Twenty-four Hours [antikvár]

I Dinner was over at last and Old Hector Champion sat like Lucullus, white and bloated, fingering a tall crystal Burgundy glass and surveying the beautiful table. It was, he reflected, like a jewel, with the four elaborate Champion family candelabra bought at Christie's the year before from the tax-ridden English Champions and the high epergne filled with mandarins and black grapes and crowned by a pineapple. In the crystal glasses resting on a cloth of old yellow lace there still lingered traces of excellent wines : in the small glasses there was the pale gold of chablis, in the shallow glasses the deeper gold of champagne, and in the great crystal goblets the rich red of Romanee-Conti. And now before himself and his three male guests the bronze gold of fine brandy filled the air with a delicate evasive scent. To Hector the table was a thing so beautiful that the mere sight of it made him forget for a moment that he had himself eaten nothing but three digestive biscuits, and drunk nothing but a glass of Vichy, and that to-morrow he might be told that he had only three months to live. And the room which surrounded and dwarfed the big table made it appear even more extravagant and lovely. It was a room taken out piecemeal from a hotel in the rue de Vareimes which had once belonged to a Cardinal, and piecemeal it had been brought to America to be put together once more in a great apartment twenty floors above the East River. To preserve the fuU beauty of the tan-grey wood and the perfection of the overdoors painted by Boucher with soft pink nymphs and fluttering cupids, steel girders had been cut, and the ceiling had been raised to fit the transplanted jewel. The windows were higher and wider than other windows in the huge building, but instead of looking out upon a green and intimate garden in the rue de Varennes, they looked out over a mighty river 3 flowing between great skyscrapers and whirring factories and crossed by three gigandc bridges. At this hour the river was a ribbon of black, and the three great bridges were necklaces of light. From these windows one could see all the way from the flares of Hell Gate to the lower harbour where the great liners shd out to the open sea. It was a view so vasr and fantastic that at times it conveyed to Old Hector a terrifying sense of his own smaUness and unimportance, and so filled him with a sullen sense of depression. As if Hector had arranged to multiply the beauties of the room, they were reflected back and forth, together with his own figure and those of his guests, from one great mirror over the ornate commode to another over the Louis Quinze fireplace, where the flames in turn reflected themselves in the dark polished floor. Hector Champion was seventy-one and soft, with a white and pink complexion that seemed unnatural and a litde ghasdy in a man so old, and although he had lost twenty pounds within the last three weeks, his short body remained grotesque and unwieldy and was still capable of inspiring repulsion in those who had not grown used to its peculiar ugliness. The image reflected back and forth in the tall mirrors was that of a round, rather shapeless face with a small mouth and two small pale-blue eyes that were malicious and feminine, and rather like the eyes of a china cat. Feature by feature he was not an ugly man. The repulsion lingered just beneath the surface, shining out of the too pale eyes, lurking in the puckered corners of the tiny mouth and in the folds of fat beneath the small ears. The men lingered over the table instead of joining the ladles or going into the library, because Old Hector believed that leaving the table for brandy and cigars broke the back of a good dinner. He scarcely heard what his guests were saying, because his thoughts kept returning morbidly to himself and his fear of death. It was worse when he was alone and so, lately, he had come to ask people to every meal—people of all sorts, even people whom he disUked and for whom he felt snobbish contempt or pity, people whom a year ago he would never have asked to his house. Anything was better than being alone. The nights were awful. The three men who sat at his table were as diverse in chat-