a duel without seconds

DJUNA BARNES

wherein a lady discovers that an ordinary theft may involve one's honor in more ways than one

The Baron and Baroness Otterly-Hans-clever were two at dinner, each immured in a lonely little canopy of light flung by the candles at either end of the long table. The third course had been served, and the Baron had helped himself to three cutlets in place of his usual two; for, now that his duelling days were practically over, he had no need to keep free of fat. The Baroness sat with lowered eyes, breaking her bread in silence and thinking of the days that were no longer.

Silent and preoccupied they both were, while between them the long, hard expanse of mahogany mocked them with a false gaiety of silver and glass and with shadows of candlelight that danced along its bland surface like ghosts of the company whose laughter it once had known. There was silence too, in the room that brooded darkly over the lonely couple—silence heavy and complete save for the whisper of the butler's feet as he moved pallidly in the dimness beyond the high, brocaded chairs. But to the Baroness the very silence was loud with echoes of the past, and to her wistful eyes the fleeting shadows now seemed to take form, almost to assume the outlines of phantom guests crowding around the table in a staccato pattern of talk and colour as vivid as in the days, not so long ago, when this same room had buzzed with conversation, had rung with laughter. So strong was the illusion that she half-turned her head toward the place on her right hand where the old Duke of Yarhoven, with his daughters, had been accustomed to sit—then to her left, where the bosoms, bright with medals, of famous generals and politicians had once swelled with confidence and gaiety. She sighed now as she recalled, one by one, those delightful friends of a happier day. . . . There had been the lanky Hoving Twins, eager young sportswomen whose laughter rang across a drawing-room in a kind of prolonged, double echo like the baying of hounds, making everyone think of pink coats and crisp, autumn fields so that they all felt enormously cheerful, even the sundry officers suffering from malaria contracted while doing the right thing by the colonies. There had been actresses, statesmen, princes, even a king—and always, like the charming, sentimental refrain running through an operetta, there had been that assortment of wistful little wives whose husbands had been sent out of their own country to do some kind of political injustice in another.

But those days were tragically over; and now the Baron and his Baroness were alone, and as lonely as dethroned royalty. The money which had once been so plentiful had diminished until now it hardly served to cover the pheasants with their appropriate dressing. Their riches were gone, their friends were gone; before them lay nothing but a thin and dreadful solitude. But while the Baroness grew hourly frailer and more despairing, her husband seemed unaffected by their misfortunes. Indeed, looking at him now down the grim length of that deserted table, she reflected that he seemed to live entirely in the past; placid, pink, and stupid, he busied himself only with his history of duelling from the sixteenth century up to his own time— when, he assured everyone who would listen, he had been no mean hand at the fine art himself. He carried a long and nasty scar across his right cheek to attest to his veracity, and although the story of that scar altered brilliantly from year to year, it gave him tremendous cachet.

When he had first met his future Baroness (she had been Gertie Platz, then, and sweetly gullible) he had assured her that it was but a month old, having been won in defense of her beauty and fair name; but scarcely had the glow in her heart begun to brighten into something akin to love for her valiant defender, when she overheard him telling the Duchess of Yarhoven that he had come by his scar one unfortunate night in Madrid when he had righted a wrong half a mile out of town. In the succeeding years (there had been twenty) he had changed the story as often as he could find anyone to tell it to; it was, variously, on a point of personal honour that he had been wounded, for the honour of the church, for the honour of his country, for the honour of a woman . . . but it was always a highly entertaining tale. In the early days, the Baroness had been thrilled. She winced and breathed faster as he drew out, in an illustrative gesture, his bloody rapier; she shuddered and paled, and murmured: "You are wonderful!" But, God of custom, that was long ago! Now her nostrils quivered slightly, and she turned her head away.

As her friends deserted her, and her life narrowed to a barren path of debt and despair, this once great lady's smile had come to be, of late, a little iced; her infrequent laughter a trifle shrill. Lines appeared about her fine eyes, and her step was slower as she walked in her lonely garden and listened to her gardener talk of winter packing for the strawberries and the gentler flowers. Alas, she knew too well why her friends had left her; as vividly as though it had been carved by a bitter blade upon her mind and heart, she could trace the first indication of disaster to that dreadful evening, five years ago, upon the occasion of their fifteenth anniversary ball, when the most deplorable, the most tragic event of her life had taken place.

The Baron, that night, had just been telling the pretty wife of General Koenig how he had come by his scar in Budapest, fighting beside the blue Danube in waltz time with an adversary who would not keep step, when one of the Hoving twins, with a long, resounding wail (the acoustics of the Baron's mansion being peculiarly perfect for rendering anguish) screamed that she had been robbed not only of her mother's emerald pendant but of her father's father's time-piece, as big as a turnip and wound with a key in the shape of a spade, which she valued not so much because it was her grandfather's as because it was worth a thousand British pounds, its equivalent in dollars, its twin in marks, and its replica in lire. To this day, the Baroness shuddered as she recalled the stark silence that had followed the announcement of this loss, then the excited hum of voices as the guests began hastily to compute the loss in various currencies. Uncomfortable pauses there had been, too, lips tightened with unspoken doubts, eyes that rested a little too long, a little too thoughtfully on other eyes. . . . All the curious, eager, yet reluctant suspicion that is so easily roused among friends dwelt like an evil fog in that brilliant room. The thing had been hushed up, of course, although neither pendant nor watch was ever found, and there the matter might have ended; but from that day the Baroness, her eyes shadowed with anxiety, noticed that at each of her parties that followed something of value was lost. Her drawing-room lacked spontaneity after that; fewer and fewer guests came, and always there was that nervous expectation of someone rising to proclaim the loss of a jewel, or—worse still —considerately hurrying away, murmuring something about having misplaced a cuff-link or a tie-pin, a bracelet or a ring. The servants were questioned, and several were dismissed under suspicion; but still the thefts continued, and the Baroness grew as thin as a leaf in the wind, and seldom, now, raised her tired eyes to the faces of those friends who were left to her. Soon, even the last of these drifted away, and the Baron and Baroness OtterlyHansclever were alone; alone, and somehow, she felt, disgraced.

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It occurred to her now, as she tasted a salad-dressing that seemed almost utterly tasteless, that had she been a younger woman she would have wept, and opened her heart to her husband. But armoured and inert as he was among his papers and notes on duelling, he, too, was lost to her. So she ate in silence, turning over and over in her mind the thought that had been ripening there like a dark and cruel seed, that their honour had gone unavenged. Not only had their guests been despoiled, but their own family plate had disappeared, piece by piece, and even her own little rope of pearls could not be found. Was there, she thought fiercely, no alternative, no future for the Otterly-Hansclevers but to sit supinely, while the dark hand of disgrace closed upon them and their friends, one by one, turned surely and dreadfully away?

Why did the Baron say nothing, do nothing? Was he so engrossed in the history of duelling that he had no time nor inclination to fight when it was needed? Well .... of what avail was the delicate art of duelling against the grim, evanescent shadow that hovered over them? Their adversary was the phantom, Doubt; so would the battle be a ghostly one. And she alone could fight it. Her fingers tightened around the worn silver of her saladfork, and in her eyes a resolve grew until they seemed like liquid pools of fire in her tired face. Yes, she alone would avenge the honour of the Otterly-Hansclevers . . . . . and she would prove in the doing that faint blood was not her portion.

When the Baron had kissed her hand and excused himself for a long night among his papers, as was his wont, she mounted slowly to her apartments. The rooms waited emptily for her, for her own maid had been dismissed not long ago, since they could afford no servants except the old butler and the gardener; but she walked across the threshold as proudly as though trumpets went before her. A duty awaited her—one last gesture to accomplish in defence of the honourable name she had assumed in marriage; and it was a gesture which must be accomplished beautifully, exquisitely. She must die.

She knew how she would die, knew that it would be by her own pistol which her mother had given her on her wedding day "in case of burglars". A handle encrusted in diamonds it had, and a long, gleaming barrel. No one had ever seen it but her husband and herself, and they had laughingly locked it away in the secret drawer of an escritoire—for, as the Baron said, "With a master of the rapier, a duellist of international fame in the house, what need could we have of pistols?" Often, in the years that had followed, she had looked at it fondly and had locked it away again.

To-night it would serve.

Slowly she lit the tall, twisted candles in their heavy sconces; one by one the tiny flames wavered, hesitated, then grew into small spires of light, pale and steady in the high shadows of the room. The Baroness drew the curtains. . . . . So, she reflected, must her courage grow and crystalize until it burned without faltering, and then —as the flame of a candle is extinguished in a breath, so would she die, quickly and alone. Her heart beat faster as she moved toward the drawer in which she knew the pistol lay. Then she paused, a hand at her breast, a dreadful indecision surging within her. Was it, after all, the best thing to do? Would her husband, her friends, know how truly, by this act, she had kept her tryst with honour, had sacrificed herself to an ideal? Or would they merely think her melodramatic? Would it, perhaps, be better to go on living, sleeping, eating, trying to forget? .... No! To die was the only vindication—and to die magnificently, by candle-light, the diamonds in her pistol flashing a last challenge to the heartless world.

She moved to the escritoire, and put out her hand toward the fateful drawer. The words, "Death, honourable and alone" came to her in a halfwhisper, but as she tried to say them, her breath caught in a little knot of pain at the base of her throat. She trembled .... but she did not falter. She pulled out the drawer, and thrust in her hand.

For one instant she stood as if turned to stone. Then she gave a faint, inaudible cry. The pistol was gone.