PROVIDING THE GENTLE READER WITH A CARD OF ADMISSION TO THE NEST OF
THE TWO DOVES
Dans ces questions de credit, il faut toujours frapper
l'imagination. L'idee de genie, c'est de prendre dans la
poche des gens l'argent qui n'y est pas encore.--Zola:
_L'Argent_.
Until just before the appearance of Charlie Cartaret's rosy vision,
this had been a day of darkness and wet. Rain--a dull, hopeless,
February rain--fell with implacable monotony. It descended in fine
spray, as if too lazy to hurry, yet too spiteful to stop. It made all
Paris miserable; but, as is the way with Parisian rains, it was a
great deal wetter on the Left Bank of the Seine than on the Right.
No rain--not even in those happy times before the great war--ever
washed the Left Bank clean, and this one only made it a marsh. A
curtain of fog fell sheer between the Isle de la Cite and the Quai des
Augustins; the twin towers of St. Sulpice staggered up into a pall of
fog and were lost in it. The gray houses hunched their shoulders,
lowered their heads, drew their mansard hats and gabled caps over
their noses and stood like rows of patient horses at a cabstand under
the gray downpour. Now and again a real cab scuttled along the
streets, its skinny beast clop-clopping over the wooden paving, or
slipping among the cobbled ways, its driver hidden under a mountainous
pile of woolen great-coat and rubber cape. Even the taxis lacked the
proud air with which they habitually splash pedestrians, and such
pedestrians as business forced upon the early afternoon thoroughfares
went with heads bowed like the houses' and umbrellas leveled like
flying-jibs.
In front of the little Cafe Des Deux Colombes, the two marble-topped
tables which occupied its scant frontage on the rue Jacob were
deserted by all save their four iron-backed chairs with wet seats and
their twin water-bottles into which, with mathematical precision,
water dropped from a pair of holes in the sagging canvas overhead.
Inside, however, there were lighted gas-jets, the proprietor and the
proprietor's wife--presumably the pair of doves for whom the Cafe was
named--and a man that was trying to look like a customer.
Gaston Francois Louis Pasbeaucoup had an apron tied about his middle,
and, standing before the intended patron's table, leaned what weight
he had--it was not much--upon his finger-tips. His mustache was fierce
enough to grace the upper lip of a deputy from the Bouches-du-Rhone
and generous enough to spare many a contribution to the
_plat-du-jour_; but his mustache was the only large thing about
him--always excepting Madame his wife, who was ever somewhere about
him and who was just now, two hundred and twenty pounds of evidence to
the good food of the Deux Colombes, stuffed into a wire cage at one
end of the bar, and bulging out of it, her eyebrows meeting over her
pug-nose and the heap of hair leaping from her head nearly to the
ceiling, while her lips and fingers were busy adding the bills from
_dejeuner_.
"It would greatly pleasure me to accommodate monsieur," Pasbeaucoup
was whispering, "but monsieur must know that already----"
The sentence ended in a deprecating glance over the speaker's shoulder
in the general direction of mighty Madame.
"Already? Already what then?" demanded the intending customer.
He was lounging on the wall-seat behind his table, and he had an
aristocratic air surprisingly at variance with his garments. His black
jacket shone too highly at the elbows, and its short sleeves betrayed
an unnecessary length of red wrist. His black boots gasped for repair;
a soft black hat, pushed to the back of his black hair, still dripped
from an unprotected voyage along the rainy street, and his neckcloth,
which was also long and soft and black, showed a spot or two not put
there by its makers. These were patently matters beyond their owner's
command and beneath the dignity of his attention. Against them one
was compelled to set a manner truly lofty, which was enhanced by a
pair of burning, deep-placed eyes, a thin white face and, sprouting
from either side of his lower jaw, near the chin, two wisps of ebon
whisker. He frowned majestically, and he smoked a caporal cigarette as
if it were a Havana cigar.
"Already what?" he loudly repeated. "If it is possible! I patronize
your cabbage of a cafe for five years, and now you put me off with
your alreadys!"
Pasbeaucoup, his fingers still resting on the table, danced in
embarrassment and rolled his eyes in a manner that plainly enough
warned monsieur not to let his voice reach the caged lady.
"I was but about to say that monsieur already owes us the trifling sum
of----"
"_Sixty francs, twenty-five!_"
The tone that announced these fateful numerals was so tremendous a
contralto as to be really bass. It came from the wire cage and
belonged to Madame.
Pasbeaucoup sank into the nearest chair. He spread out his hands in a
gesture that eloquently said:
"Now you've done it! I can't shield you any longer!"
The debtor, albeit he was still a young man, did not appear unduly
impressed. The table was across his knees, but he rose as far as it
would permit and removed his hat with a flourish that sent a spray of
water directly over Madame's monument of hair. Disregarding the
blatant fact that she was quite the most remarkable feature of the
room, he vowed that he had not observed her upon entering, was
desolated because of his oversight and ravished now to have the
pleasure of once more beholding her in all her accustomed grace and
charm.
Madame shrugged her shoulders higher than the walls of the cage.
"Sixty francs, twenty-five," she said, without looking up from her
task.
Ah, yes: his little account. Monsieur recalled that: there was a
little account; but, so truly as his name was Seraphin and his passion
Art, what a marvelous head Madame had for figures. It was of an
exactitude magnificent!
When he paused, Madame said:
"Sixty francs, twenty-five."
"But surely, Madame----" Seraphin Dieudonne was politely amazed; he
did not desire to credit her with an impoliteness, and yet she seemed
to imply that, unless he paid this absurdly little sum, there might be
some delay in serving him in this so excellent establishment.
"_C'est ca_," said Madame. "The delay will be entire."
"Incomprehensible!" Seraphin put a bony hand to his heart. "Do you not
know--all the world of the _Quartier_ knows--that I have, Madame, but
three days' work more upon my _magnum opus_--a week at the utmost--and
that then it can sell for not a sou less than fifteen thousand
francs?"
Madame's face never changed expression when she talked; it always
seemed set at the only angle that would balance her monument of hair.
She now said:
"What all the world of the _Quartier_ knows is that your last _magnum
opus_ you sold to that simpleton Fourget in the rue St. Andre des
Arts; that even from him you could squeeze but a hundred francs for
it; and that he has not yet been able to find a customer."
At first Seraphin seemed slow to credit the scorn that Madame was at
such pains to reveal. He made one valiant effort to overlook it, and
failed; then he made an effort no less valiant to meet her with the
ridiculous majesty in which he habitually draped himself. It was as
if, unable to make her believe in him, he at least wanted her to
believe that his long struggle with poverty and an indifferent public
had served only to increase his confidence in his own genius and to
rear between him and the world a wall through which the arrows of the
scornful could hardly pass. But this attempt succeeded no more than
its predecessor: as he half stood, half bent before this landlady of
a fifth-rate cafe, a tardy pink crept up his white face and painted
the skin over his cheek-bones; his eyelids fluttered, and his mouth
worked. The man was hungry.
"Madeleine!" whispered Pasbeaucoup, compassion for the debtor almost
overcoming fear of the wife.
Seraphin wet his lips.
"Madame----" he began.
"Sixty francs, twenty-five," said Madame. "_Ca y est!_"
As she said it, the door of the Deux Colombes opened and another
patron, at once evidently a more welcome patron, presented himself. He
was a plump little man with hands that were thinly at contrast with
the rest of him. He was fairly well dressed, but far better fed, and
so contented with his lot as to have no eye for the evident lot of
Seraphin. He was Maurice Houdon, who had decided some day to be a
great composer and who meanwhile overcharged a few English and
American pupils for lessons on the piano and borrowed money from any
that would trust him. He stormed Dieudonne, leaned over the
intervening table and embraced him.
"My dear friend!" he cried, his arms outflung, his fingers rattling
rapid arpeggios upon invisible pianos. "You are indeed well found. I
have news--such news!" He thrust back his head and warbled a laugh
worthy of the mad-scene in _Lucia_. "Listen well." Again he embraced
the unresisting Seraphin. "This night we dine here; we make a
collation--a symposium: we feed both our bodies and our souls. I shall
sit at the head of the table in the little room on the first floor,
and you will sit at the foot. Armand Garnier will read his new poem;
Devignes will sing my latest song; Philippe Varachon and you will
discourse on your arts; and I--perhaps I shall let you persuade me to
play the fugue that I go to write for the death of the President: it
is all but ready against the day that a president chooses to die."
But Seraphin's thoughts were fixed on the food for the body.
"You make no jest with me, Maurice?"
"Jest with you? I jest with you? No, my friend. I do not jest when I
invite a guest to dine with me."
"I comprehend," said Dieudonne; "but who is to be the host?"
At that question, Pasbeaucoup rose from his chair, and Madame, his
wife, tried to thrust her nose, which was too short to reach, through
the bars of her cage. The composer struck a chord on his breast and
bowed.
"True: the host," said he. "I had forgotten. I have found a veritable
patron of my art. He has had the room above mine for two years, and I
did not once before suspect him. He is an American of the United
States."
Madame's contralto shook her prison bars:
"There is no American that can appreciate art."
"True, Madame," admitted Houdon, bowing profoundly; "there is no
American that can appreciate art, and there is no American
millionaire that can help patronizing it."
"Eh, he is a millionaire, then, this American?" demanded Madame,
audibly mollified.
"He has that honor."
"And his name?"--Madame wanted to make a memorandum of that name.
Houdon struck another chord. It was as if he were sounding a fanfare
for the entrance of his hero.
"Charles Cartaret." He pronounced the first name in the French fashion
and the second name "Cartarette."
Seraphin's reply to this announcement rather spoiled its effect. He
laughed, and his laughter was high and mocking.
"Cartaret!" he cried. "Charlie Cartaret! But I know him well."
"Eh?"--The composer was reproachful--"And you never presented him to
me?"
"It never happened that you were by."
"My faith! Why should I be? Am I not Houdon? You should have brought
him to me. Is it that you at the same time consider yourself my
friend and do not bring to me your millionaire?"
Seraphin's laughter waxed.
"But he is not my millionaire: he is your millionaire only. I know
well that he is as poor as we are."
The musician's imaginary melody ceased: one could almost hear it
cease. He gazed at Seraphin as he might have gazed at a madman.
"But that room rents for a hundred francs a month!"
"He is in debt for it."
"And his name is that of a rich American well known."
"An uncle who does not like him."
"And he has offered to provide this collation."
Seraphin shrugged.
"M. Cartaret's credit," said he, with a glance at Madame, "seems to be
better than mine. I tell you he is only a young art-student, enough
genteel, and the relation of a man enough rich, but for
himself--poof!--he is one of us."