sightseers, and he had always been told that Montmartre was one of the
sights of Paris. They had seen everything else. They had seen Notre
Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, the markets, the Palais de Justice, the
Chambre des Deputes, the tomb of Napoleon--everything. They had enjoyed
the Jardins des Tuileries and the pictures and sculpture of the
Luxembourg Museum, and they had walked through the weary miles of
painted canvases in the Louvre, where Muriel lingered before the spot at
which the Mona Lisa had long hung. They had even permitted themselves
the horrors of the Morgue. Why should Stainton not complete his
knowledge of Paris, and why should he not, like most other Americans,
take his wife, however young she was, to Montmartre with him? Jim had
once said to Holt that he had, all his life long, kept himself clean.
The curiosities of his youth had remained unsatisfied.
The strongest impulses are not infrequently those of which one is
entirely unconscious. At Aiken, Stainton had yielded himself with the
extravagance of the young man of twenty-five, which he thought he was,
to the demands of the situation in which he found himself. At sea there
had necessarily been a quieter period; but this had ended with the
arrival of the Staintons in Paris. The tension of sightseeing had,
alone, sufficed to wear them out, and now (though he persuaded himself
that this was but the inevitable development of the novel into the
commonplace) he began to fear that the high tide of his emotion might be
sinking to the low level of habit and affection, that what was true of
himself was also true of Muriel, and he drew the inference that another
sort of sightseeing would be good for them both.
So they went to Montmartre.
At the advice of their chauffeur, they commenced with the Bal Tabarin.
From the motor-car that had hauled them up the long hills of dark and
tortuous streets, they stepped into a blaze of yellow light, under which
half a dozen men hurried to them. One held the door of the cab; another,
as if it were his sole business in life, wielded a folded newspaper as a
shield to protect Muriel's gown from contamination by the motor's muddy
tires; two pointed to the scintillating doorway, and two more chattered
enquiries that Jim could in no wise interpret.
He knew, however, that there was one answer to every question: he doled
out a handful of francs, in true American fashion, and then handed a
purple and white bill to his wife.
Curiously text-book French though it was, Muriel's French had proved
really intelligible; she had rapidly acquired the power of comprehending
a full third of the French addressed to her, and all this struck
Stainton, who loved to follow the lips that were his, speaking a
language that was not his and of which he was nearly ignorant, as a
proof of her superiority. Therefore she now preceded him to the ticket
window and made their purchase. A moment later a large man in a frock
coat was ushering them, among capped and aproned maids that begged
permission to check wraps, up to the double stairway at the end of the
big ballroom and into a box twenty feet above the floor.
They sat down, conscious of themselves, and ordered a bottle of
Ayala, presently served to them in goblets to play the role of
wine-glasses--for one drinks champagne from goblets in Montmartre--and
looked down at the dancers on the floor below. From its balcony at the
other end of the hall a brass band was sending forth a whirlwind of
quadrille music, and in the centre of the ballroom eight women danced
the can-can. They were large women, some of them rather fat, and none of
them rather young. They wore wide straw hats and simple tailored
shirtwaists and dark skirts of a cut almost severe; but in sharp
contrast to this exterior, when they danced, they displayed incredible
yards and yards of lace petticoat and stockings that outshone the
rainbow.
"What do you think of it?" asked Stainton.
Muriel condemned the Bal Tabarin as she had condemned Boussingault.
"I think it's horrid," she replied. "Aren't they ugly?" But she did not
take her eyes from the dancers.
All about the dancing-floor, except in that large circular clearing for
the performers, were little tables where men and women sat and drank
beer and smoked cigarettes. Along one side was a long bar at which both
sexes were served. Everyone gave casual heed to the dancing; everyone
applauded when he was pleased and hissed when he was not. Now and then a
young woman would rush to a neighbouring table, seize upon a man and
guide him madly about one corner of the floor in time to the music, and
now and then it would be a young man that seized upon a woman, at which
the patrons, if they paid any attention at all to it, smiled
good-naturedly. At one of the most conspicuous tables were a couple
kissing above their foaming beer-mugs, and nobody seemed to notice them.
Clearly, this was a world where one did as one pleased, and, so long as
one did not trespass upon the individuality of another, none objected.
"Something new, isn't it?" asked Jim, rather dubiously.
"It's unbelievable," said Muriel, her face flushed.
"Shall we go?"
"No--we might as well wait a little while--until we've finished our
champagne."
The quadrille ended. There were ten minutes during which the visitors to
the place waltzed rapidly, with feet lifting high, about the floor. Down
the centre two young girls were swaying together in a form of waltzing
that neither of the Americans had ever seen before. A man and a woman,
dancing, would embrace violently at every recurrence of a certain
refrain.
Muriel slipped her hand along the rail of the box. Stainton, whose eyes
were fixed on the dancers, started at her touch.
"Hold my hand," said Muriel.
He took her hand in his, lowering it from the view of the spectators.
"No," commanded Muriel: "on the rail, please."
"Certainly, but isn't that rather----"
"It seems to be the custom, Jim."
So he held her hand before them all, and soon found himself liking this.
A troupe of girls ran upon the floor and, to the music, began a
performance in tumbling. The hair of one was loosened, the ribbon that
held it fell at her slippered feet, and two men, from near-by tables,
leaped upon it and struggled laughingly for possession of the trophy.
The Staintons were intent upon this when they heard a low laugh behind
them. They looked about: three women with bright cheeks were peeping
through the swinging doors of the box. Involuntarily, Jim smiled, and,
since a smile in Montmartre passes current for an invitation, the
foremost of the girls entered, shutting out her companions.
"_Vous etes Americains?_" she enquired.
Stainton's French went as far as that. He nodded.
"_Du nord ou du sud?_"
Jim was accustomed to thinking that there was but one real America.
"The United States," said he.
"Ver' well," laughed the girl in an English prettily accented. "Your
good 'ealth, sar--and the good 'ealth of mademoiselle."
She raised from the table Jim's goblet of champagne and drank a little.
It was evident that her English was now exhausted.
Jim, frankly puzzled, looked at Muriel.
"What shall we do?" he wondered.
He thought that Muriel would resent the intrusion, but Muriel did not
seem to resent it.
"It appears to be the custom," said Muriel again. "I suppose that we had
better ask her to sit down and have some champagne."
"Very well," said Stainton, none too willingly. "You ask her, then: the
French verb 'to sit' always was too much for me."
Muriel offered the invitation; the visitor laughingly accepted; another
bottle was ordered and, while Jim, unable to understand what was being
said, leaned over the rail and looked at the dancers, his wife and the
vermilion-lipped intruder engaged in an encounter of small-talk that
Muriel began by enjoying as an improvement at once of her French and her
knowledge of the world.
The visitor, however, so managed the conversation that, though she did
give Muriel her address in a little street off the Boulevard Clichy, it
was she who was gathering information. She was extremely polite, but
extremely inquisitive.
"You have been long in Paris, is it not?" she asked.
"No, not long; only two weeks," said Muriel.
"But in France--no?"
"We came direct to Paris."
"But you speak French well, mademoiselle."
The compliment pleased Muriel to the extent that she missed the title
applied to her.
"My knowledge of French is very small," she replied. "I studied the
language in America."
"In America? Truly? One would never suppose."
"We had a French nun for teacher."
"Yes, yes. And monsieur your sweetheart, he does not speak French--no?"
Muriel started.
"Monsieur," she said, a little stiffly, "is my husband."
But the visitor, far from feeling reprimanded, was openly delighted.
"Your husband?" she echoed. "Very good. He is handsome, your husband."
"I think so," said Muriel.
"And it is always good," pursued the guest, "that the husband be much
older than the wife, is it not?"
Instantly Muriel relapsed. She could not know that the girl spoke
sincerely. She was among strangers, and, like most of us, instinctively
suspected all whose native tongue was not her own.
"He is not much older!" she retorted.
"Oh--but yes. And it is well. It is so that it is most often arranged in
France."
"No doubt--but our marriages are not 'arranged' for us in America. We
choose for ourselves."
The visitor seemed surprised. She raised her long, high brows and looked
from Stainton to Muriel.
"How then," she enquired, "you choose for yourself a man so much older?"
"I say he is _not_ much older, not any older," said Muriel, despising
herself for having fallen into such a discussion, yet unable, in an
alien language, to disentangle herself.
"But madame is a mere girl," said the visitor, seeking only to be
polite.
"And my husband is young also," declared Muriel.
Something in the tone of this repetition convinced the French girl that
the subject was not further to be pursued. She essayed another tack.
"And the babies?" she asked. "Is it that you brought with you the
babies?"
Muriel's cheeks warmed again, and she looked away.
"We have no children," she responded, shortly.
"No children?" The visitor plainly considered this unbelievable. "You
have no little babies? Then, why to marry?"
"No."
"Not one?"
"We have none."
"But how unhappy, how unfortunate for monsieur! Perhaps soon----"
"We have been married only a short time."
"Ah!" The French girl seemed to rest upon that as the sole reasonable
explanation. "Then," she said with a note of encouragement in her tone,
"it is not without hope. After a while you will have the babies."
Muriel was angry. She looked to Jim for rescue; but Jim was still
leaning over the rail, engrossed in the spectacle presented by the
dancers.
"I do not want any children," said Muriel, suddenly.
"No children? You wish no children?" gasped her inquisitor. "You choose
to marry, and yet you want no children? But why then did madame marry?"
Muriel rose.
"For reasons that you cannot understand," she said. "We must go now,"
she added; and she touched Jim's arm. "Come," she said to him; "let's
go, Jim."
Stainton turned slowly.
"What's the hurry?" he asked.
"It must be after one o'clock," said Muriel.
"But we are in Montmartre."
"Yes--and we have still a great deal of it to see before daylight, I
believe."
Jim rose.
"All right," he said.
The girl put out her hand.
"_S'il vous plait, monsieur_," she said: "_la petite monnaie_."
Stainton had tried to take the extended hand to bid its owner
good-night, but he noticed, before she began to speak, that it was
turned palm upward.
"What's this?" he enquired of Muriel.
"My cab-fare," said the visitor in French, and Muriel, vaguely
appreciating the fact that here was another custom of the country,
translated.
"Give her a five-franc piece," she said. "Something of the sort is
evidently expected."
"So I have to pay her for the privilege of buying her champagne?"
laughed Jim. "Ask her what I _am_ paying for. I am curious about this."
"No," said Muriel.
"Do," urged Stainton.
But the girl appeared now to comprehend. She was not embarrassed.
"In brief," she explained, "for my time."
"You pay her," Muriel grudgingly translated, "for her time. But," she
concluded, "I wouldn't pay her much, Jim."
"So that's it!" chuckled Stainton. "Oh, well, I don't want to seem
stingy after all this discussion of it."
He handed her a ten-franc louis.
The girl's eyes caught the unexpected glint of gold.
"Oh, la-la-la!" she gurgled, and, with what seemed one movement, she
pocketed the money; drank to Jim's health; flung her arms about him with
a sounding kiss on his mouth, and ran giggling through the
folding-doors.
Stainton, tingling with a strange excitement and looking decidedly
foolish, gazed at his wife.
"What do you think of that?" he choked.
Muriel stood before him trembling, her black eyes ablaze.
"How _dared_ you?" she demanded.
"_I?_" Jim was still bewildered. "What on earth did _I_ do?"
"And before my very eyes!" said Muriel.
"But, my dear, _I_ didn't do anything. It was the girl----"
"You permitted it."
"I hadn't time to forbid. Besides, it would have been absurd to forbid.
And she meant it as a compliment."
"Not to you. Don't flatter yourself, Jim."
"Well, at any rate, my dear, it is merely another custom of the quarter
that we are in. Really, I scarcely think you should object."
"It was the money that she liked, Jim. I think that, as for you, you
couldn't have been more absurd even if you had forbidden her."
He quieted her as best he could. They would go, he said, to L'Abbaye, of
which their chauffeur had spoken to them; and to L'Abbaye, that most
gilded and most brilliant of all the night palaces of Montmartre, they
went.
They climbed the crowded stairs and paused for a moment in the doorway,
while Jim began to divest himself of his overcoat. Muriel, ahead, was
looking into the elaborate room.
Pale green and white it was and loud with laughter and music, with the
popping of many corks and the chatter of persons that seemed to have no
mission there save the common mission of enjoyment. In the centre was a
cleared space, and there, among handsomely appointed tables, the white
waistcoated men and radiantly-gowned women loudly applauding, two
Spanish girls in bright costumes were dancing the sensuous mattchiche.
Muriel saw that, at one of the tables nearest the dancers, was a young
man who applauded more enthusiastically than any of his neighbours. She
saw that the girls observed this and liked it. She saw one girl, with an
especially violent embrace, seize her partner, hold her tight for an
instant, release her, and then, dashing to the young man, extend her
arms, to which the young man sprang amid the tolerant laughter of his
companions. Muriel saw the Spanish girl and the young man continue the
dance.
Quickly she wheeled to her husband.
"I don't want to go in here," she said.
"What?" Jim was utterly dumfounded.
She caught the lapels of his coat and held him, with his back to the
room, in the position that he had thus far maintained.
"I say that I don't want to go in. Take me away. Here, these are the
stairs. I'm tired. It's vulgar. I'm not well."
She released her hold of him and started to descend alone. He was forced
to follow with hardly the chance to get his coat and hat.
In the motor-car she grasped his face in her hot hands and fell, between
sobs, to kissing him.
"I love you!--I love you!" she cried.
The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen.
XIII
WORMWOOD
When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through
which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed,
often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried
lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing
gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to
return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply,
bidding her sleep and not bother.
Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that
opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps
this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but
Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of
his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his
hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he
cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the
turned door knob had roused her, was the glance that might be expected
of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed.
Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes
and gladly let him go.
On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he
was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal
of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked
down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that
he might pass and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to
smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He
knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their
surmise and the truth.
He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to
Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every
fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours
more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round
tables on the sidewalk outside a corner cafe. Only one of them was in
use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a
closely buttoned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner
was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and
his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other
customer.
A dirty waiter appeared from the cafe and shuffled forward, adjusting
his apron.
"_B'jour, monsieur_," the waiter mumbled.
Stainton did not return this salutation.
"_Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau_," he ordered.
He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago.
He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter
would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the
boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning.
The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the
little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink,
put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the
glass dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself
after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an
afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew.
The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress
toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind
inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with
the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their
work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their
play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys
shrilly crying the titles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim
by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the
papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles;
the girls annoyed him most because they would call one another's
attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these
people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been
doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their
own hearts; but Jim hated them all.
He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage,
went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but,
when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he
found himself the first patient in the waiting-room.
Was _M. le medecin_ in? Yes, the grave manservant assured, but he
doubted if _M. le medecin_ could as yet receive monsieur. It was early,
and _M. le medecin_ rarely saw any patients before--
Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before
the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily
bade him enter.
"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and
as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's
hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, _hein_? Did
the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not
my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what
is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend?
Sit."
The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and
pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner
Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiene Sociale,"
Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier,
Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits,
there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling
ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and
there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a
memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his
back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.
Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample
mouth were contracted.
"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something
else. I dare say it's not--not much. I know that these things may be the
merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical
weariness, or--or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does
like to have a physician's assurance."
Boussingault peered through his bar-bound _pince-nez_. He began to
understand.
"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe
before the _dejeuner_."
Stainton tried to smile.
"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life,"
he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I
took it on an empty stomach."
The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.
"M. Stainton," he asked, "you come here to-day as a patient, is it not?"
"Well, I hope that I won't need any treatment, but----"
"But you do not come here to pass the time, _hein_?"
"No, doctor."
"Then," said Boussingault, spreading out his hands and shrugging his
shoulders, "tell me why in the so early morning, not sick, you take
absinthe for the second time in your life."
He was looking at Stainton in a manner that distinctly added to Jim's
nervousness. The American was not a man to quail before most, and he had
come here to get this expert's opinion on a vital matter; yet he feared
to furnish the only data on which an opinion could, to have use, be
founded.
"Well, doctor," he said, trying hard for the easiest words, "you--you
met my wife last evening."
Boussingault's bullet head bobbed.
"What then?" he inquired.
"What do you think of her?"
"I think that she is very charming--and, M. Stainton, very young."
It struck Jim that the concluding phrase had been weighted with
significance.
"I don't know just how to tell you," he resumed. "I don't like to talk
even to my physician of--of certain intimate matters; but"--he glanced
at the most conspicuous volumes on the nearest shelf--"from the titles
of these books, I think that what I want to see you about falls within
the limits of your specialty."
He stopped, gnawing his lower lip, his mind seeking phrases. Before he
could find a suitable one, his vis-a-vis, looking him straight in the
eyes, had settled the matter:
"My friend, there are but two reasons why one that is no fool should
drink absinthe at an hour so greatly early: or he has been guilty of
excess and regrets, or he has been unable to be guilty and regrets." He
paused, his face thrust half across the desk. "Madame," he demanded,
"she is how old?"
Stainton met him bravely now, but in a manner clearly showing his
anxiety to protect himself.
"She is nearly nineteen."
"Eighteen, _bien_. And you?"
Jim drew back. He took a long breath; his fingers held tightly to the
arms of his chair.