HAD begun to follow, with an interest that was rapidly approaching mental vertigo, the amazing evolutions of that latest farcical importation—"The Turkish Bath," when I heard a rustle of skirts, a murmur from the man next me that it was of no importance, and felt the heel of a lady's boot planted squarely on my toe. Looking up, I saw that for the second time in a twelvemonth, Mrs. Peter Hexham had excited the enmity of a nature whose unvarying sweetness is a matter of comment to my friends and a source of satisfaction to myself.
Either the lady's memory or her manners were at fault, for she betrayed no recollection of our first and only meeting. Perhaps I had better reason than she to remember the occasion, when, one evening at Cannes, at her instigation, I had held a table spellbound with my censure of an anonymous romance, while the fact of my vis-à-vis being its author was a secret in which the whole company shared—myself excepted. It was she, who, with the ostensible design of leading me to firmer ground, induced me to comment on the moral obliquities of the heroine, though it was not until coffee that Jimmie Giddings was kind enough to inform me that the whole incident of the slippers was notoriously founded on the history of the lady whom I had had the honor of escorting down to dinner.
The fact that I had thus made a fool of myself twice in one evening could bring me to but one conclusion: I had to thank rather her malevolence than her reputed inanity. My uncharitableness may be pardoned to a lady whose faculty for entangling both herself and others in such social contretemps was only equalled by her husband's truculence in extricating her—a characteristic of Mr. Hexham which was to be brought to my attention before the evening was over.
At the end of the act I went out for a cigarette. The thrill of the warning bell, and the sound of an altercation at the other end of the lobby reached me at the same instant, and my feeling was scarcely one of surprise when I immediately recognized the tones of one of the disputants to be those of Hexham. I heard the murmur of men's voices, and the scuffle of feet on the marble flagging, and turned to see Hexham, visible head and shoulders above the rest, striking out. Immediately afterward, a young man plunged headlong into an immense gilt easel plastered with the photographs of the cast of "The Turkish Bath."
Some months since, I had witnessed a similar exhibition of Hexham's choler. The victim on that occasion had been a young attaché, who, before a delighted coffee-room, had perpetrated an imitation of an American lady who found young men on the Continent "so flighty." The culprit had protested that no one in particular had been intended, but in matters where his wife's lack of common-sense was concerned Hexham seldom allowed himself the luxury of a doubt, and he had dealt with the attaché with a carafe. The room, having been thoroughly satisfied by the burlesque, was proportionately in sympathy with the offender.
Now, however, popular opinion seemed all with Hexham. Whatever the offence of the individual whose foot was at that instant protruding from a speaking likeness of the premiere danseuse, in the judgment of the crowd he richly deserved his fate. I inferred that the worst was over. A common smile illumined the faces of the bystanders, and one gentleman pressed a bill into the hand of the attendant guardian of the peace. I turned, throwing away my cigarette, and started again for my seat, catching a glimpse as I did so of Hexham shouldering through the swing-doors of the café, looking, I must say, singularly distinguished in his bullish way, and surrounded by a group of thirsty and admiring adherents.
The theatre was dark, and as I groped my way to my place, I heard Mrs. Hexham's voice addressing me with irritation:
"I do wish you would manage to get back in time not to upset the whole row, Peter."
"Speaking for one member of the row, let me say how far I am from reprehending this habit of your husband. In fact, may I not felicitate myself—" I stopped, for it struck me from a certain excited flurry that passed over her that, having utterly failed to recognize me, she fancied herself addressed by a total stranger. Her share in that ridiculous evening at Cannes rose hot within me, and I determined that I would do nothing to relieve the awkwardness of her position.
"Felicitate myself," I continued blandly, seating myself, and making the inevitable futile effort to insinuate my hat into the rack presumably provided for that purpose, "on being the first to assure you that your husband is no longer in any danger, either from the arm of the law, or that of his late antagonist."