Twenty-four hours later Selby had completely forgotten Rue Barrée.
During the week he worked with might and main at the studio, and
Saturday night found him so tired that he went to bed before dinner and
had a nightmare about a river of yellow ochre in which he was drowning.
Sunday morning, apropos of nothing at all, he thought of Rue Barrée,
and ten seconds afterwards he saw her. It was at the flower-market on
the marble bridge. She was examining a pot of pansies. The gardener had
evidently thrown heart and soul into the transaction, but Rue Barrée
shook her head.
It is a question whether Selby would have stopped then and there to
inspect a cabbage-rose had not Clifford unwound for him the yarn of
the previous Tuesday. It is possible that his curiosity was piqued,
for with the exception of a hen-turkey, a boy of nineteen is the most
openly curious biped alive. From twenty until death he tries to conceal
it. But, to be fair to Selby, it is also true that the market was
attractive. Under a cloudless sky the flowers were packed and heaped
along the marble bridge to the parapet. The air was soft, the sun
spun a shadowy lacework among the palms and glowed in the hearts of a
thousand roses. Spring had come,—was in full tide. The watering carts
and sprinklers spread freshness over the Boulevard, the sparrows had
become vulgarly obtrusive, and the credulous Seine angler anxiously
followed his gaudy quill floating among the soapsuds of the lavoirs.
The white-spiked chestnuts clad in tender green vibrated with the
hum of bees. Shoddy butterflies flaunted their winter rags among the
heliotrope. There was a smell of fresh earth in the air, an echo of
the woodland brook in the ripple of the Seine, and swallows soared and
skimmed among the anchored river craft. Somewhere in a window a caged
bird was singing its heart out to the sky.
Selby looked at the cabbage-rose and then at the sky. Something in
the song of the caged bird may have moved him, or perhaps it was that
dangerous sweetness in the air of May.
At first he was hardly conscious that he had stopped, then he was
scarcely conscious why he had stopped, then he thought he would move
on, then he thought he wouldn’t, then he looked at Rue Barrée.
The gardener said, “Mademoiselle, this is undoubtedly a fine pot of
pansies.”
Rue Barrée shook her head.
The gardener smiled. She evidently did not want the pansies. She had
bought many pots of pansies there, two or three every spring, and never
argued. What did she want then? The pansies were evidently a feeler
toward a more important transaction. The gardener rubbed his hands and
gazed about him.
“These tulips are magnificent,” he observed, “and these hyacinths—” He
fell into a trance at the mere sight of the scented thickets.
“That,” murmured Rue, pointing to a splendid rose-bush with her furled
parasol, but in spite of her, her voice trembled a little. Selby
noticed it, more shame to him that he was listening, and the gardener
noticed it, and, burying his nose in the roses, scented a bargain.
Still, to do him justice, he did not add a centime to the honest value
of the plant, for after all, Rue was probably poor, and any one could
see she was charming.
“Fifty francs, Mademoiselle.”
The gardener’s tone was grave. Rue felt that argument would be wasted.
They both stood silent for a moment. The gardener did not eulogize his
prize,—the rose-tree was gorgeous and any one could see it.
“I will take the pansies,” said the girl, and drew two francs from
a worn purse. Then she looked up. A tear-drop stood in the way
refracting the light like a diamond, but as it rolled into a little
corner by her nose a vision of Selby replaced it, and when a brush of
the handkerchief had cleared the startled blue eyes, Selby himself
appeared, very much embarrassed. He instantly looked up into the sky,
apparently devoured with a thirst for astronomical research, and as
he continued his investigations for fully five minutes, the gardener
looked up too, and so did a policeman. Then Selby looked at the tips of
his boots, the gardener looked at him and the policeman slouched on.
Rue Barrée had been gone some time.
“What,” said the gardener, “may I offer Monsieur?”
Selby never knew why, but he suddenly began to buy flowers. The
gardener was electrified. Never before had he sold so many flowers,
never at such satisfying prices, and never, never with such absolute
unanimity of opinion with a customer. But he missed the bargaining, the
arguing, the calling of Heaven to witness. The transaction lacked spice.
“These tulips are magnificent!”
“They are!” cried Selby warmly.
“But alas, they are dear.”
“I will take them.”
“Dieu!” murmured the gardener in a perspiration, “he’s madder than most
Englishmen.”
“This cactus—”
“Is gorgeous!”
“Alas—”
“Send it with the rest.”
The gardener braced himself against the river wall.
“That splendid rose-bush,” he began faintly.
“That is a beauty. I believe it is fifty francs—”
He stopped, very red. The gardener relished his confusion. Then a
sudden cool self-possession took the place of his momentary confusion
and he held the gardener with his eye, and bullied him.
“I’ll take that bush. Why did not the young lady buy it?”
“Mademoiselle is not wealthy.”
“How do you know?”
“_Dame_, I sell her many pansies; pansies are not expensive.”
“Those are the pansies she bought?”
“These, Monsieur, the blue and gold.”
“Then you intend to send them to her?”
“At mid-day after the market.”
“Take this rose-bush with them, and”—here he glared at the
gardener—“don’t you dare say from whom they came.” The gardener’s eyes
were like saucers, but Selby, calm and victorious, said: “Send the
others to the Hôtel du Sénat, 7 rue de Tournon. I will leave directions
with the concierge.”
Then he buttoned his glove with much dignity and stalked off, but
when well around the corner and hidden from the gardener’s view, the
conviction that he was an idiot came home to him in a furious blush.
Ten minutes later he sat in his room in the Hôtel du Sénat repeating
with an imbecile smile: “What an ass I am, what an ass!”
An hour later found him in the same chair, in the same position, his
hat and gloves still on, his stick in his hand, but he was silent,
apparently lost in contemplation of his boot toes, and his smile was
less imbecile and even a bit retrospective.