I
John Durham, while he waited for Madame de Malrive to draw on her
gloves, stood in the hotel doorway looking out across the Rue de
Rivoli at the afternoon brightness of the Tuileries gardens.
His European visits were infrequent enough to have kept unimpaired
the freshness of his eye, and he was always struck anew by the vast
and consummately ordered spectacle of Paris: by its look of having
been boldly and deliberately planned as a background for the
enjoyment of life, instead of being forced into grudging concessions
to the festive instincts, or barricading itself against them in
unenlightened ugliness, like his own lamentable New York.
But to-day, if the scene had never presented itself more alluringly,
in that moist spring bloom between showers, when the horse-chestnuts
dome themselves in unreal green against a gauzy sky, and the very
dust of the pavement seems the fragrance of lilac made visible--to-day
for the first time the sense of a personal stake in it all, of having
to reckon individually with its effects and influences, kept Durham
from an unrestrained yielding to the spell. Paris might still be--to
the unimplicated it doubtless still was--the most beautiful city in
the world; but whether it were the most lovable or the most detestable
depended for him, in the last analysis, on the buttoning of the white
glove over which Fanny de Malrive still lingered.
The mere fact of her having forgotten to draw on her gloves as they
were descending in the hotel lift from his mother's drawing-room
was, in this connection, charged with significance to Durham. She
was the kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eye
as completely equipped, as made up of exquisitely cared for and
finely-related details; and that the heat of her parting with his
family should have left her unconscious that she was emerging
gloveless into Paris, seemed, on the whole, to speak hopefully for
Durham's future opinion of the city.
Even now, he could detect a certain confusion, a desire to draw
breath and catch up with life, in the way she dawdled over the last
buttons in the dimness of the porte-cochere, while her footman,
outside, hung on her retarded signal.
When at length they emerged, it was to learn from that functionary
that Madame la Marquise's carriage had been obliged to yield its
place at the door, but was at the moment in the act of regaining it.
Madame de Malrive cut the explanation short. "I shall walk home. The
carriage this evening at eight."
As the footman turned away, she raised her eyes for the first time
to Durham's.
"Will you walk with me? Let us cross the Tuileries. I should like to
sit a moment on the terrace."
She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were the most
commonplace thing in the world for them to be straying afoot
together over Paris; but even his vague knowledge of the world she
lived in--a knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of
yellow-backed fiction--gave a thrilling significance to her
naturalness. Durham, indeed, was beginning to find that one of the
charms of a sophisticated society is that it lends point and
perspective to the slightest contact between the sexes. If, in the
old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a brown stone
door-step, had proposed that they should take a walk in the Park,
the idea would have presented itself to her companion as agreeable
but unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive's suggestion that they
should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously fraught with
unspecified possibilities.
He was so throbbing with the sense of these possibilities that he
walked beside her without speaking down the length of the wide alley
which follows the line of the Rue de Rivoli, suffering her even,
when they reached its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the
steps to the terrace of the Feuillants. For, after all, the
possibilities were double-faced, and her bold departure from custom
might simply mean that what she had to say was so dreadful that it
needed all the tenderest mitigation of circumstance.
There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in his silence: it
was a part of her long European discipline that she had learned to
manage pauses with ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed
this one with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen
slowly before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet.
The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it
between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace,
touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast
impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he
could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of
the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there
was such fear in the thought--he read such derision of what he had
to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to
the sunset glories of the Arch--that all he had meant to say when he
finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated:
"Well?"
She answered at once--as though she had only awaited the call of the
national interrogation--"I don't know when I have been so happy."
"So happy?" The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair
skin.
"As I was just now--taking tea with your mother and sisters."
Durham's "Oh!" of surprise betrayed also a note of disillusionment,
which she met only by the reconciling murmur: "Shall we sit down?"
He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous to the spot,
and placed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying
reluctantly, as he did so: "Of course it was an immense pleasure to
_them_ to see you again."
"Oh, not in the same way. I mean--" she paused, sinking into the
chair, and betraying, for the first time, a momentary inability to
deal becomingly with the situation. "I mean," she resumed smiling,
"that it was not an event for them, as it was for me."
"An event?" he caught her up again, eagerly; for what, in the
language of any civilization, could that word mean but just the one
thing he most wished it to?
"To be with dear, good, sweet, simple, real Americans again!" she
burst out, heaping up her epithets with reckless prodigality.
Durham's smile once more faded to impersonality, as he rejoined,
just a shade on the defensive: "If it's merely our Americanism you
enjoyed--I've no doubt we can give you all you want in that line."
"Yes, it's just that! But if you knew what the word means to me! It
means--it means--" she paused as if to assure herself that they were
sufficiently isolated from the desultory groups beneath the other
trees--"it means that I'm _safe_ with them: as safe as in a bank!"
Durham felt a sudden warmth behind his eyes and in his throat. "I
think I do know--"
"No, you don't, really; you can't know how dear and strange and
familiar it all sounded: the old New York names that kept coming up
in your mother's talk, and her charming quaint ideas about
Europe--their all regarding it as a great big innocent pleasure
ground and shop for Americans; and your mother's missing the
home-made bread and preferring the American asparagus--I'm so tired
of Americans who despise even their own asparagus! And then your
married sister's spending her summers at--where is it?--the
Kittawittany House on Lake Pohunk--"
A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and
thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a
shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly
between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and
he protested with a slight smile: "Oh, but my married sister is the
black sheep of the family--the rest of us never sank as low as
that."
"Low? I think it's beautiful--fresh and innocent and simple. I
remember going to such a place once. They have early dinner--rather
late--and go off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back
golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the
piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels--only
one--who has come to see the prettiest girl (though how he can
choose among so many!) and who takes her off in a buggy for hours
and hours--" She paused and summed up with a long sigh: "It is
fifteen years since I was in America."
"And you're still so good an American."
"Oh, a better and better one every day!"