Alice Through The Liqueur Glass

A New York Débutante Takes a Romantic Ride on a Wholly Magical Carpet

DAVID CORT

IT ALL began so innocently! Alice, on that enchanted evening, looked in her glass at her handiwork. She knew that it was good, though not so good, perhaps, as to be uninteresting.

She found the image that gleamed back at her from the mirror a little exciting. One might know that it was the reflection of a very virtuous young lady, for the shoulders revealed themselves wantonly with the impudence of a naked child. The revelation of Alice was like young love in spring, of which much may well be suspected, but nothing ever, by any chance, proven. All in flushed white she was, and of an arch delicacy. Thus Alice. Well, that was that, and this—in its perverse way—persisted in being this. And Alice knew, without once looking in her engagement book —there wasn't a college vacation in sight— that she was due that evening for a Grand Dinner, off gold plates and platters, at Mrs. Pearl foot's, not to speak, as who would? of her daughter, Pansy Pearl foot. As there was no immediate prospect of the end of the world, she thought it advisable to go—and there was a chance that Pansy Pearl foot's fiance might give her—Alice—the coquettish eye.

She had scarcely gotten her teeth into these and other meditations, contemplations, and lusts, when her mother came in to say that the car was waiting. "Ah, well!" she said again, as she sniffed to make certain that there hung about her the correct half-echo of perfume. And thereupon Alice swooned forth to the evening's gaiety.

"I'm off!'' she cried to her mother.

"I've always suspected it," said that noble dame dourly.

Alice rang the elevator-bell. Not so quickly as it takes to tell it, the elevator slid into view and she stepped in.

ALICE favored the black boy, presiding over the elevator, with a "Good evening, Oliver."

"Good evening, Miss. It's snowing out."

Alice was pleased. She always felt a little more deliciously the advantages of luxury when it snowed, by which you may recognize Alice as a sensitive and perceptive girl.

The elevator came to a stop and Alice moved with as queenly a manner as she could bring into play, toward the door. The doorman who was always worried about the set of the tails of his coat, pulled at them furtively with one hand, while, with his other, he opened the door. Me bowed from the waist at Alice's nod.

She felt thoroughly warmed with the cordiality of those who do not need to be cordial. As if in response, the policeman outside remarked agreeably, "Nice night". Alice was touched. "Yes, isn't it a lovely night? Everything's so white."

With flirtation at her heart and a slight cold in her head, Alice arrived, by courtesy of her chauffeur, at Mrs. Pearl foot's house on Fifth Avenue (note the gradual acceleration of plot). There was nothing to surprise her. Mrs. Pearl foot was as frost-bitten, as to greeting, as ever. That bilious petal, Pansy, dropped three chilled syllables. But little Alice knew that this was no more than professional technique. She was not dismayed. She looked about.

And what do you think she savvf Whv, the third serving-maid to the great button baron of Cincinnati can tell you better than I. I have never been able to get into a party like that: I'm not rich enough. But I'm sure that it was all very grand and that nothing and nobody among all the noble china dolls was so much as chipped.

As she stood in the center of the great drawing-room, conning her manners, who should come up to her, who indeed, but Pansy Pearlfoot's fiance. "I'm taking you in to dinner," he announced. "Oh, well, I could do worse," Alice said—but she forgot at once whether die had said it aloud or to herself.

When the champagne appeared, Alice (who knew herself, though she was not even a female philosopher) sang steadilv and inwardly her own little chant: "TWO GLASSES OF CHAMPAGNE ARE ALL YOU CAN STAND_TWO GLASSES OF CHAM-

PAGNE ..." ad ridiculum. So she took one glass. Later, as she did not want to be silly about it, she took another.

She felt a gentle fervor in her blood. Inspired to a peculiar insight, she was able to record several very subtle impressions. In order of subtlety, they were:

1. Idle Man at her Left was awfully nice. He smiled beautifully.

2. Idle Man at her Right was horrid. He kept looking at her shoulders.

3. I he Man Across the Table was stupid. He was even now defending his theory that green was the only color for servants' liveries.

A band of mock-Slavs in red tunics wrere making agony somewhere. The music caught Alice up. I he men in red made now languid, now fevered scrubbings against their instruments and a Cossack anger-joy swept her with idle fingers. There was joy, laughing at the goodness of all evil. At a word, joy and sadness embraced and swept upward like the incense from the fired souls of ruined men. The saxophone spoke and the imperial swans cried like white loons. Alice walked in the valley of madness and light with a thousand thousand light-headed cherubim. There was an end to all order, the beginning of all things had been forgotten, and the doom denied. Once again, the amber enchantment of Tangiers came as a scarf across the face. Once again, and for the last time, the melody of the wind sobbed a poem to the right cars of good men, and the left cars of virtuous women.

Half in the darkness, Alice heard the avengers moaning in the ashes of their bivouac fires. The souls of three drowning women cried out to her.

"Ah!" she said. The music had stopped. The Man at her Right was breathing softly against the back of her neck. Life, thought Alice inconsequentially, was as simple as a raw turnip, if only you knew that you couldn't have more than two glasses of champagne. How easy it was for one who knew the secret. Was there anything else that mattered?

"Oh, no," she said just then to the Man at her Right, "I never drink liqueur. Two glasses of champagne are all that I ever take and I've already had them both."

"Skull of St. Paul! Something must be done about you. A liqueur isn't anything like champagne. If you'll try this—it's the best Russian Allasch Kiimmel and very discreet— you'll see that it's as gentle as a cough medicine."

"But I've had mv two glasses of champagne," Alice repeated inanely, just as though she were at White Sulphur taking the cures.

The Man at her Right was becoming imperious. Nothing would do but she must join him in his silly Kiimmel. She raised her liqueur-glass to his, poured the potion through her lips, as the walls of her throat seemed beautifully to collapse.

In a corsetted way, she felt suddenly gay and remembered that it was her birthday. "Ah, well!" she said, recalling that it was the duty of the mad, the half-witted, and the characters of writers who have no plot, to do a parlourtrick on so earnest an occasion. Forthwith she sang, internally, so that her liver might not overhear (it was a very critical liver and subject to vapours when it got into an artistic temper), a little ditty that came into her mind:

"Regublurb I, of treys and deuces, Of far sons and of felony; I gastric juices— (For furfoses of euphony).

Ah, but yes, she had just had a liqueur. "That was simply lovely," she said feebly to the Man at her Right, who was looking again, drat him! at her shoulders. "That's why L always have another," he said, "won't you join me?" Alice started to explain that she had finished her two glasses of champagne, but, when she looked at her place, she saw that her glass was as full as before. What was a trap for, she thought, if someone isn't caught? And so she drank her second glass. There was something of sword and flame in it, but there was also something of cough medicine and before another geologic cycle had begun, she had had two more .... passage of time . . . . .Alice giggled and the Man who had been sitting at her Left turned sharply. She glowered at him—and very justly, too. Couldn't he see the perfectly ridiculous faces that Mrs. Pearlfoot was making? Her hostess' eyes were wavering in her head, cowering at each side of her nose and then bulging out by her ears, like a rabbit's. Her nose and mouth were doing funny things, as though they were waves like a ... like .. . why, of course, like a German movie.

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Then all sorts of jolly things began to happen. First, the guests all went out into the night and on to the sidewalk, where all the King's coaches and all the King's men were lined up. Alice rushed at once into one of the coaches when she overheard Mr. Pearlfoot say of it, "Yes, new French model: twelve cylinders." She got in to the coach too quickly to see the twelve little cylinders curveting and prancing in their harness, but she knew that they must be terribly cute, with little bells on their ears and curved horns on their foreheads. She tried to picture the racing fii; of them as they sped through the tunnel of the night toward the supper club where almost all things must necessarily end, except those few that begin there. She was not surprised to find that the Man at her Right was at her Right again. He was saying a great many things that couldn't possibly have been omitted. Alice discovered with pleasure, however, that he could do other things, of which he had doubtless read in fables of Unsatisfied Princesses.

Then Alice began laughing, and then she began really laughing and then laughter made an instrument of her and then an orchestra which played a fugue of hilarity on her, so that the Man on her Right must have known himself to be appreciated. He was looking at Alice in a puzzled way, as, of course, people sometimes do, out of modesty. There was no more opportunity for witty chit-chat, of which Alice could never have enough, for the twelve little Cylinders had brought them to the door of the Supper Club. Alice then passed under a canopy and jumped over a sill and Civilized Insanity.

Another group of Slavs, this time in green tunics, were sitting on a little plateau.' The music caught Alice up. The men in green made, now languid, now fevered scrubbings against their instruments and a Cossack angerjoy swept her with idle fingers. . . . Alice saw Peter II, last of the Romanoffs, by the wall, scratching his car.

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"Ah !" she said as the music stopped. Then she saw the Man who had been at her Left. He began singing an insulting little song to her:

"How doth the Rum Syntheticum Beguile the cherte ft!lie,

And lift her little furnish soul To purplish heights quite silly!

"Beware the blotto Jagger-jag;

The walk that stalks, the eyes that s patch.

Beware the Butter-and-Egg and shun The dancing maiden-snatch."

"Ah," said Alice and the music began again. She floated once more on the bosom of this so exciting sea. Suddenly the Man at her Right appeared. "May I break, please?" lie simpered. Alice remembered in time that this was the mating cry of her species upon the dance-floor. She transferred her embrace to him. "Come with me," he whispered.

Hand in hand, they came to a most intriguing door. When they were inside, Alice noticed in her hand a not too little bottle, with three stars and the legend, DRINK ME, upon it. Although Alice had read several nice little stories of little girls who had got burned and eaten up by wild beasts, and all because of drinking out of strange bottles, she thought of Pansy Pearlfoot and emptied it in one hooker.

A moment later they were back on the other side of the door. And then, for the first time, she recognized all the lovely people who had seemed strange before. There was the Red Queen and the White Queen: and the Blue Knight, of whom she had often dreamed, and the Purple Queen who really had no Morals; and the Gold Queen, who really had no Scruples; and the Mad Flapper who would do ANA -thing, ami the Good Citizen, who wouldn't let her, and The Things From Cambridge That Walk Like Men; and the cutest little baby lizard, who went to prep school and was called the Scrump; and ever so many quaint people that Alice just knew were worth knowing.

That she never came to know them Alice will always regret. She was about to get upon a chair to sing just the cleverest little song that she had learnt when she was a child, when such a nice lady, a friend of her mother's, came along and took her by the hand and said, "One moment, dear, come with me." Then the lady led Alice away and down and over a sill and under a canopy. There stood a chariot, yellow and black, awaiting their wishes. "I'll see that you get home," said the kind lady and climbed inside after Alice. Again they sped through the night; again a canopy.

"Here you are safely, dear," cooed the lady.

And as she stepped out under the canopy, she saw, of a sudden, the Blue Knight. There he stood grandly, and all in blue. As a true character in fairy tales should, she ran bravely up to him and kissed him on the second button from the top. "Dear, dear, dear, my dear, my dear," cried the kind lady, "it's a policeman!"

But Alice, hearing her not, went triumphantly on the arm of the Blue Knight through the door of the palace. They walked on floors of inlaid phosphorus between walls of precious stones more beautiful than an army with banners and studded with gems like the palace of a Maharajah. At the end of a great while, they came to a little sanctum sanctorum, evidently the most holy and intimate closet of the Maharajah. And there, standing at the door of the closet was the Maharajah himself.

"It's stopped snowing," said the Blue Knight to the Maharajah.

"Yeah?" the Maharajah replied, and they all stepped quickly on to a magic carpet, which lifted itself miraculously and sped, with incredible swiftness, through the air, over the moon, between tall canyons, though it seemed to Alice, that its rocking was in very poor taste.

At last it landed, with a gentle thud, on a mountain of the moon. They all stepped off it and, at the Maharajah's gesture, a bell pealed. Alice waited breathlessly for the revelation that must follow the art of so great a magician.

A revelation appeared. It cried "Alice!" and Alice suddenly knew it to be her mother.

"Thank you, officer. Thank you, Oliver," her mother said.

Little Alice had at last come back from the land that lies on the other side of the Liqueur Glass.