Читать книгу The Day the World Ended - Arthur Henry Ward - Страница 23

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It was all of a quarter to seven when I joined M. Paul in the bar. His resplendence was difficult to define: but he made me feel dowdy. He wore dinner kit which would have caused the editor of the Tailor and Cutter to scream with joy; but I was well turned out, too, for that matter. It was the personality of the man, plus his faultless clothes, which created the impression.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, and leaped from his stool, regardless of the criticism of other occupants of the bar. “It is you—on the very tick of time!”

“A couple of ticks behind, to be exact,” I murmured.

I had previously grappled with the problem of what it was about the Frenchman’s mode of speech which intrigued me. At this moment I grasped it. He used the latest slang with facility—but gave the terms a new quality. In other words, reported, much of his conversation would have read like that of an Englishman; heard, it was peculiarly different.

He swept aside my natural suggestion with dramatic scorn.

“No, no!” he cried. “To-night I am host!”

Host he was—and a number-one host he proved himself to be. He had ordered dinner at the Kurhaus—not, he explained, because he regarded the cuisine there as superior to that of the Regal, but “because it is always a change.”

I perceived, when we had taken our places at a reserved window table where we could both see and hear the excellent orchestra, that M. Paul was a gourmet of discrimination. He had ordered a dinner—upon which he invited my amateur comments—that displayed Teutonic cookery to its greatest advantage. This evidenced genius. So many people order a French meal in a German restaurant.

Any doubts I had had respecting my later appointment at the Kurhaus were speedily removed by M. Paul.

“I hope it does not mean loneliness for you,” he said. “But at half-past nine I must run away.”

It suited me very well and I said so.

“Good,” said M. Paul. “Then we can enjoy our dinner.”

He talked of many things, and entertainingly, but ere long, as I had anticipated, touched upon Mme. Yburg, to whom he referred as “your charming little friend.”

I took him up on that, knowing the expression, translated into the speaker’s tongue, to possess a subtly different meaning.

“Mme. Yburg is certainly charming,” I agreed; “and we are friends. But only friends. We met a week ago.”

His keen, handsome, actor’s face registered a momentary surprise which I could have sworn was real. But believing, as I did, that M. Paul and Mme. Yburg were allies in a thus far incomprehensible conspiracy, I challenged my own judgment. In the woman’s society, that afternoon, I had certainly forgotten, or had dismissed, those mediæval ideas which I had built up around her. Now, I asked myself if I was in the company of a dupe or of an accomplice.

Mme. Yburg was fascinating; I had experienced the thrall of her peculiar personality. Was this brilliant Frenchman, with his feverishly bright eyes and pale skin, a discarded fly? Had the spider bled him white and cast him away? And was the poor infatuated victim jealously searching the horizon for who should be his successor? Or ... ?

“You surprise me, Mr. Woodville,” he said—and his sincerity one would have set beyond dispute. “I quite thought you were old friends.”

He looked at me in a new way, and began to talk about Paris.

I was nonplussed, and I fenced so badly in my subsequent attempts to draw the conversation into desired channels that I began to wonder if all my theories about M. Paul were wrong! A welcome turn was given to a very aimless conversation by my companion.

Gazing rapturously over my left shoulder:

“Ah, name of a good little man,” he murmured—“how exquisite! No! it cannot be that she is German.”

His racial prejudice made me laugh, but:

“Laugh, my friend, if you wish,” he said. “But the goddess Diana is reborn a mortal. See, here is our coffee. You may move your chair. Please select a cigar”—the head waiter had brought a case—“and share with me the joy of looking at a beautiful girl.”

I declined the cigar—I never smoke them—but lighted a cigarette and turned as M. Paul suggested. The object of his interest was unmistakable. She sat at a table not far removed, in the company of a plain, elderly lady than whom a more formidable duenna could not well be imagined.

Perhaps it was “written,” as the Moslems have it; but, at the moment of my turning, the girl was looking in our direction. I found myself meeting a grave regard from the most liquid, frank, yet searching blue eyes I had ever seen.

Their glance held me. I stared too long for courtesy. “Diana reborn” was not so extravagant as I had supposed. The subject of M. Paul’s poetry was deliciously tanned as one would imagine that divinity to have been. Her perfect arms and shoulders seemed to have absorbed the glow of sunlight. She was joyously, naïvely youthful, and her hair was a golden bronze such as surely must have crowned the Greek goddess.

No doubt my honest admiration was all too apparent. The girl flushed and glanced aside. I found myself focussed by a pair of black-rimmed spectacles worn by the duenna, which resembled dragon’s eyes.

Embarrassed by my own bad form, I turned to M. Paul. But he was dreamily gazing over my left shoulder. The orchestra outside in the gardens began to play, and:

“Was I not right?” he murmured. “They are playing the Fire Music. See! it calls to her—the grandeur of Germany’s only genius! She has a beautiful soul in a beautiful body!”