A pine forest fizzled out and factory chimneys replaced it. The train clattered past a roundhouse, and slowed down, groaning. A hideous station darkened the day.

‘Good Lord,’ cried Van, ‘that’s my stop.’

He put money on the table, kissed Cordula’s willing lips and made for the exit. Upon reaching the vestibule he glanced back at her with a wave of the glove he held — and crashed into somebody who had stooped to pick up a bag: ‘On n’est pas goujat à ce point,’ observed the latter: a burly military man with a reddish mustache and a staff captain’s insignia.

Van brushed past him, and when both had come down on the platform, glove-slapped him smartly across the face.

The captain picked up his cap and lunged at the white-faced, black-haired young fop. Simultaneously Van felt somebody embrace him from behind in well-meant but unfair restraint. Not bothering to turn his head he abolished the invisible busybody with a light ‘piston blow’ delivered by the left elbow, while he sent the captain staggering back into his own luggage with one crack of the right hand. By now several free-show amateurs had gathered around them; so, breaking their circle, Van took his man by the arm and marched him into the waiting room. A comically gloomy porter with a copiously bleeding nose came in after them carrying the captain’s three bags, one of them under his arm. Cubistic labels of remote and fabulous places color-blotted the newer of the valises. Visiting cards were exchanged. ‘Demon’s son?’ grunted Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Kalugano. ‘Correct,’ said Van. ‘I’ll put up, I guess, at the Majestic; if not, a note will be left for your second or seconds. You’ll have to get me one, I can’t very well ask the concierge to do it.’

While speaking thus, Van chose a twenty dollar piece from a palmful of gold, and gave it with a grin to the damaged old porter. ‘Yellow cotton,’ Van added: ‘Up each nostril. Sorry, chum.’

With his hands in his trouser pockets, he crossed the square to the hotel, causing a motor car to swerve stridently on the damp asphalt. He left it standing transom-wise in regard to its ordained course, and clawed his way through the revolving door of the hotel, feeling if not happier, at least more buoyant, than he had within the last twelve hours.

The Majestic, a huge old pile, all grime outside, all leather inside, engulfed him. He asked for a room with a bath, was told all were booked by a convention of contractors, tipped the desk clerk in the invincible Veen manner, and got a passable suite of three rooms with a mahogany paneled bathtub, an ancient rocking chair, a mechanical piano and a purple canopy over a double bed. After washing his hands, he immediately went down to inquire about Rack’s whereabouts. The Racks had no telephone; they probably rented a room in the suburbs; the concierge looked up at the clock and called some sort of address bureau or lost person department. It proved closed till next morning. He suggested Van ask at a music store on Main Street.

On the way there he acquired his second walking stick: the Ardis Hall silver-knobbed one he had left behind in the Maidenhair station café. This was a rude, stout article with a convenient grip and an alpenstockish point capable of gouging out translucent bulging eyes. In an adjacent store he got a suitcase, and in the next, shirts, shorts, socks, slacks, pajamas, handkerchiefs, a lounging robe, a pullover and a pair of saffian bedroom slippers fetally folded in a leathern envelope. His purchases were put into the suitcase and sent at once to the hotel. He was about to enter the music shop when he remembered with a start that he had not left any message for Tapper’s seconds, so he retraced his steps.

He found them sitting in the lounge and requested them to settle matters rapidly — he had more important business than that. ‘Ne grubit’ sekundantam’ (never be rude to seconds), said Demon’s voice in his mind. Arwin Birdfoot, a lieutenant in the Guards, was blond and flabby, with moist pink lips and a foot-long cigarette holder. Johnny Rafin, Esq., was small, dark and dapper and wore blue suede shoes with a dreadful tan suit. Birdfoot soon disappeared, leaving Van to work out details with Johnny, who, though loyally eager to assist Van, could not conceal that his heart belonged to Van’s adversary.

The Captain was a first-rate shot, Johnny said, and member of the Do-Re-La country club. Bloodthirsty brutishness did not come with his Britishness, but his military and academic standing demanded he defend his honor. He was an expert on maps, horses, horticulture. He was a wealthy landlord. The merest adumbration of an apology on Baron Veen’s part would clinch the matter with a token of gracious finality.

‘If,’ said Van, ‘the good Captain expects that, he can go and stick his pistol up his gracious anality.’

‘That is not a nice way of speaking,’ said Johnny, wincing. ‘My friend would not approve of it. We must remember he is a very refined person.’

Was Johnny Van’s second, or the Captain’s?

‘I’m yours,’ said Johnny with a languid look.

Did he or the refined Captain know a German-born pianist, Philip Rack, married, with three babies (probably)?

‘I’m afraid,’ said Johnny, with a note of disdain, ‘that I don’t know many people with babies in Kalugano.’

Was there a good whorehouse in the vicinity?

With increasing disdain Johnny answered he was a confirmed bachelor.

‘Well, all right,’ said Van. ‘I have now to go out again before the shops close. Shall I acquire a brace of dueling pistols or will the Captain lend me an army "bruger"?’

‘We can supply the weapons,’ said Johnny.

When Van arrived in front of the music shop, he found it locked. He stared for a moment at the harps and the guitars and the flowers in silver vases on consoles receding in the dusk of looking-glasses, and recalled the schoolgirl whom he had longed for so keenly half a dozen years ago — Rose? Roza? Was that her name? Would he have been happier with her than with his pale fatal sister?

He walked for a while along Main Street — one of a million Main Streets — and then, with a surge of healthy hunger, entered a passably attractive restaurant. He ordered a beefsteak with roast potatoes, apple pie and claret. At the far end of the room, on one of the red stools of the burning bar, a graceful harlot in black — tight bodice, wide skirt, long black gloves, black-velvet picture hat — was sucking a golden drink through a straw. In the mirror behind the bar, amid colored glints, he caught a blurred glimpse of her russety blond beauty; he thought he might sample her later on, but when he glanced again she had gone.

He ate, drank, schemed.

He looked forward to the encounter with keen exhilaration. Nothing more invigorating could have been imagined. Shooting it out with that incidental clown furnished unhoped-for relief, particularly since Rack would no doubt accept a plain thrashing in lieu of combat. Designing and re-designing various contingencies pertaining to that little duel might be compared to those helpful hobbies which polio patients, lunatics and convicts are taught by generous institutions, by enlightened administrators, by ingenious psychiatrists — such as bookbinding, or putting blue beads into the orbits of dolls made by other criminals, cripples and madmen.

At first he toyed with the idea of killing his adversary: quantitively, it would afford him the greatest sense of release; qualitatively, it suggested all sorts of moral and legal complications. Inflicting a wound seemed an inept half-measure. He decided to do something artistic and tricky, such as shooting the pistol out of the fellow’s hand, or parting for him his thick brushy hair in the middle.

On his way back to the gloomy Majestic he acquired various trifles: three round cakes of soap in an elongated box, shaving cream in its cold resilient tube, ten safety-razor blades, a large sponge, a smaller soaping sponge of rubber, hair lotion, a comb, Skinner’s Balsam, a toothbrush in a plastic container, toothpaste, scissors, a fountain pen, a docket diary — what else? — yes, a small alarm clock — whose comforting presence, however, did not prevent him from telling the concierge to have him called at five a.m.

It was only nine p.m. in late summer; he would not have been surprised if told it was midnight in October. He had had an unbelievably long day. The mind could hardly grasp the fact that this very morning, at dawn, a fey character out of some Dormilona novel for servant maids had spoken to him, half-naked and shivering, in the toolroom of Ardis Hall. He wondered if the other girl still stood, arrow straight, adored and abhorred, heartless and heartbroken, against the trunk of a murmuring tree. He wondered if in view of tomorrow’s partie de plaisir he should not prepare for her a when-you-receive-this-note, flippant, cruel, as sharp as an icicle. No. Better write to Demon.


Dear Dad,

in consequence of a trivial altercation with a Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, whom I happened to step upon in the corridor of a train, I had a pistol duel this morning in the woods near Kalugano and am now no more. Though the manner of my end can be regarded as a kind of easy suicide, the encounter and the ineffable Captain are in no way connected with the Sorrows of Young Veen. In 1884, during my first summer at Ardis, I seduced your daughter, who was then twelve. Our torrid affair lasted till my return to Riverlane; it was resumed last June, four years later. That happiness has been the greatest event in my life, and I have no regrets. Yesterday, though, I discovered she had been unfaithful to me, so we parted. Tapper, I think, may be the chap who was thrown out of one of your gaming clubs for attempting oral intercourse with the washroom attendant, a toothless old cripple, veteran of the first Crimean War. Lots of flowers, please!