who had not seen it were to pretend that they had.
“Pig!” she cried full in his face, and swinging high her parasol, broke
it over the hat of eight reflections. Carrying the remains of the
parasol with her, she stalked, always magnificent, into the street.
Vaguely, Ventrillon removed the ruin from his head, and stared at it,
stupefied. The crowd was wild with restrained excitement, but he heard
not their whispers, or even their sudden, suppressed little outbursts of
high-strung laughter. The portrait was destroyed. The Belletaille hated
him. She had made him ridiculous. _Tout Paris_ would reject him. There
were now no future commissions on which to count. He was hungry, he had
not a sou, and even the hat of eight reflections was a wreck in his
hand.
Ventrillon reflected. This was his to-morrow, his to-morrow at
Volland’s.
SEVENTH REFLECTION
But certain fierce and earnest words whispered in his ear with excited
persistency began at last to penetrate the vacuum of his deadened brain.
Puzzled, he turned to face the speaker.
A thin, blond young man with white eyelashes was begging anxiously:
“I’ll give you a hundred francs for that hat! I’ll give you two hundred!
I’ll give you five hundred----”
Ventrillon blinked. Then his brain cleared, as does the atmosphere with
lightning.
“No!” he thundered in a voice which filled the room. “_Nom de dieu!_
No!” And Ventrillon was himself again.
“A chair!” he shouted. “Somebody find me a chair!”
Nobody knew what was going to happen next, but everybody was ready and
delighted to do anything which might promote its happening. From
somewhere a chair was passed over the heads of the crowd. Ventrillon
mounted upon it.
For a moment he paused. The beauty of his young face and the verve of
his pose commanded a spontaneous burst of applause; but as he opened his
mouth to speak, the noise died quickly into breathless silence.
“_Messieurs et ’dames_,” he cried, “Regard me this hat! There is none
other like it. Never has such a thing happened before, and never will it
happen again. Here is the unique hat crushed by the umbrella of the
great Belletaille, and merely to own it is to render yourself famous.
Now attend to this extraordinary fact! I, Odillon Ventrillon, stand here
upon this chair, willing to part with this treasure. It is incredible,
but, _messieurs et ’dames_, how much am I bid?”
This turn of affairs was not banal; it was not at all banal. And it was
perfectly true that the shapeless hat which Ventrillon was offering was
already historic. It was on a par with the shoes of Catherine de’ Medici
in the Musée de Cluny. The highest bidder would be the envied of _tout
Paris_.
“Six hundred francs,” piped the tenor of the blond youth, breaking the
silence.
“A thousand francs,” cried an extravagantly dressed South American,
enjoying himself hugely. There was a burst of applause.
“Ah, no, monsieur,” regretted Ventrillon; “there will be higher bids
than that.”
“Two thousand,” abruptly announced an ambitious lady, wearing pink
pearls, from the midst of a group of her three daughters dressed exactly
alike in yellow cotton.
“Only _two thousand francs_!” shouted Ventrillon. “Madame, you do
yourself the injustice of underestimating its value.”
“Two thousand, five hundred,” recklessly screamed the blond youth. The
ambitious lady turned pale.
“O _Maman_,” cried the eldest of her three daughters, “bid again! We are
so rich, and he is so beautiful!”
“Yes, _Maman_!” urged the other two, breathlessly. A ripple of amusement
spread through the crowd.
“Two thousand, five hundred, and seventy-five,” announced that lady with
excessive poise, and switched a superior smile over the entire assembly.
But the bidding became general, and little by little the price went up.
The hat was now the sensation of Paris; every franc bid increased the
sensation; and _tout Paris_, which lives on sensation, bid on. Then
entered the lists a modest little gentleman with a pince-nez, a _nouveau
riche_ of the war, who felt himself intruding wherever he went. His
timid voice becoming weaker with every increase until at last it was
only a whisper, he began persistently overtopping every bid made.
“Four thousand, forty-five,” bid the blond youth.
“Four thousand, fifty,” bid the gentleman in the pince-nez.
“Four thousand, fifty-five,” bid the lady in pearls.
“Four thousand, sixty,” bid the gentleman in the pince-nez, almost
automatically.
The lady in pearls set her jaw.
“Four thousand, sixty-one,” she pronounced grimly.
The blond youth mopped his overheated brow and shot his bolt.
“Four thousand, _eighty_!” and, immediately over-bid by the little
gentleman in the pince-nez, rushed frantically from the room. Another
bid in a voice without identity.
“Five thousand miserable little francs!” thundered Ventrillon,
scornfully. “And the rate of exchange, what it is? _Bon dieu!_ It is an
insult to Mademoiselle Belletaille!”
But the sum was already beyond even reason of unreason; it was as if a
cold wind had blown into the room. Ventrillon became sensitive to the
situation.
“Five thousand, five hundred,” suddenly whispered the little gentleman
in the pince-nez.
“Five thousand, five hundred,” shouted Ventrillon, quickly. “Going,
going---” For a moment there was dead silence.
“O _Maman_,” excitedly cried the eldest daughter of the lady in pearls,
“is it too late?”
“_Chut!_” hissed the mother, pinching her daughter’s arm until she
squealed.
“Gone,” thundered Ventrillon, with finality--“gone to the dignified
monsieur in the pince-nez.”
That little man advanced conspicuously to take possession. The crowd
cheered wildly. Volland made his way in through the uproar.
“Of course, my friend,” he said genially, rubbing his hands before the
chair of Ventrillon, “you will not forget my commission. A hat is not
art, to be sure, but I am accustomed to 10 per cent. on sales made in my
galleries.”
Ventrillon, with an air, peeled off five hundred-franc notes and one
fifty from the huge packet the dignified little monsieur with the
pince-nez had produced from his pockets, and presented them to Volland.
He who was accustomed to wearing a hat of eight reflections went
bareheaded that evening to his garret.
“But,” reflected Ventrillon, “one _never_ wears a hat to eat. Politeness
forbids.” And that night he would dine extravagantly.
EIGHTH REFLECTION
At noon the next day Ventrillon woke from the long slumber of the well
fed to a nervous knocking at his door.
“Who is there?” he roared angrily.
“_Chut! Chut!_ But it is I,” loudly whispered the awed voice of the
concierge. “There is a lady below----”
“Tell her I cannot see her.”
“_But_, monsieur, she _says_ that she is the great Mademoiselle
Belletaille of the Opéra Comique.”
Ventrillon started in alarm. Perhaps that astonishing woman had come
with a gun.
“Tell her I cannot see her.”
“But, monsieur, she resembles precisely her photographs in
‘Excelsior’----”
“I don’t care whose photographs she resembles----” But he stopped short,
for he heard the footsteps of the Belletaille herself running up the
stairs.
Ventrillon leaped from his bed, and in his bare legs and shirt flung
himself against the door.
“Open your door to me!” cried the ecstatic voice of the Belletaille.
“Have you seen the morning papers? You cannot refuse me the pleasure of
grasping your hand! The name of that Fanny Max does not appear. There
was no room for it. She had not even the distinction of being among
those present.”
“But, mademoiselle,” protested Ventrillon, “I cannot see you.”
“_Tout Paris_ is wild with the news,” the Belletaille rushed on; “even
your head-size appears in the papers. It was a clever idea of me to
destroy that portrait, was it not? Even as I plunged it into my own
likeness, I felt that I plunged my little knife into the heart of that
creature. But you have surpassed me. It was a stroke of genius. And what
an advertisement for my American tour! I must kiss you on both your
cheeks----”
“But, mademoiselle,” cried Ventrillon, in agony. “I am not dressed.
Would you have me receive you in my shirt?”
“Then open your door a little way. All the world will want to know you
now; but can you not come to me this afternoon? We must begin another
portrait. Open it only a little way! Permit me to give you the present I
have brought you.”
Ventrillon allowed her to intrude a large bandbox through the gap of the
partly opened door. When she had gone, he examined it, gingerly; he
wondered if she had handed him an infernal machine. He had heard of such
things, and could not trust her honeyed words.
He placed it on his table, and opened it by cautiously cutting away
pieces of its sides with his pocket-knife. When all the cardboard had
been cut away, there stood upon his table, crown-side down, and filled
with scarlet amaryllis, a hat, a magnificent hat, an elegant hat, a
formidable hat, a hat which was all there was of chic, a genuine
glistening stove-pipe hat, an authentic hat of eight reflections.
Ventrillon stared. It was really true that he was higher in the favour
of the Belletaille than ever. He was probably the most talked-of person
in Paris. He could that afternoon begin another portrait, and a greater
celebrity than he had ever hoped for was within his grasp. There was
even before him on his table a shining hat of eight reflections in which
to walk before the admiring eyes of _tout Paris_.
Now the concierge, who, fascinated, had remained behind to peek in at
the crack of the door, saw a strange thing. When she reported it eagerly
to him that evening, her worthy spouse remarked that now he knew what
had become of that bottle of _eau-de-vie_ his uncle had sent up from the
country, and he was not a man to be taken in by a woman’s lies, even
when she was sober.
Slinging its contents of scarlet amaryllis about the floor, Ventrillon
snatched the hat from the table, placed it accurately in the seat of his
chair, and sat upon it.
“It is curious, old fellow,” he reflected aloud, without rising from the
inchoate mass it had become--“it is curious how strange one always feels
when one discovers that one has been human. But to-night you and
I--_you_ and _I_ are going together to the Closerie des Lilas. May the
francs in my pocket persuade our friends to be merciful!”
So far as the concierge could ascertain, he was addressing a rusty,
broad-brimmed black felt hat which hung shapeless from a nail on the
opposite wall.
Which, of course, was absurd.
HOME-BREW
BY GRACE SARTWELL MASON
From _Saturday Evening Post_
“Of course, they’re all dears, my family,” said Alyse; “but as fiction
material there is nothing to them; no drama, you know; no colour; just
nice, ordinary, unimaginative dears. They’re utterly unstimulating.
That’s why I can’t live at home, and create. They don’t understand it,
poor dears; but what could I possibly find to write about at home?”
She crushed down upon her hair, with its Russian bob, a sad-coloured hat
of hand-woven stuff, and locked the door of a somewhat crumby room over
the Rossetti Hand-Loom Shop, where she worked half time for a half
living. A secondhand typewriter accounted for the other half; or, to be
quite truthful, for a fraction of the other half. For her father, plain
George Todd, helped out when the typewriter failed to provide.
She then betook herself on somewhat reluctant feet to the nearest
Subway. For this was her evening at home with her unstimulating family;
and though she was fond of them all, her predominating feeling for them
was a mixture of amusement, tender tolerance, and boredom. Moreover,
they lived in Harlem, which was a deplorable wilderness, utterly lacking
in atmosphere and a long, long way from the neighbourhood of the
hand-loom shop.
In the Subway, miraculously impelled through the bowels of the earth,
Alyse--or Alice, as she had been christened--refrained from looking at
the faces opposite her. The Subway does something curious to faces. It
seems to drain all life out of them; it strips from them their defensive
masks and exposes the deep and expressive scars of existence. A secret
and hidden soul comes out in each Subway face. But Alyse averted her
eyes.
“Dear me,” she sighed, “how dull they are! Isn’t there any beauty left
in the world?”
Her father and his chum, Wally, were just ahead of her as she came up
from the Subway depths. They were wending their way to their respective
homes, having come up from downtown together, as was their invariable
custom. Alyse gazed at their middle-aged backs without seeing anything
unusual about them. Just two plodding men, getting tubby about the
waist, with evening papers under their arms, walking along, not saying
much. But when they reached George Todd’s door, they would look at each
other, and the passer-by might well have stopped and taken off his hat,
as before something rare and soul-satisfying. For here was perfect peace
in friendship.
But all they said was: “S’long. See you to-night, ol’ hoss.” Or, “See
you t’morrow mornin’, Georgie.”
Alyse had heard the tale of her father’s miraculous re-union with Wally
so many times that it meant nothing to her. It seemed that as boys they
had lived within two doors of each other in a small New England town,
and they had been inseparable. First thing in the morning and last thing
at night they were whistling outside each other’s windows; they owned a
dog in common; and when George had scarlet fever, Wally nearly died from
anxiety. Then, at sixteen, life had borne them in different directions.
Wally drifted finally to Alaska and George got a job in New York. For a
time they corresponded, but after a while letters began to come back to
George marked Not Found, and then in a roundabout way he heard of
Wally’s death.
Although George Todd was happily married, with a growing family, he
admitted that the world would never seem quite the same to him with
Wally out of it. Then came the happening that convinced him there are
mysterious and unexplainable things in the world, say what you like. He
was coming home from work one night, walking from the Subway rather more
slowly than usual and enjoying the spring twilight, when in some strange
way his heart stirred. He remembered how on evenings such as this he and
Wally used to play a game in which one tossed a ball over the house to
the other and gave a peculiar call. The middle-aged George declared
that all of a sudden he could hear this call, and wanting to fix it in
his memory, he endeavoured to imitate it by whistling its rather
melancholy intervals.
And at his whistle a man walking in front of him suddenly whirled and
stared at him. It was Wally--Wally, with a newspaper in his pocket and a
bundle of shirts from the laundry under his arm. He had been living
within half a block of George for two years.
When her father told this story to Alyse he always at this point gave
her an affectionate poke.
“Now there’s a story for you, Allie. You write up about Wally being
washed out to sea and given up for dead and working his way around the
world, and finally settling down in Harlem right next door to his old
chum. And that about the whistle. What was it made me think of that old
call?”
Alyse would explain that it was coincidence, and coincidence was the
lowest form of literary life. She was patient about it, but there was
nothing stimulating to her creative imagination in Wally and that
come-and-find-me voice he had listened to half his life. Still less was
she stimulated by her father, George Todd, owner of a feed and grain
business of the most eccentric instability. He was a dear, and she loved
him; but she hoped as they all sat down to supper that he wouldn’t begin
to joke her about her work or offer her the plot for a story.
It was a spring evening and the dining-room windows were open to the two
lilac bushes which Alyse’s mother had nursed for years in the narrow,
sooty back yard. The room was filled with an unreal light, as if the air
was full of golden pollen dust. And something else, invisible and
palpitant, was in the air of the homely room, something not to be seen
but only sensed. Some intense preoccupation a sympathetic eye could have
noted in three of the faces around the table.
“Well, well, we’re all dressed up to-night,” said George Todd, unfolding
his napkin. “Look at Miggsy, Allie. Won’t she knock somebody’s eye out
to-night?”
Alyse looked at her young sister, Mildred, aged sixteen. Mildred
blushed, fidgeted, pouted entreatingly at her father. She was a thin
little beauty, with a soft cloud of corn-silk hair about her face. In
her red mouth desire and wistfulness mingled. To-night her eyes were
stretched and brilliant. She twitched at the table silver and appeared
to have no appetite.
“Eat your spinach, dearie.” Her mother’s eyes brooded over her tenderly.
“I thought you liked it creamed.”
“I do, but---- Goodness, mother, is that clock right? I must fly!”
“But there’s chocolate pudding for dessert, dear.”
“Now, Miggs, finish your dinner. Why be so fidgety?”
Mildred looked in desperation from her father to her mother.
“But I don’t want any dinner, please! I--I have to be there early.
Please let me go now, Mother.”
She danced from one foot to the other, the secret excitement in her eyes
threatening to change to anger. She had spent most of the time since she
came home from school that afternoon in front of her mirror, and she was
now exquisitely polished, powdered, and perfumed. From under the fluff
of hair over each ear an earring of blue to match her eyes dangled.
Alyse disapproved of the earrings and of the general effect of Milly
to-night. She made a mental note to speak to her mother about letting
the child go out so many evenings. But beyond the earrings and the
general overstrung and overdressed effect she did not penetrate. She
made no attempt to interpret the secret excitement in her young sister’s
eyes. The affairs of a girl of sixteen were too inane and foolish to be
taken seriously.
At the table when Milly had gone flying up the stairs there remained
Alyse, her father and mother, Eddie, twenty-one, and Aunt Jude. Alyse
glanced around the table and suppressed a sigh. The monotony of the
lives of her family sometimes oppressed her. Take her mother, for
instance. She seldom went outside the house except to church or to an
occasional motion picture with Wally and George. All day she did
housework or looked after Grandma Todd when Aunt Jude was at work. She
did not have a cook because of a queer passion for feeding her family
herself. But when she had them all there in front of her, ranged around
the long table, and she had put on to their plates the well-cooked,
savoury dishes they liked, she would sit eating little herself, looking
from one to the other with her slightly anxious, tender glances, while
gradually an expression of peace and satisfaction stole into her face;
and Alyse wondered what her mother was getting out of life.
Take Eddie, also. No one, except perhaps his mother in odd moments, ever
got a peep-in at Eddie’s thoughts. Alyse was of the opinion that he
didn’t have any. There had been a time when she had tried to bring Eddie
out by coaxing him down to her rooms over the hand-loom shop and
introducing him to some of the girls she knew. But those clever and
voluble maidens had abashed Eddie unspeakably, and Alyse had let him
lapse back into his own plodding life. He apparently had no imagination.
Soon after he left high school he had gone to work for a seed house
downtown--George Todd badly needing help that year with the family
expenses--and there he still was. Alyse hadn’t the slightest idea what
were his amusements. Saturday and Sunday afternoons he generally
disappeared, and when asked what he had been doing, he had been to a
ball game or just taking a stroll around. He subscribed to a marine
journal, which seemed strange reading for a packer in a seed house.
And there was Aunt Jude. Really, when you considered everything, what
had Aunt Jude to live for?
Judith Todd was at that moment preparing a tray for Grandma Todd, who
was having one of her faint spells and declined to come down to supper.
With her long, slender fingers moving deftly, Judith made the tray
inviting with the china she had bought especially for it. She had
hurried her own supper so as to have plenty of time for the tray, and
she moved from the table to the sideboard with the air of detached and
ironic competence she sometimes wore when she was, as Alyse said,
spoiling Grandma Todd. She was George Todd’s younger sister,
thirty-eight, a spinster with the reputation of having been in her youth
very high-spirited, adventure-loving, and moreover with a streak of
queerness about her. As, for instance, her ambition to be a sculptor. In
those days and in the Todds’ native village a girl might as becomingly
have wanted to be a circus rider. It was said there had been some stormy
scenes over days wasted in the attic with messy clay. But finally life
itself had put a bit between her teeth--life and her mother’s
well-timed heart attacks. Her father had failed in business and died,
George had married early, and the brunt of taking care of her mother had
fallen to Judith.
After a while she had brought her mother to George’s house, which helped
George out with expenses and enabled Judith to make a living for
herself. It was the nature of her job that convinced Alyse there
couldn’t be anything in that old story about Aunt Jude’s having wanted
to be an artist. It was such an absurd job. She worked for one of those
concerns that produce novelties--favours, table decorations, boudoir
dolls--designing many of these silly fripperies, often making them with
her own hands. She had remarkable hands.
If she had an ounce of talent, Alyse decided, how could Aunt Jude go on,
year after year, squandering herself on these silly and often grotesque
objects? Alyse felt that it would have killed her to have so degraded
her talent.
But Judith actually appeared to get a certain amount of fun out of the
dreadful things. She would bring home samples of her handicraft and
bedeck the supper table with tiny fat dolls in wedding veils, droll
birds and beasts in coloured wax, and so on. And in one of her high
moods she could set the family to laughing with a single tweak at one of
these grotesqueries. On these occasions a gay and malicious sparkle
would come into her dark eyes, and her laugh would be high and reckless,
rather like a person who has taken a stiff drink to ease up an ancient
misery.
Two evenings a week she went out, no one knew where. Alyse had seen her
once at the opera, leaning far out from the highest gallery, a frown
between her brows, seeming to watch rather than to listen, with a wild
brightness in her dark eyes. The general impression of the family was
that these regular evenings away from home had something to do with her
work. On these particular evenings there was always a breathless air
about her. She would hasten in from the street, and as she climbed the
stairs to her mother’s room her face would stiffen as if for conflict.
For Grandma Todd resented these evenings.
“Traipsin’ off,” she called it. “Lord knows where. Something will happen
to you, coming home alone after ten o’clock. I don’t think you’d better
go out to-night, Judith. My heart has been fluttering this afternoon.
If I have to lie here worrying all evening I shall probably have a bad
spell.”
And then into her daughter’s face would come the expression of a person
swimming painfully against the tide. Love and pity had overcome her at
every turn of her life, until at last she had almost nothing of herself
left, except her freedom for these two evenings. As if the call of them
was more imperative, even than her long habit of abnegation, she fought
for them with a sort of desperation.