CLOUDS OF GLORY
Nancy, trailing clouds of glory, took up the management of her Inn
with renewed vigor. She had found her touchstone. The flower of love,
which she had scarcely understood to be indigenous to the soil of her
own practical little garden, had suddenly lifted up its head there in
fragrant, radiant bloom. She was so happy that she was impatient of
all the inadequate, inefficient manipulation of affairs in the whole
world. She felt strong and wise to put everything right in a neglected
universe.
She loved. She was satisfied to live in that love for the present,
with no imagination of the future except as her lover should construct
it for her; and in him she had absolute faith. The things that he had
said or left unsaid had no significance to her. Before she had dreamed
of a personal relation with him he had singled her out as a creature
made for the consummation and fulfilment of the greatest passion of
all. The merest suspicion that there had been a man in the world who
could have frustrated this beautiful potentiality in her had moved him
profoundly. There was nothing in her experience to help her to
differentiate between the sensibility of the artistic temperament and
the manifestations of the more reliable emotions. The presence in the
human breast of a fire that gave out light and not heat was a
condition undreamed of in her philosophy. To doubt Collier Pratt's
love for her in the face of his tacit pursuit of her, and the
acceptance of the obligation she had chosen to put him under, would
have seemed to her the rankest kind of heresy.
She had been brought up on terms of comradely equality with boys and
men, and she understood the rules of all the pretty games of fluffing
and light flirtation that young men and women play with each other,
but serious love-making--that was a thing apart. In the world of honor
and fair dealing a man took a woman's kiss of surrender for one reason
and one reason only----that she was his woman, and he so held her in
his heart.
Now that she was in this sort committed to her love for Collier Pratt,
her one ambition was to put her life in order for him,--to pick up the
raveling threads of her achievement and prove to him and to herself
that she was the kind of woman who accomplishes that which she
attempts. In the light of his indefatigable patience in all matters
that pertained to his art--his clean-cut workmanship--his skill in
handling his material--she blushed for the amateur spirit that
animated all her undertakings, and for the first time recognized it
for what it was.
"Gaspard," she said one morning soon after her miracle had been
achieved, "where do you think the greatest leak is? We spend a great
deal too much money in running this place. As you know, that is not
the most important matter to me. Getting my customers properly
nourished with invitingly prepared food is the essential thing, but if
there was a way to adjust the economical end of it, I should feel a
great deal more comfortable in my mind."
"But certainly, mademoiselle, I should like myself to try the pretty
little economies. The Frenchman he likes to spend his money when it is
there, but it hurts him in the heart to waste this money without
cause."
"Am I wasting money without cause, Gaspard, in your opinion?"
"What else?"
"How can I stop it?"
"By calculation of the tall cost of living, and by buying what is good
instead of what is expensive."
"What do you mean, Gaspard?"
Gaspard contemplated her for a moment.
"We have had this week--squab chicken," he said, "racks of little
unseasonable lambs, sweetbreads, guinea fowl and _filet du boeuf_. We
have with them mushrooms, fresh string bean, cooked endive, and new,
not very good peas grown in glass. We have the salted nuts, the
radish, the olive, the celery, the _bon bon_, all extra without pay.
Then you make in addition to this the health foods, and your bills are
sky high up. Is it not?"
"I'm afraid it is, Gaspard. I had no idea I was as reckless as all
that."
"But yes, and more of it."
"What would you do if you were running this restaurant, Gaspard?"
"I would give _ragoût_, and rabbits--so cheap and so good too--stewed
in red wine, and the good pot roast with vegetables all in the
delicious sauce, and carrots with parsley and the peas out of the can,
cooked with onion and lettuce, and macédoine of all the other things
left over. Lentils and flageolet I should buy dried up, and soak them
out.--All those things which you have said were needless.--In my way
they would be so excellent."
"You make my mouth water, Gaspard. I don't know whether it's a Gallic
eloquence, or whether that food really would work. They might like it
for a change anyhow."
"I have many personal patrons now," Gaspard said with some pride; "all
day they send me messages, and very good tips. I think what I would
serve them they would eat.--But there is one thing--" he paused and
hesitated dejectedly, "that, what you say, takes the heart out of the
beautiful cooking."
"What thing is that, Gaspard?"
"Those calories."
"Why, Gaspard, surely you're used to working with tables now. It must
be almost second nature to you. My whole end and aim has been to serve
a balanced ration."
"I know, but the ration when he is right, he balances himself. These
tables they are like the steps in dancing--to learn and to forget. I
figure all day all night to get those calories, and then I find I have
eight--and eight are so little--lesser than I would have had without
the figuring, and if our customer he has taken himself one piece of
sweetmeat outside, he has more than made it up."
"I always have worried about what they eat between meals," Nancy
said,--"but that, of course, we can't regulate."
"Could I perhaps go to it, as you say, and cook like the _bourgeoisie_
for a week or two of trials?"
"Yes, I think you could, Gaspard," Nancy said thoughtfully. "Go to it,
as we say, and I won't interfere in any way. Maybe they'd like it.
Perhaps our food is getting to be too much like hotel food, anyway."
She knew in her heart that the gradually increasing scale of luxury on
which she had been running her cuisine had been largely due to her
desire to provide Collier Pratt with all the delicacies he loved,
without making the fact too conspicuous. The specially prepared dishes
sent out to his table had become a matter of so much comment among the
members of the staff, and the target of so much piquant satire from
Betty that she had become sensitive on the subject, especially since
Betty had access to the books, and knew in actual dollars and cents
how much this favoritism was costing her. Now that matters had been
settled between herself and her lover, she felt vaguely ashamed of
this elaboration of method. It was so simple a thing to love a man and
give him all you had, with the eyes of the world upon you, if
necessary. She felt that she handled the matter rather unworthily.
She had also a consultation with Molly and Dolly about the economic
problem, and discovered that they agreed with Gaspard about the
unnecessary extravagance of her management.
"Them health foods," Dolly said,--she was not the more grammatical of
the twins, "the ones that gets them regular gets so tired of them, or
else they gets where they don't need them any more. There's one girl
that crumbs up her health muffins and puts them on the window-sill
every day when I ain't looking, so's not to hurt my feelings."
"That accounts for all those chittering sparrows," Nancy said.
"And some of those buttermilk men threatens not to come any more if I
don't stop serving it to them."
"What do you say to them, Dolly, when they object to it?"
"Well, sometimes I say one thing, and sometimes another. Sometimes I
say it's orders to serve it; and sometimes I say will they please to
let it stand by their plate not to get me in trouble with the
management; and sometimes I coax them to take it."
"By an appeal to their better nature," Nancy said. "I'm glad Dick
can't hear all this,--he'd think it was funny."
"We don't have so much trouble with the broths," Molly said, "but so
many people would rather have the cream soups Gaspard makes, that we
waste a good deal."
"It sours on us," Dolly elucidated.
"What do you think would be the best way out of that?"
"I think to charge for the invalid things," Dolly said; "people would
think more of them if they was specials, and had to be paid good money
for. Health bread, if you didn't call it that, would go good, if it
cost five cents extra."
"What would you call it?" Nancy asked.
"California fruit nut bread, or something like that, and call the
custards crême renversé, and the ice-cream, French ice-cream."
"Oh, dear!" Nancy said, "that isn't the way I want to do things at
all."
"We can slip the ones that needs them a few things from time to time,
can't we, Molly?" Dolly said.
"We'll do it," Nancy said. "I hate the way that the most uninspired
ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don't
believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way
around this problem of feeding up people who needed it."
"They get fed up pretty good if they do pay a regular price for it,"
Dolly said. "You can't get something for nothing in this world, and
most everybody knows it by now."
"I'm managing my restaurant a little differently," she told Collier
Pratt a few days later, as she took her place at the little table
beside him, where she habitually ate her dinner. "If you don't like it
you are to tell me, and I'll see that you have things you will like."
"This dinner is good," he said reflectively, "like French home
cooking. I haven't had a real _ragoût_ of lamb since I left the
pension of Madame Pellissier. Has your mysterious patroness got tired
of furnishing _diners de luxe_ to the populace?"
"Not exactly that," Nancy said, "but she--she wants me to try out
another way of doing things."
"I thought that would come. That's the trouble with patronage of any
kind. It is so uncertain. There is no immediate danger of your being
ousted, is there?"
"No," Nancy said, "there--there is no danger of that."
"I don't like that cutting you down," he said, frowning. "It would be
rather a bad outlook for us all if she threw you over, now wouldn't
it?"
"Oh!--she won't, there's nothing to worry about, really."
"It would be like my luck to have the only café in America turn me
out-of-doors.--I should never eat again."
"I promise it won't," Nancy said; "can't you trust me?"
"I never have trusted any woman--but you," he said.
"You can trust me," Nancy said. "The truth is, she couldn't put me out
even if she wanted to. I--she is under a kind of obligation to me."
"Thank God for that. I only hope you are in a position to threaten her
with blackmail."
"I could if anybody could," Nancy said. She put out of her mind as
disloyal, the faintly unpleasant suggestion of his words. He owed her
mythical patron a substantial sum of money by this time. He was not
even able to pay Michael the cash for the nightly teapot full of
Chianti that Nancy herself now sent out for him regularly. For the
first time since her association with him she was tempted to compare
him to Dick, and that not very favorably; but at the next instant she
was reproaching herself with her littleness of vision. He was too
great a man to gauge by the ordinary standards of life. Money meant
nothing to him except that it was the insignificant means to the end
of that Art, which was to him consecrated.
They were placed a little to the left of the glowing fire--Nancy had
restored the fireplace in the big central dining-room--and the light
took the brass of the andirons, and all the polished surface of copper
and pewter and silver candelabra that gave the room its quality of
picturesqueness.
"Some of those branching candlesticks are very beautiful," he said;
"the impression here is a little like that of a Catholic altar just
before the mass. I've always thought I'd like to have my meals served
in church, _Saint-Germain-des-Prés_ for instance."
"It is rather dim religious light." Nancy had no wish to utter
this banality, but it was forced from her by her desire to seem
sympathetic.
"Can we go to your place for a little while to-night?"
These were the words she had spent her days and nights hungering for;
yet now she hesitated for a perceptible instant.
"Yes, we can, of course. There is a friend of mine--Billy Boynton, up
there this evening. He is not feeling very fit, and phoned to ask if
he could go up and sprawl before my fire, so, of course, I said he
could."
"Oh! yes, Sheila's friend. Can't he be disposed of?"
"I think so. We could try."
But at Nancy's apartment they found not only Billy, but Caroline, and
the atmosphere was like that of the glacial regions, both literally
and figuratively.
"Hitty had the windows open, and the fire went out, and I forgot to
turn on the heat," Billy explained from his position on the hearth
where he was trying to build an unscientific fire with the morning
paper, and the remains of a soap box. There was a long smudge across
his forehead.
Caroline drew Nancy into the seclusion of her bedroom and clutched her
violently by the arm.
"I can't stand the strain any longer," she cried, "you've got to tell
me. Are you or are you not going to marry Dick Thorndyke for his
money, and is Billy Boynton putting you up to it--out of cowardice?"
"No, I'm not and he isn't," Nancy said. "What's the matter with you
and Billy anyway?"
"I haven't seen him for weeks before. I just happened to be in this
neighborhood to-night, and ran in here, and there he was."
"Why don't you take him home with you?" Nancy said.
"I don't want him to go home with me."
"Don't you love him?"
"Oh, I don't know. That isn't the point."
"It is the point," Nancy said; "there isn't any other point to the
whole of existence. There's nothing else in the world, but love, the
great, big, beautiful, all-giving-up kind of love, and bearing
children for the man you love; and if you don't know that yet,
Caroline, go down on your bended knees and pray to your God that He
will teach it to you before it is too late."
"I--I didn't know you felt like that," Caroline gasped.
"Well, I do," Nancy said, "and I think that any woman who doesn't is
just confusing issues, and taking refuge in sophistry. I wouldn't give
_that_"--she snapped an energetic forefinger, "for all your silly,
smug little ideas of economic independence and service to the race,
and all that tommy-rot. There is only one service a woman can do to
her race, and that is to take hold of the problems of love and
marriage,--and the problems of life, birth and death that are involved
in them--and work them out to the best of her ability. They _will_
work out."
"You--you're a sort of a pragmatist, aren't you?" Caroline gasped.
"Billy loves you, and you love Billy. Billy needs you. He is the most
miserable object lately, that ever walked the face of the earth. I'm
going to call a taxi-cab, and send you both home in it, and when you
get inside of it I want you to put you arms around Billy's neck, and
make up your quarrel."
"I won't do that," said Caroline, "but--but somehow or other you've
cleared up something for me. Something that was worrying me a good
deal."
"Shall I call the taxi?" Nancy said inexorably.
"Well, yes--if--if you want to," Caroline said.
The fire was crackling merrily in the drawing-room when she stepped
into it again after speeding her departing guests. Collier Pratt was
walking up and down impatiently with his hands clasped behind his
back.
"You got rid of them at last," he said. "I was afraid they would
decide to remain with us indefinitely."
"I didn't have as much trouble as I anticipated," admitted Nancy
cryptically.
Collier Pratt made a round of the rose-shaded lamps in the room--there
were three including a Japanese candle lamp,--and turned them all
deliberately low. Then he held out his arms to Nancy.
"We'll snatch at the few moments of joy the gods will vouchsafe us,"
he said.