The Call of the Blood

Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her

back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As

Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was

passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to

the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was

to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual

spirit.

He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in

build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by

perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained

limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick,

low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide

apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small,

straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the

features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that

denoted health and an out-door life--an out-door life in the south,

Artois thought.

As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the

restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself

were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of

a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical

endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity,

he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much

handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he

had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the

look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant

readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised

for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an

intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an

extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was

fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to

be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that

had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys

dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that

one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate,

leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous,

unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a

tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.