IN WHICH A FOOL AND HIS MONEY ARE SOON PARTED
Money's the still sweet-singing nightingale.--Herrick:
_Hesperides_.
Seraphin Dieudonne 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-Grace, 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 at
the 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 Dieudonne.
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-Grace 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
Odeon, and so, by the steep descent of the rue de Tournon and the rue
de Seine, came to the rue Jacob and the Cafe 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;
Maurice embraced and, embracing, tapped the diatonic scale along
Cartaret's vertebrae. 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
an _hors-d'oeuvre_ of 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 cafe.
"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 pleasant _coquin_," 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 Dieudonne, 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 Dieudonne well enough to
have been aware of his poverty and liked him well enough to be tender
toward it. "But," he nevertheless pardonably inquired, "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 almost pathetically 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 now he 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!