Ben’s glances at Polly grew longer. He watched her use her napkin to dab the corners of her mouth and then, so quickly that no one else in the place noticed, pluck a bread crumb from her bodice. He watched the tendons in her neck as she turned to look out the window at an old man walking a terrier on a leash down a turf path in the hotel’s interior garden. He watched her absentmindedly stroke the edge of the white damask tablecloth in her lap like a toddler rubbing the hem of her baby blanket.
When the pianist started playing a Chopin Fantaisie Impromptu, she suddenly turned toward the piano and happened to meet Ben’s glance for the briefest instant before they both turned away—she to greet her returning tablemate, he to inspect a random, grinning American whose side-whiskers were as broad and woolly as an unshorn sheep’s hock. Polly was accustomed to strange men stealing glances. Ben seldom eyed women so attentively, let alone wolfishly.
A half minute later, Ben looked over again and saw that she was now in animated conversation with her scarred, eager boy-man. Ben imagined, bitterly, that they were rhapsodizing about their married life, pledging eternal affection, sharing secrets, making love.
“You’ve turned gay as a cricket,” Polly said to her brother when he’d returned from the lavatory.
He began to explain, then stopped himself. “This is not proper table conversation.”
“What is it, Duff?”
Duff let his eyes widen and leaned in toward his sister to whisper. “The water closet. The seat is vulcanized. And when you pull the lever the stream comes out fast, like a millrace, as fast as a pump at a well. It absolutely blasts, Polly, and in an instant”—he started to blush—“everything…simply disappears down an iron drain.”
It was his first encounter with a privy hooked to a Croton water pipe. He had to restrain himself from actually recommending that she leave the table now to visit the ladies’ facility. And Polly had to restrain herself from confessing to him that she already had, months before.
“It absolutely takes the cake,” he said.
His slang amused her. “I am sure it does, if one has eaten cake.”
Duff was embarrassed by her little joke, as she had intended. His ears and cheeks turned as red as his scar.
Ben turned away from the couple to attack his roast duck and buttered corn and aubergines (“egg plants”). The waiter brought him a serving dish filled with two pounds of fried chipped potatoes. He ate as much as he could manage, but enough food for a second and probably a third dinner remained. After his dishes were taken away, a senior waiter in more elaborate livery approached. He had a worried expression.
“Did you find the Suprême de Canard Montmorency in some way unsatisfactory, sir?” the man asked, pronouncing the name of the duck dish as if it were supreme to Canada mount moron sea. “And your palms freet?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your duck and your fried puh-tay-toes. Were they not tasty to you?”
“Very tasty indeed, thank you. But I am unaccustomed to your extremely generous portions.”
The man relaxed, and seemed eager to pursue a different line of questioning. “Aha. English, eh, sir?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re from Great Britain, sir, are you?”
“Yes indeed.”
“May I inquire, then—your first time in America?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you find it?” the man asked, assuming the odd tone of fretful tenderness and faintly simmering rage that Lydia Winslow had used whenever she would ask if Ben really and truly loved her. Ben was considering what honest reply to give when the man answered for him.
“I expect the liberty and equality you find here may come as a shock. I expect you are also surprised, too, to find this city as sophisticated as London or Paris or any in the world—yet far more congenial and sincere. Am I correct, sir?”
“Well, I have only just arrived, actually…” Ben expected Americans to be impertinent—he welcomed it—but he was startled by this man’s self-regard and appetite for praise.
“Our food at the Astor House is renowned for its excellence. The equal of any European table, they say.”
“I am simply…full. And as for your city and country, I expect to find that it is indeed the best of all possible worlds.”
Ben couldn’t have been more sincere. The restaurant captain, however, certain that an arrogant John Bull was mocking him, nodded and strode away.
Polly glanced once, quickly, at the long-haired stranger as the waiter set down her dish of ice cream and strawberries; he was no longer ogling.
Ben did not dare to look at her again until she and her companion walked past his table to leave. He inhaled her lavender breeze. The back of her dress was cut with a slight dip at the neck. And so as she made her exit from the saloon and Ben Knowles’s life, he turned and stared—helplessly, hopelessly—at those naked few inches at the summit of her long back.
He had dared in the last few minutes to imagine that he might somehow contrive to meet her, that she would fall in love with him, that she would become his American wife. But now—he returned to his meal and sighed—he knew he would never see her again.
But he would not mope. He took a deep breath. He finished his glass of bourbon whiskey and ordered another.
As he drank he considered once again the extraordinary turns his life had taken since February. And he decided that Lloyd Ashby would approve of everything he had done since the night in Paris they were last together. He dearly hoped so.
2
two months earlier—February 23, 1848
Paris
WAITING MADE Ben Knowles impatient. That is, he lacked the patience to wait contentedly. The impatience was always there, simmering just beneath his gentleman’s pose—beneath the calm and polite and impervious marble-white English mask. Ben’s impatience exasperated his parents, and it had puzzled poor Lydia during the year of their betrothal, but he refused to consider it a weakness, which puzzled and exasperated everyone all the more. Waiting—for a new suit of clothes to be finished or a sense of life’s purpose to be revealed or an old friend to appear on a street corner—simply made him feel that underlying sense of foiled desire.
Was he standing on the wrong corner of Montmartre? The gas street lanterns were lit, twinkling up the boulevard in the gray winter dusk like two rows of very orderly planets and stars. He had discovered—smelled—that he was standing not far downwind of a hydrogen gasworks and a huge butchery. Perhaps Ashby had said to meet him at five o’clock not “where the Rue des Martyrs hits the Boulevard des Martyrs,” as Ben recalled, but, rather, across the square where the Boulevard des Martyrs becomes the Boulevard Montmartre. On the other hand, it would be in character for Ashby to choose the vicinity of a gas factory and an abattoir for a rendezvous.
They had impulsively decided on this meeting in London at Christmas—an odd arrangement, as arrangements involving Ashby tended to be. Ben’s railway train had arrived in Paris at half three. He should have asked his friend to meet him at the Gare Saint-Lazare. Instead, he had dropped his luggage at the Hôtel Diderot, walked to a taxidermist’s, and then, as Ashby had instructed, made his way here. As he had stopped on various corners attempting to find his way with one of the cunning but awkward folding maps bound into the Galignani’s New Paris Guide his hotel clerk had given him, Ben felt like a perfect caricature of an English tourist.
He was always a little rattlebrained in foreign cities. (As a child he had once spent two days in Glasgow under the impression he was in Edinburgh.) On the other hand, Lloyd Ashby was habitually tardy—his schoolboy nickname had been “Lord Later,” awarded one day when he arrived an hour late for a cricket match. And while Ben’s father approved of his intimacy with Ashby for the obvious reasons (Lloyd’s father was a peer—a viscount, Lord Brightstone), Archibald Knowles regularly cautioned him to beware the “infectiousness” of Lloyd’s “lazy and reckless approach to life.” And living in Paris these last eighteen m
onths, Ben reckoned, had surely turned his chum even more unsettled and exotic. For young Englishmen, a kind of exotic unsettledness was the point of Paris, even for those on a business trip, like Ben.
The sun had almost set. He checked his watch again: nearly quarter till five in London, so…half past five here…
But what of it? Ben inhaled a deep, cool breath and relaxed. He was in Paris. He was warm in his overcoat. The rain had stopped. He was exhilarated, as always, by travel—by leaving London, yes, but even more by having traveled fast, sitting inside a machine moving at fifty miles an hour, striking straight over the landscape like a bullet or a god. He was in the thrall of speed, the new speed of steam but also of clipper ships, of the telegraph’s instant mail and the instant portraits of the daguerreotype. It was this that distinguished him in his own mind from most people he knew. When he had traveled from London to Paris ten years earlier as a student bound for Bonn, the journey took five days; today’s trip had required not even one. Considering, then, this bonus of time that modern engineering had granted him, what was an extra hour of waiting?
He put the penguin down. Wrapped in damp gray pasteboard and string, it stood upright on the stone, two and a half feet tall. Only the tip of its bright orange beak poked out of the wrapping, looking like a wedge of old cheddar. The bird was one of sixty-seven shot by Sir Henry Pottinger off the Cape of Good Hope last year, shipped from Africa to the taxidermist on the Rue du Bac to be stuffed and distributed as gifts to Sir Henry’s friends. One of those designated penguin recipients was Ben’s father, who had asked Ben to make himself useful, as long as he was going to be in Paris on Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham business, and pick up his Spheniscus demersus. Mr. Knowles wanted the penguin as soon as possible in order to show it off. Spheniscus demersus wasn’t rare, like some of the specimens in his collection, but its provenance made it a penguin worth coveting.
“Monsieur.”
Suddenly, on the walk just to Ben’s left, like a sprite darting from a forest hollow in a fairy tale, a woman appeared. She was no more than twenty.
“Aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît!”
“Uhhhmm—bonsoir, mademoiselle,” Ben replied, groping for the right words. “Je parle français.”
She breathed quickly, each puff visible in the cold, and crouched, as if ready to spring into the air. Her pretty face was flushed and damp, contorted by fear, exertion…and by a sort of abandon that struck Ben as faintly carnal. Was she some odd French species of prostitute? She wore a twilled silk dress that exposed her shoulders, but no coat and nothing on her head. The bottom of her skirt was flecked with mud, and her palms and wrists were smutty with soot or blacking. In her left hand she held a heavy piece of pottery, and in her right a yard-long pole, a kind of rough cane with a large scrap of leather tied to one end by string. She looked less like a whore, in fact, than an actress performing the part of a vagabond in a play.
She glanced over her shoulder down the alley from which she had popped.
“Prends ça!” She shook her stick. The leather fluttered. “Tout de suite, s’il vous plaît! S’il vous plaît, monsieur!”
He recalled his father’s declaration, a decade ago, that Ben’s time at Universität Bonn was a waste of time, a folly, since a smattering of French, not German, was the only foreign language one required—and a smattering, he added, is absolutely all one required to argue bills with dressmakers and taxidermists. Here on a street in Paris at dusk, it was clear that Ben’s French did not qualify even as a smattering.
“Mademoiselle,” he tried again, “I’m afraid I really do not understand—that is: Je ne parle pas le français.”
Each stared at the other for a long moment.
“Vous êtes anglais!” she said. “Parfait. English. Perfect.”
He smiled. “Yes, just arrived.” What was she after? “Perfect…?”
“Oui,” she said, thrusting her clay pottery and pole into Ben’s hands. She pulled her damp hair from her eyes with one blackened hand and leaned in close to him. “S’il vous plaît?” she whispered with an urgency Ben had never before heard in a whisper.
What his sniggering club friends loved to say after their trips to Paris was actually true, Ben thought: any young Frenchwoman, no matter how shaggy or charwomanish, is apt to be more entrancing than ten tittering girls at a London party.
This one certainly qualified as shaggy.
“Sir, I cannot have these things. Thank you! Je reviendrai—I return in a short time.” She leapt back to the alley, grabbed something wrapped in a heavy cloth, and then ran off—literally ran!—down the Rue Pigalle, behind a coach, into a crowd and out of sight.
He propped the pole against the lamppost, next to his father’s penguin, and hefted the girl’s strange piece of pottery. It was the weight of a melon, and comprised a pair of small conical pots cemented together at their mouths and smeared yellow and black and white. From one end a piece of stiff twine dangled. He touched a yellow smear, then sniffed his gloved finger. He recognized the smell from his father’s rubber factory. Sulfur?
“Why, Ben Jonson!” From the middle of the street, Lloyd Ashby strode toward him across the cobblestones. Ben Jonson was one of several nicknames by which Ashby called him. “I saw that! What did you say to that poor gamin to make her flee? Rascal! Dirty lewdster!”
Ashby had grown a beard. He was grinning, as usual, and wore a scarf and a waistcoat with broad yellow and white stripes but no coat, hat, or gloves. He held a cigarette in one hand. Ben had never seen an Englishman smoke a cigarette. “I am notifying a gendarme immediately.”
“I believe she is crazy,” Ben shouted back. “But perhaps I misunderstood her.”
“‘Never go to France/Unless you know the lingo;/If you do, like me,/You will repent, by jingo.’” The lines were from a poem by a recently deceased acquaintance of theirs.
Ben prepared for the embarrassing Lloyd Ashby hug.
But as Ashby reached the gutter he stopped short, the smile gone. He threw aside his cigarette. Ben had seldom seen him with such a serious look—he must be playing some new joke.
“Lay that thing down, Ben.”
“But it was my gift from the girl—who, by the way, was not fleeing, she—”
“Put it down. This instant. I am quite serious.” He glanced both ways, then whispered, “It’s a republican stinkpot.”
“A what?” Ben said, glancing at the pots and twisting his face skeptically. “That’s good—‘republican stinkpot’! I believe my father called me that one night after his sixth brandy and water.”
Ashby grabbed the contraption from Ben’s hands and gently laid it on the pavement.
“Come.” He linked his arm with Ben’s, tugging at him. “Quickly.”
“Oh, but a souvenir, at least…” Ben picked up his penguin and the girl’s pole, with its fluttering piece of leather. Ashby snatched the pole away from him, threw it into the gutter, and pulled Ben along.
“You are serious.” So queer: all their lives, Ashby had been the devil-may-care mischief-maker and Ben the more prudent good boy.
“Damned right I am,” Ashby said as he led them across the street. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “That is a grenade. The stick is her staff-sling. The rioters are using them to throw bombs. They pack the stinkpot with quicklime, light the fuse, hurl them at guard posts. Makes a foul smell and a big sputtering show—”
“It wasn’t lime, it smelled to me of…brimstone? Sulfur.”
“Christ! Gunpowder.”
“Ah. Right.” Partly to confound his father, Ben had from boyhood declined to shoot, and taken up archery instead. “Of course.”
“She handed you a bomb. Why, in God’s name?”
“Because I’m English. She was very pleased to discover that. ‘Parfait,’ she said.”
Ashby looked at him as if he were simple.
“I told you I thought she was crazy,” Ben said.
“You don’t know what happened yesterday, do you? Loo
k around you, man!” He pointed to the stumps of freshly cut trees.
Ashby was relishing this opportunity. As they walked the smaller streets toward the Seine—more alleys than streets—he spoke very rapidly, in a kind of slang hybrid of French and English, and practically danced as he talked. To Ben the gullyhole stink was worse than anything in London, but Ashby claimed to enjoy the fumes. He leapt over one fecal delta just as he finished an anecdote about the king’s “syphilitic sodomite” minister. He swerved and hopped to bypass cesspools and rivulets as he told Ben about the government’s ban of the liberals’ protest the evening before last, about the crowd of students and workers and loafers milling and goading one another on in the Place de la Madeleine yesterday morning, a couple of thousand by lunchtime, their march across the river toward “the crappo Parliament,” joined by thousands of sympathetic onlookers, including Ashby himself. He described the police attack, the man next to Ashby struck by a cudgel, a few people shot, fragments of the mob running all over the Left Bank and the Right, “your girlfriend from the alley probably among them,” sawing down trees and smashing things, looting gun shops, building barricades to block the streets.
“Overnight the army made camp around the Parliament, and at some insane hour this morning, some cavalry began blowing fanfares, on trumpets and saxophones.”
Ben looked at Ashby. “Saxophones?”
“An hilarious new horn,” Ashby explained, “invented by a Monsieur Sax. The military bands use them now in place of French horns, if you can believe it. Anyway, I was just across the way in the Rue de Bourbon, asleep, and I thought, ‘My God, war!’ and scrambled outside in my nightshirt to look. The musicians were merely amusing themselves.”
“But I thought you lived in—”
“The lady’s rooms, Juliet, where I now spend most of my midnights and dawns. She calls herself an insurgent. Ben, these people are simply lusting for a revolution. They reach a point…bam.” Ashby made a gesture with his hands like a clap in reverse. “They can’t help themselves, God love them, and every twenty years the cork blows and half the country climbs aboard a runaway locomotive for sport. Like thirteen-year-old boys. It’s quite magnificent, actually. On my way to meet you earlier, I saw a crowd carrying clubs and knives, singing a song called ‘Mourir pour la patrie’—‘To Die for the Fatherland.’ Do you know it? No? From a new work by our man Dumas, his play in the theater here last season. This revolution is inspired by a story and actors singing songs!”
Heyday: A Novel Page 2
