The corridors were blocked with Saratoga trunks; perspiring porters staggered to and fro, bending beneath the weight of burdens compared to which a sailor’s chest is as a pill-box.
All went well; the tapes clicked off their international lies, detailing all the last quotations of the deep mines upon the Rand, the fall in Spanish Fours; in fact, brought home to those with eyes to see, the way in which the Stock Exchange had put a rascals’ ring around the globe.
Waiters ran to and fro, their ears attuned to every outrage upon French, seeking to find the meaning of the jargons in which they were addressed.
Majestic butlers in black knee-breeches, and girt about the neck with great brass chains, moved slowly up and down, so grave and so respectable that had you laid your hands upon any one of them and made a bishop of him he would have graced the post.
Mysterious, well-dressed men sat down beside you, and after a few words proposed to take you in the evening to show you something new.
Women walked to and fro, glaring at one another as they had all been tigresses, or again, catching each other’s eyes, reddened, and looked ashamed, as if aware, though strangers, that they understood the workings of the other’s heart.
Burano chandeliers and modern tapestry, with red brocade on the two well-upholstered chairs, imparted beauty and a look of wealth, making one feel as if by striking an electric bell a door would open and a troop of half-dressed women file into the court, after the fashion of another kind of inn.
Outside the courtyard Paris roared, chattered, and yelped, cycles and automobiles made the poor _piéton’s_ life a misery, and set one thinking how inferior after all the Mind which thought out Eden was to our own.
Upon the asphalt the horizontales lounged along, pushing against the likely-looking passer-by like cats against a chair.
Cabs rattled, and the whole _clinquant_ town wore its best air of unreality, which it puts off alone upon the morning of a revolution.
Through boulevards, parvis, cités, along the quays, in the vast open spaces which, like Saharas of grey stone, make the town desolate, in cafés, brothels, theatres, in church and studio, and wherever men most congregate, groups stood about reading the news, gesticulating, weeping, perspiring, and agog with a half-impotent enthusiastic orgasm of wildest admiration for Spain, Cervera, and the men who without bunkum or illusion steamed to certain death. And, curiously enough, the execration fell not so much upon Chicago as on “ces cochons d’Anglais,” who by their base connivance had wrought the ruin of the Spanish cause.