Jasmine Harvest

by Jane Arbor

“Paul?” Her hands went to cup her cheeks in surprise and dismay and to hide their flaming. “How—? Why—?”

  As assured as ever, he retorted, “How? You may well ask. By the skin of my teeth at St. Raphael. Ever tried racing an express on a handicap? You should. It’s good, clean fun ... Why? You shouldn’t have to ask, and anyway it’s not your question—it’s mine. Didn’t I warn you of the consequences if you and Betsy tried this kind of caper?”

  .Caroline stammered, “Yes, but—That is, we—didn’t. Betsy settled everything before we left, and explained why she had to go suddenly in the note Marie took up to your house, along with the key of the villa and the rent in lieu of notice.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I got her note. Not that you expected me to believe a word of it, surely? ‘Urgent family reasons’! Which of you thought that one up as a blind?”

  “I did.”

  He pounced in triumph. “So it was a blind! How did one guess? But now let’s have the truth. Was it a cover for Betsy’s sudden need to escape—or yours?”

  Her eyes dropped before the shrewd accusation in his.

  “If you didn’t believe Betsy’s note to you, you should ask her for the truth,” she evaded.

  “If it was only Betsy who decided she’d got to run away, I can wait to hear her tell me why,” he countered. “After all, I risked breaking my neck to catch this train in order to bribe my way into your compartment, not Betsy’s. Doesn’t that say anything to you?”

  “I—don’ know what you mean to say.”

  “Or you’re not interested? All right, skip it while we get to grips with the rest. Assuming these secret reasons for your flitting were mainly Betsy’s, they seem to have had a strong enough pull to take you along too. So what were they?”

  Under his scrutiny and the relentless pressure of his questions Caroline felt like a pinioned moth. But she made an effort to free herself.

  “Simply that Betsy begged me to leave with her, and whenever she went, you knew I meant to go with her,” she told him.

  “That’s no answer to my question. I don’t believe you’d have agreed to go in this backhanded way if you hadn’t felt equally strongly over whatever took her off at the gallop.”

  One more effort“Well, she decided to go tonight when she heard from her mother that her fiancé was flying in to Paris from the Argentine today,” Caroline said, only for Paul’s devastating logic to tear right across the evasion.

  “After bending over backwards to keep him at a distance until after she had jilted him?”

  “She isn’t jilting him now. In fact, she can hardly wait to see him.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it, the dear little weathercock. But if a dash to her—what’s his name?—Edward’s side had been her sole reason, she’d have said so. So come now, let’s have what it really was, shall we?” he invited.

  The moth ceased its fluttering. Caroline said, “It was something that happened this morning which shocked her into a complete and final revulsion against you. Or so she claims, and I don’t find it difficult to believe her.”

  “Meaning you go all the way in reverse too? Well, that’s understandable. You hadn’t as far to travel in a recoil from me as Betsy had, had you?”

  “That’s not fair! I—”

  “All right, though I can’t credit you were able to resist a smug, ‘I told you so. The fellow was never worth it.’ However, this kill-and-cure of Betsy’s infatuation for me—how did it come about?”

  Caroline told him, taking a thin comfort—which he could destroy at a word—from seeing his perplexed frown gather and darken as she did so.

  He was silent for a moment. Then:

  “But I’d written no letter to Ariane in such terms—nor in any others. She knew I was due with Berthin at Nice today, but I had no date with her, and if I’d wanted to break one, what’s the telephone for? Yet you say this letter purported to be from me?”

  “Well, it wasn’t signed. But the cheque was,” Caroline reminded him, wishing he could know how desperately she craved to believe he was as mystified as he appeared.

  “The cheque—yes. But I’d given that into Ariane’s hands about a week ago. It was for her to cash for Witold Czinner’s benefit, to help him to get back to Warsaw when Ariane closes down the salon shortly.”

  “For Monsieur Czinner?”

  “None other. I made it payable to Ariane because he has no bank account, and when she asked me to help him she suggested I should make out a cheque to her, leaving her to give him the cash. What’s odd about that?”

  “Only,” said Caroline, working it out, “that I distinctly remember Ariane saying once that Monsieur Czinner was too proud to accept help, even from her. And he had told me himself that though he hadn’t really enough funds, notwithstanding he meant to go back to Poland on the few he had. Therefore—”

  “Therefore,” Paul cut in, “you prefer to believe the context of a letter I did not write, but from which you and Betsy concluded I’ve been contributing to Ariane’s living expenses to the tune of three thousand francs a month, with all the implications of that?”

  “What else were we to conclude? But I was really going to say that as, before she asked you for it, Ariane must have known Witold Czinner would not accept it, she never meant to offer it to him because she needed it for something else.”

  “Come! We’re making headway if I’ve managed to convince you of the truth of how my cheque came into Ariane’s possession! But I suppose you realize this amounts to your accusing Ariane of getting money from me on false pretences?” he queried.

  Caroline passed a hand across her brow in the characteristic gesture which always lifted the forward thrust of her hair.

  “Yes, I do realize it may sound like that, and that you find it unthinkable, Ariane being ... what she is to you. But all I meant to imply was that she needed a cheque for a large amount, written by you to her. Not to pass on to Witold Czinner; nor meaning to cash it in her own favor, but simply having to have it for the purpose for which she used it.”

  As Caroline finished speaking she glanced wretchedly at Paul’s face—set, sterner than she had yet seen it. He said slowly,

  “You’re suggesting Ariane planned this; wanted the cheque in order to tie it in with the phoney letter, so that each seemed to bear out the fact of the other?”

  “I’m afraid it looks like it. You see, I know now that the substitution of them for my bill was no accident. Ariane sent them deliberately, guessing I should almost certainly show them to Betsy. And if it hadn’t been for the lucky chance of my expecting to receive a bill from her, I’m sure she would have managed that Betsy saw them in some other way.”

  “How can you know this?” Paul demanded.

  “Suspecting it, I rang up Ariane, and she admitted it.”

  “But why? What had she against young Betsy, in heaven’s name?”

  “She said she had had enough of Betsy’s nuisance value to herself and to you, and she claimed she thought this was the kindest way of making Betsy understand just what your relationship was. I’m afraid I told her in my opinion it was just about the cruellest. But of course she had succeeded. Betsy has understood at last the size of the thing she has been trying to fight. And though I left Ariane in no doubt as to what I thought of her shock treatment, I daresay she’ll be able to convince you she thought she was doing it for the best.”

  “On the contrary,” Paul retorted, “she’s going to have no mean task, persuading me it called for near-forgery and a pack of lies designed to relieve me of three thousand francs which Czinner was never going to see. Oh, no! Complacent and easy-conscienced I may be, but I don’t shoot sitting birds like Betsy. And if you’ve a grain of imagination, surely you have some idea of the kind of jolt my relations with Ariane have taken with all this?”

  Not without cynicism, Caroline said, “You’ll forgive her in time. One does—” She paused. Then, softening as always towards him, to something fleetingly vulnerable in his face, she added, “I’m s
orry, Paul. But you should have taken our excuse for leaving at its face value. Then Ariane would have returned the cheque to you, probably saying Witold wouldn’t take the money, and you need never have learned the use she really made of it, if you hadn’t followed us up like this; if you had allowed us to fade quietly out as we planned.”

  He stared—on the attack, nothing unguarded about him now.

  “Let you fade out?” he exploded. “Let you go? What do you take me for? A—a Berthin? What’s more, suppose we get one point clear—I followed you, not Betsy. And since I did, and I’m here, we’re going to tie in a few ragged ends between us before I do let you go—if I have to. To begin with—why pretend you don’t know what brought me?”

  “I don’t, and I wish you hadn’t come.”

  “Hand on heart, you don’t know, and you’d have me thrown out on the track if you could? I don’t believe you. In your eyes I’m idle, wilful, a self-confessed Lothario; the playboy type you’ve long since been cured of; I don’t add up anywhere to the staunch worth you’re going to marry. But I’ve yet to meet the woman who is entirely proof against adding scalps to her belt, and why do you suppose I’m here, if not to offer mine for your collection, however, little working use you may have for it?”

  It was Caroline’s turn to stare. “You? A scalp—for me?” she faltered.

  “If that’s all you want of me, yes. And I thought I’d been spelling it out for long enough. Or is it a case of ‘There’s none so blind...’?”

  “You know it isn’t! You and I have never been on those terms—never!” she denied.

  “Not even when I kissed you amongst the jasmine? If I didn’t tell you that night and ask my own questions of you, then I’m losing my grip. And since we’re talking in proverbs, what about all the ‘handsome is as handsome does’ goodwill with which I’ve been trying to impress you since? My sweet, sweet Caro,” he shook his head at her despairingly, “what do you imagine all that has been but my cap-in-hand, last ditch effort to—add up?”

  The wild hope that it was true almost choked her. “Paul, this is absurd! We’ve been good friends; I think we’ve liked each other. But this—just isn’t happening—” she began.

  He cut her short. “For me it began to happen the night you were a gatecrasher in my sleeper, and it’s still happening now I’m one in yours.”

  She shook her head. “That night you were only trying to make a pick-up.”

  His eye gleamed. “Guilty, though even then with the strictest of honorable intentions, which I’ve been expressing ever since.”

  “But you haven’t! There’s been nothing—”

  “Less than I’d have liked, I admit.. But look at the strength of the opposition. First of all I was up against comparison with a lightweight named Roy; then, or so I believed, I was fighting the sterling qualities of Cousin B.”

  “I’ve told you—I never even thought of Berthin in that way, or he me.”

  “Even so, it didn’t follow that you would think of me instead. So I made the mistake of holding my fire instead of storming you as I should have done. After all, I thought time was on my side; I wasn’t to know you were going to run out on me like this.” He paused, then took the step or two which brought him close enough to show her her own reflection in his eyes when he looked down at her.

  “But I’m storming you now, Caro,” he said. “Do you realize that?”

  She said shakily, “No. YesBut, Paul, how can you be? Ariane—”

  “Ariane, yes. My counter-attack.”

  “Oh, no, Paul. She’s been more than that to you.”

  “Add, then, a decorative enough playmate for a playboy before I met you, and since I met Betsy, one of my chief means of self-defence against her. Besides, in the matter of setting the pace of an affair there’s never been much to choose between Betsy’s technique and Ariane’s, except that Ariane’s was smoother. And you may remember I told you how the average sensible chap deals with that?”

  “You said he—plays along, just short of hurting the girl’s feelings.”

  “As I tried to do with both of them—that, and no more. But then Ariane began to step up the speed, and I saw the red light ahead. She was hoping to use me as the lever to pry her free of a husband who was prepared to indulge her career-girl excursion by setting her up in the Salon Ariane and subsidizing it, but who refused to divorce her or provide her with evidence to divorce him. And now she is closing the salon, and I shall leave her in no doubt that this last fling of hers for me has failed, I think she’ll make the best of a bad job and go back to him.”

  “Then—that letter? If you weren’t on those terms with her, how dared she—?”

  “My sweet girl, if she didn’t stick at forgery, was she likely to baulk at the size of the lie which she hoped would get rid of Betsy? It had to be convincing, and as probably you both had scruples about reading more of other people’s personal letters than necessary, it had to jump to the eye in the first sentence or two or not at all. But no, categorically, I’ve never been on those terms with Ariane, nor tempted to be. That’s the sworn truth, Caro. Is it too much to hope that it matters to you either way?”

  Owing him the truth, she said, “No, it’s not too much. It does matter to me—a lot. Because you were right. It wasn’t only Betsy who needed to escape from—from the other thing. I was only too ready to run breakneck from it too.”

  At that his eyes travelled over her, measuring her, asking a thousand questions before his tongue achieved a broken—“Because you?—” And then—“You mean you do love me? You can?”

  Momentarily even less articulate than he, she nodded.

  “Oh, Caro!” His hands came to her shoulders, holding her a little off from him. “What have we been up to, you and I? Circling round each other, puss-in-the-corner nonsense, blind man’s bluff, when we both should have been in the middle, holding hands! And you’re here, and I’m—d’you know something?—I’m too darned humble to tell you ... to tell you what you mean to me, what loving you means. Imagine! For the first time in my life I can’t make love. Now I haven’t got any right words for it; now, when I never needed them more. And what am I going to do about that?”

  She looked at him, her eyes soft, her lips curving to a smile. “You could try ... kissing me,” she said, and surrendered to his waiting arms.

  Those were the last words either spoke for some time. Then, side by side on a seat which, as Paul said, had never been designed with a view to the wilder orgies, they were talking again; saying ordinary things, knowing they had all their lives before them for the sweet incoherencies of their love.

  Paul described his headlong dash by car to St. Raphael.

  “As you know, the note you sent up by Marie told me less than nothing. So as soon as I’d read it, I rang Berthin—I’d just dropped him at the cottage on our way back from Nice—and got all I needed from Ursule. If you didn’t want to be followed, you should have covered your tracks better,” he accused.

  “Well, naturally Ursule wanted to hear how and when we were going, and how could we guess you’d want to follow us?”

  “You should have known better—However, as there was no hope of cutting you off at Cannes, though the ghost of a chance at St. Raphael, I got straight back into the car and stepped on it. You were on the move out as I skimmed through the booking hall and was hauled aboard, via the second class dining car, without benefit of ticket and with half the station personnel yelling “Défendu! Défendu!” behind me. But, forbidden or not, I’d made it, and if there’s a Providence which looks after lovers, it certainly worked overtime for me when it laid on friend Georges for this trip.”

  “Georges? Oh—yes. But how do you know his name is Georges?”

  “It doesn’t have to be. All sleeping-car attendants answer to Georges—Can you do that again to order?”

  “Do what?”

  “Blush as you did at the mention of Georges. Anyway, he and I wasted no time in coming to terms agreeable to both, and though n
o power of his could produce a sleeper of my own, he was co-operation itself over telling me where I could find yours.”

  “You haven’t got a sleeper for the night?”

  “Worse than that. There isn’t even a seat. My only hope is a second-class couchette.”

  “But there aren’t any. That’s why Betsy and I had to have first-class sleepers,” Caroline told him.

  “In that case, it looks as if I shall be sitting up in the second-class corridor all night.”

  “Then—?” She broke off, her eyes dancing with mischief.

  He nodded. “Exactly, woman mine. We don’t even toast our reunion and our future, or dine together this evening unless you’ll come slumming in the second-class diner, or unless, from your position of vantage, you’re prepared to ‘arrange’ matters for me with Georges!”

  Her laughter bubbled. “I’ll consider it, if it isn’t too expensive, though it would serve you right if I refused. But ‘all night,’ Paul? That means you’re going through to Paris?”

  “Unless you’ll stop off with me, say at Marseille, and come straight back with me?”

  “Back with you? But I can’t. I’m going to Paris with Betsy, and I suppose she’ll want to stay there until Edward Brant can go on to London with us.”

  “Then I’m staying in Paris too, and I’ll go on to London when you do. You know, Caro, I’m ashamed that I know so little of your background, but I suppose you’ve someone to whom I ought to mention that I want to marry you, and that as soon as may be?”

  A little sadly she shook her head. “Since my father died, I’ve no one closer to me than Aunt Clio and Uncle Ralph Lane, Betsy’s mother and father,” she said.

  “No one?” He drew her to him. “Never mind, petite orpheline, just as soon as you say the word, you shall have ranks and ranks of Pascal forebears ranged behind you. Meanwhile, do you have to go back to England just now?”

  “I must. For one thing, Betsy will have nowhere to live until her people return from America; for another, I promised Aunt Clio I’d come back with her, and put her up at my digs until they do.”