FOR SEVERAL days the Room had been running into heavy weather. Elisabeth had persistently tormented Paul by enigmatic looks and cryptic references to a "delicious something," which he would not be allowed to share. She treated Agatha as her confidante, Gérard as her accomplice, and countered any direct approach to the forbidden subject with a great display of winks. These machinations succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. Paul writhed and twisted on the rack of curiosity, pride alone preventing him from trying to pump Agatha or Gérard, who, under pain of terrible reprisals, were sworn to silence. At length curiosity prevailed. Posting himself at what Elisabeth had nicknamed the "stage door," he spied on the conspirators and discovered that not only Gérard but a dashing young man in a sports car was waiting for them.
The scene that occurred that night was cataclysmic. The girls were prostitutes, foul prostitutes, and Gérard was a pimp. He himself would leave the house. Then they could use it as a brothel. It was only to be expected. All mannequins were tarts, low ones at that. His sister was a bitch in heat, she had corrupted Agatha, and Gérard was behind it all.
Agatha wept. Gérard lost his temper, and in spite of Elisabeth's mild and repeated interjections of: "Leave him alone, Gérard, he's absurd," insisted on explaining that the young man was a friend of his uncle's, was called Michael, was an American Jew, was enormously rich, and that in any case they had been on the point of coming clean and introducing him to Paul.
Never, shrieked Paul, would he consent to meet the "filthy Jew": he was coming along tomorrow at the appointed hour to slap his face.
"It's too squalid," he concluded, his eyes glittering. "You take an inexperienced young girl along with you, simply to sell her to a Jew. I suppose you're hoping for a rake-off."
"Rubbish, my dear fellow," retorted Elisabeth. "You're barking up the wrong tree, I do assure you. I'm the one Michael's got his eye on. He wants to marry me, and what's more I like him very much."
"Marry you? Marry you? You must be mad. Have you looked in the glass lately? Don't you realize you're a monster? Do you really think anyone would want to marry you, you prize idiot? He must be pulling your leg."
And he burst into hysterical laughter.
Elisabeth was well aware that it was a matter of complete indifference to Paul, as to herself, whether people were or were not Jewish. She felt suffused with warmth and well-being. Her heart so overflowed it could have cracked the walls. How she reveled in this pseudo-laughter! How grim his jaw looked now! What sport indeed to goad him to such frenzy!
Next morning, Paul felt that he had made a fool of himself. His outburst, he secretly admitted, had been unnecessarily extravagant. Quite forgetting that he had suspected the American of designs on Agatha, he now told himself that Elisabeth was her own mistress, that he couldn't care less whom she chose to marry. He wondered why on earth he had flown off the handle.
After a period of sulks, he finally let himself be persuaded to meet Michael.
Michael was in every way the Room's antithesis. This was so evident that no attempt was ever made to introduce him to it. He personified the outside world. One saw at a glance that he was of the world worldly, that his whole treasure was laid up on earth, and as for ecstasy, his only chance of it would come when driving at a hundred miles an hour, at the wheel of the latest thing in high-powered sports cars.
His film-star personality captured Paul who promptly set aside his principles and fell for him. Drunk with speed, they went whirling through the countryside at all hours other than those tacitly consecrated by the four initiates to the ceremonies of the Room; and by Michael, in all simplicity, to sleep.
Their midnight mysteries took nothing from the stature of the absent Michael. He was invoked, worshipped, completely re-created.
How could he know, when next they met, that magic juices were laid upon their eyelids, making them madly dote upon him, after the manner of Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream?
