THE ART OF MISS MALLORY

Bedient was not a student of disease.  Perhaps he would have granted that destructive principles are pregnant with human interest in the abstract, but his intelligence certainly was not challenged by these dark systems of activity.  He saw that even if his mind were not held in anguish, he lacked the equipment to cope with Pleiad affairs.  As it was, his attention positively would not concentrate upon the rapid undercurrents, where the real energy of the habitues seemed to operate.  It was all like a game of evil children, or rather of queer unfinished beings, a whirring everywhere of the topsy-turvy and the perverse—­sick and insane to his weary brain.

It was clear that the Chinese had not carried the message to Framtree, but had consulted the Spaniard instead.  Had Bedient told Rey that he had come to The Pleiad to find Jenkins, or Jones, or Judd, he would doubtless have been permitted to see Framtree at once.

None of the matters made the impression upon his mind as that one glimpse of Jim Framtree at the far-end of the hall.  It was not that he was in the building, though this was of course important; but the magnificent figure of the man in evening wear was the formidable impression The Pleiad furnished.  This concerned his real life; the rest was without vitality.

By this time, however, Bedient was willing to grant that The Pleiad, and even Coral City, formed a nervous system of which Celestino Rey was the brain....  He had given up hope of writing a note to Jim Framtree, realizing it would have no more chance of getting past the Spaniard than a clicking infernal-box.

Framtree was nowhere abroad when Bedient went below.  The former moved apparently in a forbidden penetralia of this house of mystery.  But surely he could not continue miraculously to disappear....  Bedient strolled down into the city.  He sadly faced the fact that the hacienda had no call for him; little more than The Pleiad. He turned in Calle Real to look back at the great dome of the Spaniard’s establishment.  It was a gorgeous attraction of morning light....  A Chinese slipped into a fruit-shop—­one of the house-servants.  Bedient made his way to the water-front.  The Hatteras was out there in the harbor, surrounded by lighters, preparing for the return voyage to New York.  This was the lure.  It came with a pang that disordered all other mental matters for a space.

Presently he found himself wandering along the water-front.  With an exoteric eye (for the deeps of the man were in communion) he regarded the faces of all nations.  Coral City held as complete a record of crime, cruelty, and debauchery as one could find in the human indices of any port.  Many were closing their annals of error in decrepitude and beggary; others were well-knit studies of evil, with health still hanging on, more or less, and much deviltry to do.  A blue blouse,