul and accepted the hand of Mrs. Williams. Mr. Sproul looked on with the air of a man who has made things right.

Mrs. Williams was, Jerry North estimated, in her middle thirties. And the word for her was “trim.” Slightly taller than most women, she was trimmer than almost any. Her blond hair, swept up at the sides of her head, was perfect in its contours. Her figure was—Mr. North thought for a phrase—beautifully held in. Looking at her, you thought, with a sudden recollection of things past, of corsets. And yet she was not obviously corseted; it was more as if she were corseted by will power. She was, Mr. North decided, a businesslike lady and kept everything under control.

And then, murmuring a blurred “how do you do?” Mr. North was conscious of the first oddity of what was to become so odd an evening. Mrs. Williams was looking past him and a little upward, and Mr. North realized that she was looking up at Victor Leeds Sproul—looking at him with an expression which Mr. North found unexpected, but could not analyze. Involuntarily, Mr. North turned a little and looked, in turn, up at the lion of the evening. The lion was amused. He was looking at them with amusement. It was that amusement, Mr. North decided, which had momentarily disconcerted Mrs. Williams, who probably was difficult to disconcert.

If she was disconcerted, her recovery was instant. She looked at Mr. North, now, and said, with just that hint of disclaimer which detached politeness suggested, that she really felt as if she knew Mr. North.

“We are so delighted that you came, Mr. North,” she said. “Yourself. And I am so glad the firm agreed with my thought. I'm sure that Mr. Sproul is pleased, too.”

“Least they could do,” Mr. Sproul said, but he said it jovially. “Eh, North?”

Mr. North said something about its having been a very happy thought. He looked at his watch.

“We'll give them another five minutes, I think,” Mrs. Williams said. “They expect it. And would you like to have me introduce you, Mr. North? Just a word, of course.”

“I think,” the other woman in the room said, in a husky, attractive voice, “that somebody ought to introduce
me
. Don't you?”

This last was evidently to Mr. North. He turned, smiling.

“Loretta Shaw,” Sproul said over their heads. He said the name as if it should be obvious. “Mr. North. From my publishers, Retta.”

The girl, too, seemed amused, but her amusement was different in quality from Sproul's. She seemed amused at herself and at Mr. North and at all of them. Mr. North looked at her, which was enjoyable. She was slender and quick and vivacious and had dark-brown hair. She did not look corseted; she was, on the contrary, noticeably pliant. The pliancy was unobtrusive, but inescapable; no man looking at her could miss it. Mr. North, pleased—and for a moment almost forgetting the ordeal ahead—did not miss it. He wondered who she was.

“Just heartening me up, Retta is,” Sproul explained. “Came around to see that I hadn't fainted, or done a bunk or—what do we Americans say?—scrammed. A friendly thought.”

“And,” Loretta Shaw said, “obviously unnecessary. I should have known, Lee. Takes more than an audience to—to frighten Victor Leeds Sproul.”

Mr. North had a feeling she had first intended to finish her sentence differently—less amiably. But it was a fugitive feeling, based more on something in the air than in the girl's voice or manner.

“Tourists,” Sproul said, with easy contempt. “American tourists. Here or there, what difference does it make?”

“Lee!” the girl said. “If you feel that way, keep it to yourself. Don't be—condescending.”

She spoke now, Mr. North was sure, as if she had a right to caution. She looked up at Sproul and shook her head. There was admonition in the gesture.

“That's all over, Lee,” she said. “Try to remember. This is New York. This is where we all live—where you live.”

Sproul answered her in French, too rapidly for Mr. North's ears and memory. She smiled and, Mr. North thought, smiled involuntarily, against her own judgment. She answered in English, rejecting shared secrets.

“Be careful,” she said. “Tell him to be careful, Mr. North. Mrs. Williams.”

Mrs. Williams's voice was corseted, detached.

“I am sure Mr. Sproul will be—tactful,” she said. “But he will find that ours is a very—mature audience. I have no doubt that it will understand Mr. Sproul.”

It was, Mr. North thought, an odd word to use, as she used it. She gave it a rather special flavor, as if it meant more than it seemed to mean. She had, he decided, grasped Victor Leeds Sproul rather more completely than most people did in a short time, and she could not have met him more than once or twice in the course of her confirmations. She seemed to have hidden views concerning him. But then, Mr. North reflected, the outward contradictions of Mr. Sproul were not really difficult to grasp. And Mrs. Williams, although it was hard not to think of her as prim, was evidently not without comprehension. And judgment. It never paid, Mr. North thought—thought under the nervousness which was again taking possession of him—it never paid to take people as being altogether what they looked to be. Still, he added to himself, that's about the only thing we have to go on.

He looked at his watch again, and Mrs. Williams looked at hers, and this time she nodded. She went to a door opposite that by which Mr. North had entered, and instantly Mr. North guessed what the little door was. It was the little green door at Sing Sing. He took a deep breath, adopted an expression—of which he was doubtful—and prepared himself. Mrs. Williams smiled back at them encouragingly and opened the door. Mr. North heard the other door, now behind them, close, and was conscious that Miss Loretta Shaw had quitted their doomed procession. Mr. North stepped aside and let the lion precede him. The lion followed Mrs. Williams. As Sproul passed him, Mr. North looked up into the large face, wondering if, now that the moment had arrived, trepidation would make its impress even on Victor Leeds Sproul.

It had not. On the contrary, Sproul looked elated and a little flushed. He beamed down at Mr. North, and beamed excessively; he snapped two large fingers and, as he passed, murmured “tourists” and seemed to be laughing. Mr. North hoped that he had not had one drink too many to bolster himself for this crucial first stage of the de luxe tour. But the worry, at the most hardly palpable, passed instantly. Mr. North could not spend time worrying about Mr. Sproul; Mr. North had barely enough time left to worry about himself. Because, as he had feared, the little door—which was, he noticed, only symbolically green—opened directly onto the stage.

The muscles at the back of Mr. North's neck tightened as he looked out over the auditorium. It was filled, all right. There must be, Mr. North thought, nearer a thousand than five hundred. The tight muscles pulled Mr. North's head back. He was aware that a fixed smile had settled upon his lips—fixed and, he was convinced, fatuous.