Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Paris is a city of several millions of inhabitants, every inhabitant holding both hands out to you for a tip.

  Paris is a park, smothered in foliage, under which asphalted streets lead to Paradise.

  Paris is a sanitarium so skillfully conducted that nobody can tell the patients from the physicians; and all the inmates are firmly convinced that the outside world is mad.

  I looked back at the gilded mass of the Opera — that great pile of stone set lightly there as the toe of a ballet-girl’s satin slipper ——

  “What are you thinking, papa?” asked Alida.

  “Nothing,” I said hastily, amazed at my own frivolity. “Notice,” said I, “the exquisite harmony of the sky-line. Here in Paris the Government regulates the height of buildings. Nothing inharmonious can be built; the selfishness and indifference of private ownership which in New York erects skyscrapers around our loveliest architectural remains, the City Hall, would not be tolerated here, where artistic ensemble is as necessary to people as the bread they eat.”

  “Dear me, where have I read that?” exclaimed Alida innocently.

  I said nothing more.

  We were now passing through that wing of the Louvre which faces the Carousal, and we turned sharply to the right under the little arc, and straight past the Tuileries Gardens, all blooming with tulips and hyacinths, past the quaint weather-stained statues of an epoch as dead as its own sculptors, past the long arcades of the Rivoli, under which human spiders lurk for the tourist of Cook, and out into the Place de la Concorde — the finest square in the world.

  The sun glittered on the brass inlaid base on which towered the monolyth. The splashing of the great fountains filled the air with a fresh sweet sound. Round us, in a vast circle, sat the “Cities of France,” with “Strasburg” smothered in crêpe and funeral wreaths, each still stone figure crowned with battlemented crowns and bearing the carved symbols of their ancient power on time-indented escutcheons, all of stone.

  The fresh wet pavement blazed in the sunshine; men wheeled handcarts filled with violets or piled high with yellow jonquils and silvery hyacinths.

  Violet, white, and yellow — these are the colors which Paris wears in springtime, twined in her chaplet of tender green.

  I said this aloud to Dulcima, who replied that they were wearing blue in Paris this spring, and that she would like to know how soon we were going to the dressmakers.

  Now at last we were rolling up the Champs Elysées, with the Arc de Triomphe, a bridge of pearl at the end of the finest vista in the world. Past us galloped gay cavalry officers, out for a morning canter in the Bois de Boulogne; past us whizzed automobiles of every hue, shape and species.

  Past us, too, trotted shoals of people well diluted by our fellow countrymen, yet a truly Parisian crowd for all that. Hundreds of uniforms dotted the throngs; cuirassiers in short blue stable jackets, sabres hooked under their left elbows, little piou-piou lads, in baggy red trousers and shakos bound with yellow; hussars jingling along, wearing jackets of robin’s-egg blue faced with white; chasseurs à Cheval, wearing turquoise blue braided with black; then came the priests in black, well groomed as jackdaws in April; policemen in sombre uniforms, wearing sword bayonets; gendarmes off duty — for the Republican Guard takes the place of the Gendarmerie within the walls of Paris; smart officers from the Fontainebleau artillery school, in cherry-red and black; Saint-Cyr soldiers in crude blues and reds, with the blue shako smothered under plumes; then Sisters, in their dark habits and white coifs, with sweet, serene faces looking out on the sinful world they spend their lives in praying for.

  “Dulcima,” I said, “what particular characteristic strikes you when you watch these passing throngs of women?”

  “Their necks; every Parisienne is a beauty from behind — such exquisite necks and hair.”

  “Their ankles,” added Alida innocently; “they are the best-shod women in the world!”

  I had noticed something of the sort; in fact, there is no escape for a man’s eyes in Paris. Look where he will, he is bound to bring up against two neat little shoes trotting along demurely about their own frivolous business. One cannot help wondering what that business may be or where those little polished shoes are going so lightly, tap! tap! across the polished asphalt. And there are thousands on thousands of such shoes, passing, repassing, twinkling everywhere, exquisite, shapely, gay little shoes of Paris, pattering through boulevard and avenue, square, and street until the whole city takes the cadence, keeping time, day and night, to the little tripping feet of the Parisienne — bless her, heart and sole!

  “Of what are you thinking, papa?” asked Alida.

  “Nothing, child, nothing,” I muttered.

  We left our taxi and mounted to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. The world around us was bathed in a delicate haze; silver-gray and emerald the view stretched on every side from the great Basilica on Montmârtre to the silent Fortress of Mont-Valerien; from the vast dome of the Pantheon, springing up like a silver bubble in the sky, to the dull golden dome of the Invalides, and the dome of the Val-de-Grâce.

  Spite of the Sainte Chapel, with its gilded lace-work, spite of the bizarre Tour Saint-Jacques, spite of the lean monster raised by Monsieur Eiffel, straddling the vase Esplanade in the west, the solid twin towers of Nôtre-Dame dominated the spreading city by their sheer majesty — dominated Saint-Sulpice, dominated the Trocadero, dominated even the Pantheon.

  “From those towers,” said I, “Quasimodo looked down and saw the slim body of Esmeralda hanging on the gibbet.”

  “What became of her goat?” asked Alida, who was fond of pets.

  “That reminds me,” began Dulcima, “that now we are safely in Paris we might be allowed to ask papa about that — —”

  “There is a steamer which sails for New York to-morrow,” I said calmly. “Any mention of that pig will ensure us staterooms in half an hour.”

  Considerably subdued, the girls meekly opened their Baedekers and patronized the view, while I lighted a cigar and mused.

  It was my second cigar that morning. Certainly I was a changed man — but was it a change for the better? Within me I felt something stirring — I knew not what.

  It was that long-buried germ of gayety, that latent uncultivated and embryotic germ which lies dormant in all Anglo-Saxons; and usually dies dormant or is drowned in solitary cocktails at a solemn club.

  Certainly I was changing. Van Dieman was right. Doubtless any change could not be the worse for a man who has not sufficient intelligence to take care of his own pig.

  “There is,” said Dulcima, referring to her guidebook, “a café near here in the Bois de Boulogne, called the Café des Fleurs de Chine. I should so love to breakfast at a Chinese café.”

  “With chopsticks!” added Alida, soulfully clasping her gloved hands.

  “Your Café Chinois is doubtless a rendezvous for Apaches,” I said, “but we’ll try it if you wish.”

  I am wondering, now, just what sort of a place that café is, set like a jewel among the green trees of the Bois. I know it is expensive, but not very expensive; I know, also, that the dainty young persons who sipped mint on the terrace appeared to disregard certain conventionalities which I had been led to believe were never disregarded in France.

  The safest way was to pretend a grave abstraction when their bright eyes wandered toward one; and I did this, without exactly knowing why I did.

  “I wish,” said I to Dulcima, “that Van Dieman were here. He understands all this surface life one sees in the parks and streets.”

  “Do you really wish that Mr. Van Dieman were here?” asked Alida, softly coloring.

  I looked at her gravely.

  “Because,” she said, “I believe he is coming about the middle of May.”

  “Oh, he is, is he?” I said, without enthusiasm. “Well, we shall doubtless be in the Rhine by the middle of May.”

  “My gowns couldn’t be finished until June any way,” said Dulcima, laying her gloved fingers on A
lida’s chair.

  So they were allies, then.

  “I didn’t know you had ordered any gowns,” I said superciliously.

  “I haven’t — yet,” she said coolly.

  “Neither have I,” began Alida; but I refused to hear any more.

  “When you are at your modistes you may talk gowns until you faint away,” said I; “but now let us try to take an intelligent interest in this famous and ancient capital of European civilization and liberty — —”

  “Did you notice that girl’s gown?” motioned Alida to Dulcima.

  I also looked. But it was not the beauty of the gown that I found so remarkable.

  “I wonder,” thought I— “but no matter. I wish that idiot Van Dieman were here.”

  That evening, after my daughters had retired, I determined to sit up later than I ought to. The reckless ideas which Paris inspired in me, alarmed me now and then. But I was game.

  So I seated myself in the moonlit court of the hotel and lighted an unwise cigar and ordered what concerns nobody except the man who swallowed it, and, crossing my legs, looked amiably around.

  Williams sat at the next table.

  “Hello, old sport,” he said affably.

  “Williams,” I said, “guess who I was thinking about a moment ago.”

  “A girl?”

  “No, of course not. I was thinking of Jim Landon. What ever became of him?”

  “Jim? Oh, he’s all right.”

  “Successful?”

  “Very. You ought to have heard of him over there; but I suppose you don’t keep up with art news.”

  “No,” I admitted, ashamed— “it’s rather difficult to keep up with anything on Long Island. Does Jim Landon live here?”

  “In Normandy, with his wife.”

  “Oh, he got married. Was it that wealthy St. Louis girl who — —”

  “No; she married into the British Peerage. No, Landon didn’t do anything of that sort. Quite the contrary.”

  “He — he didn’t marry his model, did he?”

  “Yes — in a way.”

  “In a way?”

  Williams summoned a waiter who shifted his equipment to my table.

  “It’s rather an unusual story,” he said. “Would you care to hear it?”

  “Does it portray, with your well known literary skill, the confusion of a parent?” I inquired cautiously. “If it does, don’t tell it.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Oh. Nobody puts it all over the old man?”

  “No, not in this particular instance. Shall I begin?”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  He began with his usual graceful gesture:

  Landon was dead broke.

  As it had not been convenient for him to breakfast that morning, he was irritable. The mockery of handsome hangings and antique furniture in the outer studio increased his irritation as he walked through it into the rough, inner workshop, which was hung with dusty casts and dreary with clay and plaster.

  Here Ellis found him, an hour later, smoking a cigarette to deceive his appetite, and sulkily wetting down the clay bust of a sheep-faced old lady — an order of the post-mortem variety which he was executing from a gruesome photograph.

  “How,” inquired Ellis, “is the coy Muse treating you these palmy, balmy days?”

  Landon swore and squirted a spongeful of water over the old lady’s side curls.

  “My! my! As bad as that?” commented Ellis, raising his eyebrows. “I thought you expected to be paid for that tombstone.”

  “Man, I’ve been eating, drinking, and sleeping on that tombstone all winter. Last night I gnawed off the ‘Hic Jacet’ and washed it down with the date. There’s nothing left.”

  “You’ve — ah — breakfasted, dear friend?”

  “That’s all right — —”

  “Have you?”

  “No. But there’s a man from Fourth Avenue coming to buy some of that superfluous magnificence in the show studio. Besides, I’ll be paid for this old lady in a day or two — Where are you going?”

  “Out,” said Ellis, briefly.

  Landon, left alone, threw a bit of wet clay at the doorknob, stood irresolutely, first on one foot, then on the other; then with a hearty scowl at the sheep-faced old lady washed her complacent face with a dripping sponge.

  “Williams!” I interrupted violently, “how do you know all those details?”

  “My Lord, man!” he retorted; “I write for a living. I’ve got to know them.”

  “Go on, then,” I said.

  He went on:

  A few moments later Ellis came in with rolls, milk and fruit.

  “That’s very decent of you,” said Landon, but the other cut him short, excitedly.

  “Jim, who is the divinity I just met in your hallway? Yours?”

  “What divinity?”

  “Her hair,” said Ellis, a little wildly, “is the color of Tuscan gold; her eyes, ultra marine; and the skin of her is just pure snow with a brushful of carmine across the lips — and the Great Sculptor Himself must have moulded her body — —”

  Landon shrugged and buttered a roll. “You let her alone,” he said.

  “Reveal to me instantly her name, titles, and quality!” shouted Ellis, unsheathing a Japanese sword.

  “Her name,” said Landon, “is O’Connor; her quality is that of a shopgirl. She is motherless and alone, and inhabits a kennel across the hall. Don’t make eyes at her. She’ll probably believe whatever the first gentlemanly blackguard tells her.”

  Ellis said: “Why may I not — in a delicately detached and gayly impersonal, yet delightfully and evasively irrational manner, calculated to deceive nobody — —”

  “That would sound very funny in the Latin Quarter. This is New York.” He rose, frowning. Presently he picked up the sponge. “Better let a lonely heart alone, unless you’re in earnest,” he said, and flung the sponge back into a bucket of water, dried his hands, and looked around.

  “Have you sold any pictures yet?”

  “Not one. I thought I had a Copper King nailed to the easel, but Fate separated us on a clinch and he got away and disappeared behind the bars of his safe deposit. How goes the market with you?”

  “Dead. I can live on my furniture for a while.”

  “I thought you were going in on that competition for the Department of Peace at Washington.”

  “I am, if I have enough money left to hire a model.”

  Ellis rose, twirled his walking-stick meditatively, glanced at his carefully brushed hat, and placed it gravely on his head.

  “Soon,” he said cheerfully, “it will be time for straw hats. But where I’m going to get one I don’t know. Poverty used to be considered funny in the Quarter; but it’s no idle jest in this town. Well — I’ll let your best girl alone, Jim, if you feel that way about it.”

  They laughed and shook hands.

  In the corridor Ellis looked hard at the closed door opposite, and his volatile heart gave a tortured thump; he twirled his stick and sauntered out into Stuyvesant Square.

  CHAPTER V

  DREAMLAND

  As winter faded into spring the first tracery of green fringed the branches in Stuyvesant Square. The municipal authorities decorated the grass with tulips and later with geraniums. Later still, cannas and foliage plants were planted, over which two fountains spurted aqua Crotonis.

  But in spite of tasteless horticulture it is a quaint old square, a little sad and shabby, perhaps, yet mercifully green inside its two iron-railed parallelograms. Above the great sycamores and elms the truncated towers of St. George’s brood heavily; along the short, leafy reach of Rutherford Place an old-time Quaker meeting-house keeps gentle vigil; northward, aged mansions peer at the square through time-dimmed windows; south, above the Sisters of The Assumption, a painted Virgin clasps her stone hands and looks down on the little children of the poor.

  Along the east side of the square runs Livingston Place; behind it an elevated railroad roa
rs; in front lies the square, shabby, unkempt, but lovely always, when night lends to it her mystery. For at night the trees loom gigantic; lights sparkle over lawn and fountain; the illuminated dial of St. George’s hangs yellow as a harvest moon above the foliage; and the pleasant bell sounds from the towers, changing, for a moment, the streets’ incessant monotone to a harmony.

  Into this square went Landon; oftener, as the summer grew hotter and work grew scarcer.

  Once, at the close of a scorching afternoon, his pretty neighbour from across the corridor came slowly into the square and rested for a few moments on the same bench he occupied.

  So lovely and fresh and sweet she seemed in the early dusk that he, for an instant, was tempted from his parched loneliness to speak to her; but before he could bring himself to it she turned, recognized him, rose and went back to the house without a second glance.

  “We’ve been neighbours for a year,” he thought, “and she has never been civil enough to look at me yet — and I’ve been too civil to look at her. I was an ass.”

  He was wrong; she had looked at him often, when unafraid that his eyes might surprise her.

  He was amusingly wrong. Waking, she remembered him; during the long day she thought of him; at night, when she returned from business, the radiance from his studio lamp streaming through the transom had for her all the thrilling fascination that a lighted shop window, at Christmas, has for a lonesome child passing in darkness.

  From the dim monotony of her own life she had, at times, caught glimpses through his open door of splendours scarcely guessed. In her eyes an enchanted world lay just beyond his studio’s threshold; a bright, warm, mellow wonderland, indistinct in the golden lamplight, where only a detail here and there half revealed a figured tapestry or carved foliation — perhaps some soft miracle of ancient Eastern weaving on the floor, perhaps a mysterious marble shape veiled in ruddy shadow — enough to set her youthful imagination on fire, enough to check her breath and start the pulses racing as she turned the key in her own door and reëntered the white dusk of her own life once more.