[Illustration: "I HAVE WAITED ALL MY LIFE FOR THIS"]
MAX
A NOVEL
BY
KATHERINE CECIL THURSTON
AUTHOR OF
"THE MASQUERADER"
"THE GAMBLER" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANK CRAIG
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMX
Published September, 1910.
ILLUSTRATIONS
"I HAVE WAITED ALL MY LIFE FOR THIS"
STANDING AGAIN IN THE OUTER COURT OF A HOUSE IN PETERSBURG
TWO SOULS, DRAWN TOGETHER, TOUCHED IN A FIRST SUBTLE FUSION
"WHY, BOY, THIS IS CLEVER--CLEVER--CLEVER!"
THE IMPRESSION OF A MYSTERY FLOWED BACK UPON HIM
"LOOK! THIS IS WHAT I SHALL DO. THIS!"
THE COMPLETE SEMBLANCE OF THE WOMAN
"_C'EST LA VIE! L'ETERNELLE, LA TOUTE-PUISSANTE VIE!_"
PART I
MAX
CHAPTER I
A night journey is essentially a thing of possibilities. To those who
count it as mere transit, mere linking of experiences, it is, of course,
a commonplace; but to the imaginative, who by gift divine see a picture
in every cloud, a story behind every shadow, it suggests
romance--romance in the very making.
Such a vessel of inspiration was the powerful north express as it
thundered over the sleeping plains of Germany and France on its night
journey from Cologne to Paris. A thing of possibilities indeed, with its
varying human freight--stolid Teutons, hard-headed Scandinavians, Slavs
whom expediency or caprice had forced to descend upon Paris across the
sea of ice. It was the month of January, and an unlikely and unlovely
night for long and arduous travel. There were few pleasure-passengers on
the express, and if one could have looked through the carriage windows,
blurred with damp mist, one would have seen upon almost every face the
look--resigned or resolute--of those who fare forth by necessity rather
than by choice. In the sleeping-cars all the berths were occupied, but
here and them throughout the length of the train an occasional traveller
slept on the seat of his carriage, wrapped in coats and rugs, while in
the dining-saloon a couple of sleepy waiters lurched to and fro in
attendance upon a party of three men whose energy precluded the thought
of wasting even the night hours and who were playing cards at one of the
small tables. Up and down the whole overheated, swaying train there was
the suggestion of mystery, of contrast and effect, and the twinkling
eyes of the electric lamps seemed to wink from behind their drawn hoods
as though they, worldly wise and watchful, saw the individuality--the
inevitable story--behind the drowsy units who sat or lay or lounged
unguarded beneath them.
In one carriage, the fifth or sixth from the thundering engine, these
lights winked and even laughed one to the other each time the train
lurched over the points, and the dark, shrouding hoods quivered,
allowing a glimpse at the occupant of the compartment.
It was the figure of a boy upon which the twinkling lamp-eyes
flickered--a boy who had as yet scarce passed the barrier of manhood,
for the skin of the face was clean and smooth, and the limbs, seen
vaguely under a rough overcoat, had the freedom and supple grace that
belongs to early youth.
He was sleeping, this solitary traveller--one hand under his head, the
other instinctively guarding something that lay deep and snug in the
pocket of his overcoat. His attitude was relaxed, but not entirely
abandoned to the solace of repose; even in his sleep a something of
self-consciousness seemed to cling to him--a need for caution that lay
near to the surface of his drowsing senses--for once or twice he
started, once or twice his straight, dark eyebrows twitched into a
frown, once or twice his fingers tightened nervously upon their
treasure. He was subconsciously aware that, deserted though the
compartment was, it yet exhaled an alien suggestion, embodied in the
rugs, the coats, the hand-baggage of the card-playing travellers, which
was heaped upon the seat opposite.
But, despite this physical uneasiness, he was dreaming as the train tore
along through the damp, peaceful country--dreaming with that odd
confusion of time and scene that follows upon keen excitement, stress of
feeling or stress of circumstance.
As he dreamed, he was standing again in the outer court of a house in
Petersburg--a house to which he was debtor for one night's shelter; it
was early morning and deadly cold. The whole picture was sharp as a cut
crystal--the triple court-yard, the stone pavement, the gray well, and
frozen pile of firewood. He saw, recognized, lost it, and knew himself
to be skimming down the Nevskiy Prospekt and across the Winter Palace
Square, where the great angel towers upon its rose-granite monument.
Forward, forward he was carried, along the bank of the frozen Neva and
over the Troitskiy bridge, the powdered snow stinging his face like
pinpoints as it flew up from the nails in his little horse's shoes. Then
followed a magnifying of the picture--massed buildings rising from the
snow--buildings gold and turquoise-domed, that, even as they
materialized, lost splendor and merged into the unpretentious frontage
of the Finland station.
The scroll of the dream unwound; the dreamer moved, easing his position,
shaking back a lock of dark hair that had fallen across his forehead. He
was no longer rocking to the power of the north express; he was standing
on the platform at the end of a little train that puffed out of the
Finland station--a primitive, miniature train, white with frost and
powdered with the ashes of its wood fuel. The vision came and passed a
sketch, not a picture--a suggestion of straight tracks, wide snow
plains, and the blue, misty blur of fir woods. Then a shifting, a
juggling of effects! Åbo, the Finnish port, painted itself upon his
imagination, and he was embarked upon the lonely sledge-drive, to the
harbor. He started in his sleep, shivered and sighed at that remembered
drive. The train passed over new points, the hoods of the lamps swayed,
the lights blinked and winked, and his mind swung onward in response to
the physical jar.
Åbo was obliterated. He was on board a ship--a ship ploughing her way
through the ice-fields as she neared Stockholm; salt sea air flicked his
nostrils, he heard the broken ice tearing the keel like a million files,
he was sensible of the crucial sensation--the tremendous quiver--as the
vessel slipped from her bondage into the cradle of the sea, a sentient
thing welcoming her own element!
The heart of the dreamer leaped to that strange sensation. He drew a
long, sharp breath, and sat up, suddenly awake. It was over and done
with--the coldness, the rigor, the region of ice bonds! The fingers of
the future beckoned to him; the promises of the future lapped his ears
as the waves had lapped the ship's sides.
He looked about him, at first excitedly, then confusedly, then a little
shamedfacedly, for we are always involuntarily shamed at being tricked
by our emotions into a false conception. Drawing his hand from his
coat-pocket, he stretched himself with an assumption of ease, as though
he saw and recognized the twinkle in the electric lamps and
spontaneously rose to its demands.
The train was flying forward at unabated speed. Outside, the raw January
air was clinging in a film to the carriage window; inside, the dim light
and overheated air made an artificial atmosphere, enervating or
stimulating according to the traveller's gifts. To this solitary voyager
stimulation was obviously the effect produced, for, try as he might
to cheat the inquisitive lamps, interest in every detail of his
surroundings was portrayed in his face, in the poise of his head, the
quickness of his glance as he gazed round the compartment, verifying the
impression that he was alone.
[Illustration: STANDING AGAIN IN THE OUTER COURT OF A HOUSE IN
PETERSBURG]
Yes, he was absolutely alone! Everything was as it had been when he
settled himself to sleep on the departure of the three strangers. There,
on the opposite seat, were their rugs, their fur-lined coats, their
illustrated papers--all the impedimenta of prosperous travellers; and
there, on the rack above them, was his own modest hand-bag without
initials or label--a common little bag that might have belonged to some
poor Russian clerk or held the possessions of some needy Polish student.
The owner's glance scanned and appraised it, then by suggestion fell to
the plain rough overcoat that covered him from his neck to the tops of
his high boots, and whose replica was to be seen any day in the meaner
streets of Petersburg or Moscow. Like the bag, it was a little strange,
a little incongruous in its comfortable surroundings--a little savoring
of mystery.
The traveller's pulses quickened, his being lifted to the moment, for in
his soul was the spark of adventure, in his eyes the adventurous
look--fearless, observant, questioning. In composition, in expression
and essence, this boy was that free and fascinating creature, the born
adventurer--high of courage, prodigal of emotion, capturer of the
world's loot.
The spirit within him shone out in the moment of solitude; he passed his
hands down the front, of his coat, revelling in its coarse texture; he
rose to his feet, turned to the sheet of gray, misted glass, and,
letting down the window, leaned out into the night.
The scene was vague and ghostly, but to eyes accustomed to northern
whiteness it was full of suggestion, full of secrecy; to nostrils
accustomed to keen, rarefied air there was something poignant and
delicious in the scent of turned earth, the savor of vegetation. He
could see little or nothing as the train rocked and the landscape tore
past, but the atmosphere spoke to him as it speaks to blind men,
penetrating his consciousness. Here were open spaces, tracts of country
fructifying for the spring to come. A land of promise--of growth--of
fulfilment!
He closed his eyes, living in the suggestion, and his spirit sped
forward with the onrush of the train. Somewhere beyond the darkness lay
the land of his desires! Somewhere behind the veil shone the lights of
Paris! With a quick, exulting excitement he laughed; but even as the
laugh was caught and scattered to the winds by the thunder of the
engine, his bearing changed, the excitement dropped from him, a mask of
immobility fell upon his face, and he wheeled round from the window. The
card-playing travellers had opened the door of the carriage.
From his shadowy corner the boy eyed them; and they, alert from their
game, slightly dazed by the darkness of the carriage, peered back at
him, frankly curious. When they had left the compartment he had been a
huddled figure demanding no attention; now he was awake and an
individual, and human nature prompted interest.
Each in turn looked at him, and at each new glance his coldness of
demeanor deepened; until, as the eldest of the party came down the
carriage and appropriated the seat beside him, he turned away, pulling
up the window with resentful haste.
"Don't do that!" said the third man, pausing in the doorway and speaking
in French easily and pleasantly. "Don't do that--if you want the air!"
The boy started and looked round.
"I thank you! But I do not need the air!"
The man smiled acquiescence, but as he stepped into the carriage he took
a sharp look at the boy's clothes--the common Russian clothes--and a
slightly questioning, slightly satirical expression crossed his face. He
was a man who knew his world the globe over, and in his bearing lurked
the toleration, the kindly scepticism that such knowledge breeds.
"As you please!" he said, settling himself comfortably in the corner by
the door, while the elder of his companions--a tall, spare
American--crossed his long legs and lighted a thin black cigar, and the
younger--a spruce young Englishman wearing an eye-glass and a small
mustache--wrapped himself in his rugs, took a clean pocket-handkerchief
from his dressing-case, and opened a large bundle of illustrated
papers--French, German, and English.
For a space the train rocked on. No one attempted to speak, and the
Russian boy continued to stand by the window, pretending to look through
the blurred panes, in reality wondering how he could with least
commotion pass down the carriage to his own vacated place.
At last the man with the long cigar broke the silence in a slow, cool
voice that betrayed his nationality.
"We're well on time, Blake," he remarked, drawing out his watch.
The youth by the window shot an involuntary, fleeting glance at the two
younger men, to see which would answer to the name; and the student of
human nature noted the fact that he understood English.
"Oh, it's a good service!" he acquiesced, the tolerant look--half
sceptical, half humorous--- passing again over his face.
"I don't know! I think we could do with another few kilometres to the
hour." The thin man studied his flat gold watch with the loving interest
of one to whom time is a sacred thing.
At this point the youngest of the three raised his head.
"Marvellous sight you have, McCutcheon! Wish I could see by this light!"
McCutcheon leaned forward, replacing his watch. "What! Can't you see
your picture-books? Let's have the blinkers off!" He rose, his long,
spidery figure stretching up like a grotesque shadow, but as his arm
went out to the nearest of the shrouded lamps he was compelled to draw
back against the seat of the carriage, and an exclamation of surprise
escaped him.
Without warning or apology the Russian boy had turned from the window,
and stepping down the carriage, had tumbled into his former seat,
hunching himself up with his face to the cushions and his back to his
fellow-travellers.
It was a sudden and an uncivil proceeding. The man called Blake smiled;
the Englishman shrugged his shoulders; the American, with a movement of
quiet determination, drew back the lamp hoods.
In the flood of light the carriage lost its air of mystery, and Blake,
who had a fancy for the mysterious, dropped back into his corner and
took out his cigar-case with a little feeling of regret. In traversing
the world's pathways, beaten or wild, he always made a point of seeing
the story behind the circumstance; and, had he realized it, a common
instinct bound him in a triangular link to the peering, winking lamps,
and to the Russian boy lying unsociably wrapped in his heavy coat. All
three had an eye for an adventure.
But the lights were up, and the curtain down--it was a theatre between
the acts; and presently the calculating voice of McCutcheon broke forth
again, as he relapsed into his original attitude, coiling up his long
limbs and nursing his cigar to a glow.
"I can't get over that 'four jacks,'" he said. "To think I could have
been funked into seeing Billy at fifty!"
Blake laughed. "'Twas the eye-glass did it, Mac! A man shouldn't be
allowed to play poker with an eye-glass; it's taking an undue
advantage."
McCutcheon smiled his dry smile and shot a quizzical glance at the neat
young Englishman, who had become absorbed in one of his papers.
"Solid face, Blake!" he agreed. "Nothing so fine as an eye-glass for
sheer bluff. What would Billy be without one? Well, perhaps we won't
say. But with it you have no use for doubt--he's a diplomat all the
time."
The young man named Billy showed no irritation. With the composure which
he wore as a garment, he went on with his occupation.
For a time McCutcheon bore this aloofness, then he opened a new attack.
"What are you reading, my son? Makes a man sort of want his breakfast to
see that hungry look in your eyes. Share the provender, won't you?"
Billy looked up sedately.
"You fellows think my life's a game," he said. "But I tell you it takes
some doing to keep in touch with things."
Blake laughed chaffingly. "And the illustrated weekly papers are an
excellent substitute for Blue-books?"
Billy remained undisturbed. "It's all very well to scoff, but one may
get a side-light anywhere. In diplomacy nothing's too insignificant to
notice."
Again Blake laughed. "The principle on which it offers you a living?"
"Oh, come," said Billy, "that's rather rough! You know very well what I
mean. 'Tisn't always in the serious reports you get the color of a fact,
just as the gossip of a dinner-table is often more enlightening than a
cabinet council."
"Apropos?"
"I was thinking of this Petersburg affair."
"What? The everlasting Duma business?" McCutcheon drew in a long breath
of smoke.
Billy looked superior, as befitted a man who dealt in subtler matters
than mere politics. "Not at all," he said. "The disappearance of the
Princess Davorska."
Here Blake made a murmur of impatience. "Oh, Billy, don't!" he said.
"It's so frightfully banal."
McCutcheon took his cigar from his mouth. "The woman who disappeared on
the eve of her marriage?"
"Yes," broke in Blake, "disappeared on the eve of her marriage to elope
with some poet or painter, and set society by the ears. Thoroughly
modern and banal!"
The young diplomat glanced up once more.
"I don't think there's any suggestion of a lover."
"Fact is more potent than suggestion, Billy. Of course there is a lover.
Princesses don't disappear alone."
"You're a Socialist, Ned." Billy's eyes returned to his paper. "Like all
good Socialists, crammed to the neck with class bigotry. Nobody is such
an individualist as the man who advocates equality!"
Blake smiled. "That seems to sound all right," he said; "but it doesn't
remove the lover."
The good-humored scepticism at last forced a way to Billy's
susceptibilities.
"Look here," he said, crossly, "if hearing's not believing, perhaps
seeing is! Look at these pictures; they're not particularly modern or
banal."
He held out his paper, but Blake shook his head.
"No! No, Billy, not for me. If it was some little Rumanian gypsy who had
run away from her tribe I'd take her to my heart and welcome. But a
Princess Davorska--no!"
At this point McCutcheon stretched out his long arm and took the paper
from Billy's hand. "Let's have a squint!" he said. "Lover or no lover,
she must be a bit wide awake." And, curling himself up again, he began
to read from the paper, in a monotonous murmuring voice: "'_The
Princess, as well as being a woman of artistic accomplishments, is an
ardent sportswoman, having in her early girlhood hunted and shot with
keen zest on her father's estates. The above picture shows her at the
age of seventeen, carrying a gun_.' By the Lord, she is wide awake!" he
added, by way of comment. "She is wide awake carrying that gun, but I'd
lay my money on the second picture. Say, Billy, she looks a queen in her
court finery!"
But here real disgust crossed Blake's face. "Oh, that'll do, Mac! Give
us peace about the woman. I'm sick to death of all such nonsense. We're
due in a couple of hours. I think I'll try for forty winks." He threw
away his cigar and tucked his rug about him.
McCutcheon glanced at him, and, seeing that he was in earnest, handed
the paper back to Billy.
"Thanks, Mac!" Blake murmured. "Sorry if I was a bear! Don't switch off
the light, it won't bother me." He nodded, smiled, drew his rug closer
about his knees, and settled himself to sleep with the ease of the
accustomed traveller.
For close upon an hour complete silence reigned in the heated carriage.
Blake slept silently and peacefully; Billy went methodically through his
papers, dropping them one by one at his feet as he finished with them;
McCutcheon smoked, gazing into space with the blank expression of the
strenuous man who has learned to utilize his momentary respites; while,
stretched along the cushions of the carriage, his face hidden, his eyes
wide open and attentive, lay the young Russian, his fingers tentatively
caressing the treasure in the pocket of his coat.
But at last the spell was broken. The diplomatic Englishman dropped his
last paper, and McCutcheon stretched himself and looked once more at his
watch.
"Paris in an hour, Billy! Didn't those loafers in the dining-car promise
us coffee somewhat about this time?"
Billy looked up, unruffled of mind and body as in the first moment of
the journey. "I believe they did," he said. "Tell you what! You jog
their memories, while I go and wash. What about calling Ned?"
At sound of his own name, Blake's eyes opened. His waking was
characteristic of him. It was no slow recovery of the senses; he was
asleep and then awake--fully, easily awake, with a complete
consciousness of his position--a complete, assured grasp of time and
place.
"We're getting on, eh?" he said. "I suppose you're going to tub before
those fat Belgians in the sleeping-car, Billy? If you are, keep a second
place for me, like a good boy. There's nothing more fiendishly
triumphant than taking a bath in the basin while the rest of the train
is rattling the door-handle. Don't forget! Second place!" Then he turned
to the American. "What about the coffee, Mac? I expect those poor devils
of waiters have slept your order off."
"I was just about to negotiate that coffee transaction." McCutcheon
stood up. "You come too, my son! A little exercise will give you an
appetite." He paused to stretch his long, lean body, and incidentally
his glance fell upon their travelling companion, and he indicated the
recumbent figure with a jerk of the head.
"Say, Ned, ought we to wake our unsociable friend?" Blake cast one quick
glance at the huddled form, then he answered, tersely: "Let him alone!
He's not asleep--and, anyway, he understands English."
At which McCutcheon made a comprehending grimace, and the two left the
carriage.
* * * * *
For many minutes the young Russian did not move; then, when positive
certainty of his solitude had grown into his mind, he lifted himself on
one elbow and looked cautiously about him.
A change had passed over his face in the last hour--an interesting
change. The smooth cheek that the night air had cooled to paleness was
now flushed, and there was a spark of anger in the bright eyes.
Unquestionably this boy had a temper and a spirit of his own, and both
had been aroused. There was a certain arrogance, a certain contempt in
his glance now as it swept the inoffensive coats and rugs of the
departed travellers, a certain antagonism as he sat up, tossed back the
lock of hair that had again fallen across his forehead, and turned his
eyes to the heap of papers lying upon the carriage floor.
For long he gazed upon these papers, as though they exercised a magnetic
influence, and at last, with a swift impulse, extremely characteristic,
he stretched out his arm and drew forth the lowest of the heap.
He regained his former position with a quick, lithe movement of the
body, and in an instant he was poring over the paper, the pages turning
with incredible speed under the eagerness of his touch. At last he
reached the page he sought, the page that had offered ground for
discussion to the three voyagers an hour earlier.
His eyes flashed, his fingers tightened, his dark head was bent lower
over the paper. Two pictures confronted him. The first was of a woman in
Russian court dress, who wore her jewels and her splendor of apparel
with an air of pride and careless supremacy that had in it something
magnificent, something semi-barbaric. The boy looked at this curious and
arresting picture, but only for a moment; by some affinity, some subtle
attraction, his eyes turned instantly to the second portrait--the girl
carrying the gun--and as if in answer to some secret sympathy, some
silent comprehension, the frown upon his brows relaxed and his lips
parted.
It was still the woman of the jewels and the splendid apparel, but it
was a woman infinitely free, infinitely unhampered. The plain,
serviceable clothes fitted the slight figure as though they had been
long worn and loved; the hair was closely coiled, so that the young face
looked out upon the world frank and unadorned as a boy's. Here, as in
the first picture, the eyes looked forth with a curious, proud
directness; but beneath the directness was a glint of humor, a flash of
daring absent in the other face; the mouth smiled, seeming to anticipate
life's secrets, the ungloved hand held the gun with a touch peculiarly
caressing, peculiarly firm.
The traveller looked, looked again, and then, with a deliberation odd in
so slight a circumstance, folded the paper, rose, and stepped to the
window of the carriage.
The night mist beat in, still raw and cold, but somewhere behind the
darkness was the stirring, the vague presage of the day to come. He
leaned out, fingers close about the paper, lips and nostrils breathing
in the suggestive, vaporous air. For a moment he stood, steadying
himself to the motion of the train, palpitating to his secret thoughts;
then, with a little theatricality all for his own edification, he opened
his fingers and, freeing the paper, watched it swirl away, hang for a
second like a moth against the lighted window, and vanish into the
night.
CHAPTER II
'Journeys end in lovers' meeting.' The phrase conjures a picture. The
court-yard of some inn, glowing ripe in the tints of the setting
sun--open doors--an ancient coach disgorging its passengers! This--or,
perhaps, some quay alive with sound and movement--cries of command in
varying tongues--crowded gangways--rigging massed against the sky--all
the paraphernalia of romance and travel. But the real journey--the
journey of adventure itself--is frequently another matter: often gray,
often loverless, often demanding from the secret soul of the adventurer
spirit and inspiration, lest the blood turn cold in sick dismay, and the
brain cloud under its weight of nostalgia.
Paris in the dawn of a wet day is a sorry sight; the Gare du Nord in the
hours of early morning is a place of infinite gloom. As the north
express thundered into its recesses, waking strange and hollow echoes,
the long sweep of the platform brought a shudder to more than one tired
mind. A string of sleepy porters--gray silhouettes against a gray
background--was the only sign of life. Colors there were none, lovers
there were none, Parisian joy of living there was not one vestige.
Paris! The murmur crept through the train, stirring the weariest to
mechanical action. Paris! Heads were thrust through the windows, wraps
and hand-bags passed out to the shadowy, mysterious porters who received
them in a silence born of the godless hour and the penetrating, chilling
dampness of the atmosphere.
In the carriage fifth or sixth from the engine the three
fellow-travellers greeted the arrival in the orthodox way. The tall
American stretched his long limbs and groaned wearily as he got his
belongings together, while the dapper young Englishman thrust his head
out of the window and withdrew it as rapidly.
"Beastly morning!" he announced. "Paris on a wet day is like a woman
with draggled skirts."
"Get rid of our belongings first, Billy, make epigrams after!" The man
called Blake pushed him quietly aside and, stepping to the window,
dropped a leather bag into the hands of a porter.
Of the three, his manner was the most indifferent, his temper the most
unruffled; and of the three, he alone remembered the fourth occupant of
the carriage, for, being relieved of his bag, he turned with his hand
still upon the window, and his eyes sought the youthful figure drawn
with lonely isolation into its corner.
"Do you want a porter?" he asked.
The question was unexpected. The boy started and sat straighter in his
seat. For one moment he seemed to sway between two impulses, then, with
a new determination, he looked straight at his questioner with his clear
eyes.
"No," he said, speaking slowly and with a grave deliberation, "I do not
need a porter. I have no luggage--but this." He rose, as if to prove the
truth of his declaration, and lifted his valise from the rack.
It was a simple movement, simple as the question and answer that had
preceded it, but it held interest for Blake. He could not have analyzed
the impression, but something in the boy's air touched him, something in
the young figure so plainly clad, so aloof, stood out with sharp appeal
in the grayness and unreality of the dawn. A feeling that was neither
curiosity nor pity, and yet savored of both, urged him to further
speech. As his two companions, anxious to be free of the train, passed
out into the corridor, he glanced once more at the slight figure, at the
high Russian boots, the long overcoat, the fur cap drawn down over the
dark hair.
"Look here! you aren't alone in Paris?" he asked in the easy, impersonal
way that spoke his nationality. "You have people--friends to meet you?"
For an instant the look that had possessed the boy's face during the
journey--the look of suspicion akin to fear--leaped up, but on the
moment it was conquered. The well-poised head was thrown back, and again
the eyes met Blake's in a deliberate gaze.
"Why do you ask, monsieur?"
The words were clipped, the tone proud and a little cold.
Another man might have hesitated to reply truthfully, but Blake was an
Irishman and used to self-expression.
"I ask," he said, simply, "because you are so young."
A new expression--a new daring--swept the boy's mobile face. A spirit of
raillery gleamed in his eyes, and he smiled for the first time.
"How old, monsieur?"
The question, the smile touched Blake anew. He laughed involuntarily
with a sudden sense of friendliness.
"Sixteen?--seventeen?"
The boy, still smiling, shook his head.
"Guess again, monsieur."
Blake's interest flashed out. Here, in the gray station, in this damp
hour of dawn, he had touched something magnetic--some force that drew
and held him. A quality intangible and indescribable seemed to emanate
from this unknown boy, some strange radiance of vitality that flooded
his surroundings as with sunshine.
"Eighteen, then!" He laughed once more, with a curious sense of
pleasure.
But from the corridor outside a slow voice was borne back on the damp,
close air, forbidding further parley.
"Blake! I say, Blake! For the Lord's sake, get a move on!"
The spell was broken, the moment of companionship passed. Blake drifted
toward the carriage door, the boy following.
Outside in the corridor they were sucked into the stream of departing
passengers--that odd medley of men and women, unadorned, jaded,
careless, that a night train disgorges. Slowly, step by step, the
procession made its way, each unit that composed it glancing
involuntarily into the empty carriages that he passed--the carriages
that, in their dimmed light, their airlessness, their _débris_ of
papers, seemed to be a reflection of his own exhausted condition; then a
gust of chilly air told of the outer world, and one by one the
travellers slid through the narrow doorway, each instinctively pausing
to brace himself against the biting cold before stepping down upon the
platform.
At last it was Blake's turn. He, too, paused; then he, too, took the
final plunge, shivered, glanced at where McCutcheon and the Englishman
were talking to their porters, then turned to watch the Russian boy
swing himself lithely down from the high step of the train.
All about him was the consciousness of the awakening crowd, conveyed by
the jostling of elbows, the deepening hum of voices.
"Look here!" he said again, in response to his original impulse. "You
have somebody to meet you?"
The boy glanced up, a secret emotion burning in his eyes. "No,
monsieur."
"You are quite alone?"
"Yes, monsieur."
"And why are you here--to play or to work?"
The question was unwarrantable, but an Irishman can dispense with
warranty in a manner unknown to other men. It had ever been Blake's way
to ask what he desired to know.
This time no offence showed itself in the boy's face.
"In part to work, in part to play, monsieur," he answered, gravely; "in
part to learn life."
The reply was strange to Blake's ears--strange in its grave sincerity,
stranger still in its quiet fearlessness.
"But you are such a child!" he cried, impulsively. "You--"
Imperceptibly the slight figure stiffened, the proud look flashed again
into the eyes.
"Many thanks, monsieur, but I am older than you think--and very
independent. I have the honor monsieur, to wish you good-bye."
The tone was absolutely courteous, but it was final. He bowed with easy
foreign grace, raised his fur cap, and, turning, swung down the platform
and out of sight.
Blake stood watching him--watching until the high head, the straight
shoulders, the lithe, swinging body were but a memory; then he turned
with a start, as a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and the pleasant,
prosaic voice of the young Englishman assailed his ears.
"My dear chap, what in the world are you doing? Not day-dreaming with
the mercury at thirty?"
"Foolish--but I was!" Blake answered, calmly. "I was watching that young
Russian stalk away into the unknown, and I was wondering--"
"What?"
He smiled a little cynically. "I was wondering, Billy, what type of
individual and what particular process fate will choose to let him break
himself upon."
* * * * *
The most splendid moment of an adventure is not always the moment of
fulfilment, not even the moment of conception, but the moment of first
accomplishment, when the adventurer deliberately sets his face toward
the new road, knowing that his boats are burned.
Nothing could have been less inspiring than the dreary Gare du Nord,
nothing less inviting than the glimpse of Paris to be caught through its
open doorways; but had the whole world laughed him a welcome, the young
Russian's step could not have been more elastic, his courage higher, his
heart more ready to pulse to the quick march of his thoughts, as he
strode down the gray platform and out into the open.
In the open he paused to study his surroundings. As yet the full tale of
passengers had not emerged, and only an occasional wayfarer, devoid of
baggage as himself, had fared forth into the gloom. Outside, the
artificial light of the station ceased to do battle with nature, and
only an occasional street lamp gave challenge to the gloomy dawn. The
damp mist that all night had enshrouded Paris still clung about the
streets like ragged grave-clothes, and at the edge of the pavement half
a dozen _fiacres_ were ranged in a melancholy line, the wretched horses
dozing as they stood, the drivers huddled into their fur capes and
numbed by the clinging cold. Everywhere was darkness and chill and the
listless misery of a winter dawn, when vitality is at its lowest ebb and
the passions of man are sunk in lethargy.
Only a creature infinitely young could have held firm in face of such
dejection, only eyes as alert and wakeful as those of this wayfaring boy
could possibly have looked undaunted at the shabby streets with their
flaunting travesty of joy exhibited in the dripping awnings of the
deserted _cafés_, that offered _Bière, Billard_, and yet again _Bière_
to an impassive world.
But the eyes were wakeful, the soul of the adventurer was infinitely
young. He looked at it all with a certain steadfastness that seemed to
say, "Yes, I see you! You are hideous, slatternly, unfriendly; but
through all the disguise I recognize you. Through the mask I trace the
features--subtle, alluring, fascinating. You are Paris! Paris!"
The idea quickened action as a draught of wine might quicken thought;
his hand involuntarily tightened upon his valise, his body braced itself
afresh, and, as if resigning himself finally to chance, that deity loved
of all true adventurers, he stepped from the pavement into the greasy
roadway.
Seeing him move, a loafer, crouching in the shadow of the station, slunk
reluctantly into the open and offered to procure him a _fiacre_; but the
boy's shake of the head was determined, and, crossing the road, he
turned to the left, gazing up with eager interest at the many hotels
that rub shoulders in that uninteresting region.
One after the other he reviewed and rejected them, moving onward with
the excitement that is born of absolute uncertainty. Onward he went,
without pause, until the pavement was intersected by a side-street, and
peering up through the misty light he read the legend, "rue de
Dunkerque."
Rue de Dunkerque! It conveyed nothing to his mind. But was he not
seeking the unknown? Again his head went up, again his shoulders
stiffened, and, smiling to himself at some secret thought, he swung
round the corner and plunged into the unexplored.
Half way down the rue de Dunkerque stands the Hôtel Railleux. It is a
tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished;
there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a
certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings
in a manner tempting to one anxious to avoid his fellows.
This quality it was that caught the boy's attention. He paused and
studied the Hôtel Railleux with an attention that he had denied to the
large and common hostelries that front the station. He looked at it long
and meditatively, then very slowly and thoughtfully he walked to the end
of the street. At the end of the street he turned, his mind made up,
and, hurrying back, went straight into the hall of the hotel as though
thirsting to pledge himself irrevocably to his decision.
It is impossible for the sensible individual to see romance in this
entry into a third-rate Parisian hotel--to see daring or to see
danger--but the boy's heart was beating fast as the glass door swung
behind him, and his tongue was dry as he stepped into the little office
on the right of the poor hall.
Here in the office the story of the streets was repeated. A dingy
gas-jet shed a faint light, as though reluctantly awake; behind a small
partition, half counter, half desk, a wan and sleepy--looking man was
cowering over a stove. As the boy entered he looked up uncertainly, then
he rose and smiled, for your Parisian is exhausted indeed when he fails
to conjure up a smile.
"Good-day, monsieur!"
The words were a travesty in view of the miserable dawn, but the boy
took heart. There was greeting in the tone. He moistened his lips, which
felt dry as his tongue in his momentary nervousness, then he stepped
closer to the counter.
"Good-day, monsieur! I require a bedroom."
"A bedroom? But certainly, monsieur!" The shrewd though tired eyes of
the man passed over his visitor's clothes and the valise in his hand.
"We can give you a most excellent room at"--he raised his eyebrows in
tactful hesitation--"at five francs?"
The boy's eyes opened in genuine, instant surprise. "For so little?" he
exclaimed. Then, covered with confusion, he reddened furiously and
stammered, "For--for so much, I mean?"
The man in the office was all smooth, politeness, anxious to cover a
foreigner's slip of speech. 'But certainly, no! If five francs was more
than monsieur cared to pay, then for three francs there was a most
charming, a most agreeable room on the fifth floor. True, it did not
look upon the street, but then perhaps monsieur preferred quiet. If
monsieur would give himself the trouble of mounting--'
Monsieur, still confused by his own mistake, and nervously anxious to
insist upon his position, repeated again that five francs was out of the
question, and that, without giving himself the trouble of mounting, he
would then and there decide upon the agreeable and quiet room at three
francs.
'But certainly! It was understood!' The guardian of the office, now
fully awake and aroused to interest in this princely transaction,
disappeared from behind the counter into the back regions of the hotel,
and could be heard calling "Jean! Jean!" in a high, insistent tone.
After some moments of silence he returned, followed by a large and
amiable individual in a dirty blue blouse, who had apparently but lately
arisen from sleep.
'Now if monsieur would intrust his baggage to the valet--'
The guardian of the office took a key from a nail in the wall. Jean
stepped forward, pleased and self-conscious, and took the valise from
the boy's hand. Then all three smiled and bowed.
It was one of those foolish little comedies--utterly unnecessary,
curiously pleasant--that occur twenty times a day in Parisian life.
Involuntarily the adventurer's heart warmed to the pallid clerk and to
the dirty hotel porter. He had arrived here without luggage, shabby,
unrecommended, yet no princely compatriot of his own could have been
made more sensible of welcome. He stepped out of the office and followed
his guide, conscious that, if only for an instant, Paris had lifted her
mask and smiled--the radiant, anticipated smile.
There is no such unnecessary luxury as a lift in the Hôtel Railleux. At
the back of the hall the spiral staircase begins its steep ascent,
mounting to unimagined heights.
Jean, breathing audibly, led the way, pausing at every landing to assure
monsieur that the ascent was nothing--a mere nothing, and that before
another thought could pass through monsieur's mind the fifth floor would
be reached. The boy followed, climbing and ever climbing, until the
meagre hand-rail appeared to lengthen into dream-like coils, and the
threadbare, drab-hued carpet, with its vivid red border, to assume the
proportions of some confusing scroll.
But at length the end was reached, and Jean, beaming and triumphant,
announced their goal.
'This way! If monsieur would have the goodness to take two steps in this
direction!' He dived into a long, dark corridor, illuminated by a single
flickering gas-jet, twin brother to that which lighted the office below;
and, still eager, still breathing loudly, he ushered the guest toward
what in his humble soul he believed to be the luxurious, the impressive
bedroom supplied by the Hôtel Railleux at three francs a night.
The boy looked about him as he passed down the dim corridor. Apparently
he and Jean alone were awake in this gloomy maze of closed doors and
sleeping passages. One sign of humanity--and one alone--came to his
senses with a suggestion of sordid drama. On the floor, at the closed
door of one of the rooms, stood a battered black tray on which reposed
an empty champagne bottle and two soiled glasses.
Life! His quick imagination conjured a picture--conjured and shrank from
it. He turned away with a sense of sharp disgust and almost ran down the
corridor to where Jean was fitting a key into the door of his
prospective bedroom.
"The room, monsieur!" Jean's voice was full of pride. He had lived for
ten years in the Hôtel Railleux, working as six men and six women
together would not have worked in the fashionable quarter, and he had
never been shaken in his belief that Paris held no more inviting
hostelry.
The boy obediently stepped forward into the tiny apartment, in which a
big wooden bedstead loomed out of all proportion. His movements were
hasty, as though he desired to escape from some impression; his voice,
when he spoke, was vague.
"Very nice! Very nice!" he said. "And--and what is the view?"
"The view? Oh, but monsieur will like the view!" Jean stepped to the
window, drew back the heavy cretonne curtains, and threw open the long
window, admitting a breath of chilling cold. "The court-yard! See,
monsieur! The court-yard!"
The boy came forward into the biting air and gazed down into the
well-like depths of gloom, at the bottom of which could be discerned a
small flagged court, ornamented by a couple of dwarfed and frost-bitten
trees in painted tubs.
Jean, watchful of the visitor's face, broke forth anew with
inexhaustible tact.
'It was a fine view--monsieur would admit that! But, naturally, it was
not the street! Now No. 107, across the corridor--at five francs--?'
Monsieur was aroused. "No! No! certainly not. The view was of no
consequence. The bed looked all right."
'The bed!' Here Jean spoke with deep feeling. 'There was no better bed
in Paris. Had he not himself put clean sheets on it that day?' He turned
from the window, and with the hand of an expert displayed the beauties
of the sparse blankets, the cotton sheets, and the mountainous double
mattress.
'But monsieur was anxious to retire? Doubtless monsieur would sleep
until _déjeuner_? A most excellent _déjeuner_ was served in the
_salle-à-manger_ on the second floor.'
The words flowed forth in a stream--agreeable, monotonous, reminiscent
of the far-away province that had long ago bred this good creature.
Suddenly the exhaustion of the long journey, the sleep so long denied
rose about the traveller like a misty vapor. He longed for solitude; he
pined for rest.
"I am satisfied with everything," he said, abruptly. "Leave me. I have
not been in bed for two nights."
A flood of sympathy overspread Jean's face: he threw up his hands. "Poor
boy! Poor boy! What a terrible thing!" With a touch as light as a
woman's his work-worn fingers smoothed the pillow invitingly, and,
tiptoeing to the door, he disappeared in tactful and silent
comprehension of the situation.
Vaguely the boy was conscious of his departure. A great lassitude was
falling upon him, making him value the isolation of his three-franc room
with a deep gratitude, turning his gaze toward the unpromising bed with
an indescribable longing. Mechanically, as the door closed, he threw
off his heavy overcoat, kicked off his high boots, discarded his coat
and trousers, and, without waiting to search in his bag for another
garment, stepped into bed and curled himself up in the flannel shirt he
had worn all day.
The bed was uncomfortable with that extraordinary discomfort of the
old-fashioned French bed, that feels as though it were padded with
cotton wool of indescribable heaviness. The sheets were coarse, the
multitudinous clothes were weighty without being warm, but no prince on
his bed of roses ever rested with more luxury of repose than did this
young adventurer as, drawing the blankets to his chin, he stretched his
limbs with the slow, delicious enjoyment born of long travel.
Jean had drawn the cretonne curtains, but through their chinks streaks
of bluish, shadowy light presaged the coming day. From his lair the boy
looked out at these ghostly fingers of the morning, then his eyes
travelled round the dark room until at last they rested upon his clothes
lying, as he had thrown them, on the floor. He looked at them--the
boots, the coat and trousers, the heavy overcoat--and suddenly some
imperative thought banished sleep from his eyes. He sat up in bed; he
shivered as the cold air nipped his shoulder; then, unhesitatingly, he
slipped from between the sheets and slid out upon the floor.
The room was small; the clothes lay within an arm's length. He shivered
again, stooped, and, picking up the overcoat, dived his hand into the
deep pocket, and drew forth the packet that he had guarded so
tenaciously in the train.
For a moment he stood looking at it in the blue light of the dawn--a
thick brown packet, seven or eight inches long, tied with string and
sealed. Once or twice he looked at it, seemingly lost in reflection;
once or twice he turned it about in his hand as if to make certain it
was intact; then, with a deep sigh indicative of satisfaction, he
stepped back into bed, slipped the packet under his pillow and, with his
fingers faithfully enlaced in the string, fell asleep.
CHAPTER III
It was eleven o'clock when the boy woke. All the excitement of the past
days had culminated in the great exhaustion of the night before.
He had slept as a child might sleep--dreamlessly, happily, unthinkingly.
In that silent hour Nature had drawn him into her wide embrace, lulling
him with a mother's gentleness; and now, in the moment of waking, it
seemed that again the same beneficent agency was dispensing love and
favor, for he opened his eyes upon a changed world. A magician's wand
had been waved over the city during his hours of sleep; the mist and
oppression of the night had disappeared with the darkness. Paris was
under the dominion of the frost.
Instinctively, even before his eyelids lifted, the northern soul within
him apprised him of this change. He inhaled the crisp coldness of the
air with a vague familiarity; he opened his eyes slowly and stared about
the unknown room in an instant of hesitating doubt; then, with a great
leap of the spirit, he recognized his position. Last night--the days and
nights that had preceded it--flooded his consciousness, and in a moment
he was out of bed and pulling back the drab-hued curtains that hid the
window.
Having freed the daylight, he leaned out, peering greedily down into the
well-like court, where even the stunted trees in their painted tubs were
coated white with rime; then, with another impulse, as quickly
conceived, as quickly executed, he drew back into the room, fired with
the desire to be out and about in this newly created world.
By day, the details of the room stood out with a prominence that had
been denied them in the dim candle-light of the night before, and he
realized now, what had escaped him then, that there was neither
dressing-table, wardrobe, nor chest of drawers, that the entire space of
the small apartment was filled by the clumsy bed, a folding wash-stand,
and two ponderous arm-chairs covered in shabby red velvet. These, with a
dingy gold-framed mirror hanging above the tiny corner fireplace, and a
gilt clock under a glass shade, formed the comforts purchasable for
three francs.
He studied it all solemnly and attentively, not omitting the gray
wall-paper of melancholy design, and content that he had acquitted
himself dutifully toward his surroundings, he unpacked his valise, and
proceeded to dress for the day's happenings.
The contents of the valise were not imposing--a change of linen, a soft
felt hat, a pair of shoes, and a well-worn blue serge suit. The boy
looked at each article as he drew it forth with a quaint attentiveness
quite disproportionate to either its appearance or its value. But the
process seemed to please him, and he lingered over it, ceasing almost
reluctantly to appraise his belongings, and beginning to dress.
This morning he discarded the high Russian boots and the fur cap of
yesterday, and arrayed himself instead, and with much precision, in the
serge suit. Worn as this suit was, it evidently retained a pristine
value in its owner's eyes, for no sooner had he fastened the last button
of the coat than he looked instinctively for the mirror in which to
study the effect.
The mirror unfortunately was high and, crane his neck as he might, he
could see nothing beyond the waves of his short, dark hair and his
eager, questioning eyes. But the effect must be observed, and, with an
anxiety in seeming contrast to his nature, he pulled one of the massive
velvet chairs to the fireplace and, mounting upon it, surveyed himself
at every angle with deep intentness. At last, satisfied, he jumped to
the ground, and taking the brown-paper packet from the hiding-place
where it had reposed all night, bestowed it again in the pocket of his
overcoat and, picking up the felt hat, left the room.
The corridor, despite the advent of the day, was still dark, save where
an occasional door stood ajar and a shaft of sun from the outer world
shot across the drab carpet; but Jean had been over the floor with his
broom while the hotel slept, and the battered tray with its suggestion
of sordid festivity had been removed. Even here the electric air of the
morning had made entry, and, yielding to its seduction, the boy gave
rein to his eagerness as he hurried forward to the head of the stairs
and laid his hand upon the meagre banister.
From the hall below the white light of the day ascended with subtle
invitation, while outside the world hummed with possibilities. He began
the descent, light as a Mercury, his feet scarcely touching the steps
that last night had offered so toilsome a progress, and on the third
floor he encountered Jean, bearing another tray laden with plates and
covered dishes.
At sight of the young face, the good creature's smile broke forth
irresistibly.
'Ah, but monsieur had slept!' The little eyes ran over the face and
figure of the guest with visible pleasure.
The boy laughed--the full, light-hearted laugh that belongs to the
beginning of things.
"Yes, I have slept; and now, you may believe, I have an appetite!"
Jean echoed the laugh with a spontaneity that held no disrespect. He
lingered, drawn, as the Irishman in the train had been drawn, by
something original, something vital, in the youthful personality.
'His faith! But monsieur had the spirit as well as the appetite!'
"Ah, the spirit!" For a fleeting second the boy's eyes looked away
beyond Jean--untidy, attentive, comprehending--beyond the neutral-tinted
walls and the shabby carpet of the Hôtel Railleux, seeing in vision the
things that were to come. Then, with his swift impulsiveness, he flung
his dream from him. What mattered the future? What mattered the past? He
was here in the present--in the moment; and the moment, great or small,
demanded living.
"Never mind the spirit, Jean! Let us consider the flesh! Where is the
_salle-à-manger_?"
'The _salle-à-manger_ was on the second floor.'
'The second floor? But of course! Had not Jean mentioned that fact last
night?' With a nod and a smile, he was away down the intervening steps
and at the door of the eating-room before Jean could balance his tray
for his renewed ascent.
The room that the boy entered was in keeping with the rest of the
house--old-fashioned and in ill-repair. The floor was devoid of
covering, the ceiling low, the only furniture a dozen small tables
meagrely set out for _déjeuner_. On the moment of his entry eleven of
these tables were unoccupied, but at the twelfth an eager young waiter
attended upon a stout provincial Frenchwoman who was partaking heartily
of a pungently smelling stew.
On the opening of the door the waiter glanced round in strained
anticipation, and the lady of the stew looked up and bowed a greeting to
the new-comer.
It struck the boy as curious--this welcome from a total stranger, but
it woke anew the pleasant warmth, the agreeable sense of friendliness.
With the tingling sensation of doing a daring deed, he glanced round the
empty room, scanned the two long windows on which the cold, bright sun
played laughingly, and through which the rattle and hum of the rue de
Dunkerque penetrated like an exhilarating accompaniment, then, he walked
straight to the table of the lady, smiled and, in his own turn, bowed.
'Would madame permit him to sit at her table? It was sad to be alone
upon so fine a morning.'
A woman of any other nationality might have looked at him askance; but
madame was French. She was fifty years of age, she was fat, she was
ugly--but she was French. The sense of a pleasant encounter--the
appreciation of romance was in her blood. She smiled at the debonair boy
with as agreeable a self-consciousness as though she had been a young
girl.
'But certainly, if monsieur desired. The pleasure was for her.'
Again an interchange of bows and smiles, sympathetically repeated by the
interested young waiter. Then the boy, laying his hat and coat aside,
seated himself at the table and entered upon the business of the hour,
while madame became tactfully absorbed in her odoriferous stew.
'What did monsieur desire?' The waiter stood anxiously attentive, his
head inclining gravely to one side, his dirty napkin swinging from his
left hand.
The boy glanced up.
'What could the Hôtel Railleux offer?'
The waiter met his eye steadfastly. 'Anything that monsieur cared to
order.'
The boy encountered the steadfast look, and a little gleam of humor shot
into his eyes.
'Well, then, to begin with, should they say _Sole Waleska_?'
The waiter's glance wavered, he threw the weight of his body from one
foot to the other. Involuntarily madame looked up.
The boy buried himself behind an expression of profound seriousness.
"Yes! _Sole Waleska_! Or, perhaps, _Coulibiac à la Russe!"_
The waiter's mouth opened in a desperate resolve to meet the worst.
Madame's eyes discreetly sought her plate.
The boy threw back his head and laughed aloud at his own small jest.
"Bring me two eggs _en cocotte_," he substituted, and laughed again in
sheer pleasure at the waiter's sudden smile, his sudden restoration to
dignity, as he hurried away to put a seal upon an order that permitted
the hotel to retain its self-respect.
Again madame looked up. 'Monsieur was fond of his little pleasantry!
This waiter was a good boy, but slow. They did not keep a sufficiency of
servants at the Hôtel Railleux. But doubtless monsieur had noticed
that?'
The boy met her inquisitive glance with disarming frankness, but his
words when he answered gave little information.
'No. He had not as yet had time to notice anything.'
'But of course! Monsieur was a new arrival? He had come--when was it--?'
Madame appeared to search her memory.
'Yesterday.'
'But of course. Yesterday! And what a day it had been! What weather for
a long journey! It had been a long journey, had it not?'
The boy looked vague. 'Oh, it had been of a sufficient length!'
Madame toyed with the remnants of her stew. 'It had, perhaps, been a
journey from England? Monsieur was not French, although he had so
charming a fluency in the language?' Her eyes, her whole provincial,
inquisitive face begged for information, but the boy was firm.
'We are each of the country God has given us!' he informed her. Then he
added with convincing certainty that madame was without doubt
_Parisienne_.
Madame bridled at the soothing little falsehood.
'Alas! nothing so interesting. She was of the provinces.'
'Provincial! Impossible!'
At once the ice was broken; at once they were on the footing of friends,
and madame's soul poured forth its secret vanities.
'Monsieur was too kind. No, she was provincial--though, of a truth,
Paris was so well known to her that she might almost claim to be
_Parisienne_.'
The boy's interest was undiminished. 'Might he venture to ask if it was
pleasure alone that had brought madame to the capital--or had
business--?' He left the sentence discreetly unfinished.
Madame pushed her empty plate away and took a toothpick from the table.
'How observant was monsieur!' She eyed the bright young face with
growing approval. 'Yes, business, alas, was the pivot of her visit! This
terrible business--exacting so much, giving so little in return!' She
heaved a weighty sigh, then her fat face melted into smiles. 'But after
all, what would you?' She shrugged her ample shoulders, and the
toothpick came into full play.
'What would you, indeed?' The boy began to feel a little disconcerted
under her glance of slow approval, and a swift sense of relief passed
through him as the door opened and the waiter reappeared, carrying the
two eggs.
'What would you, indeed? One must live!' Madame, disregarding the
waiter, continued to study the boyish face--the curious dark-gray eyes,
in which the morning sun was discovering little flecks of gold. 'And
every year conditions were becoming harder, as monsieur doubtless knew.'
Monsieur nodded his head sagely, and began to eat his eggs with keen
zest.
Madame looked slowly round at the waiter and ordered coffee, then her
glance returned to the boy.
'How good, how refreshing it was to see him eat! How easy to comprehend
that he was young!' She sighed again, this time more softly. 'Youth was
a marvellous thing--and Paris was the city of the young! Was monsieur
making a long stay at the Hôtel Railleux?'
The waiter again appeared and placed the coffee upon the table.
Monsieur, suddenly and unaccountably uneasy, finished his eggs hastily
and pushed his plate aside.
'Did monsieur desire coffee?' Madame leaned forward. 'If so, it would be
but the matter of a moment to procure a second cup; and, as her
coffee-pot was quite full--' She raised the lid coquettishly, and again
her eyes lingered upon the short dark hair and the straight brows above
the gray eyes.
The waiter with ready tact departed in search of the second cup; madame
replaced the lid of the coffee-pot.
'Now that they were alone, would it be an unpardonable liberty to ask
how old monsieur really was?'
Monsieur blushed.
'How old would madame suppose?'
Madame laughed. 'Oh, it was difficult to say! One might imagine from
those bright eyes that monsieur had nineteen years; but, again, it was
impossible to suppose that a razor had ever touched that soft cheek.'
There was another little laugh, lower this time and more subtle in tone;
and madame, with a movement wonderfully swift considering her years and
her proportions, leaned across the table and touched the boy's face.
The effect was instant. A tide of color rushed into his cheeks, he rose
with an alacrity that was comic.
'He--he was much older than madame supposed!'
Madame laughed delightedly. 'How charming! How ingenuous! He positively
must sit down again. It was assured that they would become friends!
Where was that waiter? Where was that second coffee-cup?'
But monsieur remained standing.
Madame's eyes, now alive with interest, literally danced to her
thoughts.
'Come! Come! They must not allow the coffee to become cold!'
But monsieur picked up his hat and coat.
'What! He was not going? Oh, it was impossible! He could not be so
unkind!' Her face expressed dismay.
But her only answer was a stiff little bow, and a second later the door
had closed and the boy was running down the stairs of the hotel as
though some enemy were in hot pursuit.
CHAPTER IV
The mind of the boy was very full as he passed out of the hotel, so full
that he scarcely noticed the whip of cold air that stung his face or the
white mantle that lay upon the streets, wrapping in a silver sheath all
that was sordid, all that was dirty and unpicturesque in that corner of
Paris. The human note had been touched in that moment in the
_salle-à-manger,_ and his ears still tingled to its sound. Alarm,
disgust, and a strange exultant satisfaction warred within him in a
manner to be comprehended by his own soul alone.
As he stepped out into the rue de Dunkerque he scarcely questioned in
what direction his feet should carry him. North, south, east, or west
were equal on that first day. Everywhere was promise--everywhere a call.
Nonchalantly and without intention he turned to the left and found
himself once more in face of the Gare du Nord.
It is a good thing to rejoice in spite of the world; it is an infinitely
better thing to rejoice in company with it. With solitude and freedom,
the alarm, the disgust receded, and as he went forward the exultation
grew, until once again his mercurial spirits lifted him as upon wings.
The majority of passers-by at this morning hour were workers--work-girls
out upon their errands, business men going to or from the _cafés_; but
here and there was to be seen an artist, consciously indifferent to
appearances; here and there an artisan, unconsciously picturesque in his
coarse working-clothes; here and there a well-dressed woman, sunning
herself in the cold, bright air like a bird of gay plumage. It was the
world in miniature, and it stirred and piqued his interest. A wish to
stop one of these people, and to pour forth his longings, his hopes, his
dreams, surged within him in a glow of fellowship and, smiling to
himself at the pleasant wildness of the thought, he made his way through
the wider spaces of the Place Lafayette and the Square Montholon into
the long, busy rue Lafayette.
Here, in the rue Lafayette, the gloomy aspects of the district he had
made his own dropped behind him, and a wealth of bustle and gayety
greeted and fascinated him. Here the sun seemed fuller, the traffic was
more dense, and the shops offered visions to please every sense. Wine
shops were here, curio shops, shops all golden and tempting with cheeses
and butter, and hat shops that foretold the spring in a glitter of blues
and greens. He passed on, jostling the crowd good-humoredly, being
jostled in the same spirit, hugging his freedom with a silent joy.
Down the rue Halévy he went and on into the Place de l'Opéra; but here
he slackened his pace, and something of his _insouciance_ dropped from
him. The wide space filled with its cosmopolitan crowd, the opera-house
itself, so aloof in its dark splendor, spoke to him of another
Paris--the Paris that might be Vienna, Petersburg, London, for all it
has to say of individual life. His mood changed; he paused and looked
back over his shoulder in the direction from whence he had come. But the
hesitation was fleeting; a quick courage followed on the doubt. The
adventurer must take life in every aspect--must face all questions, all
moments! He turned up the collar of his coat, as though preparing to
face a chillier region, and went forward boldly as before.
One or two narrow streets brought him out upon the Place de Rivoli,
where Joan of Arc sat astride her golden horse, and where great heaps of
flowers were stacked at the street corners--mimosa, lilac, violets. He
halted irresistibly to glance at these flowers breathing of the south,
and to glance at the shining statue. Then he crossed the rue de Rivoli
and, passing through the garden of the Tuileries, emerged upon the Place
de la Concorde.
On the Place de la Concorde the cool, clean hand of the morning had
drawn its most striking picture; here, in the great, unsheltered spaces,
the frost had fallen heavily, softening and beautifying to an
inconceivable degree. The suggestion of modernity that ordinarily hangs
over the place was veiled, and the subtle hints of history stole forth,
binding the imagination. It needed but a touch to materialize the dream
as the boy crossed the white roadway, shadowed by the white statuary,
and with an odd appropriateness the touch was given.
One moment his mind was a sea of shifting visions, the next it was
caught and held by an inevitably thrilling sound--the sound of feet
tramping to a martial tune. The touch had been given: the vague visions
of tradition and history crystallized into a picture, and his heart
leaped to the pulsing, steady tramp, to the clash of fife and drum
ringing out upon the fine cold air.
All humanity is drawn by the sight of soldiers. There is a primitive
exhilaration in the idea of marching men that will last while the
nations live. Stung by the same impulse that affected every man and
woman in the Place de la Concorde, the boy paused--his head up, his
pulses quickened, his eyes and ears strained toward the sound.
It was a regiment of infantry marching down the Cours la Reine and
defiling out upon the Place de la Concorde toward the rue de Rivoli. By
a common impulse he paused, and by an equally common desire to be close
to the object of interest, he ran forward to where a little crowd had
gathered in the soldiers' route.
The French soldier is not individually interesting, and this body of men
looked insignificant enough upon close inspection. Yet it was a
regiment; it stirred the fancy; and the boy gazed with keen interest at
the small figures in the ill-fitting uniforms and at the faces, many as
young as his own, that denied past him in confusing numbers. On and on
the regiment wound, a coiling line of dull red and bluish-gray against
the frosty background, the feet tramping steadily, the fifes and drums
beating out with an incessant clamor.
Then, without warning, a new interest touched the knot of watchers, a
thrill passed from one member of the crowd to another, and hats were
raised. The colors were being borne by: Frenchmen were saluting their
flag.
The knowledge sprang to the boy's mind with the swiftness and poignancy
of an inspiration. This body of men might be insignificant, but it
represented the army of France--a thing of infinite tradition, of
infinite romance. The blood mounted to his face, his heart beat faster,
and with a strange, half-shy sense of participating in some fine moment,
his hand went up to his hat.
Unconsciously he made a picture as he stood there, his dark hair stirred
by the light, early air, his young face beautiful in its sudden
enthusiasm; and to one pair of eyes in the little crowd it seemed better
worth watching than the passing soldiers.
The owner of these eyes had been observant of him from the moment that
he had run forward, drawn by the rattle of the drums; and now, as if in
acceptance of an anticipated opportunity, he forced a way through the
knot of people and, pausing behind the boy, addressed him in an easy,
familiar voice, as one friend might address another.
"Isn't it odd," he said, "to look at those insignificant creatures, and
to think that the soldiers of France have kissed the women and thrashed
the men the world over?"
Had a gun been discharged close to his car the boy could not have
started more violently. Fear leaped into his eyes, he wheeled round;
then a sharp, nervous laugh of relief escaped him.
"How you frightened me!" he exclaimed. "Oh, how you frightened me!" Then
he laughed again.
His travelling companion of the night before smiled down on him from his
superior height, and the boy noted for the first time that this smile
had a peculiarly attractive way of communicating itself from the
clean-shaven lips to the grayish-green eyes of the stranger, banishing
the slightly satirical look that marked his face in repose.
"Well?" The Irishman was still studying him.
"Well? We're all on the knees of the gods, you see! 'Twas written that
we were to meet; you can't avoid me."
The flag had been carried past; the boy replaced his hat, glad of a
moment in which to collect his thoughts. What must he do? The question
beat in his brain. Wisdom whispered avoidance of this stranger. To-day
was the first day; was it wise to bring into it anything from yesterday?
No, it was not wise--reason upheld wisdom. He pulled his hat into place,
his lips came together in an obstinate line, and he raised his eyes.
The sun was dancing on a silvery world, from the rue de Rivoli the fifes
and drums still rattled out their march, close beside him the Irishman
was looking at him with his pleasant smile.
Suddenly, as a daring horseman might give rein to a young horse,
rejoicing in the risk, the boy discarded wisdom and its whispering curb;
his nature leaped forth in sudden comradeship, and impulsively he held
out his hand.
"Monsieur, forgive me!" he said. "The gods know best!"
He said the words in English, perfectly, easily, with that faintest of
all foreign intonations--the intonation that clings to the Russian
voice.
CHAPTER V
So the step was taken, and two souls, drawn together from different
countries, different races, touched in a first subtle fusion. With an
ease kindled by the fine and stinging air, stimulated by the crisp
summons of the flutes and the martial rattle of the drums, they bridged
the thousand preliminaries that usually hedge a friendship, and arrived
in a moment of intuition at that consciousness of fellowship that is the
most divine of human gifts.
As though the affair had been prearranged through countless ages, they
turned by one accord and forced a way through the crowd that still
encompassed them. Across the Place de la Concorde they went, past the
white statues, past the open space through which the soldiers were still
defiling like a dark stream in a snowbound country. Each was drawn
instinctively toward the Cours la Reine--the point from whence the
stream was pouring, the point where the crowd of loiterers was sparsest,
where the bare and frosted trees caught the sun in a million dancing
facets. Reaching it, the boy looked up into the stranger's face with his
fascinating look of question and interest.
"Monsieur, tell me something! How did you know me again? And why did you
speak to me?"
The question was grave, with the charming gravity that was wont to cross
his gayety as shadows chase each other across a sunlit pool. His lips
were parted naïvely, his curious slate-gray eyes demanded the truth.
[Illustration: TWO SOULS, DRAWN TOGETHER, TOUCHED IN A FIRST SUBTLE
FUSION]
The Irishman recognized the demand, and answered it.
"Now that you put it to me," he said, thoughtfully, "I'm not sure that I
can tell you. There's something about you--" His thoughtfulness
deepened, and he studied the boy through narrowed eyes. "It isn't that
you're odd in any way."
The boy reddened.
"It isn't that you're odd," he insisted, "but somehow you're such a slip
of a boy--" His voice grew meditative and he recurred to his native
trick of phrasing, as he always did when interested or moved.
"But why did you speak to me? I'm not interesting."
"Oh yes, you are!"
"How am I interesting?" There was a flash in the gray eyes that revealed
new flecks of gold.
The Irishman hesitated.
"Well, I can't explain it," he said, slowly, "unless I tell you that you
throw a sort of spell--and that sounds absurd. You see, I've knocked
about the world a bit, east and west, but at the back of everything I'm
an Irishman; I have a fondness for the curious and the poetical and the
mysterious, and somehow you seemed to me last night to be mystery
itself, with your silence and your intentness." He dropped his voice to
the meditative key, unconsciously enjoying its soft, half-melancholy
cadences, and as he spoke the boy felt some chord in his own personality
vibrate to the mind that had asked for no introduction, demanded no
credentials, that had decreed their friendship and materialized it.
"No," the Irishman mused on, "there's no explaining it. You were mystery
itself, and you fired my imagination, because I happen to come from a
country of dreams. We Irish are born dreamers; sometimes we never wake
up at all, and then we're counted failures. But, I tell you what, when
all's said and done, we see what other men don't see. For instance,
what do you think my two friends saw in you last night?"
The boy shook his head, and there was a tremor of nervousness about his
mouth.
"They saw something dangerous--something to be avoided. Yet Mac is a
millionaire several times over, and Billy is distinctly a diplomatist
with a future."
The boy forced a smile; he was beginning to shrink from the pleasant
scrutiny, to wish that the vaporous fog of last night might dim the
searching light of the morning.
"What did they see?" he asked.
The Irishman looked at him humorously. "I hardly like to tell it to
you," he said, "but they marked you for an anarchist. An anarchist, for
all the world! As if any anarchist alive would travel first-class in
third-class clothes! You see, I'm blunt."
The boy, studying him, half in fear, half in doubt, laughed suddenly in
quick relief and amusement.
"An anarchist! How droll!"
"Wasn't it? I told them so. I also told them--"
"What?"
"My own beliefs."
"And your beliefs?"
"No! No! You won't draw me! But I'll tell you this much, for I've told
it before. I knew you were no common creature of intrigue; I accepted
you as mystery personified."
"And now you would solve me?" In his returning confidence the boy's eyes
danced.
"God forbid!" The vehemence of the reply was comic, and the Irishman
himself laughed as the words escaped him. "Oh no!" he added, soberly.
"Keep your mask! I don't want to tear it from you. Later on, perhaps,
I'll take a peep behind; but I can accept mysteries and miracles--I was
born into the Roman Catholic Church."
"And I into the Greek."
"Ah! My first peep!"
"And what do you see?"
"Do you know, I see a queer thing. I see a boy who has thought. You have
thought. Don't deny it!"
"On religion?"
"On religion--and other things; you acknowledge it in one look."
The boy laughed, like a child who has been caught at some forbidden
game.
"Perhaps it was your imagination."
"Perhaps! But, look here, we can't stand all day discoursing in the
Cours la Reine! Where shall we wander--left or right?" He nodded first
in the direction of the river, then toward the large building that faced
them on the right, from the roof of which an array of small flags
fluttered an invitation.
The boy's eyes followed his movement. "Pictures!" he exclaimed. "I
didn't know there was an exhibition open."
"Live and learn! Come along!"
Together they stepped into the roadway, where the frosty surface was
scarred by the soldiers' feet, and together they reached the doorway of
the large building and read the legend, "_Soctiété Peintres et
Sculpteurs Français_."
The Irishman read the words with the faintly humorous, faintly sceptical
glance that he seemed to bestow upon the world at large.
"Remember I'm throwing out no bait, but I expect 'twill be value for a
couple of francs."
They entered the bare hall and, mounting a cold and rigid staircase,
found themselves confronted by a turnstile.
The Irishman was in the act of laying a two-franc piece in the hand of
the custodian when the boy plucked him by the sleeve and, turning, he
saw the curious eyes full of a sudden anxiety.
"Monsieur, pardon me! You know Paris well?"
"I live here for five months out of the twelve."
"Then you can tell me if--if this exhibition will be well attended. I
want with all my heart to see the pictures, but I--I dislike
crowds--fashionable crowds." His voice was agitated; it was as if he had
suddenly awakened from his pleasant dream of Bohemian comradeship to a
remembrance of the Paris that lay about him.
The Irishman expressed no surprise: his only reply was to move nearer to
the guardian of the turnstile.
"Monsieur," he said in French, "have the goodness to inform me how many
persons have passed through the turnstile this morning?"
The man looked at him without interest, though with some surprise. 'Not
many of the world were to be seen at such an hour,' he informed him.
'So far, he had admitted two gentlemen--artists, and three
ladies--American.'
The Irishman waved his hand toward the turnstile.
"In with you! The world forgetting, by the world forgot!"
His ease of manner was contagious. Whatever misgivings had assailed the
boy were banished with this reassurance, and his confidence flowed back
as the custodian took the two-franc piece and the turnstile clicked
twice, making them free of the long, bare galleries that opened in front
of them.
Inured as he was to cold, he shivered as they passed into the first of
these long rooms, and involuntarily buried his chin in the collar of his
coat. The chill of the place was vaultlike; the cold, gray light that
penetrated it held nothing of the sun's comfort, while the small, black
stove set in the middle of the room was a mere travesty of warmth.
"God bless my soul!" began the Irishman, "this is art for art's sake--"
But there he stopped, for his companion, with the impetuosity of his
temperament, had suddenly caught sight of a picture that interested him,
and had darted across the room, leaving him to his own reflections.
The boy was standing perfectly still, entirely engrossed, when he came
silently up behind him, and paused to look over his shoulder. They were
alone in the vast and chilly room save for one attendant who dozed over
some knitting in a corner near the door. Away into the distance
stretched the other rooms, bound one to the other like links in a chain.
From the third of these came the penetrating voices of the American
ladies, descanting unhesitatingly upon the pictures; while in the second
the two artists could be seen flitting from one canvas to another with a
restless, nervous activity.
These facts came subconsciously to the Irishman, for his eyes and his
thoughts were for the boy and the subject of the boy's interest--a
picture curiously repulsive, yet curiously binding in its realism of
conception. It was a large canvas that formed one of a group of five or
six studies by a particular artist. The details of the picture scarcely
held the mind, for the imagination of the beholder was instantly caught
and enchained by the central figure--the figure of a great ape, painted
with cruel and extraordinary truth. The animal was squatting upon the
ground, devouring a luscious fruit; its small and greedy eyes were
alight with gluttony; in its unbridled appetite, its hairy fingers
crushed the fruit against its sharp teeth, while the juice dripped from
its mouth.
The intimate, undisguised portrayal of greed shocked the
susceptibilities, but it was the hideous human attributes patent in the
brute that disgusted the imagination. With a terrible cunning of mind
and brush the artist had laid bare a vice that civilization cloaks.
For two or three minutes the boy stood immovable, then he looked back
over his shoulder, and the man behind him was surprised at the
expression that had overspread his face, the sombre light that glowed in
his eyes. In a moment the adventurer was lost, another being had come
uppermost--a strange, unexpected being.
"What do you think of this picture?"
The Irishman did not answer for a moment, then his eyes returned to the
canvas and his tongue was loosed.
"If you want to know," he said, "I think it's the most damnable thing
I've ever seen. When the Gallic mind runs to morbidity there's nothing
to touch it for filth."
"Why filth?"
"Why filth? My dear boy, look at this--and this!" He pointed to the
other pictures, each a study of monkey life, each a travesty of some
human passion.
The boy obeyed, conscientiously and slowly, then once more his eyes
challenged his companion's.
"I say again, why filth?"
"Because there is enough of the beast in every man without advertising
it."
"You admit that there is something of the beast in every man?"
"Naturally."
"Then why fear to see it?" The boy's face was pale, his eyes still
challenged.
The other made a gesture of impatience. "It isn't a question of fear;
it is a question of--well, of taste."
"Taste!" The boy tossed the word to scorn.
"What would you substitute?"
"Truth." There was a tremor in his voice, a veil seemed to fall upon his
youth, arresting its carelessness, sobering its vitality.
The Irishman raised his brows. "Truth, eh?"
"Yes. It is only possible to live when we know life truly, see it and
value it truly."
"There may be perverted truth."
"You say that because this truth we speak of displeases you; yet this is
no more a perversion of the truth than"--he glanced round the
walls--"than that, for example; yet you would approve of that."
He waved his hand toward another painting, a delicate and charming
conception of a half-clothed woman, a picture in which the flesh-tints,
the drapery, the lights all harmonized with exquisite art.
"You would approve of that because it pleases your eye and soothes your
senses, yet you know that all womankind is not slim and graciou--that
all life is not lived in boudoirs."
"Neither is man all beast."
"Ah, that is it! If we are to be students of human nature we must not be
swayed in one direction or the other; and that is the difficulty--to be
dispassionate. Sometimes it is--very difficult!"
It came with a charm indescribable, this sudden admission of weakness,
accompanied by a deprecating, pleading glance, and the Irishman was
filled with a sudden sense of having recovered something personal and
precious.
"What are you?" he cried. "It's my turn to seek the truth now. What are
you, you incomprehensible being?"
The boy laughed, the old careless, light-hearted laugh of the creature
infinitely free.
"Do not ask! Do not ask!" he said. "A riddle is only interesting while
it is unsolved."
CHAPTER VI
With the laugh the personal moment passed. Henceforward it was the
technique of the pictures, the individualism of the artists that claimed
the boy's attention, and in this new field he proved himself yet another
being--a creature of quick perception and curiously mature judgment,
appreciative and observant, critical and generous.
In warm and interested discussion they made the tour of the rooms, and
when they emerged again into the frosty morning air and were greeted by
the dazzle of the sun, each was conscious of a deeper understanding. A
new expression of interest and something of respect was visible in the
Irishman's face as he looked down on the puzzling, elusive being whom he
had picked up from the skirts of chance as he might have filched a jewel
or a coin.
"Look here, boy!" he said, "we mustn't say good-bye just yet. Come
across the river, and let's find some little place where we can get a
seat and a cup of coffee."
The boy's only answer was to turn obediently, as the other slipped his
hand through his arm, and to allow himself to be guided back across the
Cours la Reine and over the Pont Alexandre III.
The bridge looked almost as impressive as the Place de la Concorde under
its white garment, and his glance ranged from the high columns, topped
by the winged horses, to the thronging bronze lamps, while the sense of
breath and freedom fitted with his secret thoughts.
Leaving the river behind them, they made their way onward across the
Esplanade des Invalides, through the serried lines of trees, stark and
formal against the January sky, to the rue Fabert. Here, in the rue
Fabert, lay that note of contrast that is bound into the very atmosphere
of Paris--the note that touches the imagination to so acute an interest.
Here shabby, broken-down shops rubbed shoulders with fine old entries,
entries that savored of other times in the hint of roomy court-yard and
green garden to be caught behind their gateways; here were creameries
that conjured the country to the eager senses, and laundries that
exhaled a very aroma of work in the hot steam that poured through their
windows and in the babble of voices that arose from the women who stood
side by side, iron in hand, bending over the long, spotless tables piled
with linen.
It was a touch of Parisian life, small in itself, but subtle and
suggestive as the premonition of spring awakened by the twittering of
the sparrows in the tall, leafless trees, and the throbbing song of a
caged canary that floated down from a window above a shop. It was
suggestive of that Parisian life that is as restless as the sea, as
uncontrollable, as possessed of hidden currents.
Involuntarily the boy paused and glanced up at the bird in its cage--the
bird that, regardless of the garden of greenstuffs pushed through its
bars, was pouring forth its heart to the pale sun in a frenzy of
worship.
"How strange that is!" he said. "If I were a bird and saw the great sky,
knowing myself imprisoned, I should beat my life out against my cage."
The Irishman looked down upon him. "I wonder!" he said, slowly.
The quick, gray eyes flashed up to his. "You doubt it?"
"I don't know! 'On my soul, I don't know!"
"Would you not beat your life out against a cage?"
"I wonder that too! I'd like to think I would, but--"
"You imagine you would hesitate? You think you would shrink?"
"I don't know! Human nature is so damnably patient. Come along! here's
the place we're looking for." He drew the boy across the road to the
doorway of a little _café_, over the door of which hung the somewhat
pretentious sign Maison Gustav.
The Maison Gustav was scarcely a more appetizing place than the Hôtel
Railleux. One-half of its interior was partitioned off and filled with
long tables, at which, earlier in the day, workmen were served with
_déjeuner_, while the other and smaller portion, reserved for more
fastidious guests, was fitted with a counter, ranged with fruit and
cakes, and with half a dozen round marble-topped tables, provided with
chairs.
This more refined portion of the _café_ was empty of customers as the
two entered. With the ease and decision of an _habitué_, the Irishman
chose the table nearest to the counter, and presently a woman appeared
from some inner region, and, approaching her customers, eyed them with
that mixture of shrewd observation and polite welcome that belongs to
the Frenchwoman who follows the ways of commerce.
"Good-day, messieurs!" She inclined her head to one side like a plump
and speculative bird, and her hands began mechanically to smooth her
black alpaca apron.
"Good-day, madame!" The Irishman rose and took off his hat with a
flourish that was essentially flattering.
The bright little eyes of the _Parisienne_ sparkled, and her round face
relaxed into the inevitable smile.
'What could she have the pleasure of offering monsieur? It was late, but
she had an excellent _ragoût_, now a little cold, perhaps, but capable
in an instant--'
The stranger put up his hand. "Madame, we could not think of giving you
the trouble--"
"Monsieur, a pleasure--"
"No, madame, it is past the hour of _déjeuner_. All we need is your
charming hospitality and two cups of coffee."
'Coffee! But certainly! While monsieur was saying the word it would be
made and served.'
Madame hurried off, and in silence the Irishman took out his
cigarette-case and offered it to the boy. Bare and even cold as the
_café_ was, there was a certain sense of shelter in the closed glass
door, in the blue film of cigarette smoke that presently began to mount
upward toward the ceiling, and in the pleasant smell of coffee borne to
them from unseen regions mingling with the shrill, cheerful tones of
their hostess's voice.
"A wonderful place, Paris, when all's said and done!" murmured the
Irishman, drawing in a long, luxurious breath of smoke. "How an English
restaurant-keeper would stare you out of countenance if you demanded a
modest cup of coffee when he had luncheon for you to eat! But here,
bless you, they acknowledge the rights of man. If you want coffee,
coffee you must have--and that with the best grace in the world, lest
your self-esteem be hurt! They're like my people at home: consideration
for the individual is the first thing. It means nothing, a Saxon will
tell you, and probably he's quite right; but I'd sooner have a
pleasant-spoken sinner any day than a disagreeable saint. Ah, here comes
madame!" The last words he added in French, and the boy watched him in
amused wonder as he jumped to his feet and, meeting their hostess at the
kitchen door, insisted upon taking the tray from her hands.
Laughing, excited, and flattered, the little woman followed him to the
table.
'It was really too much! Monsieur was too kind!'
'On the contrary! It was not meant that woman should wait upon man!
Madame had accomplished her share in making this most excellent coffee!'
He sniffed at the steaming pot with the air of a connoisseur.
Madame laughed again, this time self-consciously. 'Well, her coffee had
been spoken of before now! Monsieur, her husband, who was quite a
_gourmet_--'
'Always declared there was no such coffee in all Paris! Was not that
so?'
Madame's laugh was now a gurgle of delight. 'How clever of monsieur!
Yes, it was what he said.'
'Of course it was! And now, how was this good husband? And how was life
treating them both?' He put the questions with deep solicitude as he
poured out the coffee, and madame, standing by the table and smoothing
her apron, grew serious, and before she was aware was pouring forth the
grievance that at the moment was darkening her existence--the
disappointment that had befallen the Maison Gustav when her
father-in-law, a market gardener near Issy, who had a nice little sum of
money laid by, had married again at the age of sixty-four.
'Could monsieur conceive anything more grotesque? An old man of
sixty-four marrying a young woman of twenty! Of course there would be a
child!' Her shoulders went up, her hands went out in expressive gesture.
'And her little Léon would be cheated of his grandfather's money by this
creature who--'
At this juncture the sound of a kettle boiling over brought the story to
an abrupt end, and madame flew off, leaving her guests to a not
unwelcome solitude.
As her black skirt whisked round the corner of the door the boy looked
at his companion.
"You come here often," he said.
The other laughed. "I've never set foot in the place before. It's a way
we Irish have of putting our fingers into other people's pies! Some call
it intrusion"--he glanced quizzically at the boy--"but these good
creatures understand it. They're more human than the Saxon or the--"
Again a glint of humor crossed his face, as he paused on his unfinished
sentence.
The boy reddened and impulsively leaned across the table.
"You have taught me something, monsieur," he said, shyly, "and I have
much to learn."
The other returned the glance seriously, intently. "What is it I have
taught you?"
"That in the smaller ways of life it is not possible to stand quite
alone."
The Irishman laid down his cigarette. With native quickness of
comprehension, the spirit of banter dropped from him, his mood merged
into the boy's mood.
"No," he said, "we are not meant to stand quite alone, and when two of
us are flung up against each other as we have been flung, by a wave of
circumstance, you may take it that the gods control the currents. In our
case I would say, 'Let's bow to the inevitable! Let's be friends!'" He
put out his hand and took the boy's strong, slim fingers in his grasp.
"I don't want your secret," he added, with a quickening interest, "but I
want to know one thing. Tell me what you are seeking here in Paris? Is
it pleasure, or money, or what?"
He watched the boy's mobile face as he put his question: he saw it swept
by emotion, transfigured as if by some inner light; then the hand in his
trembled a little, and the gray eyes with their flecks of gold were
lifted to his own, giving insight into the hidden soul.
"I want more than pleasure, monsieur--more than money," he said. "I want
first life--and then fame."
CHAPTER VII
It trembled and hung upon the air--that brief word "fame"--as it has so
often hung and trembled in the streets and in the _cafés_ of Paris,
winged with the exuberance of youth, the faith in his mystic star that
abides in the heart of the artist. In that moment of confession the
individuality of the boy was submerged in his ambition; he belonged to
no country, to no sex. He was inspiration made manifest--the flame
fanned into being by the winds of the universe, blown as those winds
listed.
The Irishman looked into his burning face, and a curious unnamable
feeling thrilled him--a sense of enthusiasm, of profound sadness, of
poignant envy.
"You're not only seeking the greatest thing in the world," he said,
slowly, "but the cruellest. Failure may be cruel, but success is
crueller still. The gods are usurers, you know; they lend to mortals,
but they exact a desperate interest."
The boy's hand, still lying unconsciously in his, trembled again.
"I know that; but it does not frighten me."
"A challenge? Take care! The gods are always listening."
"I know that. I am not afraid."
"So be it, then! I'll watch the duel. But what road do you
follow--music? literature? Art of some sort, of course; you are artist
all over."
Again the fire leaped to the boy's eyes. He snatched his hand away in
quick excitement.
"Look! I will show you!"
With the swiftness of lightning he whipped a pencil from his pocket,
pushed aside his coffee-cup, and began to draw upon the marble-topped
table as though his life depended upon his speed.
For ten minutes he worked feverishly, his face intensely earnest, his
head bent over his task, a lock of dark hair drooping across his
forehead; then he looked up, throwing himself back in his chair and
gazing up at his companion with the egotistical triumph--the intense,
childish satisfaction of the artist in the first flush of accomplished
work.
"Look! Look, now, at this!"
The Irishman laughed sympathetically; the artist, as belonging to a race
apart, was known by him and liked, but he rose and came round the table
with a certain scepticism. Life had taught him that temperament and
output are different things.
He leaned over the boy's chair; then suddenly he laid his hand on his
shoulder and gripped it, his own face lighting up.
"Why, boy!" he cried. "This is clever--clever--clever! I'm a Dutchman,
if this isn't the real thing! Why on earth didn't you tell me you could
do it?"
The boy laughed in sheer delight and, bending over the table, added a
lingering touch or two to his work--a rough expressive sketch of himself
standing back from an easel, a palette in his left hand, a brush in his
right, his hair unkempt, his whole attitude comically suggestive of an
artist in a moment of delirious oblivion. It was the curt, abrupt
expression of a mood, but there was cleverness, distinction, humor in
every line.
"Boy, this is fine! Fine! That duel will be fought, take my word for
it. But, look here, we must toast this first attempt! Madame! Madame!"
He literally shouted the words, and madame came flying out.
"Madame, have you a liqueur brandy--very old? I have discovered that
this is a _fête_ day."
"But certainly, monsieur! A _cognac_ of the finest excellence."
"Out with it, then! And bring two glasses--no, bring three glasses! You
must drink a toast with us!"
Madame bustled off, laughing and excited, and again the Irishman gripped
the boy's shoulder.
"You've taken me in!" he cried. "Absolutely and entirely taken me in! I
thought you a slip of a boy with a head full of notions, and what do I
find but that it's a little genius I've got! A genius, upon my word! And
here comes the blessed liquor!"
His whole-hearted enthusiasm was like fire, it leaped from one to the
other of his companions. As madame came back, gasping in her haste, he
ran to meet her, and, seizing the brandy and the glasses, drew her with
him to the table.
"Madame, you are a Frenchwoman--therefore an artist. Tell me what you
think of this!"
In his excitement he spoke in English, but madame understood his actions
if not his words. Full of curiosity she bent over the boy's shoulder,
peered into the sketch, then threw up her hands in genuine admiration.
'Ah, but he was an artist, was monsieur! A true artist! It was
delicious--ravishing!' She turned from one of her customers to the
other. 'If monsieur would but put his name to this picture she would
never again have the table washed; and in time to come, when he had made
his big success--'
"Good, madame! Good! When he has made his big success he will come back
here and laugh and cry over this, and say, 'God be with the youth of
us!' as we say in my old country. Come, boy, put your name to it!"
[Illustration: "WHY, BOY, THIS IS CLEVER--CLEVER--CLEVER!"]
The boy glanced up at him. His face was aglow, there were tears of
emotion in his eyes.
"I can say nothing," he cried, "but that I--I have never been so happy
in my life." And, bending over his sketch, he wrote across the
marble-topped table a single word--the word 'Max.'
The Frenchwoman bent over his shoulder. "Max!" she murmured. "A pretty
name!"
The Irishman looked as well. "Max! So that's what they call you? Max!
Well, let's drink to it!" He filled the three glasses and raised his
own.
"To the name of Max!" he said. "May it be known from here to the back of
God's speed!" He swallowed the brandy and laid down his glass.
"To M. Max!" The Frenchwoman smiled. "A great future, monsieur!" She
sipped and bowed.
Of the three, the boy alone sat motionless. His heart felt strangely
full, the tears in his eyes were dangerously near to falling.
"Come, Max! Up with your glass!"
"Monsieur, I--I beg you to excuse me! My heart is very full of your
kindness."
"Nonsense, boy! Drink!"
The boy laughed with a catch in his breath, then he drank a little with
nervous haste, coughing as he laid his glass down. The _cognac_ of the
Maison Gustav was of a fiery nature.
The Irishman laughed. "Ah, another peep behind the mask! You may be an
artist, young man--- you may have advanced ideas--but, for all that,
you're only out of the nursery! It's for me to make a man of you, I see.
Come, madame, the _addition_, if you please! We must be going."
For a moment madame was lost in calculation, then she decorously
mentioned the amount of their debt.
The Irishman paid with the manner of a prince, and, slipping his arm
again through the boy's, moved to the door; there he looked back.
"Good-day, madame! Many thanks for your charming hospitality! Give my
respects to monsieur, your husband--and kiss the little Léon for me!"
They passed out into the rue Fabert, into the fresh and frosty air, and
involuntarily the boy's arm pressed his.
"How am I to thank you?" he murmured. "It is too much--this kindness to
a stranger."
The Irishman paused and looked at him. "Thanks be damned!--and stranger
be damned!" he said with sudden vehemence. "Aren't we citizens of a free
world? Must I know a man for years before I can call him my friend? And
must every one I've known since childhood be my friend? I tell you I saw
you and I liked you--that was all, and 'twas enough."
Max looked at him with a certain grave simplicity. "Forgive me!" he
said.
Instantly the other's annoyance was dispelled. "Forgive! Nonsense! Tell
me your plans, that's all I want."
"My plans are very easy to explain. I shall rent a studio here in
Paris--and there I shall work."
"As a student?"
"No, I have had my years of study; I am older than you think." He took
no notice of the other's raised eyebrows. "I want to paint a picture--a
great picture. I am seeking the idea."
"Good! Good! Then we'll make that our basis--the search for the idea.
The search for the great idea!"
Max thrilled. 'The search for the idea! How splendid! Where must it
begin? Not in fashionable Paris! Oh, not in fashionable Paris!'
"Fashionable Paris!" The Irishman laughed in loud disdain. "Oh no! For
us it must be the highways and the byways, eh?"
Max freed his arm. "Ah yes! that is what I want--that is what I want.
The highways and the byways. It is necessary that I am very solitary
here in Paris. Quite unknown, you understand?--quite unnoticed."
"The mystery? I understand. And now, tell me, shall it be the highways
or the byways--Montmartre or the Quartier Latin?"
Max smiled decisively. "Montmartre."
"You know Montmartre?"
"No."
The Irishman laughed again. "Good!" he cried. "You're a fine adventurer!
You have the right spirit! Always know your own mind, whatever else
you're ignorant about! But I ought to tell you that Montmartre swarms
with your needy fellow-countrymen."
The boy looked up. "My needy fellow-countrymen will not harm me--or know
me."
"Good again! Then the coast is clear! I only thought to warn you."
"I appreciate the thought." For an instant the old reserve touched the
voice.
"Now, Max! Now! Now!" The other turned to him, caught his arm again, and
swung him out into the Esplanade des Invalides. "You're not to be doing
that, you know! You're not! You're not! I see through you like a pane of
glass. Sometimes you forget yourself and get natural, like you did in
the _café_ this time back; then, all of a sudden, some imp of suspicion
shakes his tail at you and says, 'Look here, young man, put that
Irishman in his place! Keep him at a respectable arm's length!' Now,
isn't that gospel truth?"
The boy laughed, vanquished. "Monsieur," he said, naïvely, "I will not
do it again."
"That's right! You see, I'm not interesting or picturesque enough to
suspect. When all's said and done, I'm just a poor devil of an Irishman
with enough imagination to prevent his doing any particular harm in this
world, and enough money to prevent his doing any special good. My name
is Edward Fitzgerald Blake, and I have an old barracks of a castle in
County Clare. I have five aunts, seven uncles, and twenty-four first
cousins, every one of whom thinks me a lost soul; but I have neither
sister nor brother, wife nor child to help or hinder me. There now! I
have gone to confession, and you must give me absolution and an easy
penance!"
Max laughed. "Thank you, monsieur!"
"Not 'monsieur,' for goodness' sake! Plain Ned, if you don't mind."
"Ned?" The slight uncertainty, coupled with the foreign intonation, lent
a charm to the name.
"That's it! But I never heard it sound half so well before. Personally,
it always struck me as being rather like its owner--of no particular
significance. But I must be coming down to earth again, I have an
appointment with our friend McCutcheon at three o'clock." He drew out
his watch. "Oh, by the powers and dominations, I have only two minutes
to keep it in! How the time has raced! I say, there's an auto-taxi
looming on the horizon, over by the Invalides; I must catch it if I can.
Come, boy! Put your best foot foremost!"
Laughing and running like a couple of school-boys, they zigzagged
through the labyrinth of formal trees, and secured the cab as it was
wheeling toward the _quais_.
"Good!" exclaimed Blake. "And now, what next? Can I give you a lift?"
His foot was on the step of the cab, his fingers on the handle of the
door, his face, flushed from his run and from the cold, looked
pleasantly young. The boy's heart went out to him in a glow of
comradeship.
"No, I will remain here. But I--I want to see you soon again. May I?"
"May you? Say the word! To-morrow? To-night?" The cab was snorting
impatience; Blake opened the door and stepped inside.
The boy colored. "To-night?"
"Right! To-night it shall be! To-night we'll scale the heights." He held
out his hand.
Max took it smilingly. "You have not asked me where I live."
"Never thought of it! Where is it?"
"The Hôtel Railleux, in the rue de Dunkerque."
"Not a very festive locality! But sufficient for the day, eh? Well, I'll
be outside the door of the Hôtel Railleux at nine o'clock."
"At nine o'clock. I shall be awaiting you."
"Right again! Good-bye! It's been a good morning."
Max smiled, a smile that seemed to have caught something of the sun's
brightness, something of the promise of spring trembling in the pale
sky.
"It has been a good morning. I shall never forget it."
Blake laughed. "Don't say that, boy! We'll oust it with many a better."
He released the boy's hand and gave the address to the chauffeur. There
was a moment's pause, a rasp and wrench of machinery, and the willing
little cab flew off toward the nearest bridge.
Max stood watching it, obsessed by a strange sensation. This morning he
had been utterly alone; this morning the fair, cold face of Paris had
been immobile and speculative. Now a miracle had come to pass; the
coldness had been swept aside and the beauty, the warm, palpitating
humanity had shone into his eyes, dazzling him--fascinating him.
CHAPTER VIII
Nine o'clock found Max waiting in the rue de Dunkerque. Paris,
consummate actress that she is, was already arraying herself for the
nightly appeal to her audience of pleasure-seekers. Like a dancer in her
dressing-room, she but awaited the signal to step forth into the glamour
of the footlights; the rouge was on her lips, the stars shone in her
hair, the jewelled slippers caressed her light feet. Even here, in the
colorless region of the Gare du Nord, the perfumed breath of the
courtesan city crept like the fumes of wine; the insidious sense of
nocturnal energy swept the brain, as the traffic jingled by and the
crowds upon the footpaths thronged into the _cafés_ and overflowed into
the roadway.
To the boy, walking slowly up and down, with eager eyes that sought the
one face among the many, the scene came as a joyous revelation that
called inevitably to his youth and his vitality. He made no pretence of
analyzing his sensations: he was stirred, intoxicated by the movement,
the lights, the naturalness and artificiality that walked hand-in-hand
in so strange a fellowship. A new excitement, unlike the excitement of
the morning, was at work within him; his blood danced, his brain
answered to every fleeting picture. He was in that subtlest of all moods
when the mind swings out upon the human tide, comprehending its every
ripple with a deep intuition that seems like a retrospective knowledge.
He had never until this moment stood alone in a Paris street at night;
he had never before rubbed shoulders with a Parisian night crowd; but
the inspiration was there--the exaltation--that made him one with this
restless throng of men and women whose antecedents were unknown to him,
whose future was veiled to his gaze.
The sensation culminated when, out of the crowd, a hand was laid upon
his shoulder and a familiar voice rose above the babble of sound.
"Well, and are we girded for the heights?"
It came at the right moment, it lilted absolutely with his thoughts--the
soft, pleasant tones, the easy friendliness that seemed to accept all
things as they came. His instant answer was to smile into the Irishman's
face and to press the arm that had been slipped through his.
"It's too early for anything very characteristic, but there are always
impressions to be got."
Again the boy replied by a pressure of the arm, and together he and
Blake began to walk. The strange pleasure of yielding himself to this
man's will filtered through Max's being again, as it had done that
morning, painting the world in rosy tints. The situation was anomalous,
but he ignored the anomaly. His boats were burned; the great ice-bound
sea protected him from the past; he was here in Paris, in the first
moments of a fascinating present, under the guardianship of this comrade
whose face he had never seen until yesterday, whose very name was still
unfamiliar to his ears. It was anomalous, but it held happiness; and
who, equipped with youth and health, starting out upon life's road,
stops to question happiness? He was the adventuring prince in the
fairy-tale: every step was taken upon enchanted ground.
Nothing gave him cause for quarrel as they made their way onward. Even
the Boulevard de Magenta, with its prosaic tram-lines, its large, cheap
shops, its common _brasseries_ and spanning railway bridge, seemed a
place of promise; and as they passed on, ever mounting toward
Montmartre, his brain quickened to new joy, new curiosity in every
flaunting advertisement, every cobble-stone in the long steep way of the
Boulevard Barbés, the rue de la Nature, and the rue de Clignancourt,
until at length they emerged into the rue André de Sarte--that narrow
street, quaint indeed in its dark old houses and its small, mysterious
wine shops that savor of Italy or Spain.
They paused, at the corner of the rue André de Sarte, by the doorway of
an old, overcrowded curio shop--the curio shop that in time to come was
destined to become so familiar a landmark to them both, to stand
sentinel at the gateway of so many emotions.
The lights, the shadows, the effects were all uncertain in this strange
and fascinating neighborhood. High above them, white against the winter
sky, glimmered the domes of the Sacré-Coeur, looking down in symbolic
silence upon the restless city; to the left stretched the rue Ronsard,
with its deserted market and lonely pavement; to the right, the Escalier
de Sainte-Marie, picturesque as its name, wound its precipitous way
apparently to the very stars, while at their feet, creeping upward to
the threshold of the church, was the plantation of rocks, trees, and
holly bushes that in the mysterious darkness seemed aquiver with a
thousand whispered secrets. There was deep contrast here to the
excitement, the vivacity of the boulevards; it seemed as if some shadow
from the white domes above had given sanctuary to the spirit of the
place--the familiar spirit of the time-stained houses, the stone steps
worn by many feet, the dark, naked trees.
The boy's hand again pressed his companion's arm.
"What are those steps?" He pointed to the right.
"The Escalier de Sainte-Marie; they lead up to the rue Müller, and, if
you desire it, to the Sacré-Coeur itself. Shall we climb?"
"But yes! Certainly!" The boy's voice was tense and eager. He hurried
forward, drawing his companion with him, and side by side they began the
mounting of the stone steps--those steps, flanked by the row of houses,
that rise one above the other, as if emulous to attain the skies.
Up they went, their ears attentive to the conflicting sounds that
drifted forth from the doorways, their nostrils assailed by the faintly
pungent scent of the shrubs in the plantation. Higher and higher they
climbed, sensible with each step of a greater isolation, of a rarer,
clearer air. Above them, in one of the higher houses in the rue Müller,
some one was playing a fiddle, and the piercing sweet sounds came
through the night like a human voice, adding the poignancy, the passion
and pathos of human things to the aloofness and unreality of the scene.
The boy was the first to catch this lonely music, and as though it
called to him in some curious way, he suddenly freed his arm from
Blake's and ran forward up the steps.
When Blake overtook him he had passed up the rue Müller, and was leaning
over the wooden paling that fronts the Sacré-Coeur, his elbows resting
upon it, his face between his hands, his eyes held by the glitter of
Paris lying below him.
Blake came quietly up behind him. "I thought you had given me the slip."
He turned. Again the light of inspiration, the curious illumination was
apparent in his face.
"This is most wonderful!" he said. "Most wonderful! It is here that I
shall live. Here--here--with Paris at my feet."
Blake laughed--laughed good-humoredly at the finality, the artless
arrogance of the tone.
"It may not be so easy to find a dwelling in the shadow of the
Sacré-Coeur."
Max looked at him with calm, grave eyes. "I do not consider
difficulties, monsieur. It is here that I shall live. My mind is made
up."
"But this is not the artists' quarter. You may seek your inspiration in
Montmartre, but you must have your studio across the river."
"Why must I? What compels me?"
The Irishman shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing compels you, but it is the
thing to do. You can live here, certainly, if you want to--there is no
law to forbid it--and you can find a studio on the Boulevard de Clichy;
but the other is the thing to do."
The boy smiled his young wise smile. "Monsieur, there is only one thing
to do--the thing one wants to do, the thing the heart compels. If I am
to know Paris I will know her from here--study her, love her from here.
This place is one of miracle. One might know life here, living in the
skies. Listen! That musician knows it!" He thrust out his hand
impulsively and caught Blake's in a pressure full of nervous tension,
full of magnetism. "What is it he plays? Tell me! Tell me!"
His touch, his excitement fired Blake's Celtic blood, banishing his mood
of criticism.
"The man is playing scraps from _Louise_--Charpentier's _Louise_."
"I have never heard _Louise_."
"What! And you a student of Paris? Why, it's Charpentier's hymn to
Montmartre. Listen, now!" His voice quickened. "He's playing a bit out
of the night scene. He's playing the declaration of the _Noctambule_:
"Je suis le Plaisir de Paris!
Je vais vers les Amantes--que le Désir tourmente!
Je vais, cherchant les coeurs qu'oubli a le bonheur.
Là-bas glanant le Rire, ici semant l'Envie,
Prêchant partout le droit de tous à la folie;
Je suis le Procureur de la grande Cité!
Ton humble serviteur--ou ton maître!"
He murmured the words below his breath, pausing as the music deepened
with the passion of the player and the sinister song poured into the
night.
Then came a break, a pause, and the music flowed forth again, but
curiously altered, curiously softened in character.
Max's fingers tightened. "Ah, but listen now, my friend!"
Blake turned to him in quick appreciation. "Good! Good! You are an
artist! That's Louise singing in the third act, on the day she is to be
Muse of Montmartre. It is up here in the little house her lover has
provided for her; it is twilight, and she is in the garden, looking down
upon all this"--he waved his hand comprehensively--"it is her
moment--the triumph and climax of love. Try to think what she is
saying!" He paused, and they stood breathless and enchained, while the
violin trembled under the hand of its master, vibrant and penetrating.
"What is it she says?" Max whispered the words.
Blake's reply was to murmur the burden of the song in the same hushed
way as he had spoken the song of the _Noctambule_.
"Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée, toute fleurie semble ma
destinée.
Je crois rêver sous un ciel de féerie, l'âme encore grisée de ton
premier baiser!"
But, abruptly--abruptly as a light might be extinguished--the music
ceased, and Max released Blake's hand.
"It is all most wonderful," he said; "but the words of that song--they
do not quite please me."
"Why? Have you never sung that '_l'âme encore grisée de ton premier
baiser_!'"
Then, as if half ashamed of the emotional moment, he gave a little
laugh, satirical and yet sad.
"Was there never a little dancer," he added, "never a little model in
all these years--and you so very ancient?"
The boy ignored the jest.
"I am not a believer in love," he said, evasively.
"Not a believer in love! Well, upon my soul, the world is getting very
old! You look like a child from school, and you talk like some quaint
little book I might have picked up on the _quais_. What does it all
mean?"
At the perplexity of the tone Max laughed. "Very little, _mon ami_! I am
no philosopher; but about this love, I have thought a little, and have
gained to a conclusion. It is like this! Light love is desire of
pleasure; great love is fear of being alone."
"Then you hold that man should be alone?"
"Why not?" Max shrugged his shoulders. "We come into the world alone; we
go out of it alone."
"A cold philosophy!"
"A true one, I think. If more lives were based upon it we would have
more achievement and less emotion."
The Irishman's enthusiasm caught sudden fire.
"And who wants less emotion? Isn't emotion the salt of life? Why, where
would a poor devil of a wanderer like myself be, if he hadn't the dream
in the back of his head that the right woman was waiting for him
somewhere?"
Max watched him seriously.
"Then you have never loved?"
"Never loved? God save us! I have been in and out of love ever since I
was seventeen. But, bless your heart, that has nothing to do with the
right woman!"
Max's intent eyes flashed. "And you think the right woman will be
content to take you--after all that?"
Blake came a step nearer, leaning over the parapet, his shoulder
touching his companion's.
"Boy," he said, in a changed tone, "listen to me. It's a big subject,
this subject of love and liking--too big for me to riddle out, perhaps.
But this I know, the world was made as it is, and neither you nor I can
change it; no, nor ten thousand cleverer than we! It's all a mystery,
and the queerest bit of mystery in it is that a man may go down into the
depths and rub shoulders with the worst, and yet keep the soul of him
clean for the one woman."
"Don't you think there are men who can do without either the depths or
the one woman?"
"There are abnormalities, of course."
Max waived the words. "I am serious. I ask you if you do not believe
that there are certain people to whom these things you speak of are poor
things--people who believe that they are sufficient unto themselves?"
The other's mouth twisted into a sarcastic smile.
"Show me the man who is sufficient unto himself!"
Swiftly--as swiftly as he had whipped the pencil from his pocket in the
_café_ that morning--Max stepped back, his head up, his hand resting
lightly on the wooden parapet.
"Monsieur! You see him!"
Blake's expression changed to keen surprise; he turned sharply and
peered into the boy's face.
"You?" he said, incredulously. "You, a slip of a boy, to ignore the
softer side of life and set yourself up against Nature? Take that
fairy-tale elsewhere!"
Max laughed. "Very well, my friend, wait and see!"
"And do you know how long I give you to defy the world, the flesh, and
the devil? A full-blooded young animal like you!"
"How long?"
"Three months--not a day more."
"Three months!" Max laughed, and, as had happened before, his mood
altered with the laugh. The moment of artistic exaltation passed; again
he was the boy--the adventurer, brimming with spirits, thirsting to
break a lance with life. "Three months! Very well! Wait and see! And, in
the mean time, Paris is awake, is she not?"
Blake looked at the laughing face, the bright eyes, and shook his head.
"I believe you're a cluricaun, come all the way from the bogs of Clare!
Come here, and take my arm again, or you'll be vanishing into that
plantation!"
It is unlikely that Max understood all the other's phrases, but he
understood the lenient, bantering tone that had in it a touch of
something bordering upon affection, and with a gracious eagerness he
stepped forward and slipped his hand through the proffered arm.
"Where are you going to take me?" All the lightness, all the arrogance
had melted from his voice, his tone was almost as soft, almost as
submissive as a woman's.
Blake looked down upon him. "I hardly know--after that philosophy of
yours! I thought of taking you to a little Montmartre _cabaret_, where
many a poet wrote his first verses and many an artist sang his first
song--a dingy place, but a place with atmosphere."
Max clung to his arm, the light flashing into his eyes. "Oh, my friend,
that is the place! That is the place! Let us go--let us run, lest we
miss a moment!"
"Good! Then hey for the Boulevard de Clichy and the quest of the great
idea!"
CHAPTER IX
The ascent of the heights had been exciting, the descent held a sense of
satisfaction. At a more sober pace, with a finer, less exuberant sense
of comradeship, the two passed down the hundred-odd steps of the
Escalier de Sainte-Marie, taking an occasional peep into some dark and
silent corner, halting here and there to glance into the dimly lighted
hallway of some mysterious house. On the upward way they had been all
anticipation; now, with appetites appeased, they toyed with their
sensations like diners with their dessert.
"Who are the people living in these houses?" The boy put the question in
a whisper, as if fearful of disturbing the strange silence, the close
secrecy that hung about them.
"The people who live here? God knows! Probably you would find a
_blanchisseuse_ on the ground floor, and on the fourth a poet or perhaps
a musician, like our fiddler of _Louise_. This is the real Bohemia, you
know--not the conscious Bohemia, but the true one, that is lawless
simply because it knows no laws."
They had come to the end of the steps and were once again traversing the
dim rue André de Sarte, the boy's eyes and ears awake to every
impression.
"Yes," he said in slow and meditative answer. "Yes, I think I
understand. It must be wonderful to be born unfettered."
"I don't know about wonderful; it's a profoundly interesting condition.
You get that blending of egoism and originality--daring and
scepticism--that may produce the artist or may produce the criminal."
"But you believe that the creature of temperament--of egoism and
originality--may spring up in a lawful atmosphere as well as in a
lawless one?" The question came softly. Max had ceased to look about
him, ceased to observe the streets that grew more crowded, more brightly
lighted as they made their downward way.
Blake smiled. "The tares among the wheat, eh?"
"Yes."
"Oh, of course I admit the tares among the wheat; but such growths are
mostly unsatisfactory. Forced fruit is never precisely the same as wild
fruit."
"Why not?"
"Because, my boy, there is a self-consciousness about all forced things,
and the hallmark of the Bohemian is an absolute ingenuousness."
"But to return to your example. Suppose the tare among the wheat had
always recognized itself--had always craved to be a tare with other
tares--until at length its roots spread and spread and passed beyond the
boundary of the wheat-field! Why should it not flourish and lift its
head among the weeds?"
"Because, boy, it would have its traditions. It might live forever among
the weeds, it might flourish and reign over them, but it would have a
reminiscence unknown to them--the knowledge of the years in which it
strove to mold itself to the likeness of the wheat before rebellion woke
within it. I know! I know! I know Bohemia--love Bohemia--but at best I
am only a naturalized Bohemian. I can live on a crust with these good
creatures, or I can send my gold flying with theirs, but I'm hanged if,
for instance, I can sin in quite the delicious, child-like,
whole-hearted way that is their prerogative! I have done most of the
things that they have done, but their disarming candor, their simple joy
in their exploits, is something debarred to me. It isn't for nothing, I
tell you, that I have countless God-fearing generations behind me!"
He spoke jestingly, but his glance, when it met the eager impetuosity of
the boy's, was quiet and observant.
"I disagree with you!" Max cried, suddenly. "I disagree with you wholly!
Individuality has nothing to do with environment--nothing to do with
ancestry."
"Ah, that's not logical! Humanity is only a chain of which we are the
last links forged. I have had my own delusions, when I sent the ideal to
the right-about and made realism my god, but as time has gone on my
theories have gone back on me, and tradition has come into its own,
until now I see the skeleton in every beautiful body, and the heart of
me craves something behind even the bones--the soul of the creature."
"But that is different, because your desire and your theory have been
the common desire and theory--the things that burn themselves out. My
theory is not of the body, it is of the mind. I only contend that in all
the greater concerns of life I am a being perfectly competent to stand
alone."
"My dear boy, by the mercy of God all the ideas of youth are reversible!
My fire has been extinguished; your ice will hold until the sun is in
the zenith, and not one moment longer."
"I deny it! I deny it!"
He spoke with a fine defiance. He paused, the more convincingly to
express himself; but even as he paused, his eyes and his mind were
suddenly opened to a fresh impression, were lured from the moment of
gravity, caught and held by the lights and crowds into which they had
abruptly emerged--lights and crowds through which the pervading sense
of a pleasure-chase stole like a scent borne on a breeze.
"Where are we?" he said, sharply. "What place is this?"
"The Boulevard de Clichy. Come, boy! Discussions are over. The curtain
is up; the play is on!" Without apology, Blake caught his shoulder and
swung him out into the roadway, as he had swung him across the Esplanade
des Invalides that morning. "Come! I'm going to insist upon a new
medicine; my first prescription was not the right one. You're too
theoretical to-night for a place of traditions. We'll shelve our little
_cabaret_ till some hour when genius burns, and instead I'll plunge you
straight into common frivolity, as though you were some Cockney tourist
getting his week-end's worth! Have you ever heard of the Bal Tabarin?"
"Never. And I would much--- much rather--"
"No, you wouldn't! I have spoken. Come along!"
Before Max could resist he was swept across the wide roadway, round a
corner, and through what looked to him like the entrance to a theatre.
There were many people gathered about this entrance: men in evening
dress, men in shabby, insignificant clothes, women in varying types of
costume. Max would have lingered to study the little crowd, but Blake
looked upon his hesitancy with distrust, and still retaining the grip
upon his shoulder, half led, half pushed him through a short passage
straight into the dancing-hall, where on the instant his ears were
assailed by a flood of joyous sound in the form of a rhythmic, swinging
waltz--his eyes blinked before the flood of light to which the Parisian
pins his faith for public pleasures--and his nostrils were assailed by a
penetrating smell of scent and smoke. Dazed and a little frightened he
drew back against a wall, overwhelmed by the atmosphere. Superficially
there was little astonishing in the Bal Tabarin; but to the uninitiated
being with wide eyes it seemed in very truth the gay world, with its
stirring music, its walls flaunting their mirrors and their paintings,
its galleries with their palms and railed-in boxes, and beneath--subtly
suggestive adjunct--- the bars, with their countless bottles of
champagne, bottles of every conceivable size built up in serried rows as
though Venus would raise an altar to Bacchus.
Leaning back against the wall, Max surveyed the scene, fascinated and
confused. A thousand questions rose to his lips, but not one found
utterance. Again and yet again his bright glance ranged from the gay red
of the bandsmen's coats to the lines of spectators sitting at the little
tables under the galleries, returning inevitably and persistently to the
pivot of the scene--a space of pale-colored, waxed floor in the centre
of the hall, where innumerable couples whirled or glided to the tune of
the waltz.
He had seen many a ball in progress, but never had he seen dancing as he
saw it here, where grace rubbed shoulders with absolute _gaucherie_, and
wild hilarity mingled unashamed with a curious seriousness--one had
almost said iciness--of demeanor. The women, who formed the definite
interest of the picture, were for the most part young, with a youth that
lent slimness and suppleness to the figure and permeated through the
freely used paint and powder like some unpurchasable essence. Among this
crowd of women some were fair, some brown, a few red-haired, but the
vast majority belonged to the type that was to become familiar to Max as
the true _Montmartroise_--the girl possessed of the dead white face, the
red, sensual lips, the imperfectly chiselled nose, attractive in its
very imperfection, and the eyes--black, brown, or gray--that see in a
single glance to the bottom of a man's soul. Richness of apparel was
not conspicuous among them, but all wore their clothes with the sense of
fitness that possesses the _Parisienne_. Each head was held at the angle
that best displayed the well-dressed hair and cleverly trimmed hat; each
light skirt was held waist-high with a dexterity that allowed the
elaborate petticoat to sweep out from the neat ankles in a whirl of
lace.
Some of these girls danced with pleasure-seeking young Englishmen or
Americans in conventional evening dress, others with little clerks in
ill-fitting clothes and bowler hats, while many chose each other for
partners, and glided over the waxed floor in a perfection of motion
difficult to excel.
Leaning back against the wall, he watched the picture, gaining courage
with familiarity, and unconsciously a little gasp of regret parted his
lips as the waltz crashed to a finish and the dancers moved in a body
toward the tables and the bars. Then for the first time he remembered
Blake, and, looking round, saw his green eyes fixed upon him in a
quizzical, satirical glance.
"Well, the devil has a pleasant way with him, there's no denying it!
Come and find a seat! The next will be one of the special dances--a
_can-can_ or a Spanish dance. I'd like you to see it."
"Who will dance it?"
"Who? Oh, probably, if it's the _can-can,_ half a dozen of the
best-looking of those girls with the elaborate _lingerie_. They're paid
to dance here. They're part of the show."
"I see!" Max was interested, but his voice did not sound very certain.
"And the others?" he added. "That fair girl, for example, sitting at the
table with the hideous, untidy little man in the brown suit?"
Blake's eyes sought out the couple. "What! The two smiling into each
other's eyes? Those, my boy, are true citizens of the true Bohemia. She
is probably a little dressmaker's assistant, whose whole available
capital is sunk in that Pierrot hat and those pretty shoes; and
he--well, he might be anything with that queer, clever head! But he's
probably a poet, in the guise of a journalist, picking up a few francs
when he can and where he can. A precarious existence, but lived in
Elysium! Wish I were twenty--and unanalytical! Come along! It's to be a
Spanish dance. You mustn't miss it!"
They made their way forward, pushing toward the open space, upon which a
shaft of limelight had been thrown, the better to display the faces and
figures of eight Spanish women who, dressed in their national costume,
stood preening themselves like vain birds, tossing their heads and
showing their white teeth in sudden smiles of recognition to their
friends among the audience. While Max's interested eyes were travelling
from one face to another, the signal was given, and with an electric
spontaneity the dance began. It was a wonderful dance--a dance of
sensuous contortion crossed and arrested at every moment by the fierce
flash of pride, the swift gesture of contempt indicative of the land
that had conceived it--a dance that would diminish to the merest sway of
the body accompanied by the slow, hypnotic enticement of half-closed
eyes, and then, as a fan might shut or open, leap back in an instant to
a barbaric frenzy of motion in which loosened hair and flaming draperies
carried the beholder's senses upon a tide of intoxication.
Max was conscious of quickened heart-beats and flushed cheeks as the
dancers paused and the high, shrill call that indicated an encore
pierced through the smoke-laden air; and without question he turned and
followed Blake to one of the many tables standing in the shadow of the
galleries.
The table was packed tightly between other tables, and in the moment of
intoxication he had no glance to spare for his neighbors. Even Blake's
voice when it came to him sounded far away and impersonal.
"Sit down, boy! What will you drink?"
"What you drink, _mon ami_, I will drink."
He sat down and, with a new exuberance, threw himself back in his seat.
It was a moment of bravado that reckoned not at all with circumstance;
his gesture was imperiously reckless, the space about him was crowded to
suffocation; by a natural sequence of events his head came into sharp
contact with the waving plumes of a hat at the table behind him.
With volubility and dispatch the owner of the hat expressed her opinion
of his awkwardness; one or two people near them laughed, and, flushing a
desperate red, he turned, raised his hat, and offered an apology.
The possessor of the feathers was a woman of thirty who looked ten years
older than her age; her face was unhealthily pale even beneath its mask
of powder, and her eyes were curiously lifeless, but her clothes were
costly and her figure fine, if a trifle robust. At sound of the boy's
voice she turned. Her movement was slow and deliberate; her gaze, in
which a dull resentment smouldered, passed over his confused, flushed
face, and rested upon Blake's; then a light, if light it might be
called, glimmered in her eyes, and her immobile face relaxed into a
smile.
"'_Allo, mon cher_! But I thought you had dropped out of life!"
The boy, with a startled movement, turned his eyes on Blake; but Blake
was smiling at the woman with the same pleasant smile--half humorous,
half satirical--that he had bestowed dispassionately upon the young
Englishman in the train the night before, and upon the little _café_
proprietress of the rue Fabert--the smile that all his life had been a
passport to the world's byways.
"What! you, Lize!" he was saying easily, and with only the faintest
shadow of surprise. "Well, if I have been dead, I am now resurrected!
Let's toast old times, since you are alone. _Garçon! Garçon!_"
Out of the crowd a waiter answered his call. Wine was brought,
three glasses were brought and filled, while Max watched the
performance--watched the ease and naturalness of it with absorbed
wonder.
"Lize," said Blake, as the waiter disappeared, "my friend who dared to
interfere with that marvellous hat is called Max. Won't you smile upon
him?"
Max blushed again, he could not have told why, and the lady smiled--a
vague, detached smile.
"A pretty boy!" she said. "He ought to have been a woman." Then,
sensible of having discharged her duty, she turned again to Blake.
"And the world, _mon cher_? It has been kind to you?"
Blake laughed and drank some of his wine. "Oh, I can't complain! If it
isn't quite the same world that it was, the fault's in me. I'm getting
old, Lize! Eight-and-thirty come next March!"
A palpable chill touched the woman; she shivered, then laughed a little
hysterically, and finished her wine.
"Ssh! Ssh! Don't say such things!"
Blake refilled her glass. "I was jesting. A man is as old as he feels; a
woman--" He lifted his own glass and smiled into her eyes with a certain
kindliness of understanding. "Come, Lize! The old times aren't so far
behind us! 'Twas only yesterday that Jacques Aujet painted you as the
Bacchante in his 'Masque of Folly.' Do you remember how angry you were
when he used to kiss you, and the grape juice used to run into your
hair and down your neck? Why, 'twas hardly yesterday!"
The woman looked down, and for a moment a shadow seemed to rest upon
her--a something tangible and even fearful, that lent to her mask-like
face a momentary humanity.
"_Mon ami_," she said, in a toneless voice, "do you remember that
Jacques is ten years dead?"
Then suddenly, as if fleeing from her own fear, she looked up again,
surfeiting her senses with the crowds, the lights, the smoke and scent
and crashing music.
"But what folly!" she cried. "Life goes on! The same round, is it not
so? Life and love and jealousy! Come, little monsieur, what have you to
say?"
She turned to Max, sitting silent and attentive; but even as she turned,
there was a flutter of interest among the tables behind her, and a young
girl ran up, laying her hand upon her arm.
"Lize!" she said, with a little gasp. "Lize! He is here--and I am
afraid."
Max looked up. It was the girl he had pointed out to Blake as sitting at
the table with the ugly, clever-looking man; and his eyes opened wide in
fresh surprise, fresh interest as he studied the details of her
appearance. She was of that most attractive type, the fair _Parisienne_;
her complexion was of wax-like paleness, her blonde hair broke into
little waves and tendrils under her Pierrot hat, while her eyes, clear
and blue, proclaimed her extreme youth. As she stood now, clinging to
the elder woman's arm, her mind showed itself in an utter naturalness,
an utter disregard of the fact that she was observed. Max remembered
Blake's words--"These are true citizens of the true Bohemia."
But the woman Lize had turned at her cry, and laid a plump, jewelled
hand over her slim, nervous fingers.
"Jacqueline! My child, what is wrong?"
"He is here! And Lucien is here! And I am afraid!"
The words were vague, but the elder woman asked for no explanation.
"Does Lucien know?"
The girl shook her head.
"And this beast--where is he?"
The girl, silent from emotional excitement, nodded toward the opposite
bar, and a light flickered up into Lize's eyes as she scanned the crowd
divided from them by the space of waxed floor, from which the Spanish
dancers had just retreated.
Max raised his glass and drank some of his champagne. His first dread of
the place was gripping him again--exciting him, confusing him. All about
him, like the scent-laden atmosphere itself, moved the crowd--the girls
of Montmartre and their cavaliers. Everywhere was that sense of
conscious enjoyment--that grasping of the mere moment that the Parisian
has reduced to a science. It enveloped him like a veil--the artless
artificiality of Paris! Everywhere fans emblazoned with the words Bal
Tabarin fluttered like butterflies, everywhere cigar smoke mingled with
the essences from the women's clothes, but beneath it all lurked a
something unanalyzed, dimly understood, that chained his imagination. It
hung about him; it crouched behind the women's expectant eyes; then
suddenly it sprang forth like an ugly beast into a perfumed garden.
It came in a moment: a little scuffle at the bar opposite, as a heavy,
fair-bearded man disengaged himself from the crowd about him, a little
flutter of interest as he made an unsteady way across the waxed floor, a
little smothered scream from the girl as he lurched up to the table and
paused, gazing at her with angry, bloodshot eyes.
For a second of silence the two looked at each other--the girl with a
frightened, fascinated gaze, the man with the slow insolence that drink
induces. At last, muttering some words in a guttural tongue unknown to
the boy, he swayed forward and laid a heavy red hand upon her shoulder.
The gesture was brutal, masterful, expressive. A sense of mental
sickness seized upon Max; while the woman Lize suddenly braced herself,
changing from the inert, half-hypnotized creature of a moment before
into a being of fury.
"_Sapristi_!" she cried aloud. "A pretty lover to come wooing!" And she
added a phrase that had never found place in Max's vocabulary, and at
which the surrounding people laughed.
The words and the laugh were tow to the fire of the man's rage. He freed
the girl's arm and struck the table with a resounding violence that made
the glasses dance.
It was the signal for a scene. In a second people at the neighboring
tables rose to their feet, chairs were overturned, a torrent of words
poured forth from both actors and spectators, while through everything
and above everything the band poured forth an intoxicating waltz.
Max, forgetful of himself, stood with wide eyes and white, absorbed
face. He saw the climax of the scene--saw the bearded man lean across
the table and seize the girl by the waist--saw, to his breathless
amazement, the woman Lize suddenly grasp the champagne bottle and fling
it full into his face; then, abruptly, out of the maze of sensations, he
felt some one grip him by the shoulder and march him straight through
the crowd, into the vestibule, on into the open air.
Outside, in the glare of the lights, in the cold fresh air of the
street, he turned, white and shaking, upon Blake.
"Why did you do it?" he demanded. "I think you were a coward! I would
not have run away!"
Blake laughed, though his own voice was a little uneven, his own face
looked a little pale. "There are some battle-fields, boy, where
discretion is obviously the better part of valor! I'm sorry I brought
you here, though they generally manage to avoid this sort of thing."
Max still looked indignant.
"But she was a friend of yours!"
"A friend! My God!"
"But she called you her friend!"
"Friendship is a much-defaced coin that poverty-stricken humanity will
always pass! Our friendship, boy, consists in the fact that she once
loved and was loved by a man I knew. Poor Lize! She had a bit too much
heart for the game she played. And the heart is there still, for all the
paint and powder and morphine she fights the world with! Poor Lize!"
Max's eyes were still wide, but the anger had died down.
"And the girl?" he questioned. "The girl, and the brute, and the man
with the clever head? What have they all to do with each other and with
her?"
Blake's lips parted to reply, but closed again.
"Never mind, boy!" he said, gently. "Come along back to your hotel;
you've seen enough life for one night."
CHAPTER X
With a new day began a new epoch. On the morning following the night, of
first adventure Max woke in his odd, mountainous bed at the Hôtel
Railleux kindling to fresh and definite sensations. In a manner
miraculously swift, miraculously smooth and subtle, he had discovered a
niche in this strange city, and had elected to fit himself to it. A
knowledge of present, a pledge of future interests seemed to permeate
the atmosphere, and he rose and dressed with the grave deliberation of
the being who sees his way clear before him.
It was nine o'clock when he entered the _salle-à-manger_, and one sharp
glance brought the satisfying conviction that it was deserted save for
the presence of the assiduous young waiter, who came hurrying forward as
though no span of hours and incidents separated yesterday's meal from
to-day's.
His attentive attitude was unrelaxed, his smile was as deferential as
before, but this morning he found a less responsive guest. Max was
filled with a quiet assurance that debarred familiarity; Max, in fine,
was bound upon a quest, and the submissive young waiter, the bare
eating-room, Paris itself, formed but the setting and background in his
arrogant young mind to the greatness of the mission.
The thought--the small seed of thought that was responsible for the idea
had been sown last night, as he leaned over the parapet fronting the
Sacré-Coeur, looking down upon the city with its tangle of lights; and
later, in the hours of darkness, when he had tossed on his heavy bed,
too excited to lure sleep, it had fructified with strange rapidity,
growing and blossoming with morning into definite resolve.
He drank his coffee and ate his roll in happy preoccupation, and, having
finished his meal, left the room and went quietly down the stairs and
through the glass door of the hotel.
The frost still held; Paris still smiled; and, buttoning up his coat, he
paused for a moment on the doorstep to turn his face to the copper-red
sun and breathe in the crisp, invigorating air; then, with a quaintly
decisive manner that seemed to set sentiment aside, he walked to the
edge of the footpath and hailed a passing _fiacre_.
"To the church of the Sacré-Coeur," he commanded.
The _cocher_ received the order with a grumble, looked from his
unreliable horse to the frosty roadway, and was about to shake his head
in definite negation when Max cajoled him with a more ingratiating
voice.
"The rue Ronsard, then? Will you take me to the corner of the rue
Ronsard?"
The man grumbled again, and shrugged his shoulders until his ears
disappeared in the shaggy depths of his fur cape; but, when all hope
seemed fled, he laconically murmured the one word "_Bon!_" whipped up
his horse, and started off with a fine disregard of whether his fare had
taken his seat or been left behind upon the footpath.
To those who know Montmartre only as an abode of night--a place of light
and laughter and folly--Montmartre in the day, Montmartre at half-past
nine in the morning, comes as a revelation. The whole picture is as a
coin reversed. The theatres, the music-halls, the _cabarets_ all lie
with closed eyes, innocently sleeping; the population of
pleasure-seekers and pleasure-mongers has disappeared as completely as
if some magician had waved his wand, and in its place the streets teem
with the worker--the early, industrious shopkeeper and the householder
bent upon a profitable morning's marketing. Max, gazing from the
_fiacre_ with attentive eyes, followed the varying scenes, while his
horse wound a careful and laborious way up the cobble-paved streets, and
noted with an artist's eye the black, hurrying figures of the men,
cloaked and hooded against the cold, and the black, homely figures of
the women, silhouetted against the sharp greens and yellows of the laden
vegetable stalls at which they chattered and bargained.
It was all noisy, interesting, alive; and us he watched the pleasant,
changing pictures, his courage strengthened, his belief in his own star
mounted higher; the decision of last night stood out, as so few
nocturnal decisions can stand out, unashamed and justified in the light
of day.
At the corner where the rue André de Sarte joins the rue Ronsard he
dismissed his cab, and with a young inquisitiveness in all that
concerned the quarter, paused to look into the old curio shop, no longer
closed as on the previous night, but open and inviting in its dingy
suggestion of mysteries unsolved.
Now--at this moment of recording the boy's doings--the curio shop no
longer exists at the corner of the rue André de Sarte; it has faded into
the unknown with its coppers and brasses, its silver and tinsel, its
woollen and silk stuffs; but on that January morning of his first coming
it still held place, its musty perfumes still conjured dreams, its open
doorway, festooned with antique objects, still offered tempting glimpses
into the long and dim interior, where an old Jew, presiding genius of
the place, lurked like a spider in the innermost circle of his web.
Max lingered, drawn into self-forgetfulness by the blending of faded
hues, the atmosphere of must and spices, the air of age indescribable
that veiled the place. He loitered about the windows, peeped in at the
doorway, would even have ventured across the threshold had not a
ponderous figure, rising silently from a heap of cushions upon the floor
of the inmost room, sent him hastening round the corner, guiltily
conscious that it was new lamps and not old he was here to light.
The interest of his mission flowed back, sharpened by the momentary
break, and it was with very swift steps that he ran up the Escalier de
Sainte-Marie to the rue Müller; there, in the rue Müller, he paused, his
back to the green plantation, his face to the row of houses rising one
above the other, each with its open doorway, each with its front of
brick and plaster, its iron balcony from which hung the inevitable array
of blankets, rugs, and mattresses absorbing the morning air.
To say that, in the mystic silence of the previous night and restless
hours of the dawn, Max had vowed to himself that here in the rue Müller
he would make a home, and to add that, coming in the light of day, he
found a door open to him, sounds at the least fabulous; yet, as he stood
there--eager, alert, with face lifted expectantly, and bright gaze
winging to right and left--fable was made fact: the legend '_Appartement
à louer_' caught his glance like a pronouncement of fate.
It sounds fabulous, it sounds preposterous, and yet it obtains, to be
accounted for only by the fact that in this curious world there are
certain beings to whom it is given to say of all things with naïve
faith, not 'I shall seek,' but 'I shall find.'
Max had never doubted that, if courage were high enough to undertake the
quest, absolute success awaited him. He read the legend again,
'_Appartement à louer 5ième étage. Gaz: l'eau,'_ and without hesitation
crossed the rue Müller and passed through the open door.
The difference was vast between his nervous entry thirty-six hours ago
into the Hôtel Railleux and the boldness of his step now. The difference
between secret night and candid morning lay in the two proceedings--the
difference between self-distrust and self-confidence. Then he had been a
creature newly created, looking upon himself and all the world with a
sensitive distrust; now he was an individual accepted of others, assured
of himself, already beginning to move and have his being in happy
self-forgetfulness.
He stepped into the hallway of the strange house and paused to look
about him, his only emotion a keen interest that kept every nerve alert.
The hallway round which he looked displayed no original features: it was
a lofty, rather narrow space, the walls of which--painted to resemble
marble--were defaced by time, by the passing of many skirts and the
rubbing of many shoulders. In the rear was a second door, composed of
glass, and beyond it the suggestion of a staircase of polished oak that
sprang upward from the dingy floor in a surprising beauty of panelled
dado and fine old banister.
Max's eyes rested upon this staircase: in renewed excitement he hurried
down the hall and, regardless of the consequence, beat a quick tattoo
with his knuckles upon the glass door.
Silence greeted his imperative summons, and as he waited, listening
intently, he became aware of the monotonous hum of a sewing-machine
coming through a closed door upon his left.
The knowledge of a human presence emboldened him; again he knocked, this
time more sharply, more persistently. Again inattention; then, as he
lifted his hand for the third time, the hum of the machine ceased
abruptly, the door opened, and he turned to confront a small woman with
wispy hair and untidy clothes, whose bodice was adorned with
innumerable pins, and at whose side hung a pair of scissors large as
shears.
"Monsieur?" Her manner was curt--the manner of one who has been
disturbed at some engrossing occupation.
Max felt rebuffed; he raised his hat and bowed with as close an
imitation as he could summon of Blake's ingratiating friendliness.
"Madame, you have an _appartement_ to let?"
"True, monsieur! An _appartement_ on the fifth floor--gas and water."
There was pride in the last words, if a grudging pride.
"Precisely! And it is a good _appartement_?"
"No better in Montmartre."
"A sufficiency of light?"
'Light?' The woman smiled in scorn. 'Was it not open to the skies--with
those two windows in front, and that balcony?'
Max's excitement kindled.
"Madame, I must see this _appartement_! May I mount now--at once?"
But the matter was no such light one. Madame shook her head. 'Ah, that
was not possible!'
'Why not?'
'Ah, well, there was the _concierge_! The _concierge_ was out.'
'But the _concierge_ would return?'
'Oh yes! It was true he would return!'
The little woman cast a wistful eye on the door of her own room.
'At what hour?'
'Ah! That was a question!'
'This morning?'
'Possibly!'
'This afternoon?'
'Possibly!'
'But not for a certainty?'
'Nothing was entirely certain.'
Anger broke through Max's disappointment. Without a word he turned on
his heel and strode down the hall with the air of an offended prince.
The woman watched him with an expressionless face until he reached the
door, then something--perhaps his youth, perhaps his brave carriage,
perhaps his defiant disappointment--moved her.
"Monsieur!" she called.
He stopped.
"Monsieur, if it is absolutely necessary that you see the
_appartement_--"
"It is. Absolutely necessary." Max ran back.
"Then, monsieur, I will conduct you up-stairs."
The suggestion was greedily seized upon. This _appartement_ on the fifth
floor had grown in value with each moment of denial.
"Thank you, madame, a thousand times!"
"Shall we mount?"
"On the moment, if you will."
Through the glass door they went, and up the stairs, mounting higher and
ever higher in an unbroken silence. Half way up each flight of stairs
there was a window through which the light fell upon the bare oak steps,
proving them to be spotless and polished as the floor of a convent. It
was an unexpected quality, this rigid cleanliness, and the boy
acknowledged it with a mute and deep satisfaction.
Upon each landing were two doors--closed doors that sturdily guarded
whatever of secrecy might lie behind, and at each of these silent
portals Max glanced with that intent and searching look that one bestows
upon objects that promise to become intertwined with one's daily life.
At last the ascent was made, the goal reached, and he paused on the last
step of the stairs to survey the coveted fifth floor.
It was as bare, as scrupulously clean as were the other landings; but
his quick glance noted that while the door upon the left was plain and
unadorned as the others he had passed, that upon the right bore a small
brass plate engraved with the name 'L. Salas.'
This, then, was his possible neighbor! He scanned the name attentively.
"This is the fifth floor, madame?"
"The fifth floor, monsieur!" Without ceremony the little woman went
forward and, to his astonishment, rapped sharply upon the door with the
brass plate.
Max started. "Madame! The _appartement_ is not occupied?"
The only reply that came to him was the opening of the door by an inch
or two and the hissing whisper of a conversation of which he caught no
word. Then the lady of the scissors looked round upon him, and the door
closed.
"One moment, monsieur, while madame throws on a garment!"
A sudden loss of nerve, a sudden desire for flight seized upon Max. He
had mounted the stairs anticipating the viewing of empty rooms, and now
he was confronted with a furnished and inhabited _appartement_, and
commanded to wait 'while madame threw on a garment'! A hundred
speculations crowded to his mind. Into what _milieu_ was he about to be
hurled? What sordid morning scene was he about to witness? In a strange
confusion of ideas, the white face of the woman Lize sprang to his
imagination, coupled with the memory of the empty champagne bottle and
the battered tray of the first night at the Hôtel Railleux. A deadly
sensitiveness oppressed him; he turned sharply to his guide.
"Madame! Madame! It is an altogether unreasonable hour to intrude--"
The reopening of the door on the right checked him, and a gentle voice
broke across his words:
"Now, madame, if you will!"
He turned, his heart still beating quickly, and a sudden shame at his
own thoughts--a sudden relief so strong as almost to be painful--surged
through him.
The open door revealed a woman of forty-five, perhaps of fifty, clothed
in a meagre black skirt and a plain linen wrapper of exquisite
cleanliness. It was this cleanliness that struck the note of her
personality--that fitted her as a garment, accentuating the quiet
austerity of her thin figure, the streaks of gray in her brown hair, the
pale face marked with suffering and sympathy and repression.
With an instinctive deference the boy bared his head.
"Madame," he stammered, "I apologize profoundly for my intrusion at such
an hour."
"Do not apologize, monsieur. Enter, if you will!" She drew back, smiling
a little, and making him welcome by a simple gesture. "We are anxious, I
assure you, to find a tenant for the _appartement_; my husband's health
is not what it was, and we find it necessary to move into the country."
He followed her into a tiny hall; and with her fingers on the handle of
an inner door, she looked at him again in her gentle, self-possessed
way.
"You will excuse my husband, monsieur! He is an invalid and cannot rise
from his chair."
She opened the inner door, and Max found himself in a bedroom, plain in
furniture and without adornment, but possessing a large window, the full
light from which was falling with pathetic vividness on the shrunken
figure and wan, expressionless face of a very old man who sat huddled in
a shabby leathern arm-chair. This arm-chair had been drawn to the
window to catch the wintry sun, and pathos unspeakable lay in the
contrasts of the picture--the eternal youth in the cold, dancing
beams--the waste, the frailty of human things in the inert figure, the
dim eyes, the folded, twitching hands.
The old man looked up as the little party entered, and his eyes sought
his wife's with a mute, appealing glance; then, with a slight confusion,
he turned to Max, and his shaking hand went up instinctively to the old
black skullcap that covered his head.
"He wishes to greet you, monsieur, but he has not the strength." The
woman's voice dropped to tenderness, and she stooped and arranged the
rug about the shrunken knees. "If you will come this way, I will show
you the _salon_."
She moved quietly forward, opening a second door.
"You see, monsieur, it is all very convenient. In summer you can throw
the windows open and pass from one room to the other by way of the
balcony."
She moved from the bedroom into the _salon_ as she spoke, Max and the
lady of the pins following.
"See, monsieur! It is quite a good room."
Max, still subdued by the vision of age, went forward silently, but as
he entered this second room irrepressible surprise possessed him. Here
was an atmosphere he had not anticipated. A soft, if faded, carpet
covered the floor; a fine old buffet stood against the wall; antique
carved chairs were drawn up to a massive table that had obviously known
more spacious surroundings; while upon the walls, from floor to ceiling,
were pictures--pictures of all sizes, pictures obviously from the same
hand, on the heavy gold frames of which the name 'L. Salas' stood out
conspicuously in proof of former publicity.
"Madame!" He turned to the sad-faced woman, the enthusiasm of a
fellow-craftsman instantly kindled. "Madame! You are an artist? This is
your work?"
The woman caught the sympathy, caught the fire of interest, and a faint
flush warmed her cheek.
"Alas, no, monsieur! I am not artistic. It is my husband who is the
creator of these." She waved her hand proudly toward the walls. "My
husband is an artist."
"A renowned artist!"
It was the woman of the pins and scissors who spoke, surprising Max, not
by the sudden sound of her voice, but by her sudden warmth of feeling.
Again Blake's words came back--'These are the true citizens of the true
Bohemia!'--and he looked curiously from one to the other of the women,
so utterly apart in station, in education, in ideals, yet bound by a
common respect for art.
"It is my loss," he said, quietly, "that I did not, until to-day, know
of M. Salas."
"But no, monsieur! What would you know of twenty years ago? It is true
that then my husband had a reputation; but, alas, time moves
quickly--and the world is for the young!"
She smiled again, gently and patiently, and a sudden desire seized Max
to lift and kiss one of her thin, work-worn hands. The whole pitiful
story of a vogue outlived, of a generation pushed aside, breathed in the
silence of these fifth-floor rooms.
"They must be a great pride to you, madame--these pictures."
"These, monsieur--and the fact that he is still with me. We can dispense
with anything save the being we love--is it not so? But I must not
detain you, talking of myself! The other rooms are still to see! This,
monsieur, is our second bedroom! And this the kitchen!"
Max, following her obediently, took one peep into what was evidently
her own bedroom--a tiny apartment of rigid simplicity, in which a narrow
bed, with a large black crucifix hanging above it, seemed the only
furniture, and passed on into the kitchen, a room scarce larger than a
cupboard, in which a gas-stove and a water-tap promised future utility.
"See, monsieur! Everything is very convenient. All things are close at
hand for cooking, and the light is good. And now, perhaps, you would
wish to pass back into the _salon_ and step out upon the balcony?"
Still silent, still preoccupied, he assented, and they passed into the
room so eloquent of past hours and dwindled fortunes.
"See, monsieur! The view is wonderful! Not to-day, perhaps, for the
frost blurs the distances; but in the spring--a little later in the
year--"
Crossing the room, she opened the long French window and stepped out
upon the narrow iron balcony.
Max followed, and, moving to her side, stood gazing down upon the city
of his dreams. For long he stood absorbed in thought, then he turned and
looked frankly into her face.
"Madame," he said, softly, "it is a place of miracle. It is here that I
shall live."
She smiled. She had served an apprenticeship in the reading of the
artist's heart--the child's heart.
"Yes, monsieur? You will live here?"
"As soon, madame, as it suits you to vacate the _appartement_."
Again she smiled, gently, indulgently. "And may I ask, monsieur, whether
you have ascertained the figure of the rent?"
"No, madame."
"And is not that--pardon me!--a little improvident?"
Max laughed. "Probably, madame! But if it demanded my last franc I
would give that last franc with an open heart, so greatly do I desire
the place."
The quiet eyes of the woman softened to a gentle comprehension.
"You are an artist, monsieur."
The color leaped into the boy's face, his eyes flashed with triumph.
"Madame, how did you guess?"
"It is no guessing, monsieur. You tell me with every word."
"Ah, madame, I thank you!" With a charming, swift grace he bent and
caught her hand. "And, madame"--he hesitated naïvely and colored again.
"Madame, I would like to say that when my home is here it will be my
care never to desecrate the atmosphere you have created." He bent still
lower, the sun caressing his crisp, dark hair, and very lightly his lips
touched her fingers.
"_Adieu_, madame!"
"_Adieu_, monsieur!"
CHAPTER XI
It seemed to Max, as the door closed behind him and he found himself
upon the bare landing, that he had dreamed and was awake again; for in
truth the _ménage_ into which he had been permitted to peep seemed more
the fabric of a dream than part of the new, inconsequent life he had
elected to make his own. A curious halo of the ideal--of things set
above the corroding touch of time or fortune--surrounded the old man
forgotten of his world, and the patient wife, content in her one frail
possession.
He felt without comprehending that here was some precious essence, some
elixir of life, secret as it was priceless; and for an instant a shadow,
a doubt, a question crossed his happy egoism. But the sharp, inquisitive
voice of his guide brought him back to material things.
"You like the _appartement_, monsieur?"
He threw aside his disturbing thoughts.
"Undoubtedly, madame!" he said, quickly. "It is here that I shall live."
Without conscious intention he used the phrase that he had used to
Blake--that he had used to Madame Salas.
"You are quick of decision, monsieur?"
"It is well, at least, to know one's own mind, madame! And now tell me
who I shall have for my neighbor." As they moved toward the head of the
stairs, he indicated the second door on the landing--the door innocent
of name, bell, or knocker.
"For neighbor, monsieur? Ah, I comprehend! That is the _appartement_ of
M. Lucien Cartel, a musician; but his playing will not disturb you, for
the walls are thick--and, in any case, he is a good musician."
A conclusion, winged with excitement, formed itself in the mind of Max.
"Madame!" he cried. "He plays the violin--this M. Cartel?"
"Both violin and piano, monsieur. He has a great talent."
"And, madame, he played last night? He played last night between the
hours of ten and eleven?"
"He plays constantly, monsieur, but of last night I am not sure. Last
night was eventful for M. Cartel! Last night--But I speak too much!"
She glanced at Max, obviously desiring the question that would unloose
her tongue. But Max was not alert for gossip, he was listening instead
to a faint sound, long drawn out and fine as a silver thread, that was
slipping through the crevices of M. Cartel's door.
"Ah, there he goes!" interjected the little woman. "Always at the music,
whatever life brings!"
"And I am right! It was he who played last night. How curious!"
The woman glanced up, memory quickening her expression.
"But, yes, monsieur, you are perfectly correct," she said. "M. Cartel
did play last night. I remember now. I was finishing the hem of a black
dress for Madame Dévet, of the rue des Abesses, when my husband came in
at eleven o'clock. He walked in, leaving the door open--the door I came
through this morning at your knock--and he stood there, blowing upon his
fingers, for it was cold. 'Our good Cartel is in love, Marthe!' he said,
laughing. 'He is making music like a bird in spring!' And then,
monsieur, the next thing was a great rush of feet down the stairs, and
who should come flying into the hallway but M. Cartel himself. He paused
for an instant, seeing our door open, and he, too, was laughing. 'What a
fellow that Charpentier is!' he cried to my husband. 'His _Louise_ has
kept me until I am all but late for my _rendezvous_!' And he ran out
through the hall, singing as he went. That was all I saw of M. Cartel
until two o'clock this morning, when some one knocked upon our door--"
But she was permitted to go no further. The silvery notes of the violin
had dwindled into silence, and Max abruptly remembered that he had an
appointment with Blake on the Boulevard des Italiens.
"You are very good, madame, but it is necessary that I go! When can I
see the _concierge_?"
"The _concierge_, monsieur, is my husband. He will be here for a
certainty at one o'clock."
"Good, madame! At one o'clock I shall return."
He smiled, nodded, and ran down the first flight of stairs; but by the
window at the half-landing he stopped and looked back.
"Madame, tell me something! What is the rent of the _appartement_?"
"The rent? Two hundred and sixty francs the year."
"Two hundred and sixty francs the year!" His voice was perfectly
expressionless. Then, apparently without reason, he laughed aloud and
ran down-stairs.
The woman looked after him, half inquisitively, half in bewilderment;
then to herself, in the solitude of the landing, she shook her head.
"An artist, for a certainty!" she said, aloud, and, turning, she
retraced her steps and knocked with her knuckles on the door of M.
Lucien Cartel.
Meanwhile, Max finished his descent of the stairs, his feet gliding
with pleasant ease down the polished oak steps, his hand slipping
smoothly down the polished banister. Already the joy of the free life
was singing in his veins, already in spirit he was an inmate of this
house of many histories. He darted across the hall, picturing in
imagination the last night's haste of M. Cartel of the violin. What
would he be like, this M. Cartel, when he came to know him in the flesh?
Fat and short and negligent of his figure? or lean and pathetic, as
though dinner was not a certainty on every day of the seven? He laughed
a little to himself light-heartedly, and gained the street door with
unnecessary, heedless speed--gained it on the moment that another
pedestrian, moving swiftly as himself, entered, bringing him to a sharp
consciousness of the moment.
Incomer and outgoer each drew back a step, each laughed, each tendered
an apology.
"_Pardon_, monsieur!"
"_Pardon_, mademoiselle!"
Then simultaneously a flash of recognition leaped into both faces.
"Why," cried the girl, "it is the little friend of the friend of Lize!
How droll to meet like this!"
Her candor of speech was disarming; reticence fled before her smile,
before her artless friendliness.
"What a strange chance!" said Max. "What brings you to the rue Müller,
mademoiselle?"
She smiled, and in her smile there was a little touch of pride--an
indefinite pride that glowed about her slender, youthful person like an
aura.
"Monsieur, I live in this house--now."
"Now?" Sudden curiosity fired him.
"Ah, you do not comprehend! Last night was sad, monsieur; to-day--" She
stopped.
"To-day, mademoiselle?"
For a second the clear, childish blue of her eyes flashed like a glimpse
of spring skies.
"It is too difficult, monsieur--the explanation. It is as I say. Last
night was dark; to-day the sun shines!" She laughed, displaying the
dazzling whiteness of her teeth. "And you, monsieur?" she added, gayly.
"You also live here in the rue Müller? Yes? No?" She bent her head
prettily, first to one side, then to the other, as she put her
questions.
"I hope to live here, mademoiselle."
"Ah! Then I wish you, too, the sunshine, monsieur! Good-day!"
"Good-day, mademoiselle!"
It was over--the little encounter; she moved into the dark hallway as
light, as joyous, as inconsequent as a bird. And Max passed out into the
sharp, crisp air, sensible that the troubling memories of the Bal
Tarbarin had in some strange manner been effaced--that inadvertently he
had touched some source whence the waters of life bubbled in eternal,
crystal freshness.
In the rue Ronsard he found a disengaged cab, and in ten minutes he was
wheeling down into the heart of Paris. It was nearing the hour of
_déjeuner_, the boulevards were already filling, and the cold, crisp air
seemed to vibrate to the bustle of hurrying human creatures seriously
absorbed in the thought of food.
He smiled to himself at this humorously grave homage offered up so
untiringly, so zealously to the appetite, as he made his way between the
long line of tables at the restaurant where he had appointed to meet
Blake. Like all else that appertains to the Frenchman, its very
frankness disarmed criticism or disgust. He looked at the beaming faces,
smiling up from the wide-spread napkins in perfect accord with life, and
again, involuntarily, he smiled. It was essentially a good world,
whatever the pessimists might say!
From a side-table he heard his name called, and with an added glow of
pleasure, he turned, saw Blake, and made his way through the closely
ranged chairs and the throng of hurrying waiters.
"Well, boy! Dissipation suits you, it seems! You're looking well. Just
out of bed, I suppose?"
Max laughed. Words were brimming to his lips, until he knew not how to
speak.
"And now, what 'll you eat? I waited to order until you came."
"I do not know that I can eat."
"God bless my soul, why not? Sit down!"
Max laughed again, dropped obediently into a chair, rested his arms on
the table, and looked full at Blake.
"May I speak?"
"From now till Doomsday! _Garçon_!"
But Max laid an impulsive hand upon his arm.
"Wait! Do not order for one moment! I must tell you!" He gave a little
gasp of excitement. "I have seen an _appartement_ in the rue Müller--an
_appartement_ with a charming _salon_ opening upon a balcony, a nice
little bedroom, another room with an excellent painting light, a kitchen
with water and gas, all--all for what do you imagine?"
"What in God's name are you raving about?" Blake laid down the _menu_
just handed to him.
Max paid not the slightest heed.
"All for two hundred and sixty francs the year! Figure it to yourself!
Two hundred and sixty francs the year! What one would pay in a couple of
days for a suite of hotel rooms! I am mad since I have seen the
place--quite mad!" He laughed again so excitedly that the people at the
neighboring table stared.
"I can subscribe to that!" said Blake, satirically.
"Listen! Listen! You have not heard; you have not understood. I have
found an _appartement_ in the rue Müller, at Montmartre--the
_appartement_ I had set my heart upon, the place where I can live and
paint and make my success!"
Blake stared at him in silence.
"Yes! Yes!" Max insisted. "And it is all quite settled. And you are
coming back with me to-day at one o'clock to interview the _concierge_!"
Blake threw himself back in his chair. "I'm hanged if I am!"
Yesterday the boy would have drawn back upon the instant, armored in his
pride, but to-day his reply was to look direct into Blake's face with
fascinating audacity.
"Then you will leave me to contend alone against who can say what
villain--what _apache_?"
"It strikes me you are qualified to deal with any _apache_."
"You are angry!"
"Angry! I should think not!"
"Oh yes, you are!" Max's eyes shone, his lips curled into smiles.
"And why should I be angry? Because your silly little wings have begun
to sprout? I'm not such a fool, my boy! I knew well enough you'd soon be
flying alone."
Max clapped his hands. "Oh yes, you are! You are angry--angry--angry!
You are angry because I found my way to Montmartre without you, and made
a little discovery all by myself! Is it not like a--" He stopped,
laughed, reddened as though he had made some slip, and then on the
instant altered his whole expression to one of appeal and contrition.
"_Mon ami_!"
Blake's reply was to pick up the _menu_ and turn to the attending
waiter.
"Monsieur Ned!"
Blake glanced at him reluctantly, caught the softened look, and laughed.
"You're a young scamp--and I suppose I'm a cross-grained devil! But if I
was angry, where's the wonder? A man doesn't pick up a quaint little
book on the _quais_, and look to have it turning its own leaves!"
"But now? Now it is all forgiven? You will not cast away your little
book because--because the wind came and fluttered the pages?"
Once again Max spoke softly, with the softness that broke so alluringly
across the reckless independence of look and gesture.
A sudden consciousness of this fascination--a sudden annoyance with
himself that he should yield to it--touched Blake.
"I can't go with you to Montmartre," he said, abruptly. "It's
McCutcheon's last day in Paris, and I promised to give him the
afternoon."
"Who? The long, spider man who disliked me?"
"A spider who weaves big webs, I can tell you! You ought to be more
respectful to your elders."
"And I ought to have a studio across the river? Oh, Monsieur Ned, order
some food, for the love of God! I am perishing of hunger."
Blake ordered the _déjeuner_, and talked a great deal upon indifferent
subjects while they ate; but each felt jarred, each felt disappointed,
though neither could exactly have said why. At last, with a certain
relief, they finished their coffee and made a way between the long lines
of tables to the door.
There they halted for a moment in mutual hesitation, and at last the boy
held out his hand.
"And now I must wish you good-bye! Shall I see you any more?"
Blake seemed lost in thought; he took no notice of the proffered hand.
"Are you going to drive or walk?" He put the question after a
considerable pause.
"I thought to drive, because--"
Without permitting him to complete the sentence Blake crossed the
footpath and hailed a passing cab.
"Come on! In you get!"
Max obeyed uncertainly, and as he took his seat a sudden fear of loss
crushed him--life became blank, the brightness of the sun was eclipsed.
"Monsieur Ned!" he called. "Monsieur Ned! I shall see you again?"
Blake was speaking to the _cocher_. 'Rue Ronsard!' he heard him say.
'The corner of the rue André de Sarte!'
He leaned out of the window.
"Monsieur Ned! Monsieur Ned! I shall see you again? This is not
good-bye?"
Blake turned; he laid his hand on the door of the cab and suddenly
smiled his attractive, humorous smile.
"Little fool!" he said. "Didn't you know I was coming with you?"
PART II
CHAPTER XII
From a distinctly precarious perch--one foot on the back of a chair, the
other on an oak chest--Blake surveyed the unfurnished _salon_ of the
fifth-floor _appartement_. His coat was off, in one dusty hand he held a
hammer, in the other a picture, while from between his lips protruded a
brass-headed nail.
"If I drive the nail here, boy, will you be satisfied? Upon my word,
it's the last place I'll try!" He spoke with what dignity and
distinctness he could command, but the effect was lost upon Max, who,
also dusty, also bearing upon his person the evidences of manual labor,
was crouching over a wood fire, intent upon the contents of a brass
coffee-pot.
"Max! Do you hear me?"
"No, I do not hear. Take the nail from your mouth."
"Take it for me! I haven't a hand."
Max left the coffee-pot with some reluctance, crossed the room, and with
the seriousness known only to the enthusiastic amateur in
house-furnishing, removed the nail from Blake's mouth.
"It is a shame! You will spoil your nice teeth."
"What is a tooth or two in such a cause! Have you a handkerchief?"
"Yes."
"Then, for the love of God, wipe my forehead for me!"
Still without a smile, Max produced a handkerchief that had obviously
played the _rôle_ of duster at an earlier hour and, passing it over
Blake's face, removed the dew of heat, leaving in its place a long black
streak.
"Thanks! I'm cooler now--though probably dirtier!"
"Dirtier! On the contrary, _mon ami_! You have the most artistic scar of
dust that makes you as interesting as a German officer! Oh!" His voice
rose to a cry of sharp distress, and he ran back to the fire. "Oh, my
coffee! My beautiful coffee! Oh, Ned, it has over boiled!"
Blake eyed the havoc from his coign of vantage with a philosophy tinged
with triumph.
"Didn't I tell you that coffee-pot was a fraud the very first day old
Bluebeard tried to palm it off on us! You will never distinguish between
beauty and utility."
"Beauty is utility!" Max, in deep distress, was using the much-taxed
handkerchief to wipe the spilt coffee from the hearth.
"Should be, my boy, but isn't! I say, give me that business to see to!"
Regardless of the picture still dangling from his hand, he jumped to the
ground and strode through a litter of papers, straw, and packing-cases.
"Give me that rag!" He took the sopping handkerchief and flung it into a
distant corner. "A wisp of this straw is much more useful--less
beautiful, I admit!"
Max glanced up with wide eyes, extremely wistful and youthful in
expression. "I do not believe I care about either the use or the
beauty," he said, plaintively. "I only care that I am hungry and that my
coffee is lost."
"Hungry, boy? Why, bless my soul, you must be starving! What time is it
at all?" Blake pulled out his watch. "Eleven! And we've been at this
hard since eight! Hungry! I should think you are. Look here! You just
sit down!" He pushed aside the many objects that encumbered the floor,
and began impatiently to strip the packing from a leather arm-chair.
Max laughed a little.
"But, _mon cher_, I prefer the ground--this nice warm little corner
close to the fire. One day I think I shall have two cushions, like your
Bluebeard of the curio shop, and sit all day long with my legs crossed,
imagining myself a Turk. Like this!" He drew back against the wall,
curling himself up with supple agility, and smiled into his companion's
eyes.
Blake looked down, half amused, half concerned.
"Poor little _gamin_! Tired and dirty and hungry. Just you wait!"
Nodding decisively, he crossed the room, opened the door softly, and
disappeared.
Left to himself, Max drew farther back into his warm corner and clasped
his hands about his knees. Max was enjoying himself. The fact was patent
in the lazy ease of his pose, in the smile that hovered about his lips,
in the slow, pleased glance that travelled round and round the bare room
and the furniture still standing ghostly in its packing. It was still
the joyful beginning of things: the clean white paper upon the walls
spoke of first hours as audibly as the bunch of jonquils peeping from a
dark corner spoke of spring. It was still the beginning of things--the
salt before the sweet, the ineffable, priceless moment when life seems
malleable and to be bent to the heart's desire.
One month had passed since his first visit to this fifth floor; one
month since he had entered Paris, armored in his hopes; one month since
Blake had crossed his path.
The smile upon his lips deepened, then wavered to seriousness, and his
gaze turned from the white wall to the fire, where the flames from the
logs spurted copper and blue.
One month. A dream--or a lifetime?
Gazing into the fire, questioning his own fancy, he could scarce decide
which; a dream in the quick moving of events--the swift viewing of new
scenes; a lifetime in alteration of outlook and environment--the
severing and knitting of bonds.
The happy seriousness was still enfolding him, his eyes were still
intent upon the fire, when Blake entered, triumphant, carrying a
coffee-pot, and followed by a demure girl with blonde hair and delicate
pale skin.
"Monsieur is served!"
Max, startled out of his reverie, jumped to his feet.
"What is this? Oh, but you should not! You should not!"
"And why not, in the name of God? If you insist upon having antique
brass coffee-pots, your neighbors must expect to suffer, eh,
Jacqueline?"
The little Jacqueline laughed, shaking her fair head. "Ah, well,
monsieur, it is an art--the keeping of an establishment--and must be
learned like any other!"
"And you think we ought to go to school?"
"I did not say that!" She laid down the loaf of bread, the butter, and
the milk-jug that she was carrying, and took the coffee from Blake's
hands with an air of pretty gravity. "And now, monsieur, where are the
cups?"
Blake turned to Max. "Cups?" he said in English. "I know we bought
something quite unique in the matter of cups, but where the deuce we put
them--For the love of God and the honor of the family, boy, tell me
where they are!"
Max's eyes were shining. "They are in the chest, _mon cher_. We put them
there for safety as we went out last night."
"Good! Give me the key."
"The key, _mon ami_, I have left at the Hôtel Railleux!"
Consternation spread over Blake's face, then he burst out laughing and
turned to Jacqueline, relapsing into French.
"Monsieur Max would have you to know, mademoiselle, that he possesses an
altogether unusual and superior set of Oriental china, which he bought
from a certain villanous Jew at the corner of the rue André de Sarte;
that for safety he has locked that china into the artistic and musty
dower-chest standing against the wall; and that for greater safety he
has forgotten the key in an antique hotel near the Gare du Nord!"
He laughed again; Max laughed; the little Jacqueline laughed, and ran to
the door.
"Oh, _la! la_! What a pair of children!" She flitted out of the room,
returning with two cups, which she set beside the coffee and the milk.
"And now, messieurs, it is possible you can arrange for yourselves!" She
shot a bright, quizzical look from one to the other. "I know you would
wish me to stay and measure out the milk and sugar, and it would flatter
me to do so, but, unhappily, I have a dish of some importance upon my
own fire, and it is necessary that one is domestic when one is only a
woman--is it not so, Monsieur Max?" She wrinkled her pretty face into a
grimace of mischief, and nodded as if some idea infinitely amusing,
infinitely profound lurked at the back of her blonde head.
"Good-day, Monsieur Edouard. Good-day, Monsieur Max!"
"Strange little creature!" said Blake, as the door closed upon her.
"Frail as a butterfly, with one capacity to prevent her taking wing!"
"And that capacity--what is it?" Max had returned to his former
position, and was pouring out the coffee as he crouched comfortably by
the fire.
"The capacity, boy, for the _grande passion_. Odd that it should exist
in so light a vessel, but these are the secrets of Nature! There are
moments, you know, when this little Jacqueline isn't laughing at
life--rare, I admit, but still existent--and then you see that the
corners of her mouth can droop. She may live to find existence void, but
she'll never live to find it shallow. Thanks, boy!" He took his cup of
coffee, and, walking to the table, cut a slice of bread, which he
carried back to the fire. "Now, don't say a word! I'm going to make you
the finest bit of toast you ever saw in your life!"
Max, preserving the required silence, watched him make the toast,
carefully balancing the bread on the tip of a knife, carefully browning,
carefully buttering it.
"Now! Taste that, and tell me if there wasn't a great _chef_ lost in
me!"
He carried the toast back to the fire and watched Max eat the first
morsel.
"Nice?"
"Delicious!"
"Ah! Then it's all fair sailing! I'll cut myself a bit of bread and sit
down on my heels like you. There's something in that Turkish idea, after
all! But, as I was saying"--he buttered his bread and dropped into
position beside the boy--"as I was saying awhile ago, that child next
door, with all her innocent air and her blue eyes, has climbed the
slippery stairs and reached the seventh heaven. And not only reached it
herself, mind you, but dragged that ungainly Cartel with her by the tip
of her tiny finger! Wonderful! Wonderful! Enviable fate!"
Max's eyes laughed. "M. Cartel's?"
"M. Cartel's. Oh, boy, that seventh heaven! Those slippery steps!"
"And the tip of a tiny finger?" Max was jesting; but Blake, lost in his
own musings, did not perceive it.
"For Cartel--yes!" he said. "For me, no! I think I'd like the whole
hand."
Here Max picked up a tongs and stirred the logs until they blazed.
"Absurd!" he said. "The tip of a finger or the whole of a hand, it is
all the same! It is a mistake, this love! That old story of the Garden
and the Serpent is as true as truth. Man and Woman were content to live
and adorn the world until one day they espied the stupid red Apple--and
straightway they must eat! Look even at this Cartel! He is an artist; he
might make the world listen to his music. But, no! He sees a little
butterfly, as you call her--all blonde and blue--and down falls his
ambition, and up go his eyes to the sky, and henceforth he is content to
fiddle to himself and to the stars! Oh, my patience leaves me!" Again he
struck the logs, and a golden shower of sparks flew up the chimney.
"I don't know!" said Blake, placidly. "I'm not so sure that he isn't
getting the best of it, when all's said and done!"
Max reddened. "You make me angry with this 'I do not know!' and 'I am
not so sure!' The matter is like day. You cannot submerge your
personality and yet retain it."
"I don't know! I'd submerge mine to-morrow if I could find an _alter
ego_!"
"Then, _mon cher_, you are a fool!"
Blake drank his coffee meditatively. "Some say the fools are happier
than the wise men! I remember a poor fool of a boy at home in Clare who
used to say that he danced every night with the fairies on the rath, and
I often thought he was happier than the people who listened to him out
of pity, and shook their heads and laughed behind his back!"
Max looked up, and as he looked the anger died out of his eyes.
"Ned, _mon cher_, you are very patient with me!"
Blake turned. "What do you mean?"
"What I say--that you are patient. Why is it?"
"Oh, I don't know. I'm fond of you, I suppose."
"I am, then, a good comrade?"
"The best."
"What is it you find in me?"
"I don't know! You are you."
"I amuse you?"
"You do--and more."
"More! In what way more?" Max drew nearer.
"Oh, I don't know! You're as amusing and spirited and generous as any
boy I've known, and yet you're different from any boy. You sometimes fit
into my thoughts almost like a woman might!" He hesitated, and laughed
at his own conceit.
Max, with an odd little movement of haste, drew away again.
"Do not say that, _mon ami_! Do not think it! I am your good comrade,
that is all."
"Of course you are! Sorry if I hurt your pride."
"You did not. It was not that." With an inexplicable change of mood Max
drew near again, and suddenly slipped his hand through Blake's arm.
They laughed in unison at the return to amity, and then fell silent,
looking into the fire, watching the blue spurt of the flames, the
feathery curls of ash on the charred logs.
"Ned! Make me one of your stories! Tell me what you are seeing in the
fire!"
Blake settled himself more comfortably.
"Well, boy, I was just seeing a castle," he began in the accepted manner
of the story-teller, and in his pleasant, soothing voice. "A great big
castle on the summit of a mountain, with a golden flag fluttering in the
sunset; and I think it must be the 'Castle of Heart's Desire,' because
all up the craggy path that leads to it there are knights urging their
horses--"
"Good!" Max smiled with pleasure and pressed his arm. "Continue!
Continue!"
"Well, they're all sorts of knights, you know," Blake went on in the
dreamy, singsong voice--"fair knights and red knights and black knights,
every one of them in glittering armor, with long lances, and wonderful
devices on their shields--"
"Yes! Yes!"
"--wonderful devices on their shields, and spurs of gold and
silver, and waving plumes of many colors; and the flanks of their
horses--cream-colored and chestnut and black--shine in the light."
"Continue, _mon cher_! Continue! I can see them also!" Max, utterly
absorbed, charming as a child, bent forward, staring into the heart of
the fire.
"Well, they mount and mount and mount, and sometimes the great horses
refuse the craggy path and rear, and sometimes a knight is unseated and
the others look back and laugh at his discomfiture and ride on until
they themselves are proved unfit; and so, on and on, while the way gets
steeper and more perilous, and the company smaller and still smaller,
until the sun drops down behind the mountain and the gold flag flutters
as gray as a moth, and in all the windows of the castle torches spring
up to greet the knight who shall succeed."
"And which is he--the knight who shall succeed?"
"Don't you see him?"
"No! Where is he? Where?"
"Why, there--riding first, on the narrowest verge of the craggy path! A
very young knight with dark hair and a proud carriage and gray eyes
with flecks of gold in them."
For an instant Max gazed seriously into the flames, then turned,
blushing and laughing.
"Ah! But you are laughing at me! What a shame! For a punishment you
shall go straight back to work." He jumped up and handed Blake his
discarded hammer.
Blake looked reluctantly at the hammer, then looked back at the enticing
flame of the logs.
"Oh, very well! Have it your own way!" he said, getting slowly to his
feet. "But if I were you, I'd like to have heard what awaited the knight
in the tapestried chamber of the castle tower!"
CHAPTER XIII
To the zest of the amateur, Blake added knowledge of a practical kind in
the arrangement of household gods, and long ere the February dusk had
fallen, the fifth-floor _appartement_ had assumed a certain homeliness.
True, much of the 'old iron,' as he termed the coppers and brasses for
which Max had bartered in the rue André de Sarte, still encumbered the
floor, and most of the windows cried aloud for covering; but the little
_salon_ was habitable, and in the bedroom once occupied by Madame Salas
a bed and a dressing-table stood forth, fresh and enticing enough to
suggest a lady's chamber, while over the high window white serge
curtains shut out the cold.
At seven o'clock, having torn the canvas wrappings from the last chair,
the two workers paused in their labors by common consent and looked at
each other by the uncertain light of half a dozen candles stuck into
bowls and vases in various corners of the _salon_.
"Boy," said Blake, breaking what had been a long silence, "I tell you
what it is, you're done! Take a warm by the fire for a minute, while I
tub under the kitchen tap, then we'll fare forth for a meal and a breath
of air!"
Max, who had worked with fierce zeal if little knowledge, made no
protest. His face was pale, and he moved with a certain slow weariness.
"Here! Let's test the big chair!" Blake pulled forward the deep leathern
arm-chair, that had been purchased second-hand in the rue de la Nature,
and set it in front of the blazing logs. Without a word, Max sank into
it.
"Comfortable?"
"Very comfortable." The voice was a little thin.
The other looked down upon him. "You're done, you know! Literally done!
Why didn't you give in sooner?"
"Because I was not tired--and I am not tired."
"Not tired! And your face is as white as a sheet! I don't believe you're
fit to go out for food."
"How absurd! You talk as though I were a child!" Max lifted himself
petulantly on one elbow, but his head drooped and the remonstrance died
away before it was finished.
"I talk as if you were a child, do I? Then I talk uncommon good sense!
Well, I'm off to wash."
"There is some soap in my bedroom." The voice seemed to come from a
great distance, the elbow slipped from the arm of the chair, the dark
head drooped still more, and as the door shut upon Blake, the eyelids
closed mechanically.
Blake's washing was a protracted affair, for the day had been long and
the toil strenuous; but at last he returned, face and hands clean, hair
smooth, and clothes reduced to order.
"Sorry for being so long," he began, as he walked into the room; but
there he stopped, his eyebrows went up, and his face assumed a curious
look, half amused, half tender.
"Poor child!" he said below his breath, and tiptoeing across the room,
he paused by the arm-chair, in the depths of which Max's slight figure
was curled up in the pleasant embrace of sleep.
The fire had died down, the pool of candle-light was not brilliant,
and in the soft, shadowed glow the boy made an attractive picture.
[Illustration: THE IMPRESSION OF A MYSTERY FLOWED BACK UPON HIM]
One hand lay carelessly on either arm of the chair; the head was thrown
back, the black lashes of the closed eyes cast shadows on the smooth
cheeks.
Blake looked long and interestedly, and his earliest impression--the
impression of a mystery--flowed back upon him strong as on the night of
the long journey.
The beauty and strength of the face called forth thought; and Max's own
declaration, so often repeated, came back upon him with new meaning, 'I
am older than you think!'
For almost the first time the words carried weight. It was not that the
features looked older; if anything they appeared younger in their deep
repose. But the expression--the slight knitting of the dark brows, the
set of the chin, the modelling of the full lips, usually so mobile and
prone to laughter--suggested a hidden force, gave warranty of a depth, a
strength irreconcilable with a boy's capacities.
He looked--puzzled, attracted; then his glance dropped from the face to
the pathetically tired limbs, and the sense of pity stirred anew,
banishing question, causing the light of a pleasant inspiration to
awaken in his eyes.
Smiling to himself, he replenished the fire with exaggerated stealth;
and, creeping out of the room, closed the door behind him.
He was gone for over half an hour, and when he again entered, the fire
had sprung into new life, and fresh flames--blue and sulphur and
copper-colored--were dancing up the chimney, while the candles in their
strange abiding-places had burned an inch or two lower. But his eyes
were for Max, and for Max alone, and with the same intense stealth he
crept across the room to the bare table and solemnly unburdened himself
of a variety of parcels and a cheery-looking bottle done up in red
tissue-paper.
Max still slept, and, drawing a sigh of satisfaction, he proceeded with
the task he had set himself--the task of providing supper after the
manner of the genius in the fairy-tale.
First plates were brought from the new-filled kitchen shelves; then
knives were found, and forks; then the mysterious-looking parcels
delivered up their contents--a cold roast chicken, all brown and golden
as it had left the oven, cheese, butter, crisp rolls, and crisp red
radishes, finally a little basket piled with fruit.
It was a very simple meal, but Blake smiled to himself as he set out the
dishes to the best advantage, placed the wine reverentially in the
centre to crown the feast, and at last, still tiptoeing, came round to
the back of Max's chair and laid his hands over the closed eyes.
"Guess!" he said, as if to a child.
Max gave a little cry, in which surprise and fear struggled for
supremacy; then he sprang to his feet, shaking off the imprisoning
hands.
"What is it? Who is it?" Then he laughed shamefacedly, and, turning, saw
the spread table.
"Oh, _mon ami_!" His eyes opened wide, and he gazed from the food to
Blake. "_Mon ami!_ You have done this for me while I was sleeping!"
His gaze was eloquent even beyond his words, and Blake, finding no fit
answer, began to move about the room, collecting the vases that held the
candles and carrying them to the table.
"_Mon ami!_"
"Nonsense, boy! It's little enough I do, goodness knows!"
"This is a great deal."
"Nonsense! What is it? You were fagged and I was fresh! And now I
suppose I must knock the head off this bottle, for we haven't a
corkscrew. The Lord lend me a steady hand, for 'twould be a pity if I
shook the wine!"
He carried the bottle to the fireplace, and with considerable dexterity
cracked the head and wiped the raw glass edges. "Now, boy, the glasses!
Oh, but have we glasses, though?" His face fell in a manner that set Max
laughing.
"We have one glass--in my room."
"Bravo! Fly for it!"
Max laughed again--his sleep, his surprise, his gratitude equally
routed; he flew, in literal obedience to the command, across the little
hall and, groping his way to the dressing-table, searched about in the
darkness for the tumbler.
"Ned! A candle!"
Blake brought the desired light, and together they discovered the
coveted glass. Max seized upon it eagerly, but as he delivered it up a
swift exclamation escaped him:
"My God! How dirty I am! Regard my hands!"
"What does it matter! You can wash after you've eaten."
"Oh, but no! I pay more compliment to your feast."
"Very well, then! We may hope to sup in an hour or so. I know you and
the making of your toilet!"
"Impertinent!" Max caught him by the arm and pushed him, laughing,
toward the door. "Go back and complete the table. I will delay but
four--three--two minutes in the making of myself clean."
"But the table is complete--"
"It is incomplete, _mon ami_; it is without flowers."
Before Blake's objections could form into new words, he found himself
in the little hallway with the bedroom door closed upon him, and, being
a philosopher, he shook his head contentedly and walked back into the
_salon_, where he obediently brought to light the bowl of jonquils that
was still perfuming the air from its dark corner, and set it carefully
between the wine and the fruit.
Ten minutes and more slipped by, during which, still philosophical, he
walked slowly round and round the table, straightening a candle here,
altering a dish there, humming all the while in a not unmusical voice
the song from _Louise_.
He was dwelling fondly upon the line
"Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée"--
when the door of the bedroom was flung open as by a gale, and at the
door of the _salon_ appeared Max--his dark hair falling over his
forehead, a comb in one hand, a brush in the other.
"_Mon cher!_ a hundred--a thousand apologies for being so long! It is
all the fault of my hair!"
Blake looked at him across the candles. "Indeed I wouldn't bother about
my hair, if I were you! A century of brushing wouldn't make it
respectable."
"Why not?"
"Look at the length of it!"
"Ah, but that pleases me!"
Blake shook his head in mock seriousness. "These artists! These
artists!" he murmured to himself.
Max laughed, threw the comb and brush from him into some unseen corner
of the hall, and ran across the _salon_.
"You are very ill-mannered! I shall box your ears!"
Blake threw himself into an attitude of defence. "I'd ask nothing
better!" he cried. "Come on! Just come on!"
Max, laughing and excited, took a step forward, then paused as at some
arresting thought.
"Afraid? Oh, _la, la_! Afraid?"
"Afraid!" The boy tossed the word back scornfully, but his face flushed
and he made no advance.
"You'll have to, now, you know!"
Max retreated.
"Oh, no, you don't!" With a quick, gay laugh, touched with the fire of
battle, Blake followed; but ere he could come to close quarters, the boy
had dodged and, lithe and swift as a cat, was round the table.
"No! No!" he cried, with a little gasp, a little sob of excitement that
caught the breath. "No! No! I demand grace. A starving man, _mon ami_! A
starving man! It is not fair."
He knew his adversary. Blake's hands dropped to his sides, he yielded
with a laugh.
"Very well! Very well! Another time I'll see what you're made of. And
now 'we'll exterminate the bread-stuffs,' as McCutcheon would say!"
And laughing, jesting--content in the moment for the moment's sake--they
sat down to their first serious meal in the little _salon_.
CHAPTER XIV
The meal was over; the candles had burned low; in the quiet, warm room
the sense of repose was dominant.
Blake took out his cigarette-case and passed it across the table,
watching Max with lazy interest as he chose a cigarette and lighted it
at a candle-flame.
"Happy?"
"Absolutely!"
He had wanted in a vague, subconscious way to see the flash of the white
teeth, the quick, familiar lifting of the boy's glance, and now he
smiled as a man secretly satisfied.
"I know just exactly what you're feeling," he said, as Max threw himself
back in his chair and inhaled a first deep breath of smoke. "You feel
that that little white curl from the end of your cigarette is the last
puff of smoke from the boats you have burned; and that, with your own
four walls around you, you can snap your fingers at the world. I know!
God, don't I know!"
Max smiled slowly, watching the tip of his cigarette. "Yes, you know!
That is the beautiful thing about you."
The appreciation warmed Blake's soul as the good red wine had warmed his
blood.
"I believe I do--with you. I believe I could tell you precisely your
thoughts at this present moment." With a pleasant, meditative action, he
drew a cigar from his case.
"Tell me!"
"Well, first of all, there's the great contentment--the sense of a
definite step. You're strong enough to like finality."
"I hope I am. I think I am."
"You are! Not a doubt of it! But what I mean is that you've left an old
world for a new one; and no matter how exciting the voyaging through
space may have been, you like to feel your feet on terra firma."
Max leaned forward eagerly. "That is quite true! And I like it because
now I can open my eyes, and say to myself, 'not to-morrow, but to-day I
live.' I have put--how do you say in English?--my hand upon the plough."
"Exactly! The plough--or the palette--it's all the same! You're set to
it now."
The boy's eyes flashed in the candle-light, and for an instant something
of the fierce emotion that can lash the Russian calm, as a gale lashes
the sea, troubled his young face.
"You comprehend--absolutely! I have made my choice; I have come to it
out of many situations. I would die now rather than I would fail."
In his voice was a suppressed fervor akin to some harsh or cruel
emotion; and to Blake, watching and listening, there floated the hot
echo of stories in which Russians had acted strange parts with a
resolve, a callousness incomprehensible to other races.
"When you talk like that, boy, I could almost go back to that first
night, and adopt McCutcheon's theory. You might feasibly be a
revolutionary with those blazing eyes."
Max laughed, coming back to the moment.
"Only revolutionary in my own cause! I fight myself for myself. You take
my meaning?"
"Not in the very least! But I accept your statement; I like its brave
ring. You are your own romance."
"I am my own romance."
"Let's drink to it, then! Your romance--whatever it may be!" He raised
the half-empty tumbler, drank a little, and handed it across the table.
Max laughed and drank as well. "My romance--whatever it may be!"
"Whatever it may be! And now for that breath of air we promised
ourselves! It's close on ten o'clock."
So the meal ended; coats were found, candles blown out, and a last
proprietary inspection of the _appartement_ made by the aid of matches.
They ran down the long, smooth staircase, and, stepping into the quiet,
starlit rue Müller, linked arms and began their descent upon Paris with
as much ease, as nice a familiarity as though life for both of them had
been passed in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur.
On the Boulevard de Clichy the usual confusion of lights and humanity
greeted them like welcoming arms, and with the same agreeable
nonchalance they yielded to the embrace.
Conscious of no definite purpose, they turned to the right and began to
breast the human tide with eyes carelessly critical of the thronging
faces, ears heedlessly open to the many tangled sounds of street life.
Outside the theatres, flaunting posters made pools of color; in the
roadway, the network of traffic surged and intermingled; from amid the
flat house fronts, at every few hundred yards, some _cabaret_ broke upon
the sight in crude confusion of scenic painting and electric light;
while dominating all--a monument to the power of tradition--the sails of
the time-honored mill sprang red and glaring from a background of quiet
sky.
But the two, walking arm-in-arm, had no glance for revolving mill-sails
or vivid advertisement, and presently Blake halted before a house that,
but for a certain prosperity of stained-glass window and dark-green
paint, would have seemed a common wine shop.
"Max," he said, "do you remember the famous night when we went to the
Bal Tabarin, and saw much wine spilled? It was here I was first going to
bring you then."
"Here?"
"This very place! 'Tis one of the old artistic _cabarets_ of
Paris--grown a bit too big for its shoes now, like the rest of
Montmartre, but still retaining a flavor. What do you say to turning
in?"
"I say 'yes.'"
"Come along, then! I hope 'twon't disappoint you! There's a good deal of
rubbish here, but a scattering of grain among the chaff. Ah, messieurs!
Good-evening!"
This last was addressed with cordiality to a knot of men gathered inside
the doorway of the _cabaret_, all of whom rose politely from their
chairs at Blake's entry.
Max, peering curiously through the tobacco smoke that veiled the place,
received an impression of a room--rather, of a shop--possessed of
tables, chairs, a small circular counter where glasses and bottles
winked and gleamed, and of walls hung with a truly Parisian collection
of impressionist studies and clever caricatures.
"Monsieur is interested?"
He turned, to meet the eyes of the host, a stout and affable Frenchman,
who by right divine held first place among the little group of loungers;
but before he could frame a reply, Blake answered for him.
"He is an artist, M. Fruvier, and finds all life interesting."
M. Fruvier bowed with much subtle comprehension.
"Then possibly it will intrigue him to step inside, and hear our little
concert. We are about to commence."
Blake nodded in silent acquiescence; the knot of men bowed quickly and
stiffly; and Max found himself being led across the bare, sawdust-strewn
floor into an inner and larger room--a holy of holies--where the light
was dimmer and the air more cool.
Here, a scattered audience was assembled--a score or so of individuals,
sober of dress, unenthusiastic of demeanor, sitting in twos and threes,
sipping beer or liqueurs and waiting for the concert to begin.
Max's eyes wandered over this collection of people while Blake sought
for seats, but his glance and his interest passed on almost immediately
to the walls, where, as in the outer room, pictures ranged from floor to
ceiling.
The seats were chosen; a white-aproned waiter claimed an order, and
Blake gave one as if from habit.
"And now, boy, a cigarette?"
"If you please--a cigarette!" Max's voice had the quick note, his eyes
the swift light that spoke excitement. "_Mon ami_, I like this place! I
like it! And I wonder who painted that?" He indicated a picture that
hung upon the wall beside them.
"I don't know! Some chap who used to frequent the place in his unknown
days. We can ask Fruvier."
"It is clever."
"It is."
"It has imagination."
They both looked at the picture--a study in black and white, showing an
attic room, with a _pierrette_ seated disconsolate upon a bed, a
_pierrot_ gazing through a window.
"_Pierrot_ seeking the moon, eh?"
Max nodded.
"Yes. It has imagination--and also technique!"
But their criticism was interrupted; a piano was opened at the farther
end of the room by an individual affecting the unkempt hair and
velveteen coat of past Bohemianism, who seated himself and ran his
fingers over the keys as though he alone occupied the room.
At this very informal signal, the curtain rose upon a ridiculously small
stage, and an insignificant, nervous-looking man stepped toward the
footlights at the same moment that M. Fruvier and his followers entered
and seated themselves in a row, their backs to the wall.
This appearance of the proprietor was the sole meed of interest offered
to the singer, the audience continuing to smoke, to sip, even to peruse
the evening papers with stoic indifference.
The song began--a long and unamusing ditty, topical in its points. Here
and there a smile showed that it did not pass unheard, and as the singer
disappeared a faint _roulade_ of applause came from the back of the
room.
Max turned to his companion.
"But I believed the Parisians to be all excitement! What an audience!
Like the dead!"
"They are excitable when something excites them."
"Then they dislike this song?"
"Oh no! 'Not bad!' they'd say if you asked them; but they're not here to
be excited--they're not here to waste enthusiasm. Like ourselves, they
have worked and have eaten, and are enjoying an hour's repose. The song
is part of the hour--as inevitable as the _bock_ and the cigar, and you
can't expect a smoker to wax eloquent over a familiar weed."
"How strange! How interesting!" The boy looked round the scattered
groups that formed to his young eyes another side-show in the vast
theatre of life.
No one heeded his interest. The women, young and elderly alike,
conversed with their escorts and sipped their liqueurs with absorbed
quiet; the men smoked and drank, talked or read aloud little paragraphs
from their papers with whispering relish.
Then again the piano tinkled, and the same singer appeared, to sing
another song almost identical with the first; but now his nervousness
was less, he won a laugh or two for his political innuendoes, and when
he finished Max clapped his hands, and Blake laughingly followed suit.
"He's a new man," he said; "this is probably his first night."
"His first? Oh, poor creature! What a _début_! Clap your hands again!"
"Poor creature indeed! He's delighted with himself. Many a better man
has been driven from the stage after his first verse. Your Paris can be
cruel."
Their example had been tepidly followed, and the singer, beaming under
the relaxed tension of his nerves, was smiling and bowing before
entering upon the perils of a third song.
"And what do they pay him?"
"Oh, a couple of francs a song! The fees will grow with his success."
Max gasped. "A couple of francs! Oh, my God!"
"What do you expect? We're not in Eldorado."
"But a couple of francs!"
"Ssh! Don't talk anarchy. Here come the powers that be!"
M. Fruvier was coming toward them, making his way between the seats with
many bows, many apologetic smiles.
"Well, messieurs, and what of our new one? Not a Vagot,
perhaps"--mentioning a famous _comique_ whose star had risen in the
firmament of the _cabaret_--"not a Vagot, perhaps, but not bad! Not
bad?"
"Not bad!" acquiesced Blake.
"Very good!" added Max, pondering hotly upon the wage of the singer,
and regarding M. Fruvier with doubtful glance.
"No! No! Not bad!" reiterated that gentleman, as if viewing the
performance from a wholly impersonal standpoint. "Not bad!" And, still
bowing, still smiling, he wandered on to exchange opinions with his
other patrons, while a new singer appeared, a man whose vast proportions
and round red face looked truly absurd upon the tiny stage, but whose
merry eye and instant friendly nod gained him a murmur of welcome.
With the appearance of the new-comer a little stir of life was felt, and
in obedience to some impulse of his own, Max took a sketch-book and a
pencil from his pocket, and sat forward in his seat, with glance roving
round and round the room, pencil poised above the paper.
"I heard this fellow here twelve years ago," said Blake. "He and Vagot
were young men then. Shows the odd lie of things in this world! There's
Vagot making his thousands of francs a week next door at the Moulin
Rouge, and this poor fat clown still where he was!"
Max did not reply. His head was bent, his face flushed; he was sketching
with a furious haste.
"What are you doing?"
Still no reply. The song rolled on; and Blake, leaning back in his seat,
smoking with leisurely enjoyment, felt for perhaps the first time in his
life the sense of complete companionship--that subtle condition of mind
so continuously craved, so rarely found, so instantly recognized.
"Boy," he said at last, "let me come up sometimes when you're messing
with your paints? I won't bother you."
Max looked up and nodded--a mere flash of a look, but one that conveyed
sufficient; and the two relapsed again into silence.
At the end of an hour the boy raised his head, tossed a lock of hair out
of his eyes, and closed his sketch-book.
Blake met his eyes comprehendingly. "Will we go?"
"Yes. But one more glance at this black-and-white!"
He jumped up, unembarrassed, unconscious of self, and looked at the
picture closely; then stepped back and looked at it from a little
distance, eyes half closed, head critically upon one side.
"Satisfied?" Blake rose more slowly.
"Perfectly. It is clever--this! It has imagination!" He slipped his arm
confidingly through Blake's, and together they made a way to the door.
A new song began as they stepped into the outer room--the tinkle of the
piano came thinly across the smoke-laden air. Blake paused and looked
back.
"Well, and what do you think of it? A trifle dull, perhaps, but still--"
"Dull? But no! Never! I could work here. Others have worked here. It is
in the atmosphere--- the desire to create."
They passed into the street, Blake raising his hat to a stout lady,
presumably Madame Fruvier, who sat wedged behind the counter, Max
glancing greedily at the bold rough sketches, the brilliantly Parisian
caricatures adorning the walls.
"It is in the atmosphere! One breathes it!" he said again, as they
walked down the cool, lighted boulevard. "I feel it to-night as I have
not felt it before--the artist's Paris. _Mon ami_"--he raised a glowing
face--"_mon ami_, tell me something! Do you think I shall succeed? Do
you think I possess a spark of the great fire--a spark ever so tiny?"
His earnestness was almost comical. He stopped and arraigned his
companion, regardless of interested glances and passing smiles.
"Ned, tell me! Tell me! Have you faith in me?"
Blake looked into the feverishly bright eyes, and a swift conviction
possessed him.
"I know this, boy, whatever you do, you'll do it finely! More I cannot
say."
Max fell silent, and they proceeded on their way, each preoccupied with
his own thoughts. At the turning to the heights Blake paused.
"I'll say good-bye here! I have letters to write to-night; but I'll be
up to-morrow to spirit you off to lunch. I won't come too early, for I
know what you'll be doing all the morning."
Max laughed, coming back out of his dream. "And what is it I shall be
doing all the morning?"
"Why, carting canvases and paint tubes, and God knows what, up those
steps till your back is broken, and then settling down with your temper
and your ambition at fever heat to begin the great picture at the most
inopportune moment in the world! Think I don't know you?"
Max laughed again, but more softly.
"_Mon ami!_"
"I'm right, eh? That sketch at the _cabaret_ is meant to grow?"
Instantly Max was diffident. "Oh, I am not so sure! It is only an idea.
It may not arrive at anything."
"Let's have a look?"
Max's hand went slowly toward his pocket. "I am not sure that I like it;
it is not my theory of life. It's more of your theory--it is ironical."
"Let's see!"
The sketch-book came reluctantly to light, and as Max opened it, the two
stepped close to a street lamp.
"As I tell you, it is ironical. If it becomes a picture I shall give it
this name--_The Failure_." He handed it to Blake, leaning close and
peering over his shoulder in nervous anxiety.
"Understand, it is but an idea! I have put no work into it."
Blake held the book up to the light, his observant face grave and
interested.
"What a clever little beggar you are!" he said at length.
Max glowed at the words, and instantly his tongue was loosed.
"Ah, _mon cher_, but it is only a sketch! That atmosphere--that dim,
smoky atmosphere--is so difficult with the pencil. The audience is, of
course, but suggested; all that I really attempted was the singer--the
failure with the merry eyes."
"And well you've caught him too, by gad! One would think you had seen
the antithesis--Vagot, the success, long and lean and yellow, the
unhappiest-looking man you ever saw."
"Ah, but you must not say that!" cried Max unexpectedly. "I told you it
was not my theory. To me success is life, failure is death! This is but
a reflected impression of yours--- an impression of irony!" He took the
sketch-book from Blake's hands and closed it sharply; then, to ask
pardon for his little outburst, he smiled.
"_Mon cher_! Forgive me! Come to-morrow, and we will see if day has
thrown new light."
They shook hands.
"All right--to-morrow! Good-night, boy--and good luck!"
"Good-night!"
Max stood to watch the tall figure disappear into the tangle of traffic,
then with a light step, a light heart, a light sense of propitiated
fate, he began the climb to his home.
CHAPTER XV
That night the pencil-sketch obsessed the brain of Max. Tossing wakeful
upon his bed, he saw the pageant of the future--touched the robe, all
saffron and silver, of the goddess Inspiration--and, with the brushes
and colors of imagination, gained to the gateway of fame.
It was a wild night that spurred to action, and with the coming of the
day, Blake's prophecy was fulfilled. Before the Montmartre shops were
open, he was seeking the materials of his art; and long ere the sun was
high, he was back in the room that had once been the bedroom of M.
Salas, surrounded by the disarray of the inspired moment.
The room was small but lofty, and a fine light made his work possible.
The inevitable wood fire crackled on the hearth, but otherwise the
atmosphere spoke rigidly of toil.
Zeal, endeavor, ambition in its youngest, divinest form--these were the
suggestions dormant in the strewn canvases, the tall easel, the bare
walls; and none who were to know, or who had known, Max--none destined
to kindle to the flame of his personality, ever viewed him in more
characteristic guise than he appeared on that February morning clad in
his painting smock, the lock of hair falling over his forehead, his
hands trembling with excitement, as he executed the first bold line that
meant the birth of his idea.
So remarkable, so characteristic was the pose that chance, ever with an
eye to effect, ordained it an observer, for scarcely had he lost himself
in the work than the door of his studio opened with a Bohemian lack of
ceremony, and his neighbor, Jacqueline--dressed in a blue print dress
that matched her eyes--came smiling into the room.
"Good-day, monsieur!"
He glowered with complete unreserve.
"You are displeased, monsieur; I intrude?"
"You do, mademoiselle."
The tone was uncompromising, but Jacqueline came on, softly moving
nearer and nearer to the easel, looking from the canvas to Max and back
again to the canvas in an amused, secret fashion comprehensible to
herself alone.
"You feel like my poor Lucien, when an interruption offers itself to his
work; but, as I say, _ennui_ is the price of admiration! Is it not so,
Monsieur Max?"
She leaned her blonde head to one side, and looked at him with the naïve
quality of meditation that so became her.
"Do not permit me to disturb you, monsieur! Continue working."
"Thank you, mademoiselle!" A flicker of irony was observable in the tone
and, with exaggerated zeal, he returned to his task.
The girl came softly behind him, looking over his shoulder.
"What is the picture to be, monsieur?"
"It is an idea caught last night in a _cabaret_. It would not interest
you."
"And why not?"
Max shrugged his shoulders, and went on blocking in his picture.
"Because it is a psychological study--a side-issue of existence.
Nothing to do with the crude facts of life."
"Oh!" Jacqueline drew in her breath softly. "I am only interested, then,
in the crude facts? How do you arrive at that conclusion, monsieur?"
"By observation, mademoiselle."
"And what have you observed?"
"It is difficult to say--in words. In a picture I would put it like
this--a blue sky, a meadow of rank green grass, a stream full of
forget-me-nots, and a girl bending over it, with eyes the color of the
flowers. Conventionality would compel me to call it _Spring_ or
_Youth_!" He spoke fast and he spoke contemptuously.
She watched him, her head still characteristically drooping, the little
wise smile hovering about her lips.
"I comprehend!" she murmured to herself. "Monsieur is very worldly-wise.
Monsieur has discovered that there is--how shall I say?--less atmosphere
in a blue sky than in a gray one?"
Max glanced round at her. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was
being laughed at, but her clear azure eyes met his innocently, and her
mouth was guiltless of smiles.
"I have had a sufficiency of blue sky," he said, and returned to his
work.
"One is liable to think that, monsieur, until the rain falls!"
"So you doubt the endurance of my philosophy?"
She shrugged; she extended her pretty hands expressively.
"Monsieur is young!"
The words exasperated Max. Again it had arisen--the old argument. The
anger smouldering in his heart since the girl's invasion flamed to
speech.
"I could wish that the world was less ready with that opinion,
mademoiselle! It knows very little of what it says."
"Possibly, monsieur! but you admit that--that you are scarcely aged."
There was a quiver now about the pretty lips, a hint of a laugh in the
eyes.
"Mademoiselle,"--he wheeled round with unexpected vehemence,--"I should
like you, to tell me exactly how old you think I am."
"You mean it, monsieur?"
"I mean it. Is it seventeen--or is it sixteen?" His voice was edged with
irony.
"It is neither, monsieur!" Jacqueline was very demure now, her eyes
sought the floor. "Granted your full permission, monsieur, I would
say--"
"You would say--?"
"I would say"--she flashed a daring look at him and instantly dropped
her eyes again--"I would say that you have twenty-four, if not
twenty-five years!"
The confession came in a little rush of speech, and as it left her lips
she moved toward the door, contemplating flight.
An immense surprise clouded Max's mind, a surprise that brought the
blood mantling to his face and sent his words forth with a stammering
indecision.
"Twenty-four--twenty-five! What gave you that idea?"
"Oh, monsieur, it is simple! It came to me by observation!"
Leaving Max still red, still confused, she slipped out of the room
noiselessly as she had come, and as the door closed he heard the faint,
exasperating sound of a light little laugh.
CHAPTER XVI
After Jacqueline had closed the door and the light laugh had died into
silence, Max stood before his easel, hands inert, the flush still
scorching his face. For the first time since the birth of the new life
he had been made sensible of personal criticism--the criticism winged
with fine ridicule, that leaves its victim strangely uncertain,
curiously uneasy. The immemorial subtlety of woman had lurked in the
girl's eyes as she cast her last penetrating glance at him. He felt now,
as he stood alone, that his soul had been stripped and was naked to the
bare walls and gaping canvas, and his start was one of purely unbalanced
nerves when a knock fell upon the door, telling of a new intruder.
He had all but cried out in protest when the door opened, but at sight
of the invader the cry merged into an unstrung laugh of welcome.
"Ned! You?"
Blake walked into the room, talking as he came. "Well, upon my word!
Wasn't I right? Here he is, easel and canvas and all--even the temper
isn't wanting!"
Max ran forward, caught and clung to his arm.
"_Mon ami_! _Mon cher_! I have wanted you--wanted you."
"Anything wrong?"
"No! No! Nothing. It was only--"
"What?"
Again Max laughed nervously, but his fingers tightened.
"Only this--I have wanted to hear you say that I am your friend--your
boy, Max--as I was yesterday and the day before and the day before. Say
it! Say it!" His eyes besought Blake's.
"What! Tell you you are yourself?"
He nodded quickly and seriously.
The other looked into his face, and for some unaccountable reason his
amusement died away.
"What a child it is!" he said kindly; and, putting his hands upon the
boy's shoulders, he shook him gently. "Who has been putting notions into
your head? Whoever it is, just refer him to me; I'll deal with him."
It was Max's turn to laugh. "Ah, but I am better now! I am quite all
right now! It was only for the moment!" He made a little sound, half
shy, half relieved. "It was, I suppose, as you expected; I tired myself
with carrying up these things, and then I still more tired myself with
trying to block in my picture, and then--"
"Yes, then?"
"No more--nothing."
"I'm sceptical of that."
Max glanced up. "Well, to you I always say the truth. The girl
Jacqueline came in and chattered to me, and--"
"Oh, ho!"
"Do not say that! I cannot bear it."
"Nonsense! I'm only teasing you! Though why a little girl with hair like
spun silk and skin like ivory--"
"Ah! You admire her, then?"
"I do vastly--in the abstract."
"And what does that mean--in the abstract?"
"Oh, I don't know! I suppose it means that if I were a painter I might
use her as a model, or if I were a poet I might string a verse to her;
but being an ordinary man, it means--well, it means that I don't feel
drawn to kiss her. Do you see?"
"I see." Max grew thoughtful; he disengaged the hands still lying
lightly on his shoulders and walked back to his easel.
"You don't a bit! But it doesn't matter! What is it you're doing?"
Max, idle before his canvas, did not reply.
"_Mon ami?_" he said, irrelevantly.
"What?"
"Tell me the sort of woman you want to kiss."
Blake looked round in surprise.
"Well, to begin with, I used the word symbolically. I'm a queer beggar,
you know; the kiss means a good deal to me. To me, it's the key to the
idealistic as well as the materialistic--the toll at the gateway. I
never kiss the light woman."
"No?" Max's voice was very low, his hands hung by his sides, the look in
his half-veiled eyes was strange. "Then what is she like--the woman you
would kiss?"
"Oh, she has no bodily form. One does not say 'her hair shall be black'
or 'her hair shall be red' any more than one makes an image of God. She
dwells in the mysterious. Even when the time comes and she steps into
reality, mystery will still cling to her. There must always be the
wonder--the miracle." He spoke softly, as he always spoke when sentiment
entrapped him. His native turn of thought found vent at these odd times
and made him infinitely interesting. The slight satire that was
ordinarily wont to twist his smile was smoothed away, and a certain
sadness stole into its place; his green eyes lost their keenness of
observation and looked into a space obscure to others. In these rare
moments he was essentially of his race and of his country.
"No," he added, as if to himself, "a man does not say 'her hair shall
be red' or 'her hair shall be black'!"
"It is very curious--very strange--a dream like that!" Max's voice was a
mere whisper.
"Without his dreams, man would be an animal."
"And you, then, wait for this woman? In seriousness you wait, and
believe that out of nothing she will come to you?"
Blake turned away and walked slowly to the window, the sadness, the
aloofness still visible in his face like the glow from a shrouded light.
"That's the hardship of it, boy--the faith that it wants and the
patience that it wants! Sometimes it takes the heart out of a man!
There're days when I feel like a derelict; when I say to myself, 'Here I
am, thirty-eight years old, unanchored, unharbored.' Oh, I know I'm
young as the world counts age! I know that plenty of men and women like
me, and that I pass the time of day to plenty as I go along! But all the
same, if I died to-morrow there isn't one would break a heart over me.
Not a solitary one."
"Do not say that!"
"It's true, all the same! Sometimes I say to myself, 'Wha a fool you
are, Ned Blake! The Almighty gives reality to some and dreams to some,
and who knows but your lot is to go down to your grave hugging empty
hopes, like your forefathers before you!' It's terrible, sometimes, the
way the heart goes out of a man!"
"Ned! Ned! Do not say that!" Max's voice was strangely troubled,
strangely unlike itself, so unlike and troubled that it wakened Blake to
self-consciousness.
"I'm talking rank nonsense! I'm a fool!"
"You are not!" The boy ran across to him impulsively; then paused, mute
and shy.
"What is it, boy?"
"Only that what you say is not the truth. If you were to die, there is
one person who would--"
Blake's face softened. He was surprised and touched.
"What? You'd care?"
Max nodded.
"Thank you, boy! Thank you for that!"
They stood silent for a moment, looking through the uncurtained window
at the February breezes ruffling the holly bushes in the plantation,
each unusually aware of the other's presence, each unusually
self-conscious.
"But if it comes to pass--your miracle--you will forget me? You will no
longer have need of me, is that not so?"
Max spoke softly, a disproportionate seriousness darkening his eyes,
causing his voice to quiver.
Blake turned to answer in the same vein, but something checked him--some
embarrassment, some inexplicable doubt of himself.
"Boy," he said, sharply, "we're running into deep waters. Don't you
think we ought to steer for shore? I came to smoke, you know, and watch
you at your work."
The words acted as a charm. Max threw up his head and gave a little
laugh, a trifle high, a shade hysterical.
"But, of course! But, of course! I believe I, too, was falling into a
dream; and the dream comes after, the work first, is it not so? The work
first; the work always first. Place another log upon the fire and begin
to smoke, and I swear to you that before the day is finished I will make
you proud of me. I swear it to you!"
CHAPTER XVII
There is impetus, if not necessarily inspiration in a goading thought,
and Max returned to his interrupted task with a zeal almost in excess of
his protestations. He worked with vigor--with an exuberant daring that
seemed to suggest that the creation of his picture was rather the
creation of a mental narcotic than the expression of an idea.
He had given rein to sentiment in the moment with Blake, and now he was
applying the curb, working incessantly--- never pausing to speak--never
casting a glance at the corner where his companion was smoking and
dreaming over the fire.
To the casual observer it might have seemed a scene of ideal
comradeship; yet in the minds of the comrades there lurked an
uneasiness, an uncertainty not lightly to be placed--not easily to be
clothed in words. A certain warmth was stirring in Blake's heart,
coupled with a certain wonder at his sudden discovery of the depth of
the boy's regard; while in the boy's own soul a tumult of feelings ran
riot.
Shame burned him that he should have confessed himself; amazement seared
him that the confession had been there to make. A bewildering annoyance
filled him--a first doubting of the ego he was cherishing with so fine a
care.
It is indeed a black moment when an egoist doubts himself; it is as if
the god within the temple became self-conscious; more, it is as if the
god rent down the veil before the shrine and showed himself a thing of
clay to his astonished worshippers.
The mind of Max was a complex study as he worked with his new-found
vehemence, expressing or crushing a thought with each bold stroke. He
prided himself upon his powers of self-analysis; and, being possessed as
well of honesty and of a measure of common sense, the mental picture
that confronted him was scarcely pleasant seeing. Doubt of himself--of
his own omnipotence--- had assailed him; and, being young, being spoiled
of the world, it found expression in bitter resentment.
Having continued his onslaught upon the canvas until midday was close at
hand, he suddenly astonished the unoffending Blake by flinging his
charcoal from him to the furthest end of the room, where it broke rudely
against the spotless wall-paper.
"God bless my soul!" Blake turned, to see an angry figure striding to
the window, his hair ruffled, his hands thrust deep into his trouser
pockets.
"What in God's name is the matter with you?"
There was no answer and, being a wise man, he did not press the point.
Presently, as he expected, the boyish figure wheeled round.
"I cannot work. It is all bad! All wrong!"
He rose slowly and began to walk toward the easel, but with a cry the
boy ran forward and intercepted him.
"No! No! No! It is bad, I tell you--you must not see. Look! This is what
I shall do. This!" He turned and, swift as lightning, snapped up a
knife, and before Blake could find a gesture or a word, ripped his
canvas from end to end.
"Upon my word! Well, upon my word! There's an extravagant young devil!
Why, in the name of God, would you destroy your canvas like that?"
"Why? Because, my friend, I am I! I do not work again upon a thing that
I have marred!" His voice shook, trembling between excited laughter and
tears.
Blake looked at him. "Bless my soul, if he isn't crying! Come here to
me! You're a baby!"
But Max turned on him, so furious that the hot anger in his eyes
scorched the tears that hung there.
"A baby? This much a baby, that I love my work so truly that I have set
it upon an altar and made it my religion! And when I find, as to-day,
that it fails me I am damned--my soul is lost!"
"And why does it fail you--to-day?"
"I do not know!"
"Is that the truth?"
"Yes, it is."
"Are you perfectly sure? Are you perfectly sure that 'tisn't I--my
presence here--?"
"You?" Max withered him with a scorn meant for himself as well. "You
rate yourself high, my friend, and you imagine my work a very trivial
thing!"
"Nonsense! Plenty of artists must have solitude."
"Plenty of fools! An artist is engrossed in his art so perfectly that
when he stands before his canvas no world exists but the world of his
imagination. Do you suppose me to be affected because you sit somewhere
in the background, smoking over the fire? Oh, no! I trust I have more
capacity to concentrate!"
He shrugged his shoulders to the ears; he raised his eyebrows in the
very elaboration of indifference.
Blake, hot as he in pride or anger, caught sudden fire.
"Upon my soul, you're damned complimentary! I think, if you have no
objection, I'll be wishing you good-day!" He picked up his hat, and
strode to the door.
[Illustration: "LOOK! THIS IS WHAT I SHALL DO. THIS!"]
The action was so abrupt, the offence so real, that it sobered Max.
With a sudden collapse of pride, he wheeled round.
"Ned! Oh, Ned!"
But the banging of the outer door was his only answer; and he drew back,
his face fallen to a sudden blankness of expression, his hand going out
as if for support to the tattered canvas.
Minutes passed--how many or how few he made no attempt to reckon--then a
tap fell on the door and his blood leaped, leaped and dropped back to a
sick pulsation of disappointment, as the door opened and Jacqueline's
fair head appeared.
For an instant a fierce resentment at this new intrusion fired him, then
the absorbing need for human sympathy welled up, drowning all else.
"Mademoiselle," he cried out, "I am the most unhappy person in all the
world; I have tried to make a picture and failed, and I have quarrelled
with my best friend!"
Jacqueline nodded sagely. "That, M. Max, is my excuse for intruding. Of
the picture, of course, I know nothing"--she shrugged expressively--"but
of the quarrel I understand all--having passed M. Blake upon the
stairs!"
At any other moment Max would have resented in swift and explicit terms
this probing of his private concerns; but the soreness at his heart was
too acute to permit of pride.
"Then you are sorry for me, mademoiselle?"
"Yes, monsieur!"
"Because of my spoiled picture?" Waywardness flickered up momentarily.
"No, monsieur!"
"Then why?"
Jacqueline glanced up swiftly, then dropped her eyes.
"Because, monsieur--being but a woman--I say to myself 'life is long,
and other pictures may be painted; but with love--or friendship--'"
"Mademoiselle, that is sufficient! You are charming--you are
sympathetic--- but, like many others, you place too great a value upon
those words 'love' and 'friendship.' It is like this! If I quarrel with
my friend it is doubtless sad, but it only affects myself; if, on the
contrary, I paint a bad picture I am making a blot upon a beautiful
world!"
"And what of the heart, monsieur? May there not be sad stains upon the
heart--even if no eyes see them?"
"Now, mademoiselle, you are talking sentiment!"
"And you, monsieur, are materialistic?" For a second a flash of mischief
showed in the blue eyes.
Max stiffened his shoulders; made brave show to hide the detestable ache
in his soul.
"Yes, mademoiselle," he said. "I think, without pride, I may claim to
see life wholly, without idealization."
Quite unexpectedly Jacqueline clapped her hands and laughed, stepping
close to him with an engaging air of mystery.
"Then all is well! I have a physic for all your ills!"
He looked distrustful.
"A physic?"
"This, monsieur--that you put aside the great sorrow of your picture,
and the little sorrow of your friend--and step across and partake of
_déjeuner_ with Lucien and me. A very special _déjeuner_, I assure you;
no less than a _poulet bonne femme_, cooked with a care--"
She threw out her hands in an ecstasy of expression, a portrayal of the
artless greed that had more than once brought a smile to the boy's lips.
But this time no amusement was called up; disgust rose strong within
him and, accompanying it, a certainty that were Jacqueline's chicken to
be laid before him, he must assuredly choke with the first morsel. One
does not eat when one has failed in one's art--or quarrelled with one's
best friend!
"Mademoiselle," he said, unsteadily, "you are kind--and I am not without
appreciation. But to-day I have no appetite--food does not call to me.
Doubtless, there are days when M. Cartel cannot eat." He strove to force
a laugh.
Jacqueline looked humorously grave.
"When Lucien cannot work, monsieur, he eats the more! It is only on the
days when work flows from him that I am compelled to drag him to the
table--those days or, perhaps, the days--" She stopped discreetly.
"What days, mademoiselle?"
For the gratification of a curiosity he condemned, Max put the question.
"Oh, monsieur, when some little affair arises upon which he and I
dispute--when some cloud, as it were, darkens the sun." She continued to
look down demurely; then quickly she looked up again. "But I waste your
time! And, besides, I have not finished what I would say."
"Oh, mademoiselle, I beg--"
"It is not of the _poulet_ that I would speak, monsieur! I understand
that artists are not all alike; and that, whereas bad work gives Lucien
an appetite, it gives you a disgust! Still, you are a philosopher, and
will allow others to eat, even if you will not eat yourself."
Max looked bewildered.
"Good!" Jacqueline clapped her hands again softly. "I knew I would find
success! I said I would find success!"
"But, mademoiselle, I do not understand."
"No, monsieur! Neither did M. Blake, when I met him upon the stairs,
and told him of my _poulet_. He also, it seems, had lost his appetite.
Your picture must have been truly bad!"
She discreetly toyed with her belt during the accepted space of time in
which a brain can conceive--a heart leap--to an overmastering joy; then
she looked again at Max.
"It is a little idea of my own, monsieur, that you and M. Édouard should
make the acquaintance of my Lucien. M. Édouard already consents; I hope
that you, monsieur--"
For answer, Max caught her hand. From that moment he loved her--her
prettiness, her mischief, her humanity.
"Mademoiselle! I do not understand--and I do understand!"
"But you will come, monsieur?"
"I will eat your chicken, mademoiselle--even to the bones!"
CHAPTER XVIII
Comradeship in its broader sense is Bohemianism at its best;
Bohemianism, not as it is imagined by the _dilettante_--a thing of
picturesque penury and exotic vice--but a spontaneous intermingling of
personalities, an understanding, a fraternity as purely a gift of the
gods as love or beauty.
It is true that the sense of regained happiness beat strong in the mind
of Max when he followed Jacqueline into her unpicturesque living-room
with its sparse, cheap furniture, its piano and its gas stove, and that
the happiness budded and blossomed like a flower in the sun at the one
swift glance exchanged with Blake; but even had these factors not been
present, he must still have been sensible of the pretty touch of
hospitality patent in the girl's manner the moment she crossed her own
threshold, conscious of the friendly smile of M. Lucien Cartel, typical
artist, typical Frenchman of the southern provinces--short, swarthy,
alive from his coarse black hair to the square tips of his fingers. It
was in the air--the sense of good-will--the desire for conviviality; and
in the first greeting, the first hand-shake, the relations of the party
were established.
But the true note of this Bohemianism is not so much spontaneous
friendship as a spontaneous capacity for the interchange of
thought--that instant opening of mind to mind, when place becomes of
slight, and time of no importance.
Such an atmosphere was created by M. Lucien Cartel in his poor
Montmartre _appartement_, and under its spell Max and Blake fell as
surely, as luxuriously as they might have fallen under the spell of a
summer day. It was not that M. Cartel was brilliant; his only capacity
for brilliance lay in his strong, square hands; but he was a good fellow
and possessed of a philosophy that at once challenged and interested.
For Church and State he had a wide contempt, a scoffing raillery, a
candid blasphemy that outraged orthodoxy: for humanity and for his art
he owned an enthusiasm touching on the sublime. Upon every subject--the
meanest and the most profound--he held an opinion and aired it with
superb frankness and incredible fluency. So it was that, when the
_poulet bonne femme_ had been picked to the bones and Jacqueline had
retired to some sanctum whence the clatter of plates and the sound of
running water told of domestic duties, the three pushed their chairs
back from the table and fell to talk.
Precisely how they talked, precisely what they talked of in that
pleasant period subsequent to the meal is not to be related. They
thrashed the paths of morality, science, religion until their contending
voices filled the room and the tobacco smoke hung in clouds about them.
They talked until the last drop of Jacqueline's coffee had been drained;
they talked until Jacqueline herself came silently back into the room
and seated herself by Cartel's side, slipping her hand into his with
artless spontaneity.
Morality, science, religion, and then, in natural sequence, art--music!
The brain of M. Cartel tingled, his fingers twitched as the rival merits
of composers--the varying schools of thought--were touched upon, warmed
to, or torn by contending opinions. One end only was conceivable to that
last discussion. The moment arrived when the brain of M. Cartel cried
vehemently for expression, when his hand, imprisoned in the small
fingers of Jacqueline, was no longer to be restrained, when he sprang
from his chair and rushed to the piano, his coarse black hair an untidy
mat, his ugly face alight with God's gift of inspiration.
'What had he said? Was this, then, not magnificent--wonderful?'
And, seating himself, he unloosed into the common room a beauty of sound
more adorning than the rarest devices of the decorator's art--a mesh of
delicate harmonies that snared the imaginations of his three listeners
and sent them winging to the very borders of their varying realms.
M. Lucien Cartel in every-day life and to the casual observer was a good
fellow with a fund of enthusiasm and a ready tongue; M. Lucien Cartel to
the woman he loved and in the enchanted world of his art was a mortal
imbued warmly and surely with a spark of the divinity he derided. There
is no niggardliness in Bohemia: it made him as happy to give of his
music as it made his listeners to receive, with the consequence that
time was dethroned and that four people sat entranced, claiming nothing
from the world outside, more than content in the knowledge that the
world had no eyes for the doings of a little room on the heights of
Montmartre.
From opera to opera M. Cartel wandered, now humming a passage under his
breath in accompaniment to his playing, again raising his soft, southern
voice in an abandonment of enthusiasm.
It was following close upon some such enthusiastic moment that Max rose,
crossed the room, and taking a violin and bow from where they lay upon a
wooden bench against the wall, carried them silently to the piano.
As silently M. Cartel received them and, lifting the violin, tucked it
under his chin and raised the bow.
There is no need to detail the magic that followed upon that simple
action. The world--even his own Paris--has never heard of M. Lucien
Cartel, and cares not to know of the pieces that he played, the degree
of his technique, the truth of his interpretation; but when at last the
hand that held the violin dropped to his side and, lifting his right
arm, he wiped his damp forehead with the sleeve of his coat, the faces
of his audience were pale as the faces of those who have looked upon
hidden places, and in the eyes of the little Jacqueline there were
tears.
A moment of silence; then M. Cartel laid down his violin and laughed.
The laugh broke the spell: Jacqueline, with a childish cry of
excitement, flew across the room and, throwing her arms about his neck,
kissed him with unashamed fervor; Blake and Max pressed round the piano,
and in an instant the room was humming again to the sound of voices, and
some one made the astounding discovery that it was five o'clock.
This was Blake's opportunity--the opportunity loved beyond all others of
the Irishman, when it is permissible to offer hospitality. The idea came
to him as an inspiration, and was seized upon as such. Eager as a boy,
he laid one hand on Max's shoulder, the other on that of M. Cartel.
'He had a suggestion to make! One that admitted of no refusal! M. Cartel
had entertained them regally; he must suffer them to make some poor
return. There was a certain little _café_ where the _chef_ knew his
business and the wine really was wine--' He looked from one face to
another for approval, and perhaps it was but natural that his eyes
should rest last and longest on the face of Max.
So it was arranged. A dinner is a question readily dealt with in the
quarter of Montmartre, and soon the four--laughing, talking,
arguing--were hurrying down the many steps of the Escalier de
Sainte-Marie, bent upon the enjoyment of the hour.
CHAPTER XIX
They dined with a full measure of satisfaction; for with his invitation
to a feast, your Parisian accepts an obligation to bring forth his best
in gayety, in conversation, in good-will; and it might well have
happened that Blake, spending ten times as much money upon guests of his
own world, might have lacked the glow, the sense of success, that filled
him in the giving of this dinner to an unknown musician and a little
blonde-haired _Montmartroise_.
They dined; and then, because the winds were still wintry and coffee
could not yet be sipped outside _café_ doors, they betook themselves to
the little theatre of the 'Trianon Lyrique' on the Boulevard
Rochechouart, where for an infinitesimal sum the _bourgeoisie_ may sit
in the stalls and hear light opera conscientiously sung.
As it was a gala evening, Blake reserved a box, and the little
Jacqueline sat in the place of honor, neat and dainty to the point of
perfection, with a small black jacket fitting closely to her figure, and
a bunch of violets, costing ten centimes, pinned coquettishly into her
lace _jabot_. They sat through the performance in a happy mood of
toleration, applauding whenever applause might be bestowed, generously
silent when anything tempted adverse criticism; and between the acts
they smoked and drank liqueurs in company with the good Montmartre
shopkeepers--the soldiers--the young clerks and the young girls who
formed the crowd in the lounge.
But all things end; the curtain fell on the last act of _Les Cloches de
Corneville_, and not without a pleasant, passing sigh, the four left the
theatre.
The boulevard teemed with life as they made their way into the open; a
certain intoxication seemed blown along the thoroughfare on the light
spring wind; a restless energy tingled in the blood.
On the steps of the little theatre, Blake looked back at his party.
'The night was young! What would they say to supper?'
Jacqueline's eyes sparkled, but she looked at M. Cartel, and regretfully
M. Cartel shook his head.
'Alas! He was expecting a friend--a composer, to call upon him before
midnight.'
Jacqueline betrayed no disappointment; with a charming air she echoed
the regret, the shake of the head, and slipped a confiding hand through
M. Cartel's arm.
Then followed the leave-taking--the thanks and disclaimers--the promises
of future meetings--and at last the lovers moved out into the crowd--M.
Cartel, cheery and brisk, humming the tunes of '_Les Cloches_,' the
little Jacqueline clinging to his arm, smiling up into his ugly face.
Max watched them for a moment with a deep intentness, then wheeled round
swiftly and caught Blake's arm.
"Ned! Take me somewhere! I would forget myself!"
"What troubles you, boy? Not the thought of the picture?"
"No! A something of no consequence. Do not question me. Be kind to me,
and take me where I can see life and forget myself."
"Where will I take you?"
"To some place of gayety--where no one thinks."
"Very well! We'll go over and have supper at the Rat Mort. You won't be
over-troubled with thought there. We can sit in a corner and observe,
and I give you my word there will be no encounters with old friends this
time! I'll be blind and deaf and dumb if anything is washed up from the
past!"
Guiding the boy across the crowded roadway, he passed through the narrow
door and up the steep stair that ends so abruptly into the long, low
supper-room of the Rat Mort.
Max felt the abruptness of this entry, as so many climbers of the
ladder-like stairs have felt it before him; and a dazed sensation seized
upon him as the wild _Ztigane_ music of the stringed orchestra beat
suddenly upon his ears and the intense white light struck upon his
sight.
He felt it as others have felt it--the excitement, the consciousness of
an emotional atmosphere--as he followed Blake down the dazzingly bright
room. It was in the air, as it had been at the Bal Tabarin.
As they seated themselves, the barbaric music ceased; the orchestra
broke forth afresh with a light Parisian waltz, and down between the
lines of tables came a negro and a negress--properties of the place, as
were the glasses and the table linen--waltzing with the pliant
suppleness, the conscious sensuality of their race, and close behind
them followed a second couple--a Spaniard, restless and lithe, small of
stature and pallid of face, and a young Spanish girl of splendid
physique.
Max sat silent, attentive to this dance, while Blake ordered supper; but
when the wine was brought, he lifted his glass and drank, as if some
strong sensation had dried his throat.
Blake turned and looked at him.
"Well? Is it amusing?"
"It is--and it is not. Those black creatures are extraordinary. They are
repulsive--like figures in a nightmare."
"Oh! Repulsive, are they? And what about a certain picture we once
looked at--when I was swept off the face of the earth for using that
same word? I believe, you know, that points of view are changing! I
believe I'm coming to part two of my little book! These niggers aren't a
bit more disgusting than the monkey sucking the fruit."
Max glanced at him, laughed a trifle self-consciously and drank some
more wine. "Let us forget monkeys and little books and all such
stupidities. There is a pretty woman over there! Make me a story
concerning her." He nodded toward a table in the middle of the room.
Blake, looking, saw a slim woman in white, whose large hat threw a
becoming shadow on auburn hair and red-brown eyes.
"Ah, now," he said, thoughtfully, "you've given me too much to do! At a
first glance I'd say she's just the ordinary better-class _cocotte_; but
at a second glance it seems to me I'd pause. There's something about the
eyes--there's something about the mouth that puzzles me. You'll have to
wait, my boy, and let fate tell you your fairy tale!"
Trained in the consciousness of regard, the woman they discussed looked
across at them as Blake ceased, and the flicker of a smile touched her
lips--a smile of interest in which there lurked no hint of invitation.
"Ah, wasn't I right! She discriminates--our auburn lady! We'll see
something interesting before the night is out, mark my words!"
They half forgot her and her possible story in the hour that followed,
though Max noted that the woman who wanders from party to party at the
Rat Mort, distributing roses, paused twice by her table and spoke to
her, each time departing without unburdening herself of her wares; also,
he noted that the pallid little Spaniard, who had been scattering his
attentions among the ladies unprovided with companions, came and bowed
before her, and that, contrary to her impression of aloofness, she rose
and danced a waltz with him.
At this episode of the dance, Blake's eyes as well as the boy's were
attracted; and, as she glided up and down between the tables, cool,
unmoved, seemingly indifferent to the world about her, his interest
reawakened, and he cast a sidelong glance at Max.
"Wait!" he said. "When you see that guarded look in a woman's eyes, you
may always know she's expecting something."
Even as he spoke, she returned to her solitary table, dismissing the
Spaniard with an inclination of the head and, as she seated herself,
both observers saw a change pass over her face--saw her gaze narrow and
turn toward the door--saw a faint flush touch her cheeks and recede,
leaving them paler than before.
It was a controlled emotion, almost imperceptible--differing in essence
from either the latent violence of the woman Lize or the artless
impulsiveness of the little Jacqueline; but with certain intuition it
sent Max's glance winging to the door of the supper-room, assured that
some issue in the subtle war of sex was about to be fought out.
A new party was entering the room--a small dark _Parisienne_, bringing
in her wake two Englishmen--one brown--the other fair, with the accepted
Saxon fairness.
Down the long room the little lady came, ushered by obsequious waiters,
the recipient of many glances, admiring or envious; close behind her
followed the brown-haired Englishman and, a little in the rear, her
second cavalier--reserved of demeanor, distinguished of carriage,
obviously upholding the tradition of _sang-froid_ that clings to his
countrymen.
Max's instinct was fully awake now; and when, in passing her table, the
fair man inclined his head to the auburn-haired lady, the matter merely
fitted with his expectations.
What brief emotional past lay in the mists of the unknown, linking this
woman to this man? Nothing was to be read from her face--no expression
of pleasure, none of chagrin; but in her half-veiled eyes a certain
brilliance was observable and her long, white fingers began softly to
drum upon the table in time to the music.
No explanation was demanded; in a clear, disconcerting flash, the
situation was laid bare. Here was woman desiring the love of man; woman
determined to reap her spoil. It was one issue in the deathless,
relentless struggle--the struggle wherein the little Jacqueline clung to
her M. Cartel, tenacious as the frail fern to the ungainly rock--wherein
Madame Salas had fought sickness and neglect to protect a fading life.
It was a truth--arresting as truth must ever be; and stricken with a
tingling fear, the boy drove it from him, and turned his eyes from the
fateful, shadowed face and the light, drumming fingers.
A new dance had begun: the grinning negro had seized upon the Spanish
girl and was whirling her down the room to the laughter of the company,
while her countryman looked round the tables in indifferent search for a
partner.
His glance skimmed the white figure at the lonely table, the eyes of the
woman were lifted for an instant, revealing a flash of their new light,
and in a moment the two were dancing again, moving up and down the
room, in and out between the tables with their original easy grace; but
this time the woman's lips were parted and her eyelids drooped in a
clever simulation of enjoyment.
Up and down they glided, passing and repassing the table where the
little dark lady supped with her two cavaliers, but never once did the
woman raise her eyes to the Englishman's or seem aware of the cold,
close glance that followed her movements; but once, as the music faded
to silence, and her white skirt swept past his table for the last time,
she murmured something softly in Spanish to her partner, and allowed one
level, effective glance to fall on his pallid face.
That was all; the waltz stopped, she disengaged herself gently, and
walked back alone to her table.
This waltz was followed by another and yet another, and again she fell
to her old attitude of lowered eyes and drumming fingers.
The Englishman at his table made pretence to eat his supper, poured
himself out a fresh glass of champagne, drank it, and with a suddenly
achieved decision, gave a cool laugh of excuse, rose and walked straight
toward the solitary figure.
Max, momentarily _clairvoyant_, felt the violent heartbeat, the caught
breath, that told the woman of his presence--felt to a nicety the
control of her expression, the rigidity of her body, as she slowly
raised her head and met his eyes; then he saw the man bow, making some
suggestion, and he leaned back in his seat with a little sigh of
satisfaction as the woman smiled and rose and the two began to dance.
Both tall above the ordinary, they were a well-suited couple, and a
certain pleasure filled the beholder's mind as they moved decorously up
and down the long aisle formed by the double row of tables--the man
entirely indifferent to his surroundings, dancing in this Parisian
supper-place precisely as he would have danced in a London ball-room;
the woman following his every movement with a passivity--a oneness--that
gave no hint of the definite purpose at work within her brain.
The dance over, he led her back to her table, drew her chair forward
with elaborate politeness, bowed and, with a murmured word, strolled
back to his own table.
So sure had been her triumph, so abrupt its collapse, that Max--smoking
his cigarette, sipping his coffee--turned, with a little exclamation, to
Blake.
"Have you observed, _mon ami_? Oh, why was that?"
Blake was carefully lighting a cigar.
"'Twould be hard to say," he answered, meditatively. "In a matter of
emotion, an Englishman has a way of getting frightened of himself. This
particular specimen has come over to Paris to play--and he doesn't fancy
fire for a toy!"
"And what will happen? What will be the end?" Max had laid his cigarette
aside; his fingers were interlaced, sure sign that his emotions were
running high; and his eyes, when he fixed them on Blake's, held a touch
of their rare sombre fire.
"How will it end, you say? Guess, my child!"
Max shook his head.
"Well, boy, Eve will be Eve to the end of time--and Adam will be Adam!"
"You mean--? Oh, but look!"
This last was called forth by the rising from table of the trio--the
quiet passing from the room of the fair man in the train of his friend
and the little dark lady.
It seemed so final, so sharp an answer to his question, that Max could
feel--as things personal and close--the sick sinking of the heart, the
accompanying whiteness of cheek that must fall upon the woman sitting
immovable and alone.
"I am sorry!" he cried. "Oh, but I am sorry!"
Blake looked thoughtfully at the tip of his cigar.
"Wait!"
Even as he said it, the fair man reappeared alone. "What did I say? Eve
will be Eve--Adam will be Adam!"
But Max was not listening. Excited, lifted beyond himself, he was
watching the Englishman thread a way between the tables--watching the
woman thrill to his approach without lifting an eyelid, moving a muscle.
Rigid as a statue she sat, until he was quite close; then, curiously, as
if nature demanded some symbol of the fires within, her lips opened and
she began to hum the tune the orchestra was playing.
It was a strange form of self-expression, and as she yielded to it her
cheeks burned suddenly and her eyes shone between their narrowed lids.
She did not speak when the man seated himself at her table, she did not
even look up; she went on humming in a strange ecstatic reverie, but she
smiled--a very slow, a very subtle smile.
A waiter came, and wine was brought; she drank, laid down her glass and
continued her strange song. The seller of flowers hovered about the
table, smiling at the Englishman, and laid a sheaf of pink roses on the
white cloth; still the humming continued, though mechanically the
woman's long, white fingers gathered up the flowers and held them
against her face. At last, unexpectedly, she raised her head, looked at
the man whose eyes were now fixed in fascination upon her, looked away
beyond him, and, lifting her voice from its murmuring note, began to
sing aloud.
It was a scene curious beyond description--the hot, white room, the many
painted faces, the many jewelled hands, the grotesque black forms of
the negro dancers, and in the midst a woman hypnotized by her own
triumph into absolute oblivion.
She sat with the roses in her hands, her eyes looking into space, while
her voice, pure and singularly true, gathered strength until gradually
the chattering of voices and the clinking of glasses lessened, and the
musicians lowered their music to a deliberate accompaniment.
Nowhere but in Paris could such a scene take place; but here, although
the faces turned toward the singer's were flushed with wine, they were
touched with comprehension. The gathered roses--the high, sweet
voice--the rapt face composed a picture, and even when his eyes are
glazed, your Parisian is a connoisseur.
The last note quivered into silence; a little ripple of applause
followed; and with the same concentrated, hypnotized gaze, the woman's
eyes turned from space and rested again upon the man.
It was the glance ancient as tradition--significant as fate. At his
distant table, Max rose and laid a trembling hand upon Blake's arm.
"Ned! May we go?"
"Oh, why? The night is young!"
"Please!"
"But why?"
"I desire it."
Blake looked more closely, and his expression changed.
"Why, you're ill, boy!" he said. "You're as white as a sheet!"
Max tried to laugh. "It is the heat--nothing more."
"Of course it is! The place is like a hot-house! You want a breath of
air!"
Again Max tried to laugh, but it was a laugh oddly broken.
"That is it!" he said. "I want the air."
CHAPTER XX
Max passed down the long, low room, blind to the white light, blind to
the flowers and faces, deaf to the voices and laughter and swaying sound
of stringed instruments.
One glance he permitted himself--one only--at the table where the man
and woman still looked into each other's eyes and where the sheaf of
pink roses still shed its incense: then he passed down the steep, short
stairs, halting at the door of the _café_, hesitating between two
atmospheres--outside, the sharp street lights, the cold, wind-swept
pavement--within, the hot air, the close sense of humanity, powerful as
a narcotic.
"Ned!" he said, looking back for Blake, "I need a favor. Will you grant
it?"
"A hundred!" Blake was buttoning up his coat.
"Then wish me good-night here. I would go home alone."
"Alone? What nonsense! You don't think I'd desert you when you're seedy?
What you want is air. We'll take a stroll along the boulevards."
Max shook his head. He seemed rapt in his own thoughts; his pale face
was full of purpose.
"I am quite well--now."
"Then all the more reason for the stroll! Come along!"
But the boy drew away. "Another time! Not to-night."
"Why not?"
"I cannot tell you."
Blake looked more closely at the nervously set lips, the dark eyebrows
drawn into a frown.
"I say, boy, it hasn't got on your nerves--this place? I know what a
queer little beggar you are."
"No; it is not that."
"Then what? Another inspiration?"
"No."
"Very well! I won't probe. I'm old enough to know that the human animal
is inexplicable. Good-night--and good luck! I'll see you to-morrow."
"To-morrow, yes!"
There was relief in the readiness of the response, relief in the quick
thrusting forth of the boy's hand.
"Good-night!"
"Good-night! And go to bed when you get home. You're very white."
"Yes."
His voice seemed to recede further into its distant absorbed note, his
fingers were withdrawn from Blake's close pressure with a haste that was
unusual, and turning away, he crossed the boulevard as though the vision
of some spectre had lent wings to his feet.
No impression of romance touched him as he hastened up the narrow
streets toward his home. He had no eyes for the secret shadows, the
mysterious corners usually so fruitful of suggestion; his whole
perceptions were turned inward; his self-consciousness was a thing so
living, so acute that he went forward as one bereft of sight or hearing.
Reaching the foot of the Escalier de Sainte-Marie, he quickened his
already hurried pace, and began to run up the uneven steps. The door of
his house stood open, and he plunged into the dark well of the hall
without waiting to strike a match. By instinct his hand found the
smooth banister, and he began his climb of the stairs.
Up he went, and up, living in himself with that perfect absorption that
comes in rare and violent moments--moments of sorrow, of pleasure or, it
may be, of surprise, when a new thought suspends the action of the
brain.
In obedience to some unconsidered instinct he softened his steps on
reaching the fifth floor, and crept across the bare corridor to the door
of his own rooms.
He entered quietly, and still ignoring the need for light, groped a way
to his bedroom.
It was the room that had once belonged to Madame Salas; and, like the
kitchen, it looked upon the network of roofs and chimneys that spread
away at the rear of the house. Now, as he entered, closed the door, and
stood leaning against it, breathing quickly, these roofs and chimneys,
seen through the uncurtained window, made a picturesque medley of lines
and curves startlingly distinct against the star-powdered sky.
The ethereal light of a Parisian spring night filled the room, touching
the white walls--the white bed--a bowl of flowers upon the
dressing-table and its fairy-like reflection in the mirror--to a subtly
insidious fragility that verged upon the unreal; and the boy, quivering
to his tangled sensations, felt this unreality quicken his
self-distrust, touch and goad him as a spur.
Physical action became imperative; he walked unsteadily across the room,
pulled the serge curtains across the window, abruptly shutting out both
stars and roofs, and turning to the dressing-table, groped for matches
and struck a light.
Four candles stood in an old silver candelabra; he touched them with the
match-flame, they flickered, spat, rose to a steady glow. In the new
light the room looked warmer, more in touch with human things and,
moving with the inevitableness of a pendulum, his mind swung to a
definite desire.
Impulse seized him; questions, doubts, fears were submerged; trembling
to a loosed emotion, he ran across the room and bent over his narrow
bed.
He was alone now; alone in the absolutely primal sense of the word, when
the individual ceases to act even to himself. The instinct he had denied
was dominating him, and he was yielding with a sense of intoxication.
With hands that shook in excitement, he raised the mattress and,
searching beneath, drew forth an object--a flat packet, bound and
sealed--the packet, in fine, that had lain so deep and snug in the
pocket of his overcoat on the night of his entry into Paris.
His hand--his whole body--was trembling as he brought it to light and
walked back to the dressing-table.
There, he pulled forward a chair and sat down before the mirror. For a
full minute he sat, as if enchained, then at length--in obedience to the
force that was dominating him--his fingers crept under the string, there
came to the ear a faint, sharp crackle, and the seals broke.
The seals broke, a gasp slipped from between his parted lips, and in his
hands lay the symbol of all the imaginings, all the pretty mockery
wherewith he purported to cheat nature.
It lay in his hands--a simple thing, potent as simple things ever are.
No rare jewel, no state paper, merely the long, thick strands of a
woman's hair.
The paper fell away, and he lifted it shakingly to the light.
Stiff-coiled from its long imprisonment, it unwound slowly, allowing the
candle-light to filch strange hues from its dark length--glints of
bronze, tinges of copper-color that gleamed elusively from the one end,
where it had been roughly clipped from the head, to the other, where it
still curled and twisted into little tendrils like a living thing.
A woman's hair! A weapon old as time--as light, as destructible, as
possessed of subtle powers as woman herself. Strand upon strand, he drew
it out, following the glints of light with dazed, questioning eyes.
A woman's hair! A woman's hair, woven to blind men's eyes!
Max leaned forward, quivering to a new impulse, and, raising the heavy
coils, twisted them swiftly about his head. With the action, the blood
rushed into his cheeks, a flame of excitement sprang into his eyes and,
drawing the candles closer, he peered into the mirror.
There are moments when a retrospective impression is overwhelming--when
a scent, a sight, a sound can quicken things dead--things buried out of
mind.
Max looked and, looking, lost himself. The boy with his bravery of
ignorance, his frankly arrogant egoism was effaced as might be the
writing from a slate, and in his place was a sexless creature, rarely
beautiful, with parted, tremulous lips and wide eyes in which subtle,
crowding thoughts struggled for expression.
He looked, he lost himself, and losing, heard nothing of a sound, faint
and undefined, that stole from the region of the outer door--nothing of
a light step in the little hall outside his room. Leaning closer to the
mirror, still gazing absorbed, he began to twist the short waves of his
own hair more closely into the strands that resembled them so nearly in
texture and hue.
It was then, quietly--with the appalling quietude that can appertain to
a fateful action--that the handle of the bedroom door clicked, the door
itself opened, and the little Jacqueline--more child than ever in the
throes of a swift amazement--stood revealed, a lighted candle in one
hand, in the other a china mug.
At sound of the entry, Max had wheeled round, his hands still
automatically holding up the strands of hair; at the vision that
confronted him, a look of rage flashed over his face--the violent,
unrestrained rage of the creature taken unawares.
At the look the little Jacqueline quailed, her lips opened and drooped,
her right hand was lowered, until the candlestick hung at a perilous
angle and the wax began to drip upon the floor.
"Oh!" she cried, "and I thought to find the room empty! _Pardon!
Pardon!_ Oh, _pardon, mons--madame!_"
CHAPTER XXI
It was spoken--the one word, so brief, so significant; and Jacqueline
stood hesitating, pleading, equally ready to rush forward or to fly.
At last Max spoke.
"Why do you call me that?"
The tone in which the question was put was extremely low, the gray eyes
were steady almost to coldness, the strong, slight fingers began
mechanically to fold up the hair, strand upon strand.
Jacqueline's candle swayed, until a stream of the melted wax guttered to
the floor.
"Because--"
"Yes?"
"Because--oh, because--because--I have always known!"
Then indeed a silence fell. Jacqueline, too petrified to embellish
her statement, let her voice trail off into silence; Max,
folding--mechanically folding--the strands of hair, offered neither
disclaimer nor acceptance. With the force of the inevitable the
confession had struck home, and deep within him was the strong soul's
respect for the inevitable.
"You have always known?" he said, slowly, when the silence had fulfilled
itself. "You have always known--that I am a woman?"
It sounded abominably crude, abominably banal--this tardy question, and
never had Max felt less feminine than in the uttering of it.
The lips of Jacqueline quivered, her blue eyes brimmed with tears of
distress.
"Oh, I could wish myself dead!"
"And why?"
"Because I have made myself an imbecile!"
The humiliation, the self-contempt were so candid, so human, that
something changed in Max's face and the icy rigidity of pose relaxed.
"Come here!"
The guilty child to the life, Jacqueline came timidly across the room,
the candlestick still drooping unhappily from her right hand, the
mysterious mug clutched in her left.
Max's first action was to take possession of both, and to set them side
by side upon the dressing-table. The candle Jacqueline delivered up in
silence, but as the mug was wrested from her, she cried out in sudden
vindictiveness:
"And that--look you--that is the cause of all! It was Lucien's idea! I
served a cup of _bouillon_ to him and to his friend at midnight, for
they had talked much; and finding it good, nothing would serve but I
must place a cup also for Monsieur Max, to await him on his return.
Alas! Alas!"
Max pushed the cup away, as if to remove a side issue.
"Answer the question I put to you! You know that I am a woman?"
"Yes; I know."
"Since when? Since the night at the Bal Tabarin?"
"Oh, but no!"
"Since the morning we met upon this doorstep?"
"No."
"Since the morning you made the coffee for M. Blake and me?"
Jacqueline was twisting the buckle of her belt in nervous perturbation.
"Answer me! It was since that morning?"
"No! Yes! Oh, it was before that morning. Oh, madame--monsieur!" She
wrung her hands in a confusion of misery. "Oh, do not torture me! I
cannot tell you how it was--or when. I cannot explain. You know how
these things come--from here!" She lightly touched the place where she
imagined her heart to be.
Max, sitting quiet, made no betrayal of the agony of apprehension at
work within.
"And how many others have had this--instinct? M. Cartel? M. Blake?"
So surprising, so grotesque seemed the questions, that self-confidence
rushed suddenly in upon Jacqueline. She threw back her head and
laughed--laughed until her old inconsequent self was restored to power.
"Lucien! Monsieur Édouard! Oh, _la, la_! How droll!"
"Then they do not know?"
"Know? Are they not men? And are men not children?"
The vast superiority--the wordly wisdom in the babyish face was at once
so comical and so reassuring that irresistibly Max laughed too; and at
the laugh, the little Jacqueline dropped to her knees beside the
dressing-table and looked up, smiling, radiant.
"I am forgiven?"
"I suppose so!"
"Then grant me a favor--one favor! Permit me to touch the beautiful
hair!"
Without waiting for the permission, the eager little hands caught up the
coiled strands, and in a moment the candlelight was again chasing the
red tints and the bronze through the dark waves.
"My faith, but it is beautiful! Beautiful! And what a pity!"
"A pity--?"
"That no man may see it!" For an instant Jacqueline buried her face in
the silky mass; then, like a little bright bird, looked up again. "A man
would go mad for this!"
"For a thing like that? Absurd!"
"Yet a thing like that can demolish Monsieur Max, and leave in his
place--"
"What?"
"How shall I say? His sister?" She looked up anew, disarming in her
naïve candor: and a swift temptation assailed her listener--the
temptation that at times assails the strongest--the temptation to
unburden the mind.
"Jacqueline," Max cried, impetuously, "you speak a great truth when you
say that! We have all of us the two natures--the brother and the sister!
Not one of us is quite woman--not one of us is all man!"
The thought sped from him, winged and potent; and Jacqueline, wise in
her child's wisdom, offered no comment, put forward no opinion.
"It is a war," Max cried again, "a relentless, eternal war; for one
nature must conquer, and one must fail. There cannot be two rulers in
the same city."
"No," Jacqueline murmured, discreetly, "that is most true."
"It is. Most true."
"Why, then, was madame adorning herself with her beautiful hair when I
had the unhappiness to enter? Has not madame already waged her war--and
conquered?"
The eyes were full of innocent question, the soft lips perfectly grave.
Max paused to frame the falsehood that should fit the occasion; but,
like a flood-tide, the frankness, the courage of the boy nature rose up,
and the truth broke forth.
"I thought until to-night, Jacqueline, that the battle was won; but
to-night, while I supped with M. Blake, a little play was played out
before me--a little human play, where real people played real parts,
where the woman clung to her womanhood, as you cling to yours, and the
man to his manhood, as does M. Cartel; where the stage effects were
smiles and glances and eyes and hair--"
Jacqueline nodded, but said not a word.
"And as I watched, the thought came to me--the mad thought, that I had,
perhaps, lost something--that I had, perhaps, put something from me. Oh,
it was a possession! A possession of some evil spirit!"
Max sprang from the chair, and began to pace up and down the shadowed
room, while the little Jacqueline, sitting back upon her heels in a
stillness almost Oriental, watched, evolving some thought of her own.
"And so madame desired to strangle the evil spirit with her beautiful
hair?"
The hurried steps ceased.
"I wished to see the woman in me--and to dismiss her!"
"And was she easily dismissed?"
The new question seemed curiously pregnant. Max heard it, and in swift
response came back again to the dressing-table, took the hair from
Jacqueline's hands and began again to intertwist it with the boyish
locks.
Jacqueline raised herself from her crouching position, the more easily
to gratify her curiosity.
"It is extraordinary--the change!" she murmured. "Extraordinary! Madame,
let us complete it! Let us remove that ugly coat!" Excitedly, and
without permission, she began to free Max of the boy's coat, while Max
yielded with a certain passive excitement. "And, now, what can we find
to substitute? Ah!" She gave a cry of delight and ran to the bed, over
the foot of which was thrown a faded gold scarf--a strip of rich fabric
such as artists delight in, for which Max had bargained only the day
before in the rue André de Sarte.
"Now the tie! And the ugly collar!" She ran back, the scarf floating
from her arm; and Max, still passive, still held mute by conflicting
sensations, suffered the light fingers to unloose the wide black tie, to
remove the collar, to open a button or two of the shirt.
"And now the hair!" With lightning-like dexterity, Jacqueline drew a
handful of hairpins from her own head, reduced her short blonde curls to
confusion, and in a moment had brushed the thick waves of Max's clipped
hair upward and secured them into a firm foundation.
"Now! Now, madame! Close your eyes! I am the magician!"
Max's eyes closed, and the illusion of dead hours rose again, more
vivid, more poignant than before. With the familiar sensation of deft
fingers at work upon the business of hairdressing, a thousand
recollections of countless nights and mornings--countless preparations
and wearinesses--countless anticipations and disgusts, born with the
placing of each hairpin, the coiling of the unfamiliar--familiar--weight
of hair.
"Now, madame! Is it not a picture?"
With the gesture and pride of an artist, Jacqueline cast the wide scarf
round Max's shoulders and stepped back.
Max's eyes opened, gazing straight into the mirror, and once again in
that night of contrasts, emotion rose paramount.
It was most truly a picture; not the earlier, puzzling sketch--the
anomalous mingling of sex--but the complete semblance of the woman--the
slim neck rising from the golden folds, the proud head, seeming smaller
under its coiled hair than it had ever appeared in the untidiness of its
boy's locks.
"And now, madame, tell me! Is the evil spirit one lightly to be
dismissed?"
All the woman in the little Jacqueline--the creature of eternal
tradition, eternal intrigue--was glorying in her handiwork, in the
consciousness of its potency.
But Max never answered; Max continued to stare into the glass.
"You will dismiss it, madame?"
Max still stared, a peculiar light of thought shining and wavering in
the gray eyes.
"Madame, you will dismiss it?"
Max turned slowly.
"I will do more, Jacqueline. I will destroy it utterly."
"Madame!"
"I have a great idea."
"Madame!"
"If a spirit--no matter how evil--could be materialized, it would cease
to affect the imagination. I shall materialize mine!"
"Madame!"
"Yes; I have arrived at a conclusion. I shall render my evil spirit
powerless by materializing it. But I must first have a promise from you;
you must promise me to keep my secret."
"Madame--madame!" Jacqueline stammered.
"You will promise?"
"Yes."
"And how am I to trust you?"
Jacqueline's blue eyes went round and round the room, in search of some
overwhelming proof of her fidelity; then swiftly they returned to Max's.
[Illustration: THE COMPLETE SEMBLANCE OF THE WOMAN]
"Not even to Lucien, madame, shall it be revealed!" And silently Max
nodded, realizing the greatness of the pledge.
* * * * *
Many hours later, when all the lights were out in the rue Müller and all
the doors wore closed, the slight figure of the boy Max might have been
seen by any belated wanderer slipping down the Escalier de Sainte-Marie
to post a letter--a letter that had cost much thought, and upon which
had been dropped many blots of ink; and had the belated wanderer been
possessed of occult powers and wished to probe inside the envelope, the
words he would have read were these--scrawled with bold impetuosity:
_Mon Ami_,--My idea--the true idea--has come to me. It was born in
the first hour of this new day, and with it has come the knowledge
that, either you were right and some artists need solitude, or I am
one of the fools I talked of yesterday!
All this means that I am ill of the fever of work, and that for
many, many days--many, many weeks--I shall be in my studio--locked
away even from you.
Think no unkind thing of me! All my friendship is yours--and all my
thought. Be not jealous of my work! Understand! Oh, Ned,
understand! And know me, for ever and for ever, your boy.
MAX.
PART III