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THE GUEST OF QUESNAY
BY BOOTH TARKINGTON
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK 1915
TO OVID BUTLER JAMESON
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Several pairs of brighter eyes followed my companion ...... Frontispiece
"I haven't had my life. It's gone!"
"You and Miss Ward are old and dear friends, aren't you?"
"Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!" she cried
CHAPTER I
There are old Parisians who will tell you pompously that the
boulevards, like the political cafes, have ceased to exist, but this
means only that the boulevards no longer gossip of Louis Napoleon, the
Return of the Bourbons, or of General Boulanger, for these highways are
always too busily stirring with present movements not to be forgetful
of their yesterdays. In the shade of the buildings and awnings, the
loungers, the lookers-on in Paris, the audience of the boulevard, sit
at little tables, sipping coffee from long glasses, drinking absinthe
or bright-coloured sirops, and gazing over the heads of throngs afoot
at others borne along through the sunshine of the street in carriages,
in cabs, in glittering automobiles, or high on the tops of omnibuses.
From all the continents the multitudes come to join in that procession:
Americans, tagged with race-cards and intending hilarious disturbances;
puzzled Americans, worn with guide-book plodding; Chinese princes in
silk; queer Antillean dandies of swarthy origin and fortune; ruddy
English, thinking of nothing; pallid English, with upper teeth bared
and eyes hungrily searching for sign-boards of tea-rooms;
over-Europeanised Japanese, unpleasantly immaculate; burnoosed sheiks
from the desert, and red-fezzed Semitic peddlers; Italian nobles in
English tweeds; Soudanese negroes swaggering in frock coats; slim
Spaniards, squat Turks, travellers, idlers, exiles, fugitives,
sportsmen--all the tribes and kinds of men are tributary here to the
Parisian stream which, on a fair day in spring, already overflows the
banks with its own much-mingled waters. Soberly clad burgesses,
bearded, amiable, and in no fatal hurry; well-kept men of the world
swirling by in miraculous limousines; legless cripples flopping on
hands and leather pads; thin-whiskered students in velveteen;
walrus-moustached veterans in broadcloth; keen-faced old prelates;
shabby young priests; cavalrymen in casque and cuirass; workingmen
turned horse and harnessed to carts; sidewalk jesters, itinerant
vendors of questionable wares; shady loafers dressed to resemble
gold-showering America; motor-cyclists in leather; hairy musicians,
blue gendarmes, baggy red zouaves; purple-faced, glazed-hatted,
scarlet-waistcoated, cigarette-smoking cabmen, calling one another
"onions," "camels," and names even more terrible. Women prevalent over
all the concourse; fair women, dark women, pretty women, gilded women,
haughty women, indifferent women, friendly women, merry women. Fine
women in fine clothes; rich women in fine clothes; poor women in fine
clothes. Worldly old women, reclining befurred in electric
landaulettes; wordy old women hoydenishly trundling carts full of
flowers. Wonderful automobile women quick-glimpsed, in multiple veils
of white and brown and sea-green. Women in rags and tags, and women
draped, coifed, and befrilled in the delirium of maddened
poet-milliners and the hasheesh dreams of ladies' tailors.
About the procession, as it moves interminably along the boulevard, a
blue haze of fine dust and burnt gasoline rises into the sunshine like
the haze over the passages to an amphitheatre toward which a crowd is
trampling; and through this the multitudes seem to go as actors passing
to their cues. Your place at one of the little tables upon the sidewalk
is that of a wayside spectator: and as the performers go by, in some
measure acting or looking their parts already, as if in preparation,
you guess the roles they play, and name them comedians, tragedians,
buffoons, saints, beauties, sots, knaves, gladiators, acrobats,
dancers; for all of these are there, and you distinguish the principles
from the unnumbered supernumeraries pressing forward to the entrances.
So, if you sit at the little tables often enough--that is, if you
become an amateur boulevardier--you begin to recognise the transient
stars of the pageant, those to whom the boulevard allows a dubious and
fugitive role of celebrity, and whom it greets with a slight flutter:
the turning of heads, a murmur of comment, and the incredulous
boulevard smile, which seems to say: "You see? Madame and monsieur
passing there--evidently they think we still believe in them!"
This flutter heralded and followed the passing of a white touring-car
with the procession one afternoon, just before the Grand Prix, though
it needed no boulevard celebrity to make the man who lolled in the
tonneau conspicuous. Simply for THAT, notoriety was superfluous; so
were the remarkable size and power of his car; so was the elaborate
touring-costume of flannels and pongee he wore; so was even the
enamelled presence of the dancer who sat beside him. His face would
have done it without accessories.
My old friend, George Ward, and I had met for our aperitif at the
Terrace Larue, by the Madeleine, when the white automobile came snaking
its way craftily through the traffic. Turning in to pass a victoria on
the wrong side, it was forced down to a snail's pace near the curb and
not far from our table, where it paused, checked by a blockade at the
next corner. I heard Ward utter a half-suppressed guttural of what I
took to be amazement, and I did not wonder.
The face of the man in the tonneau detached him to the spectator's gaze
and singled him out of the concourse with an effect almost ludicrous in
its incongruity. The hair was dark, lustrous and thick, the forehead
broad and finely modelled, and certain other ruinous vestiges of youth
and good looks remained; but whatever the features might once have
shown of honour, worth, or kindly semblance had disappeared beyond all
tracing in a blurred distortion. The lids of one eye were discoloured
and swollen almost together; other traces of a recent battering were
not lacking, nor was cosmetic evidence of a heroic struggle, on the
part of some valet of infinite pains, to efface them. The nose lost
outline in the discolorations of the puffed cheeks; the chin, tufted
with a small imperial, trembled beneath a sagging, gray lip. And that
this bruised and dissipated mask should suffer the final grotesque
touch, it was decorated with the moustache of a coquettish marquis, the
ends waxed and exquisitely elevated.
The figure was fat, but loose and sprawling, seemingly without the will
to hold itself together; in truth the man appeared to be almost in a
semi-stupor, and, contrasted with this powdered Silenus, even the woman
beside him gained something of human dignity. At least, she was
thoroughly alive, bold, predatory, and in spite of the gross
embon-point that threatened her, still savagely graceful. A purple
veil, dotted with gold, floated about her hat, from which green-dyed
ostrich plumes cascaded down across a cheek enamelled dead white. Her
hair was plastered in blue-black waves, parted low on the forehead; her
lips were splashed a startling carmine, the eyelids painted blue; and,
from between lashes gummed into little spikes of blacking, she favoured
her companion with a glance of carelessly simulated tenderness,--a look
all too vividly suggesting the ghastly calculations of a cook wheedling
a chicken nearer the kitchen door. But I felt no great pity for the
victim.
"Who is it?" I asked, staring at the man in the automobile and not
turning toward Ward.
"That is Mariana--'la bella Mariana la Mursiana,'" George answered;
"--one of those women who come to Paris from the tropics to form
themselves on the legend of the one great famous and infamous Spanish
dancer who died a long while ago. Mariana did very well for a time.
I've heard that the revolutionary societies intend striking medals in
her honour: she's done worse things to royalty than all the anarchists
in Europe! But her great days are over: she's getting old; that type
goes to pieces quickly, once it begins to slump, and it won't be long
before she'll be horribly fat, though she's still a graceful dancer.
She danced at the Folie Rouge last week."
"Thank you, George," I said gratefully. "I hope you'll point out the
Louvre and the Eiffel Tower to me some day. I didn't mean Mariana."
"What did you mean?"
What I had meant was so obvious that I turned to my friend in surprise.
He was nervously tapping his chin with the handle of his cane and
staring at the white automobile with very grim interest.
"I meant the man with her," I said.
"Oh!" He laughed sourly. "That carrion?"
"You seem to be an acquaintance."
"Everybody on the boulevard knows who he is," said Ward curtly, paused,
and laughed again with very little mirth. "So do you," he continued;
"and as for my acquaintance with him--yes, I had once the distinction
of being his rival in a small way, a way so small, in fact, that it
ended in his becoming a connection of mine by marriage. He's Larrabee
Harman."
That was a name somewhat familiar to readers of American newspapers
even before its bearer was fairly out of college. The publicity it then
attained (partly due to young Harman's conspicuous wealth) attached to
some youthful exploits not without a certain wild humour. But frolic
degenerated into brawl and debauch: what had been scrapes for the boy
became scandals for the man; and he gathered a more and more unsavoury
reputation until its like was not to be found outside a penitentiary.
The crux of his career in his own country was reached during a midnight
quarrel in Chicago when he shot a negro gambler. After that, the negro
having recovered and the matter being somehow arranged so that the
prosecution was dropped, Harman's wife left him, and the papers
recorded her application for a divorce. She was George Ward's second
cousin, the daughter of a Baltimore clergyman; a belle in a season and
town of belles, and a delightful, headstrong creature, from all
accounts. She had made a runaway match of it with Harman three years
before, their affair having been earnestly opposed by all her
relatives--especially by poor George, who came over to Paris just after
the wedding in a miserable frame of mind.
The Chicago exploit was by no means the end of Harman's notoriety.
Evading an effort (on the part of an aunt, I believe) to get him locked
up safely in a "sanitarium," he began a trip round the world with an
orgy which continued from San Francisco to Bangkok, where, in the
company of some congenial fellow travellers, he interfered in a native
ceremonial with the result that one of his companions was drowned.
Proceeding, he was reported to be in serious trouble at Constantinople,
the result of an inquisitiveness little appreciated by Orientals. The
State Department, bestirring itself, saved him from a very real peril,
and he continued his journey. In Rome he was rescued with difficulty
from a street mob that unreasonably refused to accept intoxication as
an excuse for his riding down a child on his way to the hunt. Later,
during the winter just past, we had been hearing from Monte Carlo of
his disastrous plunges at that most imbecile of all games, roulette.
Every event, no matter how trifling, in this man's pitiful career had
been recorded in the American newspapers with an elaboration which, for
my part, I found infuriatingly tiresome. I have lived in Paris so long
that I am afraid to go home: I have too little to show for my years of
pottering with paint and canvas, and I have grown timid about all the
changes that have crept in at home. I do not know the "new men," I do
not know how they would use me, and fear they might make no place for
me; and so I fit myself more closely into the little grooves I have
worn for myself, and resign myself to stay. But I am no "expatriate." I
know there is a feeling at home against us who remain over here to do
our work, but in most instances it is a prejudice which springs from a
misunderstanding. I think the quality of patriotism in those of us who
"didn't go home in time" is almost pathetically deep and real, and,
like many another oldish fellow in my position, I try to keep as close
to things at home as I can. All of my old friends gradually ceased to
write to me, but I still take three home newspapers, trying to follow
the people I knew and the things that happen; and the ubiquity of so
worthless a creature as Larrabee Harman in the columns I dredged for
real news had long been a point of irritation to this present exile.
Not only that: he had usurped space in the Continental papers, and of
late my favourite Parisian journal had served him to me with my morning
coffee, only hinting his name, but offering him with that gracious
satire characteristic of the Gallic journalist writing of anything
American. And so this grotesque wreck of a man was well known to the
boulevard--one of its sights. That was to be perceived by the flutter
he caused, by the turning of heads in his direction, and the low
laughter of the people at the little tables. Three or four in the rear
ranks had risen to their feet to get a better look at him and his
companion.
Some one behind us chuckled aloud. "They say Mariana beats him."
"Evidently!"
The dancer was aware of the flutter, and called Harman's attention to
it with a touch upon his arm and a laugh and a nod of her violent
plumage.
At that he seemed to rouse himself somewhat: his head rolled heavily
over upon his shoulder, the lids lifted a little from the red-shot
eyes, showing a strange pride when his gaze fell upon the many staring
faces.
Then, as the procession moved again and the white automobile with it,
the sottish mouth widened in a smile of dull and cynical contempt: the
look of a half-poisoned Augustan borne down through the crowds from the
Palatine after supping with Caligula.
Ward pulled my sleeve.
"Come," he said, "let us go over to the Luxembourg gardens where the
air is cleaner."