seated I will inform the master."
The post was not filled, then. Annette sat down, let the wasp-hued
flunkey pass out of sight, and looked round at the room in which she
found herself. It was here, evidently, that the function of
"reception" was accomplished. The manservant admitted the client; one
rose from one's place at the little inlaid desk in the alcove and
rustled forward across the gleaming parquet, with pleased and
deferential alacrity to bid Monsieur or Madame welcome, to offer a
chair and the incense of one's interest and delight in service. One
added oneself to the quality of the big, still apartment, with its
antique furniture, its celebrities and notorieties pictured upon its
walls, its great chandelier, a-shiver with glass lusters hanging
overhead like an aerial iceberg. No noises entered from the street;
here, the business of being photographed was magnified to a
solemnity; one drugged one's victim with pomp before leading him to
the camera.
"I could do it," thought Annette. "I'm sure I could do it. I could
fit into all this like a like a snail into a shell. I'd want shoes
that didn't slide on the parquet; and then oh, if only this comes
off!"
A small noise behind her made her turn quickly. The door by which the
footman had departed was concealed by a portiere of heavy velvet; a
hand had moved it aside and a face was looking round the edge of it
at her. As she turned, the owner of it came forward into the room,
and she rose.
"Be seated, be seated!" protested the newcomer in a high emasculate
voice, and she sat down again obediently upon the little
spindle-legged Empire settee from which she had risen.
"And you have come in consequence of the advertisement?" said the man
with a little giggle. "Yes; yes! We will see, then!"
He stood in front of her, half-way across the room, staring at her.
He was a man somewhere in the later thirties, wearing the velvet
jacket, the cascading necktie, the throat-revealing collar, and the
overlong hair which the conventions of the theatre have established
as the livery of the artist. The details of this grotesque foppery
presented themselves to Annette only vaguely; it was at the man
himself as he straddled in the middle of the polished floor, staring
at her, that she gazed with a startled attention a face like the
feeble and idiot countenance of an old sheep, with the same flattened
length of nose and the same weakly demoniac touch in the curve and
slack hang of the wide mouth. It was not that he was merely ugly or
queer to the view; it seemed to Annette that she was suddenly in the
presence of something monstrous and out of the course of Nature. His
eyes, narrow and seemingly colorless, regarded her with a fatuous
complacency.
She flushed and moved in her seat under his long scrutiny. The
creature sighed.
"Yes," he said, always in the same high, dead voice. "You satisfy the
eye, mademoiselle. For me, that is already much, since it is as an
artist that I consider you first. And your age?"
She told him. He asked further questions, of her previous employment,
her nationality, and so forth, putting them perfunctorily as though
they were matters of no moment, and never removing his narrow eyes
from her face. Then, with short sliding steps, he came across the
parquet and sat down beside her on the Empire settee.
Annette backed to the end of it and sat defensively on the edge,
facing the strange being. He, crossing his thin legs, leaned with an
arm extended along the back of the settee and his long,
large-knuckled hand hanging limp. His sheep's face lay over on his
shoulder towards her; in that proximity its quality of feeble
grotesqueness was enhanced. It was like sitting in talk with a sick
ape.
"Curiouser and curiouser!" quoted Annette to herself. "I ought to
wake up next and find he really doesn't exist."
"Mademoiselle!" The creature began to speak again. "You are the ninth
who has come hither today seeking the post I have advertised. Some I
rejected because they failed to conciliate my eye; I cannot, you will
understand, be tormented by a presence which jars my sense."
He paused to hear her agree.
"And the others?" inquired Annette.
"A-ah!" The strange being sighed. "The others in each case, what a
disappointment! Girls beautiful, of a personality subdued and
harmonious, capable of taking their places in my environment without
doing violence to its completeness; but lacking the plastic and
responsive quality which the hand of the artist should find in his
material. Resistant they were resistant, mademoiselle, every one of
them."
"Silly of them," said Annette briefly. She was meeting the secret
stare of his half-closed eyes quite calmly now; she was beginning to
understand the furtive satire in the regard of the smooth footman who
had admitted each of those eight others in turn and seen their later
departure. "What was it they wouldn't do?" she inquired.
"Do!" The limp hand flapped despairingly; the thin voice ran shrill.
"I required nothing of them. One enters; I view her; I seat myself at
her side as I sit now with you; I seek in talk to explore her
resources of sentiment, of temperament, of sympathy. Perhaps I take
her hand" As though to illustrate the recital, his long hand dropped
suddenly and seized hers. He ceased to talk, surveying her with a
scared shrewdness.
Annette smiled, letting her hand lie where it was. She was not in the
least afraid; she had forgotten for the moment the barrenness of the
streets that awaited her outside, and the fact that she had come to
the end of her hopes.
"And they objected to that?" she inquired sweetly.
"Ah, but you." He was making ready to hitch closer along the seat,
and she was prepared for him.
"Oh, I'd let you hold them both if that were all," she replied. "But
it isn't all, is it?"
She smiled again at the perplexity in his face; his hands slackened
and withdrew slowly. "You haven't told me what salary you are
offering," she reminded him.
"Mademoiselle you, too?"
She nodded. "I, too," she said, and rose. The man on the settee
groaned and heaved his shoulders theatrically; she stood, viewing in
quiet curiosity that countenance of impotent vileness. Other failures
had left her with a sense of defenselessness in a world so largely
populated by men who glanced up from their desks to refuse her plea
for work. But now she had resources of power over fate and
circumstance; the streets, the night, the river, whatever of fear and
destruction the future held, could neither daunt nor compel her. She
could go out to meet them, free and victorious.
"Mademoiselle!" The man on the settee bleated at her.
She shook her head at him. It was not worth while to speak. She went
to the door and opened it for herself; the smooth manservant was
deprived of the spectacle of her departure.
She went slowly down the wide stairs. "Nine of us," she was thinking.
"Nine girls, and not one of us was what did he call it? plastic. I'm
not really alone in the world, after all."
But it was very like being alone in the world to go slowly, with
tired feet, along the perspectives of the streets, to turn corners
aimlessly, to wander on with no destination or purpose. There was yet
money in the old purse a single broad five-franc piece; it would
linger out her troubles for her till to-morrow.
She would need to eat, and her room at Madame Mardel's would come to
three francs; she did not mean to occupy it any longer than she could
pay for it. And then the morning would find her penniless in
actuality.
Her last turning brought her out to the arches of the Rue de Rivoli;
across the way the trees of the Tuileries Gardens lifted their green
to the afternoon sunlight. She hesitated; then crossed the wide road
towards the gardens, her thoughts still hovering about the five-franc
piece.
"It's a case for riotous living," she told herself, as she passed in
to the smooth paths beneath the trees. "Five francs' worth of real
dinner or something like that. Only I'm not feeling very riotous just
now."
What she felt was that the situation had to be looked at, but that
looking at it could not improve it. Things had come to an end; food
to eat, a bed to sleep in, the mere bare essentials of life had
ceased, and she had not an idea of what came next; how one entered
upon the process of starving to death in the streets. Passers-by,
strolling under the trees, glanced at her as she passed them,
preoccupied and unseeing, a neat, comely little figure of a girl in
her quiet clothes with her still composed face. She went slowly;
there was a seat which she knew of farther on, overshadowed by a lime
tree, where she meant to rest and put her thoughts in order; but
already at the back of her mind there had risen, vague as night,
oppressive as pain, tainting her disquiet with its presence, the hint
of a consciousness that, after all, one does not starve to death pas
si bete! One takes a shorter way.
A lean youth, with a black cotton cap pulled forward over one eye,
who had been lurking near, saw the jerk with which she lifted her
head as that black inspiration was clear to her, and the sudden
coldness and courage of her face, and moved away uneasily.
"Ye-es," said Annette slowly. "Ye-es! And now Ghh!"
A bend in the path had brought her suddenly to the seat under the
lime tree; she was within a couple of paces of it before she
perceived that it had already its occupant the long figure of a young
man who sprawled back with his face upturned to the day and slumbered
with all that disordered and unbeautiful abandon which goes with
daylight sleep. His head had fallen over on one shoulder; his mouth
was open; his hands, grimy and large, showed half shut in his lap.
There was a staring patch of black sticking plaster at the side of
his chin; his clothes, that were yet decent, showed stains here and
there; his face, young and slackened in sleep, was burned brick-red
by exposure. The whole figure of him, surrendered to weariness in
that unconscious and uncaring sprawl, seemed suddenly to answer her
question this was what happened next; this was the end unless one
found and took that shorter way.
"They walk till they can't walk any longer; then they sleep on
benches. I could never do that!"
She stood for some seconds longer, staring at the sleeping man.
Resolution, bitter as grief, mounted in her like a tide. "No, it
shan't come to that with me!" she cried inwardly. "Lounging with my
mouth open for anyone to stare at! No!"
She turned, head up, body erect, face set strongly, and walked away.
Neither sheep-faced human grotesques in palatial offices nor all
Paris and its civilization should make her other than she wished to
be. She stepped out defiantly and stopped short.
The old purse was in her hand; through its flabby sides she could
feel with her fingers the single five-franc piece which it yet
contained. Somehow, that had to be disposed of or provided for; five
francs was a serious matter to Annette. She looked round; the man in
the seat was still sleeping.
Treading quietly, she went back to him, taking the coin from her
purse as she went. Upon his right side his coat pocket bulged open;
she could see that in it was a little wad of folded papers. "His
testimonials poor fellow!" she breathed. Carefully she leaned forward
and let the broad coin slip into the pocket among the papers. Then,
with an end of a smile twisted into the set of her lips, she turned
again and departed. Among the trees the lean youth in the black
cotton cap watched her go.
A day that culminates in sleep upon a bench in a public place is
commonly a day that has begun badly and maintained its character. In
this case it may be said to have begun soon after nine A.M. when a
young man in worn tweed clothes and carrying a handkerchief pressed
to his jaw, stepped out from a taxi and into that drug-store which is
nearest to the Gare de Lyon. The bald, bland chemist who presides
there has a regular practice in the treatment of razor-cuts acquired
through shaving in the train; he looked up serenely across his
glass-topped counter.
"Good morning, monsieur," he said. "A little cut yes?"
Young Raleigh gazed at him across the handkerchief.
"No! A thundering great gash," he answered with emphasis. "I want
something to patch it up with."
"Certainly certainly!" The bald apothecary had the airs of a family
physician; he smiled soothingly. "We shall find something. Let me now
see the cut!"
Raleigh protruded his face across the soaps and the bottles of
perfume, and the apothecary rose on tiptoe to scrutinize the wound.
The razor had got home on the edge of the jaw with a scraping cut
that bled handsomely.
"Ah!" The bald man nodded, and sought a bottle. "A little of this" he
was damping a rag of lint with the contents of the bottle "as a
cleansing agent first. If monsieur will bend down a little so."
Daintily, with precision and delicacy, he proceeded to apply the
cleansing agent to the cut; at the first dab the patient leapt back
with an exclamation.
"Confound you!" he cried. "This stuff burns like fire."
"It will pass in a moment," soothed the chemist. "And now, a little
patch, and all will be well."
His idea of a suitable dressing was two inches of stiff and shiny
black plaster that gripped at the skin like a barnacle and looked
like a tragedy. Raleigh surveyed the effect of it in a show-case
mirror gloomily.
"I wonder you didn't put it in a sling while you were about it," he
remarked ungratefully. "People'll think I've been trying to cut my
throat."
"Monsieur should grow a beard," counseled the chemist as he handed
him his change.
Raleigh grunted, disdaining, retort, and passed forth to his waiting
cab. The day had commenced inauspiciously. The night before, smoking
his final cigarette in his upper berth in the wagon-lit, he had
tempted Providence by laying out for himself a programme and a time
schedule; and it looked as if Providence had been unable to resist
the temptation. The business of the firm in which he was junior
partner had taken him to Zurich; he had given himself a week's
holiday in the mountains, and was now on his way back to London. The
train was due to land him in Paris at half-past eight in the morning,
and his plans were clear. First, a taxi to the Cafe de la Paix and
breakfast there under the awning while the day ripened towards the
hours of business; then a small cigar and a stroll along the
liveliness of the boulevard to the offices of the foundry company,
where a heart-to-heart talk with the manager would clear up several
little matters which were giving trouble. Afterwards, a taxi across
the river and a call upon the machine-tool people, get their report
upon the new gear-steels and return to the Gare du Nord in time to
catch the two o'clock train for Calais.
He had settled the order of it to his satisfaction before he pulled
the shade over the lamp and turned over to sleep; and then, next
morning, he had gashed himself while shaving, and the train was forty
minutes late.
"These clothes" there was a narrow slip of mirror between the front
windows of the taxi which reflected him, a section at a time "these
clothes 'ud pass," he considered gloomily, considering their worn and
unbusinesslike quality. "But with this" his fingers explored his chin
"folks'll think we only do business between sprees."
The manager of the foundry company was a French engineer who had been
trained in Pittsburg, a Frenchman of the new style, whose silky
sweetness of manner was the mask of a steely tenacity of purpose. He
had a little devilish black moustache, waxed at the points, like an
earl of melodrama, and with it a narrow cheerless smile that jeered
into futility Raleigh's effort to handle the subject on a basis of
easy good fellowship. The heart-to-heart talk degenerated into a keen
business controversy, involving the consultation of letter-files; it
took more time than Raleigh had to spare; and in the end nothing was
settled.
"You catch the airly train to London?" inquired the manager amiably,
when Raleigh was leaving.
"Yes," replied Raleigh warmly. "I'm going to get out of this while
I've got my fare left."
"Bon voyage," said the Frenchman smilingly. "You will present my
compliments to your father?"
"Not me," retorted Raleigh. "I'm not going to let him know I saw
you."
The machine-tool people, to whom his next visit was due, were
established south of the river, a long drive from the boulevards.
They were glad to receive him; there was a difficulty with some of
the new steels, and they took him into the shops that he might see
and appreciate the matter for himself. In the end it was necessary
for Raleigh to reset the big turret lathe and demonstrate the manner
of working, standing to the machine in his ancient tweed clothes
nobody offered him overalls while the swift belting slatted at his
elbow and fragments of shaved steel and a fine spray of oil welcomed
him back to his trade. The good odor of metal, the engine-room smell,
filled his nostrils; he was doing the thing which he could do best;
it was not till it was finished that he looked at his watch and
realized that the last item of his time-table had gone the way of the
first, and he had missed the two o'clock train.
He paid off his return cab in the Place de la Concorde and stood
doubtfully on the curb, watching it skate away with the traffic. His
baggage had gone on by the two o'clock train; he was committed now to
an afternoon in those ancient clothes with the oily stigma of the
workshop upon them. His hands, too, were black from his work; he had
slept badly in the train and done without a bath. In the soft
sunlight that rained upon those brilliant streets he felt foul and
unsightly.
He yawned, between a certain afternoon drowsiness and a languid
depression.
"I'll wander up to the Meurice an' get a wash, anyhow," he decided,
and turned to stroll through the Tuileries Gardens towards the hotel.
He went slowly; it was pleasant among the trees, and when a seat in
the shadows offered itself he sank down into it.
"I'll sleep all right in the train to-night," he thought, shoving
back his cap.
There were children playing somewhere out of sight; their voices came
to him in an agreeable tinkle. He crossed one leg over the other and
settled himself more comfortably; he had plenty of time to spare now.
His eyes closed restfully.
The touch that roused him was a very gentle one, scarcely more than a
ghost of a sensation, the mere brush of a dexterous hand that slid as
quietly as a shadow along the edge of his jacket pocket and groped
into it with long clever fingers, while its owner, sitting beside him
on the bench, gazed meditatively before him with an air of complete
detachment from that skilled felonious hand. Raleigh, waking without
moving, was able for a couple of seconds to survey his neighbor, a
slim white-faced youth with a black cotton cap slouched forward over
one eye. Then, swiftly, he caught the exploring hand by the wrist and
sat up.
"Your mistake," he said crisply. "There's nothing but old letters in
that pocket."
The youth at the first alarm tried to wrench loose, writhing in
startled effort like a pronged snake, with all his smooth, vicious
face clenched in violent fear. Raleigh gave a twisting jerk to the
skinny wrist and the struggle was over; the lad uttered a yelp and
collapsed back on the seat.
"Be good," warned Raleigh in easy French; "be good, or I'll beat you,
d'you hear?"
The youth sniffed, staring at him with eyes in which a mere foolish
fear was giving place to cunning. He was a creature flimsy as paper,
a mere lithe skinful of bones, in whom the wit of the thief supplied
the place of strength. He was making now his hasty estimate of the
man he had to deal with.
"Well," demanded Raleigh, "what have you got to say for yourself?"
"Monsieur!" the youth struck into an injured whine. "I meant no harm,
but I was desperate; I have not eaten today" his eyes noted the
amused contempt on Raleigh's face, and he poised an instant like a
man taking aim "and when I saw the lady slip the money into
monsieur's pocket while he slept, and reflected that he would never
even know that he had lost it."
"Eh?" Raleigh sat up. The thief suppressed a smile. "What lady,
espece de fourneau? What are you talking about?"
"It's not a minute ago," replied the youth, discarding the whine.
"See, she is perhaps not out of sight yet, if monsieur will look
along the path. No, there she goes that one!"
His hand was free now; he was using it to point with; but he made no
attempt to escape.
"She approached monsieur while he slept, walking cautiously, and
slipped the money it was a five-franc piece, I think into his pocket.
Yes, monsieur, that was the pocket."
He smiled patronizingly as Raleigh plunged a hand into the pocket in
question, fumbled among the papers there, and drew out the coin and
stared at it. He had the situation in hand now; he could get rid of
this strong young man as soon as he pleased.
"She is going out of the gate now, monsieur," he said.
Raleigh turned. At the farther end of the path the woman who had been
pointed out to him was close to the exit; in a few seconds more she
would be gone. He could see of her nothing save her back that and a
certain quality of carriage, a gait measured and deliberate.
He threw a word to the thief, who stood by with his hands in his
pockets and an air of relishing the situation. "All right; you can
go," he said, and started upon the chase of the secret bestower of
alms.
"And me?" the outraged thief cried after him in tones of bitterness.
"And me? I get nothing, then?"
The serge-clad back was disappearing through the gates into the
welter of sunlight without; Raleigh gathered up his feet and sprinted
along the tree shaded path. He was going to understand this business.
He picked up the view of the serge-clad back again, walking towards
the bridge, hastened after it and slowed down to its own pace when he
was still some ten yards behind.
"Why, it's a girl!"
Somehow, he had counted upon finding an elderly woman, some
charitable eccentric who acquired merit by secret gifts. He saw,
instead, a slim girl, neatly and quietly clad, whose profile, as she
glanced across the parapet of the bridge, showed pearl-pale in the
shadow of her hat, with a simple and almost childlike prettiness of
feature. There was something else, too, a quality of the whole which
Raleigh, who did not deal in fine shades, had no words to describe to
himself. But he saw it, nevertheless a gravity, a character of sad
and tragic composure, that look of defeat which is prouder than any
victory; it waked his imagination.
"Something wrong!" he said to himself vaguely, and continued to
follow.
At the southern end of the bridge she turned her back to the sun and
went east along the quay where the second-hand booksellers lounged
beside their wares. She neither hurried nor slackened that deliberate
pace of hers; Raleigh, keeping well behind, his wits at work acutely,
wondered what it reminded him of, that slow trudge over the
pavements. It was when the booksellers were left behind that an
incident enlightened him.
She stopped for a minute and leaned upon the parapet; he crossed the
road to be out of sight in case she should look back. She had been
carrying in her hand a purse, and now he saw her open it and
apparently search its interior, but idly and without interest as
though she knew already what to expect of it. Then she closed it and
tossed it over the parapet into the river.
"Ah!" Sudden comprehension rushed upon him; he knew now what that
slow, aimless gait suggested to him. He recalled evenings in London,
when he walked or drove through the lit streets and saw, here and
there, the figures of those homeless ones who walked walked always,
straying forward in a footsore progress till the night should be ripe
for them to sit down in some corner. And then, that shadow in her
face, that mouth, tight-held but still drooping; her way of looking
at the river! His hand, in his pocket, closed over the five-franc
piece which she had dropped there; he started across the road to
accost her forthwith, but at that moment she moved on again, and once
more he fell into step behind her.