Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski | Page 4

he
reflected, one morning, that he had not missed a single performance of
Mademoiselle Olympe for nearly two weeks.
"This will never do," said Van Twiller. "Olympe"--he called her
Olympe, as if she were an old acquaintance, and so she might have
been considered by that time--"is a wonderful creature; but this will
never do. Van, my boy, you must reform this altogether."
But half past nine that night saw him in his accustomed orchestra chair,
and so on for another week. A habit leads a man so gently in the
beginning that he does not perceive he is led--with what silken threads
and down what pleasant avenues it leads him! By and by the soft silk
threads become iron chains, and the pleasant avenues Avernus!
Quite a new element had lately entered into Van Twiller's enjoyment of
Mademoiselle Olympe's ingenious feats--a vaguely born apprehension
that she might slip from that swinging bar; that one of the thin cords
supporting it might snap, and let her go headlong from the dizzy height.
Now and then, for a terrible instant, he would imagine her lying a
glittering, palpitating heap at the foot-lights, with no color in her lips!
Sometimes it seemed as if the girl were tempting this kind of fate. It

was a hard, bitter life, and nothing but poverty and sordid misery at
home could have driven her to it. What if she should end it all some
night, by just unclasping that little hand? It looked so small and white
from where Van Twiller sat!
This frightful idea fascinated while it chilled him, and helped to make it
nearly impossible for him to keep away from the theatre. In the
beginning his attendance had not interfered with his social duties or
pleasures; but now he came to find it distasteful after dinner to do
anything but read, or walk the streets aimlessly, until it was time to go
to the play. When that was over, he was in no mood to go anywhere but
to his rooms. So he dropped away by insensible degrees from his
habitual haunts, was missed, and began to be talked about at the club.
Catching some intimation of this, he ventured no more in the orchestra
stalls, but shrouded himself behind the draperies of the private box in
which Delaney and I thought we saw him on one occasion.
Now, I find it very perplexing to explain what Van Twiller was wholly
unable to explain to himself. He was not in love with Mademoiselle
Olympe. He had no wish to speak to her, or to hear her speak. Nothing
could have been easier, and nothing further from his desire, than to
know her personally. A Van Twiller personally acquainted with a
strolling female acrobat! Good heavens I That was something possible
only with the discovery of perpetual motion. Taken from her theatrical
setting, from her lofty perch, so to say, on the trapeze-bar, Olympe
Zabriski would have shocked every aristocratic fibre in Van Twiller's
body. He was simply fascinated by her marvellous grace and élan, and
the magnetic recklessness of the girl. It was very young in him and very
weak, and no member of the Sorosis, or all the Sorosisters together,
could have been more severe on Van Twiller than he was on himself.
To be weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a proud
man. Van Twiller took his punishment, and went to the theatre,
regularly.
"When her engagement comes to an end," he meditated, "that will
finish the business."
Mademoiselle Olympe's engagement finally did come to an end, and

she departed. But her engagement had been highly beneficial to the
treasury-chest of the up-town theatre, and before Van Twiller could get
over missing her she had returned from a short Western tour, and her
immediate reappearance was underlined on the play-bills.
On a dead-wall opposite the windows of Van Twiller's sleeping-room
there appeared, as if by necromancy, an aggressive poster with
Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski on it in letters at least a foot high. This
thing stared him in the face when he woke up, one morning. It gave
him a sensation as if she had called on him overnight, and left her card.
From time to time through the day he regarded that poster with a
sardonic eye. He had pitilessly resolved not to repeat the folly of the
previous month. To say that this moral victory cost him nothing would
be to deprive it of merit. It cost him many internal struggles. It is a fine
thing to see a man seizing his temptation by the throat, and wrestling
with it, and trampling it under foot like St. Anthony. This was the
spectacle Van Twiller was exhibiting to the angels.
The evening Mademoiselle Olympe was to make