“Are these your rooms?” she asked unsteadily.
“I thought so, once. Probably there’s something the matter with me.”
“You did not desire to rent them furnished during your absence?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And you have returned a month before they expected you, and I — oh, this is infamous!” she cried, clenching her white hands. “How dared that wretched man rent this place to me? How dared he!”
A long and stunning silence fell upon them — participated in by the British maid.
Then Seabury began to laugh. He looked at the maid, he looked at her angry and very lovely young mistress, looked at the tables littered with typewriters and stationery, he caught sight of his own dining-room with the little table laid for two. His gayety disconcerted her — he rose, paced the room and returned.
“It seems my landlord has tried to turn a thrifty penny by leasing you my rooms!” he said, soberly. “Is that it?”
She was close to tears, controlling her voice and keeping her self-possession with a visible effort. “I — I am treasurer and secretary for the new wing to — to St. Berold’s Hospital,” she managed to say. “We — the women interested, needed an office — we employ several typewriters, and — oh, goodness! What on earth will your sister think!”
“My sister? Why, she’s at Seal Harbor — —”
“Your sister was there visiting my mother. I came on to town to see our architects; I wired her to come. She — she was to dine with me here to-night! Sherry was notified!”
“My sister?”
“Certainly. What on earth did she think when she found me installed in your rooms? And that’s bad enough, but I invited her to dine and go over the hospital matters — she’s one of the vice presidents — and then — then you tied our feet together and it’s — what time is it?” she demanded of her maid.
“It is midnight, mem,” replied the maid in sepulchral tones.
“Is that man from Sherry’s still there?”
“He is, mem.”
Her mistress laid her charming head in her hands and covered her agreeable features with a handkerchief of delicate and rather valuable lace.
The silence at last was broken by Seabury addressing the maid: “Is that dinner spoiled?”
“Quite, sir.”
Her mistress looked up hastily: “Mr. Seabury, you are not going to — —”
“Yes, I am; this is the time and the place!” And he rose with decision and walked straight to the kitchen, where a stony-faced individual sat amid the culinary ruins, a statue of despair.
“What I want you to do,” said Seabury, “is to fix up a salad and some of the cold duck, and attend to the champagne. Meanwhile I think I’ll go downstairs; I have an engagement to kill a man.”
However, a moment later he thought better of it; she was standing by the mirror — his own mirror — touching her eyes with her lace handkerchief and patting her hair with the prettiest, whitest hands.
“Kill him? Never: I’ll canonize him!” muttered Seabury, enchanted. Behind him he heard the clink of glass and china, the pleasant sound of ice. She heard it, too, and turned.
“Of all the audacity!” she said in a low voice, looking at him under her level brows. But there was something in her eyes that gave him courage — and in his that gave her courage.... Besides, they were dreadfully hungry.
“You refuse to tell me?”
“I do,” she said. “If you have not wit enough to find out my name without betraying me to your sister you do not deserve to know my name — or me.”
It was nearly two o’clock, they had risen, and the gay little flowery table remained between them; the salad and duck were all gone. But the froth purred in their frail glasses, breaking musically in the candle-lit silence.
“Will you tell me your name before I go?”
“I will not.” Her bright eyes and fair young face defied him.
“Very well; as soon as I learn it I shall be more generous — for I have something to tell you; and I’ll do it, too!”
“Are you sure you will?” she asked, flushing up.
“Yes, I am sure.”
“I may not care to hear what you have to say, Mr. Seabury.”
They regarded one another intently, curiously. Presently her slender hand fell as by accident on the stem of her wine-glass; he lifted his glass: very, very slowly. She raised hers, looking at him over it.
“To — what I shall tell you — when I learn your name!” he said, deliberately.
Faint fire burned in her cheeks; her eyes fell, then were slowly raised to his; in silence, still looking at one another, they drank the toast.
“Dammit!” I said, impatiently, “is that all?”
“Yes,” he said, “that will be about all. I’m going home to bed.”
CHAPTER XX
DOWN THE SEINE
My daughter Alida and my daughter Dulcima had gone to drive with the United States Ambassador and his daughter that morning, leaving me at the Hôtel with instructions as to my behaviour in their absence, and injunctions not to let myself be run over by any cab, omnibus, automobile, or bicycle whatever.
Considerably impressed by their solicitude, I retired to the smoking-room, believing myself safe there from any form of vehicular peril. But the young man from Chicago sauntered in and took a seat close beside me, with benevolent intentions toward relieving my isolation.
I preferred any species of juggernaut to his rough riding over the English language, so I left him murkily enveloped in the fumes of his own cigar and sauntered out into the street.
The sky was cloudless; the air was purest balm. Through fresh clean streets I wandered under the cool shadows of flowering chestnuts, and presently found myself on the quay near the Pont des Arts, leaning over and looking at the river slipping past between its walls of granite.
In a solemn row below me sat some two dozen fishermen dozing over their sport. Their long white bamboo poles sagged, their red and white quill-floats bobbed serenely on the tide. Truly here was a company of those fabled Lotus-eaters, steeped in slumber; a dreamy, passionless band of brothers drowsing in the sunshine.
Looking east along the grey stone quays I could see hundreds and hundreds of others, slumbering over their fishpoles; looking west, the scenery was similar.
“The fishing must be good here,” I observed to an aged man, leaning on the quay-wall beside me.
“Comme ça,” he said.
I leaned there lazily, waiting to see the first fish caught. I am an angler myself, and understand patience; but when I had waited an hour by my watch I looked suspiciously at the aged man beside me. He was asleep, so I touched him.
He roused himself without resentment. “Have you,” said I, sarcastically, “ever seen better fishing than this, in the Seine?”
“Yes,” he said; “I once saw a fish caught.”
“And when was that?” I asked.
“That,” said the aged man, “was in 1853.”
I strolled down to the lower quay, smoking. As I passed the row of anglers I looked at them closely. They all were asleep.
Just above was anchored one of those floating lavoirs in which the washerwomen of Paris congregate to beat your linen into rags with flat wooden paddles, and soap the rags snow-white at the cost of a few pennies.
The soapsuds from the washing floated off among the lines of the slumbering fishermen. Perhaps that was one reason why the fish were absent from the scenery. On the other hand, however, I was given to understand that a large sewer emptied into the river near the Pont des Arts, and that the fishing was best in such choice spots. Still something certainly was wrong somewhere, for either the sewer and the soapsuds had killed the fish, or they had all migrated up the sewer on an inland and subterranean picnic to meet the elite among the rats of Paris, and spend the balance of the day.
The river was alive with little white saucy steamboats, rushing up and down the Seine with the speed of torpedo
craft. There was a boat-landing within a few paces of where I stood, so, when a boat came along and stopped to discharge a few passengers, I stepped aboard, bound for almost anywhere, and not over-anxious to get there too quickly. Neither did I care to learn my own destination, and when the ticket agent in naval uniform came along to inquire where I might be going, I told him to sell me a pink ticket because it looked pretty. As all Frenchmen believe that all Americans are a little mad, my request, far from surprising the ticket agent, simply confirmed his national theory; and he gave me my ticket very kindly, with an air of protection such as one involuntarily assumes toward children and invalids.
“You are going to Saint Cloud,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to get off the boat.”
“Thank you,” said I.
“You ought to be going the other way,” he added.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Charenton lies the other way,” he replied, politely, and passed on to sell his tickets.
Now I had forgotten much concerning Paris in my twenty years of absence.
There was a pretty girl sitting on the bench beside me, with elbows resting on the railing behind. I glanced at her. She was smiling.
“Pardon, madame,” said I, knowing enough to flatter her, though she had “mademoiselle” written all over her complexion of peaches and cream— “pardon, madame, but may I, a stranger, venture to address you for a word of information?”
“You may, monsieur,” she said, with a smile which showed an edge of white teeth under her scarlet lips.
“Then, if you please, where is Charenton?”
“Up the river,” she replied, smiling still.
“And what,” said I, “is the principal feature of the town of Charenton?”
“The Lunatic Asylum, monsieur.”
I thanked her and looked the other way.
Our boat was now flying past the Louvre. Above in the streets I could see cabs and carriages passing, and the heads and shoulders of people walking on the endless stone terraces. Below, along the river bank, our boat passed between an almost unbroken double line of dozing fishermen.
Now we shot out from the ranks of lavoirs and bathhouses, and darted on past the Champ de Mars; past the ugly sprawling Eiffel Tower, past the twin towers of the Trocadero, and out under the huge stone viaduct of the Point du Jour.
Here the banks of the river were green and inviting. Cafés, pretty suburban dance-houses, restaurants, and tiny hotels lined the shores. I read on the signs such names as “The Angler’s Retreat,” “At the Great Gudgeon,” “The Fisherman’s Paradise,” and I saw sign-boards advertising fishing, and boats to let.
“I should think,” said I, turning to my pretty neighbor, “that it would pay to remove these fisherman’s signs to Charenton.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because,” said I, “nobody except a Charentonian would ever believe that any fish inhabit this river.”
“Saint Cloud! Saint Cloud!” called out the ticket-agent as the boat swung in to a little wooden floating pier on the left bank of the river.
The ticket-agent carefully assisted me over the bridge to the landing-dock, and I whispered to him that I was the Duke of Flatbush and would be glad to receive him any day in Prospect Park.
Then, made merry at my own wit, I strolled off up the steps that led to the bank above.
There, perched high above the river, I found a most delightful little rustic restaurant where I at once ordered luncheon served for me on the terrace, in the open air.
The bald waiter sped softly away to deliver my order, and I sipped an Amer-Picon, and bared my head to the warm breeze which swept up the river from distant meadows deep in clover.
There appeared to be few people on the terrace. One young girl, however, whom I had seen on the boat, I noticed particularly because she seemed to be noticing me. Then, fearing that my stare might be misunderstood, I turned away and soon forgot her when the bald waiter returned with an omelet, bread and butter, radishes and a flask of white wine.
Such an omelet! such wine! such butter! and the breeze from the west blowing sweet as perfume from a nectarine, and the green trees waving and whispering, and the blessed yellow sunshine over all ——
“Pardon, monsieur.”
I turned. It was my pretty little Parisienne of the steamboat, seated at the next small table, demurely chipping an egg.
“I beg your pardon,” said I, hastily, for the leg of my chair was pinning her gown to the ground.
“It is nothing,” she said brightly, with a mischievous glance under her eyes.
“My child,” said I, “it was very stupid of me, and I am certainly old enough to know better.”
“Doubtless, monsieur; and yet you do not appear to be very, very old.”
“I am very aged,” said I— “almost forty-five.” And I smiled a retrospective smile, watching the bubbles breaking in my wine-glass.
Memory began to work, deftly, among the debris of past years. I saw myself a student of eighteen, gayly promenading Paris with my tutor, living a monotonous colourless life in a city of which I knew nothing and saw nothing save through the windows of my English pension or in the featureless streets of the American quarter, under escort of my tutor and my asthmatic aunt, Miss Janet Van Twiller.
That year spent in Paris, to “acquire the language” in a house where nothing but English was spoken, had still a vague, tender charm for me, because in that year I was young. I grew older when I shook the tutor, side-stepped my aunt, and moved across the river.
Once, only once, had the placid serenity of that year been broken. It was one day — a day like this in spring — when, for some reason, even now utterly unknown to me, I deliberately walked out of the house alone in defiance of my tutor and my aunt, and wandered all day long through unknown squares and parks and streets intoxicated with my own freedom. And I remember, that day — which was the twin of this — sitting on the terrace of a tiny café in the Latin Quarter, I drifted into idle conversation with a demure little maid who was sipping a red syrup out of a tall thin glass.
Twenty-seven years ago! And here I was again, in the scented spring sunshine, with the same west wind whispering of youth and freedom, and my heart not a day older.
“My child,” said I to the little maid, “twenty-seven years ago you drank pink strawberry syrup in a tall iced glass.”
“I do not understand you, monsieur,” she faltered.
“You cannot, mademoiselle. I am drinking to the memory of my dead youth.”
And I touched my lips to the glass.
“I wonder,” she said, under her breath, “what I am to do with the rest of the day?”
“I could have told you,” said I— “twenty-seven years ago.”
“Perhaps you could tell me better now?” she said, innocently.
I looked out into the east where the gold dome of the Tomb rose glimmering through a pale-blue haze. “Under that dome lies an Emperor in his crypt of porphyry,” said I. “Deeper than his dust, bedded in its stiff shroud of gold, lies my dead youth, sleeping forever in the heart of this fair young world of spring.”
I touched my glass idly, then lifted it.
“Yet,” said I, “the pale sunshine of winter lies not unkindly on snow and ice, sometimes. I drink to your youth and beauty, my child.”
“Is that all?” she asked, wonder-eyed.
I thought a moment: “No, not all. Williams isn’t the only autocratic interpreter of Fate, Chance, and Destiny.”
“Williams!” she repeated, perplexed.
“You don’t know him. He writes stories for a living. But he’ll never write the story I might very easily tell you in the sunshine here.”
After a pause she said: “Are you going to?”
“I think I will,” I said. And my eyes fixed smiling upon the sunny horizon, I began:
Now, part of this story is to be vague as a mirrored face at dusk; and part is to be as precise as the reflection of green trees
in the glass of the stream; and all is to be as capricious as the flight of that wonderful butterfly of the South which is called Ajax by the reverent, and The White Devil by the profane. Incidentally, it is the story of Jones and the Dryad.
The profession of Jones was derided by the world at large. He collected butterflies; and it may be imagined what the American public thought of him when they did not think he was demented. But a large, over-nourished and blasé millionaire, wearied of collecting pigeon-blood rubies, first editions and Rembrandts, through sheer ennui one day commissioned Jones to gather for him the most magnificent and complete collection of American butterflies that could possibly be secured — not only single perfect specimens of the two sexes in each species, but series on series of every kind, showing local varieties, seasonal variations in size and colour, strange examples of albinism and polymorphic phenomena — in fact, this large, benevolent and intellectual capitalist wanted something which nobody else had, so he selected Jones and damned the expense. Nobody else had Jones: that pleased him; Jones was to secure specimens that nobody else had: and that would be doubly gratifying. Therefore he provided Jones with a five-year contract, an agreeable salary, turned him loose on a suspicious nation, and went back to hunt up safe investments for an income the size of which had begun to annoy him.
“This part of the story is clear enough, is it not, my child?”
“Are you Jones?”
“Don’t ask questions,” I said, seriously.
“The few delirious capers cut by Jones subsequent to the signing of the contract consisted of a debauch at the Astor Library, a mad evening with seven aged gentlemen at the Entomological Society, and the purchase of a ticket to Florida. This last spasm was his undoing; he went for butterflies, and the first thing he did was to trip over the maliciously extended foot of Fate and fall plump into the open arms of Destiny. And in a week he was playing golf. This part is sufficiently vague, I hope. Is it?”
She said it was; so I continued:
The Dryad, with her sleeves rolled up above her pretty elbows, was preparing to assault a golf ball; Jones regarded the proceedings with that inscrutable expression which, no doubt, is bestowed upon certain creatures as a weapon for self-protection.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 571
