_ BOOK VI. IN BALTIMORE
CHAPTER I
Mamise remembered her earlier visits to Baltimore as a tawdry young vaudevillette. She had probably walked from the station, lugging her own valise, to some ghastly theatrical boarding-house. Perhaps some lover of hers had carried her baggage for her. If so, she had forgotten just which one of her experiences he was.
Now she hoped to be even more obscure and unconsidered than she had been then, when a little attention was meat and drink, and her name in the paper was a sensation. She knew that publicity, like love, flees whoso pursueth and pursues who flees it, but she prayed that the rule would be proved by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out as anonymously as she had sneaked in.
Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was groping for her hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on. They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab she was in.
But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she struggled against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar bruin--buffeted his arms away and muttered:
"You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the glass and tell the driver to let me out?"
"
Nein doch!"
"Then let me alone or I will."
Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing at all to her, and she said the same to him while long strips of Baltimorean marble stoops went by. They turned into Charles Street and climbed past its statue-haunted gardens and on out to the north.
They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized that she was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She spoke angrily:
"You said you wanted to see me. I'm here."
Nicky fidgeted and sulked:
"I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is no use."
"If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something."
"I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk."
Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could not imagine how to coax him out of silence.
His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:
"
Ach Gott, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me. These Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf my
Vaterland. But the time comes soon, and I must make patience.
Eile mit Weile!"
"You'd better tell me what's on your mind," Mamise suggested, but he shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized that she could not extort Nicky's secret from him by asserting her own dignity.
She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas except such silly schemes as were suggested by her memory of the vampire picture. She hated the very passage of such thoughts through her mind, but they kept returning, with an insistent idea that a patriotic vampire might accomplish something for her country as Delilah and Judith had "vamped" for theirs. She had never seen a vampire exercise her fascinations in a fur coat in a dark automobile, but perhaps the dark was all the better for her purpose.
At any rate, she took the dare her wits presented her, and after a struggle with her own mutinous muscles she put out her hand and sought Nicky's, as she cooed:
"Come along, Nicky, don't be so cantankerous."
His hand registered the surprise he felt in the fervor of its clutch:
"But you are so colt!"
She insinuated, "You couldn't expect me to make love to you the very first thing, could you?"
"You mean you do like me?"
Her hands wringing his told the lie her tongue refused. And he, encouraged and determined to prove his rating with her, flung his arm about her again and drew her, resisting only in her soul, close to him. _