of biograph, and trained dogs, and Neapolitan ballet, until the liveried
attendants thrust cards bearing the number 19 into rococo frames at the
side of the proscenium, and the orchestra plunged into Sarasate's
"Zapateado," and various stout gentlemen wrestled with mechanical
devices for supplying opera-glasses, and, conquering, sat back in their
seats and grunted. Then the drop rose upon a pale pink and gray libel on
Versailles, and La Belle Thaïs flashed out from the wing, with a red
silk scarf bound about her head and a toreador's hat perched on one
side.
There was no denying it. Despite her rouge, despite her four decades (an
eternity in Paris), La Thaïs was very beautiful. Dodo forgot his
cigarette, his champagne, and his companions. He followed every swish of
her spangled skirts, every click of her castanets, every tap of her
pointed shoes, every movement of her gleaming shoulders and her lithe,
white arms. This, then, was the reality of his dream, the soul and
substance of his vision, the essence of the great city that had drawn
him like a magnet from his humdrum bourgeois life in the suburbs of
Arles,--the ineffable, eternal Woman, poured like oil upon the
smouldering fire of boyish imagination! His slender hands gripped the
plush of the box-rail feverishly, his eyes widened and brightened, his
lips parted, and his breath came short. Then, suddenly, there was a
final clash of tambourines and castanets which brought La Belle Thaïs to
a standstill, her head flung back, and one arm high in air!
"She has charm--even now!" said Sacha, emptying his glass.
Three days later, it was known to all the world that concerns itself
with such things that Dodo Chapuis was latest in the train of victims to
the fascinations of Thaïs de Trémonceau. One cannot pretend to say what
she saw in him to divert her attention from richer and maturer men. He
was handsome--yes--but the Comte d'Ys was handsomer. He was rich, as
such things go, and for the moment. But he had no wit, poor Dodo--and as
for money, which, after all, is the only other thing which counts in the
demi-monde, what were forty thousand francs to one authorized to draw,
_ad libitum_, upon a Brazilian multi-millionaire? No, evidently, it was
one of those strange whims to which the slaves of self-interest are
sometimes subject. The de Trémonceau had nothing to gain, and everything
to lose, for, certainly, her Brazilian miché would have been ill pleased
to know that Dodo Chapuis was riding daily six times up and six times
down the allée des Acacias in the victoria of La Belle Thaïs. As it
chanced, he was in Buenos Ayres. Still, he might return without warning.
He had an ignoble habit of doing that. But when those sufficiently
intimate suggested this to Thaïs she only laughed, and sang a snatch
from La Belle Hélène:--
"_Si par mégarde il se hasarde
De rentrer chez lui tout à coup,
Il est le maître, mais c'est, peut-être,
Imprudent et de mauvais goût!_"
As for Dodo, he was in Elysium. He was singularly innocent, Dodo, with
his smooth russet hair, and his steady gray eyes, and his straight, fine
nose, and his sensitive, patrician mouth; and, believe it or not as you
will, he cherished the project of marrying Thaïs de Trémonceau! He had
fed himself on the poetry of Alfred de Musset, giving doubtful words and
phrases his own interpretation, from lack of experience, and, despite
the lesson of "Don Paez" and "La Nuit d'Octobre," he believed in the
power of trust to hold another true. Alas, he was hopelessly
conventional! There is no one of us poor moths who is content with
seeing his fellow singe his wings. No, each must plunge into the radius
of consuming heat and learn its peril for himself. All of which is, no
doubt, a wise ruling. For if experience could be handed down from father
to son, and accepted on its face value, then the child of the third or
fourth generation would be a demi-god, or even a full one, and there
would be no further attraction in heaven, and no further menace in hell.
The which morsel of morality may be allowed to pass, if only for
contrast's sake. We were speaking of Thaïs de Trémonceau.
Dodo's Elysium lasted longer than such mirages are wont to do. For a
full month he basked in the sultry sunshine of the de Trémonceau's
smiles, dined almost nightly in the rue de la Faisanderie, occupied a
fauteuil at the Folies while she whisked her spangled skirts and sang
"Holà! Holà!" to Sarasate's music, supped with her afterwards at the
Café de Paris or Paillard's, and paid the addition, and tipped the
garçon, and the maître d'hôtel and the chef d'orchestre, as liberally as
if he had had a million francs instead of a dwindling twenty thousand.
And the delirium might have lasted even longer had it not been for
Louise Chapuis.
No one ever knew who told. There is a wireless telegraphy in such cases
which defies detection. Suffice it to say that, one morning, the Hôtel
de Choiseuil numbered Mademoiselle Chapuis among its guests, and that,
as this name was inscribed upon the register, the Fates rang up the
curtain on the final act of the brief comedy of the tuition of Dodo
Chapuis.
Where, when, and how Louise contrived, in three days of Paris, to
strike, full and firm-fingered, the keynote of the situation remained a
mystery which none of those concerned was capable of solving. In all the
capital there was but one person competent to deal conclusively with the
situation. That person was Gabrielle de Poirier, and to Gabrielle de
Poirier Louise Chapuis applied.
There could have been no stranger meeting than this between the young
Arlésienne, with her blue eyes, and her embarrassed hands, and her gown
that all the plage turned to look at, because it was in the fashion of
more than yester-year, and the cold, stately leader of the demi-monde,
with her air of languid ease, her shimmer of diamonds, and her slow,
tired voice, roused to interest for the moment by this singularly sudden
and imperative demand upon her good-will and ingenuity.
Louise found Gabrielle half buried among the cushions of a great divan,
with a yellow-backed novel perched, tent-like, upon her knee. For once,
the demi-mondaine was alone, bored to extinction by the blatant ribaldry
of Octave Mirbeau. She had fingered the simply-lettered card of her
unknown visitor for a full minute, before bidding her valet-de-pied
admit her. A whim, a craving for novelty--who knows what? The Open
Sesame had been spoken, and now, in the half-light of late afternoon,
her caller stood before her.
"Be seated," said Gabrielle courteously. "Be seated, Ma--?"
"--Demoiselle," replied Louise, complying with the invitation.
There was a brief pause. Each woman studied the other curiously. Then
Louise began to speak, at first timidly.
"You think it strange, no doubt, madame, this visit of mine. Let me be
quite candid. I come to ask a favor of you--I, who have no right, save
the right of one woman to crave assistance from another. I have a
brother"--
"Faith of God!" said Gabrielle, lightly, "so have I. A poor sample, if
you will!"
Her flippancy seemed suddenly to lend the other fresh courage. She
leaned forward eagerly, clasping her gray-gloved hands upon her knee.
"But mine," she said, "is but a boy. He has come to Paris, seeking to
know the world, and, lately, he has become the friend of Mademoiselle
Thaïs de Trémonceau."
"Zut!" put in Gabrielle. "You say well that it is but a boy!"
"Is there need to tell you," continued Louise, without heeding the
sneer, "what this means to me? Is there need to tell you what it means
to _him_?"
"My faith, no!" said Mademoiselle de Poirier. "It is acquainted with me,
that story. The end is not beautiful!"
"Tout simplement," said her visitor, "I have come to Paris to bring him
back, to show him the folly of his way. But I alone am powerless.
You--you who are more admired, more beautiful, more clever than this
Mademoiselle de Trémonceau"--(Oh, Louise!)--"you alone can aid me to
rescue him."
Gabrielle raised her eyebrows slightly, and let her lids droop with an
air of unutterable boredom.
"Truly, mademoiselle," she drawled, "I neither see in what fashion I can
assist you, nor why, in any event, I should concern myself with this
affair. If your brother has such taste"--
"Oh, madame, I know I have no right," broke in Louise. "But you, of all
women in Paris, alone have the power to win him from her."
"And when I have won him," demanded Gabrielle, "what then? Do you think
your precious brother will fare better with me than with the de
Trémonceau?"
Her calm was broken for a moment by a flash of anger.
"The world is full of fools," she added. "One more or less is no great
matter. I am not a Rescue Society, mademoiselle. Let your brother go his
way. His best cure will be effected by the woman herself. When his money
is gone, there will be no need to win him from her."
The sneer sent the blood racing to the other's cheeks. She had been
counting, as she realized with a pang of mortification, upon some
Quixotic quality which her reading had taught lay always dormant, even
in such a woman as Gabrielle de Poirier,--some innate nobility, ready to
spring into activity at the bidding of such an appeal as she had just
made. And, too, beneath all her anxiety, she had believed that Thaïs
loved her brother, that his peril lay not so much in her making use of
him and then flinging him aside, as in the existence of actual affection
between him and a woman whom, even as his wife, society would not
recognize. This brutal intrusion of money into the discussion, this
flippant classification of Dodo with a world full of fools who flung
away honor and reputation for a passing fancy, only to be flung away
themselves in turn, suddenly seemed to lay clear the whole situation, in
all its sordid vulgarity, and with the revelation came a white rage
against this woman who was only another of the same kind. She despised
herself for having stooped to ask her aid, and a fury of wounded pride
blazed in her reply.
"You know yourself well, madame!" she said. "No, surely my brother
would fare no better with you, though that was not what I meant to ask.
I thought, in my folly, that, perhaps, in the life of such a one as you,
there might come moments when you longed to be other than you are,
moments when you would like to think that among all the men you have
played with, ruined, and spurned, there were one or two who could speak
and think of you as men speak and think of honest women, who could say
that you had been an ennobling influence in their lives, and whose word
would count upon the side of good when you come to answer for the evil
you have done. I thought that, not for money's sake or vanity's, you
might wish to win my brother from this woman, and, when you had won him,
teach him how sordid, how wicked, how futile such a life is, and send
him back to decency--a better man! I see how mistaken I was in judging
you. There is no compassion in you, no nobler instinct than
self-interest. Your motives are the same as hers, love of admiration and
love of gold,--and, perhaps, less worthy. I cannot say. Hers, at least,
I can only suspect: yours I have had from your own lips. Had my brother
been more than the poor weak boy he is, had he been brilliant, powerful,
or a millionaire, it would never have been necessary for me to ask you
to win him from her. No, madame, for you would have done so of your own
accord!"
Now, there is such a thing as diplomacy, and there is such a thing as
luck, and of the former Louise Chapuis had not an atom. An impulse, made
apparently reasonable by pure imagination, led her to seek out
Gabrielle, and had she found her, as her fancy had painted her, readily
moved by the appeal of honest affection and confidence, she was
competent to have won her end. Louise was one of the people who, in
foreseeing a dispute, invent the replies to their own questions, and
who, if the actual answers accord with those preconceived, will emerge
from the ordeal triumphant, but who lack the diplomat's gift of adapting
the line of argument to that of unexpected retort. Confronted with a
state of affairs wholly different from that which she had supposed
existent, her sole resource was in this outburst of disappointment and
reproach, honest, but inutile as the clamor of a baffled baby. So much
for diplomacy.
But, as we have said, there is also such a thing as luck. Gabrielle de
Poirier was insufferably bored. Her Russian was in Moscow, her recent
tips at Auteuil had proved disastrous, her latest feuilleton had been
rejected. For six hours she had been buried among the cushions of the
divan, clad materially in light pink but mentally in deepest blue,
skipping from page to page of a novel that was not amusing, and
confronted every ten minutes by the recurrent realization that the next
event on her calendar was a dinner at the Café de Paris, which would not
come for the eternity of twenty-seven hours! Despite her ungracious
reception of Louise, she had been grateful for the diversion, and hardly
had she sneered at Dodo's position before she lit a cigarette, and fell
to studying the situation seriously. Louise, pausing, breathless, after
her tirade, was surprised to find that she made no reply, looking
straight before her with her great eyes half closed, and put down her
silence as equivalent to admission of the charges hurled against her.
The truth of the matter was, however, that Gabrielle had not heard one
word of her visitor's impassioned denunciation!
There was a long silence, and then the demi-mondaine looked up.
"Where does your brother live?" she asked, touching an electric button
at her side, "and what is his first name?"
"At the Hôtel du Rhin," stammered Louise, "and his name is Do--I should
say Charles,--Charles Chapuis. I am at the Hôtel de Choiseuil."
"Bon!" said the other. "If you will go home, mademoiselle, and keep your
own counsel, I think I can promise you that you will shortly have your
brother back."
Louise stepped forward impulsively.
"Oh, madame!"--she began.
But just then the valet-de-pied appeared at the door, and Gabrielle,
taking up her novel, flounced back among the cushions.
"Bon jour, mademoiselle," she said, without looking at Louise. "Achille,
la porte! And send Mathilde to me."
The conference between mistress and maid was brief but eloquent.
"Who," demanded Gabrielle, "is Dodo Chapuis?"
"The young monsieur of Boule-de-Boue," responded Mathilde promptly.
"Parfaitement. I needed to refresh my memory. And how long is it since
we cabled the last tuyau?"
"Eight weeks, at least, madame--before the coming of Monsieur Chapuis."
"Bon!" said Gabrielle. "We cable another tip at once."
(For it may be noted, in passing, that she had one source of income
which La Belle Thaïs little suspected!)
"What does Boule-de-Boue do to-night?" she demanded again.
"Dines at home with Monsieur Chapuis," replied the omniscient Mathilde,
"dances at the Fol' Berg' at eleven, sups at Paillard's with Monsieur
Chapuis."
(For it may also be noted, in passing, that the maid of La Belle Thaïs
had one source of income which her mistress totally ignored!)
"Très bien!" said Gabrielle. "Now a pen and paper, the inkstand,
envelopes, sealing wax, and a telegraph form, and write as I tell thee."
For ten minutes Mathilde wrote rapidly, and then spread the results of
her exertions out before her, in the shape of two notes and a cablegram,
and read them aloud triumphantly. The first note was directed to
Monsieur Charles Chapuis, at the Hôtel du Rhin, place Vendôme:--
"If Monsieur Chapuis is a man of honor," it ran briefly, "he will break
all engagements, however important, for this evening, and present
himself chez Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier at seven o'clock, on a
matter intimately touching the good fame of his family. The sister of
Monsieur, Mademoiselle Louise Chapuis, is chez Mademoiselle de Poirier."
The second note was addressed to Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau, at 27
bis, rue de la Faisanderie.
"A friend advises Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau that Monsieur Charles
Chapuis dines with Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier this evening at
half past seven."
And the cablegram was to Señor Miguel Cevasco, Reconquista 21,
Buenos-Ayres, République Argentine.
"19 rides in the carriage of 52. 26."
The point of which observation lay in the fact that Dodo confessed to
nineteen, and Señor Miguel to fifty-two, and Gabrielle to twenty-six.
It was a bold play, and one foredoomed to failure unless each link in
the chain held true. But Mademoiselle de Poirier was no novice, and
experience had long since taught her that success is the child of
audacity; so, ten minutes later, Achille was speeding, in one cab,
toward the place Vendôme, pausing only at the bureau de télégraphe on
the corner of the rue Pierre Charron and the avenue Marceau, and
Mathilde was speeding in another toward the rue de la Faisanderie: and
Gabrielle herself was making life not worth living for Louis, her
long-suffering maître-d'hôtel.
The upshot of this triple commotion was that, as the clock on her mantel
struck seven, Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier was posing on a
chaise-longue in correct imitation of David's "Madame Récamier," except
for a wonderful black gown, when Achille announced Monsieur Charles
Chapuis.
Dodo entered the room in immaculate evening dress, but with a touch of
embarrassment in his manner which betrayed his years. He was good to
look upon, was Dodo, tall, straight, and slight, with the ruddy olive
skin, the firm, square fling of chest and shoulder, the narrowness of
waist, and the confident swing of long, slender, but sinewy legs with
which one is blessed at nineteen in Bouches-du-Rhône. Gabrielle, taking
note of him from under her covert, languid lids, was compelled, for
once, to mental candor.
"I comprehend Thaïs," she said to herself, but to Dodo, "Monsieur, I
felicitate you. You have the true spirit of chivalry."
"My sister"--began Dodo.
"Is, no doubt, at the Hôtel de Choiseuil," answered Gabrielle, coolly,
fanning herself. "In any event she is not here. Oh, she _was_ here--yes;
but she had gone--gone _before_ I sent you the note. Be seated,
monsieur."
Dodo selected a chair, dropped into it, and awaited developments in
silence. Six weeks before, he would have demanded in a passion the
meaning of this subterfuge. But whatever might be said of La Belle
Thaïs, one learned diplomacy in her company.
"You are surprised, monsieur!"
"I am infinitely surprised, madame," he agreed, with charming candor.
"Shall we be frank with each other?" asked Gabrielle, pleasantly.
"I think it is the only way," said Dodo. "Eh bien, I am infinitely
surprised, madame; first, to see my sister's name in connection with
yours at all, and, second, to find that you have been lying to me."
"She came to ask me to rescue you from the toils of Thaïs de
Trémonceau."
Despite his elaborate self-control, Dodo flushed crimson.
"I think we had best drop the discussion here," he said, rising. "There
can be no possible profit in continuing it. If my sister was here at
all"--
"Her card is there on the table," put in Gabrielle, pointing with her
fan.
"Pardon. I should not have permitted myself the insinuation. I accept
your statement, and simply say that it was an unwarrantable intrusion on
her part. For you, madame, I have only admiration. Your compliance"--
"It was not that," said Gabrielle, shortly. "I can conceive of nothing
less important to me than your sister's wishes. But I dislike
Mademoiselle de Trémonceau."
"That," said Dodo, with exaggerated courtesy, "can only be a matter of
opinion. _I_ admire Mademoiselle de Trémonceau enormously."
"The force of admiration is undoubtedly strong," snapped Gabrielle, "to
reconcile you to riding in another man's carriage, drinking another
man's wine, dawdling with another man's"--
"Assez!" said Dodo.
Gabrielle shrugged her shoulders.
"Quite right," she said. "You are old enough to see for yourself. I
presume you will not return to her."
"On the contrary, I shall be with her in fifteen minutes."
In the distance an electric bell whirred.
"Sooner than that, I think," smiled Gabrielle, and then La Belle Thaïs
was standing at the salon door. She was gowned in scarlet, with a poppy
flaring in her hair, and, if she had but lent to her dance at the Folies
but half the fury of that entrance, the manager would, no doubt, have
tripled her already ample salary. And, at the instant of her
appearance, as if by signal,--which indeed it was,--Louis flung wide the
opposite door, with a stately "Monsieur et madame sont servis," and
there, gleaming with spotless napery, silver shaded candlesticks, and
shimmering cut glass, was the daintiest of tables, set for two!
What Thaïs did and what she said, this is not the time or place to
detail. She was not wanting in vocabulary, the de Trémonceau, nor
sparing thereof in an emergency. A decade of careful training fell from
her like a discarded mantle, and she became in an instant the
vulgar-tongued fleuriste of the boulevards. From her chaise-longue
Gabrielle smiled calmly, the picture of a new Circe, rejoicing in the
success of her spells. And, between the two, Dodo, his hands clenched
until the knuckles shone white, turned sick with contempt and loathing.
At the end Thaïs flung him an unspeakable taunt, and there was a pause.
Then,--
"Do you play the black or the red, monsieur?" asked Gabrielle, sweetly,
with a glance at her own gown and another at the de Trémonceau's.
Dodo let his eyes run slowly, contemptuously, from the topmost ripple
of her bronze hair to the point of her satin slipper, with the
felicitous inspiration of seeming to take stock of her charms and to be
not over-pleased therewith. Then,--
"I continue my game, madame!" he said. "I play the red."
It was the last, faint cry of youthful chivalry, disillusioned, blotted
out, and it was wasted on Thaïs de Trémonceau.
"Tu penses, salaud!" she broke in, with a laugh. "Well, then, thou art
well mistaken. Rien ne va plus!"
"He will come back to me!" she cried to her rival, as the door closed
behind him.
"Perhaps," agreed Gabrielle, "but only to leave you again, in a fashion
more mortifying for him and more calamitous for you. I sent a cable to
Buenos Ayres this afternoon."
She was deliberately flinging away the aforementioned source of income,
for the sake of seeing a certain expression on the face of La Belle
Thaïs. But when she saw it, she was well content. For the honors were no
longer even.
On the avenue Kléber, Dodo hailed the first cab that passed, and
flinging a curt "Hôtel de Choiseuil--au galop!" to the cocher, blotted
himself into one corner, and covered his face with his hands.
"It was my first, but it shall be my last confidence in woman," he said.
It was neither strictly original nor strictly true, this, but it showed
progress.
For there is such a thing as diplomacy and there is such a thing as
luck, and the fact that his sister had not an atom of the former made no
difference whatever in the tuition of Dodo Chapuis.
[Illustration]
Le Pochard
HIS applicability was evident to the mind of Jean Fraissigne from the
moment when the camelot placed Le Pochard on a table in front of the
Taverne, and he proceeded to go through his ridiculous pretense of
drinking from the cup in his left hand which he filled from the bottle
in his right. Jean, who was dawdling over a demi, and watching the
familiar ebb and flow of life on the Boul' Miche', was at first
passively pleased at the distraction provided by the appearance of the
toy, and then, of a sudden, consumedly absorbed in the progress of his
operations. For what was plain to any but a blind man was the fact that
Le Pochard was the precise counterfeit of Jean's friend and comrade,
Grégoire--Grégoire, with his flat-brimmed hat, and his loose working
blouse, and his loud checked trousers--Grégoire, hélas! with his flushed
face, and his tremulous hands, and his unsteady walk, as Jean had seen
him a hundred times!
Le Pochard staggered to and fro upon the marble-topped table, nodding
maudlinly, and alternately filling his cup and raising it uncertainly to
his expressionless face. At last, weakened by his exertions, he passed
one arm through the handle of Jean's demi, hesitated, and then leaned
heavily against the glass and stood motionless, with his topheavy head
bent forward, and his eyes fixed on the price-mark upon the saucer
below. This eloquent manoeuvre, so unspeakably appealing, determined the
future ownership of Le Pochard. Jean purchased him upon the spot, and
bore him off in triumph to the rue de Seine, as an object lesson for
Grégoire Caubert.