Money’s the still sweet-singing nightingale.—Herrick:Hesperides.
Money’s the still sweet-singing nightingale.—Herrick:Hesperides.
Seraphin Dieudonné told the truth: at that moment Charlie Cartaret—for all this, remember, preceded the coming of the Vision—at that moment Cartaret was seated in his room in the rue du Val-de-Grâce, wondering how he was to find his next month’s rent. His trouble was that he had just sold a picture, for the first time in his life, and, having sold it, he had rashly engaged to celebrate that good fortune by a feast which would leave him with only enough to buy meals for the ensuing three weeks.
He was a rather fine-looking, upstanding young fellow of a type essentially American. In the days, not long distant, when the goal atthe other end of the gridiron had been the only goal of his ambition, he had put hard muscles on his hardy frame; later he had learned to shoot in Arizona; and he even now would have looked more at home along Broadway or Halsted Street than he did in the rue St. Jacques or the Boulevard St. Michel. He was tow-haired and brown-eyed and clean-shaven; he was generally hopeful, which is another way of saying that he was still upon the flowered slope of twenty-five.
Cartaret had inherited his excellent constitution, but his family all suffered from one disease: the disease of too much money on the wrong side of the house. When oil was found in Ohio, it was found in land belonging to his father’s brother, but Charlie’s father remained a poor lawyer to the end of his days. Uncle Jack had children of his own and a deserved reputation for holding on to his pennies. He sent his niece to a finishing-school, where she could be properly prepared for that state of life to which it had not pleased Heaven to call her,and he sent his nephew to college. When the former child was finished, he found her a place as companion to an ancient widow in Toledo and dismissed her from his thoughts; when Charlie was through with college—which is to say, when the faculty was through with him for endeavoring to plant a fraternity in a plot of academic soil that forbade the seed of Greek-letter societies—he asked him what he intended to do now—and asked it in a tone that plainly meant:
“What further disgrace are you planning to bring upon our name?”
Charlie replied that he wanted to be an artist.
“I might have guessed it,” said his uncle. “How long’ll it take?”
Young Cartaret, knowing something about art, had not the slightest idea.
“Well,” said the by-product of petroleum, “if you’ve got to be an artist, be one as far away from New York as you can. They say Paris is the best place to learn the business.”
“It is one of the best places,” said Charlie.
The elder Cartaret wrote a check.
“Take a boat to-morrow,” he ordered. “I’ll pay your board and tuition for two years: that’s time enough to learn any business. After two years you’ll have to make out for yourself.”
So Charlie had worked hard for two years. That period ended a week ago, and his uncle’s checks ended with it. He had stayed on and hoped. To-day he had carried a picture through the rain to Seraphin’s benefactor, the dealer Fourget; and the soft-hearted Fourget had bought it. Cartaret, on his return, met Houdon in the lower hall and before the American was well aware of it, he was pledged to the feast of which Maurice was bragging to Dieudonné.
Charlie dug into his pocket and fished out all that was in it: a matter of two hundred and ten francs. He counted it twice over.
“No use,” he said. “I can’t make it any larger. I wonder if I ought to take a smaller room.”
Certainly there was more room here than he wanted, but he had grown to love the place:even then, when he had still to see it in the rose-pink twilight of romance, in the afterglow that was a dawn—even then, before the apparition of the strange Lady—he loved it as his sort of man must love the scenes of those struggles which have left him poor. Its front windows opened upon the street full of student-life and gossip, its rear windows looked on a little garden that was pretty with the concierge’s flowers all Summer long and merry with the laughter of the concierge’s children on every fair day the whole year round. The light was good enough, the location excellent; the service was no worse than the service in any similar house in Paris.
“But I have been a fool,” said Cartaret.
He looked again at his money, and then he looked again about the room. The difference between a fool and a mere dilettante in folly is this: that the latter knows his folly as he indulges it, whereas the former recognizes it, if ever, only too late.
“If I’d been able to study for only one year more,” he said.
It was the wail of retrospection that, sooner or later, every man, each in his own way and according to his chances and his character for seizing them, is bound to utter. It was what we all say and what, in saying, we each think unique. Happy he that says it, and means it, in time to profit!
“Yes,” said Cartaret, “I’ve been a fool. But I won’t be a quitter,” he added. “I’ll go and order that dinner.”
Thus Charles Cartaret in the afternoon.
He had put on a battered, broad-brimmed hat of soft black felt, which was picturesquely out of place above his American features, and a still more battered English rain-coat, which did not at all belong with the hat, and, thus fortified against the rain, he hurried into the hall. As he closed the door of his studio behind him, he fancied that he heard a sound from the room across from his own, and so stood listening, his hand upon the knob.
“That’s queer,” he reflected. “I thought that room was still to let.”
He listened a moment longer, but the sound, if sound there had been, was not repeated, so he pulled his hat-brim over his eyes and descended to the street.
The rain had lessened, but the fog held on, and the thoroughfares were wet and dismal. Cartaret cut down the rue du Val-de-Grâce to the Avenue de Luxembourg and through the gardens with their dripping statues and around the museum, whence he crossed to the sheltered way between those bookstalls that cling like ivy to the walls of the Odéon, and so, by the steep descent of the rue de Tournon and the rue de Seine, came to the rue Jacob and the Café Des Deux Colombes.
Seraphin and Maurice were still there. They received him as their separate natures dictated, the former with a restrained dignity, the latter with the dignity of a monarch so secure of his title that he can afford to condescend to an air of democracy. Seraphin bowed; Mauriceembraced and, embracing, tapped the diatonic scale along Cartaret’s vertebræ. Pasbeaucoup, in trembling obedience to a cryptic nod from the caged Madame, hovered in the background.
“I have come,” said Cartaret, whose French was the easy and inaccurate French of the American art-student, “to order that dinner.” He half turned to Pasbeaucoup, but Houdon was before him.
“It is done,” announced the musician, as if announcing a favor performed. “I have relieved you of that tedium. We are to begin with anhors-d’oeuvreof anchovies and——”
Madame had again nodded, this time less cryptically and more violently, at her husband, and Pasbeaucoup, between twin terrors, timidly suggested:
“Monsieur Cartaret comprehends that it is only because of the so high cost of necessities that it is necessary for us to request——”
He stopped there, but the voice from the cage boomed courageously:
“The payment in advance!”
“A custom of the establishment,” explained Houdon grandly, but shooting a venomous glance in the direction of Madame.
Seraphin came quietly from behind his table and, slipping a thin arm through Cartaret’s, drew him, to the speechless amazement of the other participants in this scene, toward the farthest corner of the café.
“My friend,” he whispered, “you must not do it.”
“Eh?” said Cartaret. “Why not? It’s a queer thing to be asked, but why shouldn’t I do it?”
Seraphin hesitated. Then, regaining the conquest over self, he put his lips so close to the American’s ear that the Frenchman’s wagging wisps of whisker tickled his auditor’s cheek.
“This Houdon is but a pleasantcoquin,” he confided. “He will suck from you the last sou’s worth of your blood.”
Cartaret smiled grimly.
“He won’t get a fortune by it,” he said.
“That is why I do not wish him to do it:I know well that you cannot afford these little dissipations. I do not wish to see my friend swindled by false friendship. Houdon is a good boy, but, Name of a Name, he has the conscience of a pig!”
“All right,” said Cartaret suddenly, for Seraphin was appealing to a sense of economy still fresh enough to be sensitive, “since he’s ordered the dinner, we’ll let him pay for it.”
“Alas,” declared Dieudonné, sadly shaking his long hair, “poor Maurice has not the money.”
“Oh!”—A gleam of gratitude lighted Cartaret’s blue eyes—“Then you are proposing that you do it?”
“My friend,” inquired Seraphin, flinging out his arms as a man flings out his arms to invite a search of his pockets, “you know me: how can I?”
Cartaret blushed at his ineptitude. He knew Dieudonné well enough to have been aware of his poverty and liked him well enough to be tender toward it. “But,” he nevertheless pardonablyinquired, “if that’s the way the thing stands, who’s to pay? One of the other guests?”
“We are all of the same financial ability.”
“Then I don’t see——”
“Nor do I. And”—Seraphin’s high resolution clattered suddenly about his ears—“after all, the dinner has been ordered, and I am very hungry. My friend,” he concluded with a happy return of his dignity, “at least I have done you this service: you will buy the dinner, but you will not both buy it and be deceived.”
Cartaret turned, with a smile no longer grim, to the others.
“Seraphin,” he said, “has persuaded me. Madame,l’addition, if you please.”
Pasbeaucoup trotted to the cage, bringing back to Cartaret the long slip of paper that Madame had ready for him. Cartaret glanced at only the total and, though he flushed a little, paid without comment.
“And now,” suggested Houdon, “now let us play a little game of dominoes.”
Seraphin, from the musician’s shoulder,frowned hard at Cartaret, but Cartaret was in no mood to heed the warning. He was angry at himself for his extravagance and decided that, having been such a fool as to fling away a great deal of his money, he might now as well be a greater fool and fling it all away. Besides, he might be able to win from Houdon, and, even if Houdon could not pay, there would be the satisfaction of revenge. So he sat down at one of the marble-topped tables and began, with a great clatter, to shuffle the dominoes that obsequious Pasbeaucoup hurriedly fetched. Within two hours, Seraphin was head over ears in the musician’s debt, and the American was paying into Houdon’s palm all but about ten francs of the money that he had so recently earned. He rose smilingly.
“You do not go?” inquired Houdon.
Cartaret nodded.
“But the dinner?”
“Don’t you worry; I’ll be back for that—I don’t know when I’ll get another.”
“Then permit me,” Houdon condescended,“to order a bock. For the three of us.” He generously included the hungry Seraphin. “Come, we shall drink to your better fortune next time.”
But Cartaret excused himself. He said that he had an engagement with a dealer, which was not true, and which was understood to be false, and he went into the street.
The last of the rain, unnoticed during Cartaret’s fevered play, had passed, and a red February sun was setting across the Seine, behind the higher ground that lies between L’Etoile and the Place du Trocadero. The river was hidden by the point of land that ends in the Quai D’Orsay, but, as Cartaret crossed the broad rue de Vaugirard, he could see the golden afterglow and, silhouetted against it, the high filaments of the Eiffel Tower.
What an ass he had been, he bitterly reflected, as he passed again through the Luxembourg Gardens, where now the statues glistened in the fading light of the dying afternoon. What a mad ass! If a single stroke of almostpathetically small good luck made such a fool of him, it was as well that his uncle and not his father had come into a fortune.
His thought went back with a new tenderness to his father and to his own and his sister Cora’s early life in that small Ohio town. He had hated the dull routine and narrow conventionality of the place. There the most daring romance of youth had been to walk with the daughter of a neighbor along the shaded streets in the Summer evenings, and to hang over the gate to the front yard of the house in which she lived, tremblingly hinting at a delicious tenderness, which one never dared more adequately to express, until a threatening parental voice called the girl to shelter. His life, since those days, had been more stirring, and sometimes more to be regretted; but he had loved it and thought it absurd sentiment on Cora’s part to insist that their tiny income go to keeping up the little property—the three-story brick house and wide front and back-yard along Main Street—which had been their home. Yet nowhe felt, and was half ashamed of feeling, a strong desire to go back there, a pull at his heartstrings for a return to all that he was once so anxious to quit forever.
He wondered if it could be possible that he was tired of Paris. He even wondered if it were possible that he could not be a successful artist—he had never wanted to be a rich one—whether the sensible course would not be to go home and study law while there was yet time....
And then——
Then, in the rose-pink twilight, the beginning of the Dream Wonderful: that scent of the roses from the sky; that quick memory of sunlight upon snow-crests; that first revelation of the celestial Lady transfiguring the earthly commonplace of his room!
... AdowneThey prayd him sit, and gave him for to feed.—Spenser:Faerie Queene.
... AdowneThey prayd him sit, and gave him for to feed.—Spenser:Faerie Queene.
... AdowneThey prayd him sit, and gave him for to feed.—Spenser:Faerie Queene.
Charlie Cartaret would have told you—indeed, he frequently did tell his friends—that the mere fact of a man being an artist was no proof that he lacked in the uncommon sense commonly known as common. Cartaret was quite insistent upon this and, as evidence in favor of his contention, he was accustomed to point to C. Cartaret, Esq. He, said Cartaret, was at once an artist and a practical man: it was wholly impossible, for instance, to imagine him capable of any silly romance.
Nevertheless, when left alone in his room by the departure of the Lady on that February evening, he sat for a long time with the strangerose between his fingers and a strange look in his eyes. He regarded the rose until the last ray of light had altogether faded from the West. Only then did he recall that he had invited sundry persons to dine with him at the Café Des Deux Colombes, and when he had made ready to go to them, the rose was still in his reluctant hand.
Cartaret looked about him stealthily. He had been in the room for some hours and he should have been thoroughly aware that he was alone in it; but he looked, as all guilty men do, to right and left to make sure. Then, like a naughty child, he turned his back to the street-window.
He stood thus a bare instant, yet in that instant his hand first raised something toward his lips, and then bestowed that same something somewhere inside his waistcoat, a considerable distance from his heart, but directly over the rib beneath which ill-informed people believe the heart to be. This accomplished, he exhibited a rigorously practical face to the roomand swaggered out of it, ostentatiously humming a misogynistic drinking-song:
“There’s nothing, friend, ’twixt you and meExcept the best of company.(There’s just one bock ’twixt you and me,and I’ll catch up full soon!)What woman’s lips compare to this:This sturdy seidel’s frothy kiss——”
“There’s nothing, friend, ’twixt you and meExcept the best of company.(There’s just one bock ’twixt you and me,and I’ll catch up full soon!)What woman’s lips compare to this:This sturdy seidel’s frothy kiss——”
“There’s nothing, friend, ’twixt you and meExcept the best of company.(There’s just one bock ’twixt you and me,and I’ll catch up full soon!)What woman’s lips compare to this:This sturdy seidel’s frothy kiss——”
Armand Garnier, one of the men that were to dine with Cartaret to-night, had written the words of which this is a free translation, and Houdon had composed the air—he composed it impromptu for Devignes over an absinthe, after laboring upon it in secret for an entire week—but Cartaret, when he reached the note that stood for the last word here given, came to an abrupt stop; he was facing the door of the room opposite his own. He continued facing it for quite a minute, but he heard nothing.
“M. Refrogné,” he said, when he thrust his head into the concierge’s box downstairs, “if—er—if anybody should inquire for me this evening,you will please tell them that I am dining at the Café Des Deux Colombes.”
Nothing could be seen in the concierge’s box, but from it came a grunt that might have been either assent or dissent.
“Yes,” said Cartaret, “in the rue Jacob.”
Again the ambiguous grunt.
“Exactly,” Cartaret agreed; “the Café Des Deux Colombes, in the rue Jacob, close by the rue Bonaparte. You—you’re quite sure you won’t forget?”
The grunt changed to an ugly chuckle, and, after the chuckle, an ugly voice said:
“Monsieur expects something unusual: he expects an evening visitor?”
“Confound it, no!” snapped Cartaret. He had been wildly hoping that perhaps The Girl might need some aid or direction that evening and might seek it of him. “Not at all,” he pursued, “but you see——”
“How then?” inquired the voice.
Cartaret’s hand went to his pocket and drewforth one of the few franc-pieces that remained there.
“Just, please, remember what I’ve said,” he requested.
In the darkness of the box into which it was extended, his hand was grasped by a larger and rougher hand, and the franc was deftly extracted.
“Merci, monsieur.”
A barely appreciable softening of the tone encouraged Cartaret. He balanced himself from foot to foot and asked:
“Those people—the ones, you understand, that have rented the room opposite mine?”
Refrogné understood but truly.
“Well—in short, who are they, monsieur?”
“Who knows?” asked Refrogné in the darkness. Cartaret could feel him shrug.
“I rather thought you might,” he ventured.
The darkness was silent; a good concierge answers questions, not general statements.
“Where—don’t you know where they come from?”
There was speech once more. Refrogné, it said, neither knew nor cared. In the rue du Val de Grâce people continually came and went—all manner of people from all manner of places—so long as they paid their rent, it was no concern of Refrogné’s. For all the information that he possessed, the two people of whom monsieur inquired might be natives of Cochin-China. Mademoiselle evidently wanted to be an artist, as scores of other young women, and Madame, her guardian and sole companion, evidently wanted Mademoiselle to be nothing at all. There were but two of them, thank God! The younger spoke much French with an accent terrible; the elder understood French, but spoke only some pig of a language that no civilized man could comprehend. That was all that Refrogné had to tell.
Cartaret went on toward the scene of his dinner-party. He wished he did not have to go. On the other hand, he was sure he had thrown Refrogné a franc to no purpose: the Lady of the Rose was little likely to seek him! He foundthe evening cold and his rain-coat inadequate. He began humming the drinking-song again.
They were singing it outright, in a full chorus, when he entered the little room on the first floor of the Café Des Deux Colombes. The table was already spread, the feast already started. The unventilated room was flooded with light and full of the steam of hot viands.
Maurice Houdon, his red cheeks shining, his black mustache stiffly waxed, sat at the head of the table as he had promised to do, performing the honors with a regal grace and playing imaginary themes with every flourish of address to every guest: a different theme for each. On his right was a vacant place, the sole apparent reference to the host of the evening; on his left, Armand Garnier, the poet, very thin and cadaverous, with long dank locks and tangled beard, his skin waxen, his lantern-jaw emitting no words, but working lustily upon the food. Next to Cartaret’s place bobbed the pear-shaped Devignes, leading the chorus, as became the only professional singer in the company. Across from himwas Philippe Varachon, the sculptor, whose nose always reminded Cartaret of an antique and long lost bit of statuary, badly damaged in exhumation; and at the foot Seraphin was seated, the first to note Cartaret’s arrival and the only one to apologize for not having delayed the dinner.
He got up immediately, and his whiskers tickled the American’s cheek with the whisper:
“It was ready to serve, and Madame swore that it would perish. My faith, what would you?”
Pasbeaucoup was darting among the guests, wiping fresh plates with a napkin and his dripping forehead with his bare hand. Cartaret felt certain that the little man would soon confuse the functions of the two.
“Ah-h-h!” cried Houdon. He rose from his place and endeavored to restore order by beating with a fork upon an empty tumbler, as an orchestral conductor taps his baton—at the same time nodding fiercely at Pasbeaucoup to refill the tumbler with red wine. He was the sole member of the company not long known to their host,but he said: “Messieurs, I have the happiness to present to you our distinguished American fellow-student, M. Charles Cartarette. Be seated among us, M. Cartarette,” he graciously added; “pray be seated.”
Cartaret sat down in the place kindly reserved for him, and the interruption of his appearance was so politely forgotten that he wished he had not been such a fool as to make it. The song was resumed. It was not until the salad was served and Pasbeaucoup had retired below-stairs to assist in preparing the coffee, that Houdon turned again to Cartaret and executed what was clearly to be the Cartaret theme.
“We had despaired of your arrival, Monsieur,” said he.
Cartaret said he had observed signs of something of the sort.
“Truly,” nodded Houdon. His tongue rolled a ball of salad into his cheek and out of the track of speech. “Doubtless you had the one living excuse, however.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Cartaret.
Houdon leered. His fingers performed on the table-cloth something that might have been themotifof Isolde.
“I have heard,” said he, “your American proverb that there are but two adequate excuses for tardiness at dinner—death and a lady—and I am charmed, monsieur, to observe that you are altogether alive.”
If Cartaret’s glance indicated that he would like to throttle the composer, Cartaret’s glance did not misinterpret.
“We won’t discuss that, if you please,” said he.
But Houdon was incapable of understanding such glances in such a connection. He tapped for the attention of his orchestra and got it.
“Messieurs,” he announced, “our good friend of the America of the North has been having an adventure.”
Everybody looked at Cartaret and everybody smiled.
“Delicious,” squeaked Varachon through his broken nose.
“Superb,” trilled the pear-shaped singer Devignes.
Garnier’s lantern-jaws went on eating. Seraphin Dieudonné caught Cartaret’s glance imploringly and then shifted, in ineffectual warning, to Houdon.
“But that was only what was to be expected, my children,” the musician continued. “What can we poor Frenchmen look for when a blond Hercules of an American comes, rich and handsome, to our dear Paris? Only to-day I observed, renting an abode in the house that Monsieur and I have the honor to share, a young mademoiselle, the most gracious and beautiful, accompanied by atuteur, the most ferocious; and I noted well that they went to inhabit the room but across the landing from that of M. Cartarette. Behold all! At once I said to myself: ‘Alas, how long will it be before this confiding——’”
He stopped short and looked at Cartaret, for Cartaret had grasped the performing hand of the composer and, in a steady grip, forced it quietly to the table.
“I tell you,” said Cartaret, gently, “that I don’t care to have you talk in this strain.”
“How then?” blustered the amazed musician.
“If you go on,” Cartaret warned him, “you will have to go on from the floor; I’ll knock you there.”
“Maurice!” cried Seraphin, rising from his chair.
“Messieurs!” piped Devignes.
Varachon growled at Houdon, and Garnier reached for a water-bottle as the handiest weapon of defense. Houdon and Cartaret were facing each other, erect, each waiting for the other to make a further move, the former red, the latter white, with anger. There followed that flashing pause of quiet which is the precursor of battle.
The battle, however, was not forthcoming. Instead, through the silence, there came a roar of voices that diverted the attention of even the chief combatants. It was a roar of voices from the café below: a heavy rumble that was unmistakably Madame’s and a clatter ofunintelligible shrieks and demands that were feminine but unclassifiable. Now one voice shouted and next the other. Then the two joined in a mighty explosion, and little Pasbeaucoup was shot up the stairs and among the diners as if he were the first rock from the crater of an emptying volcano.
He staggered against the table and jolted the water-bottle out of the poet’s hand.
“Name of a Name!” he gasped. “She is a veritable tigress, that woman there!”
They had no time then to inquire whom he referred to, though they knew that, however justly he might think it, he would never, even in terror like the present, say such a thing of his wife. The words were no sooner free of his lips than a larger rock was vomited from the volcano, and a still larger, the largest rock of the three, came immediately after.
Everybody was afoot now. They saw that Pasbeaucoup cowered against the wall in a fear terrible because it was greater than his fear for Madame; they saw that Madame, who was thethird rock, was clinging to the apron-strings of another woman, who was rock number two, and they saw that this other woman was a stocky figure, who carried in her hand a curious, wide head-dress, and who wore a parti-colored apron that began over her ample breasts and ended by brushing against her equally ample boots, and a black skirt of simple stuff and extravagant puffs, surmounted by a short-skirted blouse or basque of the same material. Her face was round and wrinkled like a last winter’s apple on the kitchen-shelf; but her eyes shone red, her hands beat the air vigorously, and from her lips poured a lusty torrent of sounds that might have been protestations, appeals or curses, yet were certainly, considered as words, nothing that any one present had ever heard before.
She ran forward; Madame ran forward. The stranger shouldered Madame; Madame dragged her back. The stranger cried out more of her alien phrases; Madame shouted French denunciations. The Gallic diners formed a grinning circle, eager to lose no detail of the sort ofwrangle that a Frenchman loves best to watch: a wrangle between women.
Cartaret made his way through the ring and put his hand on the stranger’s shoulder. She seemed to understand, and relapsed into quiet, attentive but alert.
“Now,” said Cartaret, “one at a time, please. Madame, what is the trouble?”
“Trouble?” roared Madame. Her face did not change expression, but she held her arms akimbo, pug-nose and strong chin poked defiantly at the strange interloper. “You may well say it, trouble!”
She put her position strongly and at length. She had been in thecaisse, with no one of the world in the café, when, crying barbarous threats incomprehensible, this she-bandit, this—thisanarchiste infâme, had burst in from the street, disrupting the peace of the Deux Colombes and endangering its well-known quiet reputation with the police.
That was the gist of it. When it was delivered, Cartaret faced the stranger.
“And you, Madame?” he asked, in French.
The stranger strode forward as a pugilist steps from his corner for the round that he expects to win the fight for him. She clapped her wide head-dress upon her head, where it settled itself with a rakish tilt.
“Holy pipe!” cried Houdon. “In that I recognize her. It is the ferocioustuteur!”
Cartaret’s interest became tense.
“What did you want here?” he urged, still speaking French.
The stranger said, twice over, something that sounded like “Kar-kar-tay.”
“She is mad,” squeaked Varachon.
“She is worse; she is German,” vowed Madame.
Cartaret raised his hand to silence these contentions.
“Do you understand me?” he urged.
The wide head-dress flapped a vehement assent.
“But you can’t answer?”
The head-dress fluttered a negative, and themouth mumbled a negative in a French so thick, hesitant and broken as to be infinitely less expressive than the shake of the head.
Cartaret remembered what the concierge Refrogné had told him. To the circle of curious people he explained:
“She can understand a little French, but she cannot speak it.”
Madame snorted. “Why then does she come to this place so respectable if she cannot talk like a Christian?”
“Because,” said Cartaret, “she evidently thought she would be intelligently treated.”
It was clear to him that she would not have come had her need not been desperate. He made another effort to discover her nationality.
“Who of you speaks something besides French?” he asked of the company.
Not Madame; not Seraphin or Houdon: they were ardent Parisians and of course knew no language but their own. As for Garnier, as a French poet and a native of the pure-tongued Tours, he would not have soiled his lips withany other speech had he known another. Varachon, it turned out, was from the Jura, and had picked up a little Swiss-German during a youthfulliaisonat Pontarlier. He tried it now, but the stranger only shook her head-dress at him.
“She knows no German,” said Varachon.
“Such German!” sniffed Houdon.
“Chut! This proves rather that she knows it too well,” grumbled Madame. “She but wishes to conceal it; probably she is a German spy.”
Devignes said he knew Italian, and he did seem to know a sort of Opera-Italian, but it, too, was useless.
Cartaret had an inspiration.
“Spanish!” he suggested. “Does any one know any Spanish?”
Pasbeaucoup did; he knew two or three phrases—chiefly relating to prices on the menu of the Deux Colombes—but to him also the awful woman only shook her head in ignorance.
Cartaret took up the French again.
“Can you not tell me what you want here?” he pleaded.
“Kar-kar-tay,” said the stranger.
“Ah!” cried Seraphin, clapping his hands. “Does not Houdon say that she makes her abode in the same house that you make yours? She seeks you, monsieur. ‘Kar-kar-tay,’ it is her manner of endeavoring to say Cartarette.”
At the sound of that name, the stranger nodded hard.
“Oui, oui!” she cried.
She understood that her chief inquisitor was Cartaret, and it was indeed Cartaret that she sought. She flung herself on her knees to him. When he hurriedly raised her, she caught at the skirt of his coat and nearly pulled it from him in an attempt to drag him to the stairs.
Cartaret looked sharply at Houdon. The musician having been so recently saved from the wrath of his host, was momentarily discreet: he hid his smile behind one of the thin bands that contrasted so sharply with his plump cheeks.
“Messieurs,” said Cartaret, “I am going with this lady.”
They all edged forward.
“And I am going alone,” added the American. “I wish you good-night.”
“You will be knifed in the street,” said Madame. Her tone implied: “And it will serve you right.”
None of the others seemed to mind his going; the wrangle over, they were ready for their coffee and liqueurs. Houdon was frankly relieved. Only Seraphin protested.
“And you will leave your dinner unfinished?” he cried.
Cartaret was taking his hat and rain-coat from the row of pegs on the wall where, among the other guests’, he had hung them when he entered. He nodded his answer to Seraphin’s query.
“Leave your dinner?” said Seraphin. “But my God, it is paid for!”
“Good-night,” said Cartaret, and was plunged down the stairs by the strangely-garbed woman tugging at his hand.
La timidité est un grand péché contre l’amour.—Anatole France:La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque.
La timidité est un grand péché contre l’amour.—Anatole France:La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque.
If that strange old woman in the rakish head-dress was in a hurry, Cartaret, you may be sure, was in no mood for tarrying by the way. He left the Café des Deux Colombes, picturing The Girl of the Rose desperately ill, and he was resolved not only to be the first to come to her aid, but to have none of the restaurant’s suspicious company for a companion. Then, no sooner had he passed through the empty room on the ground-floor of Mme. Pasbeaucoup’s establishment and gone a few steps toward the rue de Seine, than he began to fear that perhaps the house to which he was apparently being conducted—The Girl’s house andhis own—had taken fire; or that the cause of the duenna’s mission was some like misfortune which would be better remedied, so far as The Girl’s interests were concerned, if there were more rescuers than one.
“What is the matter?” he begged his guide to inform him, as they hurried through the darkened streets.
His guide lifted both hands to her face.
“Is mademoiselle ill?”
The duenna shook her head in an emphatic negative.
“The place isn’t on fire?” His tone was one of petition, as if, should he pray hard enough, she might avert the catastrophe he now dreaded; or as if, by touching her sympathies, he could release some hidden spring of intelligible speech.
The old woman, however, only shook her head again and hurried on. Cartaret was glad to find that she possessed an agility impossible for a city-bred woman of her apparent age, and he was still more relieved when they reached their lodging-house and discovered it inapparently the same condition as that in which he had left it.
Their ascent of the stairs was like a race—a race ending in a dead-heat. At the landing, Cartaret turned, of course, toward his neighbor’s door; to his amazement, the old woman pulled him to his own.
He opened it and struck a match: the room was empty. He held the match until it burnt his fingers.
The old woman pushed him toward his table, on which stood a battered lamp. She pointed to the lamp.
“But your mistress?” asked Cartaret.
The duenna pointed to the lamp.
“Shall I light it?”
She nodded.
He lit the lamp. The flame grew until it illuminated a small circle about the table.
“Now what?” Cartaret inquired.
Again that odd gesture toward the nose and mouth.
“I don’t understand,” said Cartaret.
She picked up the lamp and made as if to search the floor for something. Then she held out the lamp to him.
“Oh”—it began to dawn on Cartaret—“you’ve lost something?”
“Oui, oui!”
He took the lamp, and they both fell on their knees. Together they began a minute inspection of the dusty floor. Cartaret’s mind was more easy now: at least his Lady suffered no physical distress.
“It’s like a sort of religious ceremony,” muttered the American, as, foot by foot, they crawled and groped over the grimy boards....
“Was it money you lost?” he inquired.
No, it was not money.
The search continued. Cartaret crawled under the divan, while the duenna held the cover high to admit the light. He blackened his hands in the fire-place and transferred a little of the soot to his few extra clothes that hung behind the corner curtain—but only a little; most of the soot preferred his hands.
“I never knew before that the room was so large,” he gasped.
They had covered two-thirds of the floor-space when a new thought struck him. Still crouching on his knees, he once more tried his companion.
“I can’t find it,” he said; “but I’d give a good deal to know what I’m looking for. What were you doing in here when you lost it, anyway?”
She shook her head, with her hand on her breast. Then she pointed to the door and nodded.
“You mean your mistress lost it?”
“Oui.”
“Well, then, let’s get her. She can tell me what I’m after.”
He half rose; but the woman seized his arm. She broke into loud sounds, patently protestations.
“Nonsense,” said Cartaret. “Why not? Come on; I’ll knock at her door.”
The duenna would not have her mistress disturbed. The ancient voice rose to a shriek.
“But I say yes.”
The shriek grew louder. With amazing strength, the old woman forced his unsuspecting body back to its former position; she came near to jolting the lamp from his hand.
It was then that Cartaret heard a lesser noise behind them: a voice, the low sweet voice of The Rose-Lady, asked, in the duenna’s strange tongue, a question from the doorway. Cartaret turned his head.
She was standing there in the dim light, a sort of kimono gathered about her, her sandaled feet peeping from its lower folds, the lovely arm that held the curious dressing-gown in place bare to the elbow. She was smiling at the answer that her guardian had already given her; Cartaret thought her even more beautiful than when he had seen her before.
The duenna had scuttled forward on her knees and, amid a series of cries, was pressing the hem of the kimono to her lips. The Girl’s free hand was raising the petitioner.
“I am sorry that you have been disturbed by Chitta,” she was saying.
Cartaret understood then that he was addressed. Moreover, he became conscious that he was by no means at his best on his knees, with his clothes even more rumpled than usual, his hands black and, probably, his face no better. He scrambled to his feet.
“It’s been no trouble,” he said awkwardly.
“I should say that it had been a good deal,” said the Girl. “Chitta is so very superstitious. Did you find it?”
“No,” said Cartaret. “At least I don’t think so.”
The Girl puckered her pretty brow.
“I mean,” explained Cartaret, coming nearer, but thankful that he had left the lamp on the floor behind him, whence its light would least reveal his soiled hands and face—“I mean that I haven’t the least idea what I was looking for.”
The Girl burst into rippling laughter.
“Not the least,” pursued the emboldenedAmerican. “You see, I left word with Refrogné—that’s the concierge—that I was dining with some friends at the Deux Colombes—that’s a café—when I went out; and I suppose she—I mean your—your maid, isn’t it?—made him understand that she—I mean your maid again—wanted me—you know, I don’t generally leave word; but this time I thought that perhaps you—I mean she—or, anyhow, I had an idea——”
He knew that he was making a fool of himself, so he was glad when she came serenely to his assistance and gallantly shifted the difficulty to her own shoulders.
“It was too bad of Chitta to take you away from your dinner.”
Chitta had slunk into the shadows, but Cartaret could descry her glaring at him.
“That was of no consequence,” he said; he had forgotten what the dinner cost him.
“But, sir, for a reason of so great an absurdity!” She put one hand on the table and leaned on it. “I must tell you that there is in my country a superstition——”
She hesitated. Cartaret, his heart leaping, leaned forward.
“What is your country, mademoiselle?” he asked.
She did not seem to hear that. She went on:
“It is really a superstition so much absurd that I am slow to speak to you of it. They believe, our peasants, that it brings good luck when they take it with them across our borders; that only it can ensure their return, and that, if it is lost, they will never come back to their home-land.” Her blue eyes met his gaze. “They, sir, love their home-land.”
Cartaret was certain that the land which could produce this presence, at once so human and so spiritual, was well worth loving. He wanted to say so, but another glance at her serene face checked any impulse that might seem impertinent.
“I, too, love my country, although I am not superstitious,” the Girl pursued, “so I had brought it with me from my country. I brought it with me to Paris, and I lost it. We go early tosleep, the people of my race; I had not missed it when I went to bed; but then Chitta missed it; and I told her that I thought that I had perhaps dropped it here. She ran before I could recall her—and I fell straightway asleep. She tells me that she had seen you go out, sir, and that she went to the concierge, as you supposed, to discover where you had gone, for she thought, she says, that your door was locked.” The corners of the Girl’s mouth quivered in a smile. “I trust that she would not have trespassed when you were gone, even if your doorwasopen. Until I heard her shriek but now, I had no idea that she would pursue you. I regret for your sake that she disturbed you, but I also regret for her sake that it was not found.”
Cartaret had guessed the answer to his question before he asked it. His cheeks burned for the consequences, but he put the query:
“What was lost?” he inquired.
“Ah, I thought that I had said it: a flower.”
“A—a rose?”
The hand that held her kimono pressed a little closer to her breast.
“Then you have found it?”
Mountain-peaks and glaciers in the sun: Cartaret, being a practical man, was distinctly aware of not wanting her to know the present whereabouts of that flower. He fenced for time.
“Was it a rose?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said, “the Azure Rose.”
“What?” Perhaps, after all, he was wrong. “I’ve never heard of a blue rose.”
“It is not blue,” she said; “we call it the azure rose as you, sir, would say the rose of azure, or the rose of heaven. We call it the azure rose because it grows only in our own land, where the mountains are blue, and only high, high up on those mountains, near to the blue of the sky. It is a white rose.”
“Yes. Of course,” said Cartaret. “A white rose.”
He stood uncertainly before her. For a reason that he would have hesitated long to define, he hated to part with that rose; for areason concerning which he was quite clear, he did not want to produce it there and then.
“You have it?” asked The Girl.
“Er—do you want it?” countered Cartaret.
A shade of impatience crossed her face. She tried to master it.
“I gather from your speech that you, sir, are American, not English. You are the first American that ever I have met, and I do not seem well to understand the motives of all that you say, although I do understand perfectly the words. You ask do I want this rose. But of course I want it! Have I not asked for it? I want it because Chitta will be distressed if we lose it, but also I want it for myself, to whom it belongs, since it is a souvenir already dear to me.”
Her face was alight. Cartaret looked at it; then his glance fell.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m forever putting my foot in things.”
“You have trodden on my rose?” Her voice discovered her dismay.
“No, no! I wouldn’t—I couldn’t. I meant that I was always making mistakes. This afternoon, for instance—And now——”
To the rescue of his embarrassment came the thought that indeed he obviously could not tread on the rose, unless he were a contortionist, because the rose was——
Among the smudges of black, his cheeks burned a hot red. He thrust a hand between his shirt and waistcoat and produced the coveted flower: a snow-rose in the center of his grimy palm.
Again the perfume, subtle, haunting. Again the pure mountain-peaks. Again the music of a poem in a tongue unknown....
At first he did not dare to look at her; he kept his gaze lowered. Had he looked, he would have seen her wide eyes startle, then change to amusement, and then to a doubting tenderness. He felt her delicate fingers touch his palm and he thrilled at the touch as she recaptured her rose. He did not see that, in welcome to the returned prodigal, she started to raise to herown lips those petals, gathered so tight against the flower’s heart, which he had lately kissed. When at last he glanced up, she had recovered her poise and was again looking like some sculptured Artemis that had wandered into his lonely room from the gardens of the Luxembourg.
Then he saw a much more prosaic thing. He saw the hand that held the rose and saw it discolored.
“Will you ever forgive me?” he cried. “You’ve been leaning on my table, and I mix my paints on it!”
The speech was not precisely pellucid, but she followed his eyes to the hand and understood.
“The fault was mine,” she said.
Cartaret was searching among the tubes and bottles on the table. He searched so nervously that he knocked some of them to the floor.
“If you’ll just wait a minute.” He found the bottle he wanted. “And if you don’t mind the turpentine.... It smells terribly, but it will evaporate soon, and it cleans you up before you know it.”
He lifted one of the rags that lay about, and then another. He discarded both as much too soiled, hesitated, ran to the curtained corner and returned with a clean towel.
She had hidden the flower. She extended her hand.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“Do I object? No. You are kind.”
He took the smudged hand—took it with a hand that trembled—and bent his smudged face so close to it that she must have felt his breath beating on it, hot and quick. He made two dabs with the end of the towel.
Chitta, whom they had both sadly neglected, pounced upon them from her lair among the shadows. She seized the hand and, jabbering fifty words in the time for two, pushed Cartaret from his work.
“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” said Cartaret. “Do, please, get away.”
The Girl laughed.
“Chitta trusts no foreigners,” she explained.
She spoke to Chitta, but Chitta, glowering at Cartaret, shook her head and grumbled.
“I do not any more desire to order her about,” said The Girl to Cartaret. “Already this evening I have wounded her feelings, I fear. She says she will allow none but herself to minister to me. You, sir, will forgive her? After all, it is her duty.”
Cartaret inwardly cursed Chitta’s fidelity. What he said was: “Of course.” He knew that just here he might say something gallant, and that he would think of that something an hour hence; but he could not think of it now.
The Girl touched the turpentine bottle.
“And may we take it to our room?”
“Eh? Oh, certainly,” said Cartaret.
She held out her hand, the palm lowered.
“Good-night,” she said.
Cartaret’s heart bounded: this time she had not said “Good-by.” He seized the hand. Chitta growled, and he released it with a conventional handshake.
The Girl smiled.
“Ah, yes,” she said; “this afternoon it puzzled me, but now I recollect: you Americans, sir, shake one’s hand, do you not?”
She was gone, and glowering Chitta with her, before he could answer.
Cartaret stood where she had left him, his brows knitted. He heard Chitta double-lock the door to their rooms. He was thinking thoughts that his brain was not accustomed to. It was some time before they became more familiar. Then he gasped:
“I wonder if my face is dirty!”
He took the lamp and sought the sole mirror that his room boasted. His face was dirty.
“Damn!” said Cartaret.
Down in the narrow street, an uncertain chorus was singing: