Читать книгу Lark Ascending - Mazo de la Roche - Страница 7

AT the time when Josie and Diego were running along the beach toward the lobster house Purley Bond was walking in the direction of his home. He had a good swinging walk and he liked the outdoor movement after so many hours in his close, poorly lighted store. He had grown up with the intention of being a doctor like his father and his grandfather before him, but after six months at a medical college he had changed his mind and taken a course in chemistry. The horrors of the dissecting-room, the sights he had seen in hospitals, were more than he could endure. The messiness, the anguish, affected his nerves. He could not sleep or eat. It was useless for his father to tell him that he would get accustomed to it. He said he would rather become a fisherman or break stones on the road than be a doctor. His disappointed father gave in, and he took his degree from a pharmaceutical college. Now sometimes he was driven to wish that his father had been harder with him or that he had hardened himself. He was not made for an indoor life, and the pressure of times which forced him into the selling of chocolates, magazines and cigarettes made him angry and irritable.

The Bonds had been one of the most respected families of Saltport. Purley Bond wondered sometimes if it were in him that the family was to run to seed. The men of his family had prospered in their profession, they had married into other respected families. They had built a fine house and kept it up well. They had had children. Now he was thirty-six. He was going back rather than forward financially. He was in love and had been in love for years with Fay Palmas. Could he afford to marry her? Would she have him? Her husband had been dead for seven months. How soon could he decently ask her? Did he really want her disturbing presence in his house? Had he, in truth, the making of a bachelor in him? These questions occupied him as he strode down the street.

He unlatched the gate in the ornamental picket fence painted white, passed through the high clipped hedge and heard the gate click softly behind him. Inside was a cold, almost frosty shade, for the hedge shut out the afternoon sun and evening came early to the house. His grandfather had planted the hedge; in his father’s time it had been kept below the level of the fence, but for several years now he had encouraged the privacy it gave and allowed it to shut out, with its dense glossy leaves, not only the gaze of the passer-by but the sun and air. The front windows of the ground floor looked into it. The windows of the upper stories peered distrustfully over it. The brass plate with the name of both his father and grandfather—Frederick Bond, M.D.—shone on the door. It was a beautiful door, he thought, deeply set and arched, and, like the rest of the house, was painted a pure and smoothly finished white. He had been too sentimental to remove the brass plate. The brass knocker and doorknob would have looked lonely without it. The large flat front of the house with its many windows, its pillared porch, stood to him for what was admirable in his life. The interior of the house was getting shabby, but the white paint of the exterior was never long allowed to need renewing.

He lingered for a moment to look at the border of dahlias and salvia, wondering how long the frost would spare their brightness. They needed more sun. But he could not bring himself to have the hedge cut.

He unlocked the door and went into the hall. A thick quietness shrouded the house and it had an unused smell, though the Finnish woman who came in to work for him kept it clean and in order. She had left his evening meal on the table—cold corned beef, pickles, catsup, potato salad, a covered dish of corn on the cob and a large slice of pumpkin pie with a mound of whipped cream on it. The coffee percolator was bubbling on the side table.

He was not at all intimidated by the sight of this repast. His New England digestion was enured to such ordeals, quite able to cope with them. To-night, however, he did not know what he ate. He left half the food untouched. His stomach must go unfilled because his mind was overflowing with the problems of those who lived at the bakery. Diego had said that his mother was ready for a nervous breakdown. And no wonder! To have kept the business going, with only the help of Josie, through the tourist season, after the long months of nursing, after the years of disappointment, was enough to wear down the nerves of any woman. Even a strong woman like Fay Palmas.

He thought of what her life had been. A disappointment. A bitter disappointment. How old was she now? She must be thirty-eight. Thirty-eight—and the mother of that big fellow of nineteen! Close work, that! She had been the only child of John Elwood, the Principal of the High School. He was the close friend of Doctor Bond, and, like him, a member of one of Saltport’s most respected families. Religious, expecting others to be as high-minded, as honourable as themselves. Yet the Elwoods were not quite the equal of the Bonds. They had something to live down. The Bonds might have washed all their linen in public and not even clouded the water. For their ancestor, who had crossed the Atlantic from Yorkshire, was a Presbyterian minister, and his descendants had lived, without noticeable deviation, according to the precepts of the Shorter Catechism.

But it was said that the first Elwood had been nothing more or less than an old pirate. He had owned a sloop, and in it he had harried foreign vessels up and down the coast. He had thought as little of taking their lives as their gold. He had lived, with his half-naked family, in a log house on a rocky promontory. Retribution had never touched him. He had buried his spoils under the house, and, when he had acquired what was in those days a fortune, he had clothed his children, bought respectable black for himself (his wife had died from the strain of being the wife of a pirate), and become a Baptist. Something picturesque and adventurous in that faith had attracted him. The Baptist minister of the day had immersed him in the water of a nearby creek and he had emerged a new man. He had educated his youngest son for the ministry, and, before he died, had sat in a front pew—a rugged, weather-beaten figure—and heard his son preach his first sermon, the text being the tenth commandment. It was through the bounty of this son that the present Baptist church had been built, the prettiest church in Saltport, surrounded by a garden and ornamental trees. But the son of this minister had given a jolt to the family’s upward progress. He had been a missionary, and, on a mission to the Indians of Hudson’s Bay, he had fallen in love with and married a handsome Indian girl. All Saltport had been shocked when he brought her home, but he had reared an exemplary family from her. Fay Palmas, his great-granddaughter, was the last of the Elwoods in the district. She had been the darling of her father, the schoolmaster. His own school had not been good enough for her and he had sent her to Boston to a young ladies’ seminary, where she would not only get a refined education but a training for her lovely voice. She had just returned from there—eighteen years old and striking-looking—when she met young Palmas, ten years her senior, a civil engineer. They had fallen in love and been married that summer. Through his profession she had hoped to escape from Salt-port and see something of the world, but her hopes came to nothing. Within the year she gave birth to Diego (she had named him Diego against the will of both families), and, before he could run about, Palmas had been taken with inflammation of the lungs, from exposure, and forced to give up his profession. Her father could not help them for he had lost all his money by investing in the Saltport fisheries, already doomed by Gloucester’s ascendancy. The civil engineer had become a baker, and there she had been caught, a prisoner in the bakery, for seventeen years.

Purley Bond and she had played together as children, but they had seen little of each other in the years following. He had been installed in his drug store for two years before he had given her a second thought. Then one night he had himself taken some medicine to the Palmas house for Diego, ill of a serious complaint. He and she had talked together in the sitting-room behind the shop. They had not sat. He had watched her swaying up and down the tiny room—lithe, swarthy, anguished for her child. She magnified his sufferings, thought him dying. Bond had tried unsuccessfully to soothe her.

The next evening he had called to ask after the child. She had taken him into the sitting-room again. This time she had caught his hand and led him. She was wild with joy and gratitude. Her darling was better. He was almost well. She gave Bond—not his father, the doctor—the credit. From the moment he had entered the house Diego had improved. Virtue had gone from him into the child. From him into her. There was a kind of noble simplicity in her—as in a primitive Indian. Anything seemed possible to her. From that time she gave him a sort of proud homage. She went often to the drug store to ask his advice—to get strength from him, she said.

Strength she took from him—the strength to resist her. During the years since he had thought of no other woman. He did not know what were her feelings toward him. Not a word of love had passed between them.

He, the lonely druggist, living alone. . . . She, the widow of a bookish baker, Indian blood arching her nose, her nostrils, her eyelids, making her hair black and strong, though her father and her father’s father had shown no trace of its sultry flow. . . . Diego, her dark son, with his chaotic talent, his dramatic face that exaggerated his indolent emotions, his Portuguese blood that crept out of the past to mingle with her Indian. . . . Josie Froward, her cousin on her mother’s side—pure blood of the Pilgrim Fathers there—with her bright changing colour, her secrecy, her ironic devotion to mother and son. Purley Bond brooded on this group of four, their intermingled relations that were drawing closer together, as he bit the yellow kernels of corn from the cob with his strong teeth.

He walked about the parlour, furnished just as his mother had left it. She had kept to the style of the old New England parlours. There were ladder-backed chairs, a mahogany secretary, old glass bottles on the mantelpiece and a spinning-wheel by the unused hearth. He walked through his father’s surgery, kept just as he had left it, still retaining its smell of a surgery, lined with out-of-date medical books. He climbed the stair, with its spindled bannister, and wandered through the bedrooms. Faintly musty, spotlessly clean, with framed texts on the walls. He tried to picture Fay Palmas in this house and could not. Strange that the heat, the sweet sticky smell of the bakery, was a more convincing background for her than the old-fashioned austerity of this house.

He looked at his father’s large gold watch which he carried and saw that it was time to go to the bakery.

He felt excited and nervous, as he always did when he knew that he was going to be with her. Yet once in her presence he was reserved, almost irritatingly stolid towards her.

A large bright moon hung above the whiteness of the street. The houses in the best streets were all clearly white, the intense, delicate shadows of elm boughs laid against their whiteness. Dead leaves had been burned in the gardens that day and the teasing odour of smoke still hung in the air. The air was so clear with coming frost that it seemed to crackle in the moonlight.

His steps rang out, for he was the only one on the street. Yellow squares shewed against the drawn blinds. From one house came the sound of a cottage organ playing a hymn tune. Salt-port submitted to her tourist season as to a necessary evil, but she was now her unchanged self again. The cottages of her summer colony, their grotesque or sentimental names painted above their doors, were boarded up for the winter. The rocky point known as Wolfskin Neck, disfigured by them, was now deserted. Motor-loads of holiday-makers seeking the “picturesque and quaint” no longer filled the steamy restaurants to devour “chicken dinners” and clam chowder. Saltport had dropped them all like a dingy carnival garment.

He climbed the hill to the bakery, mounted decorously the six steps which led to the door and rang. Josie opened it. She drew back almost behind it, said good-evening in her quick, rather breathless way, and asked him to go through to the sitting-room. The shop was unlighted, but he saw the glimmer of the glass cases and the pallid shapes of a mound of loaves. Fay Palmas and her son were in the sitting-room. Josie passed through a narrow hallway behind and went to her room.

Fay Palmas took Bond’s coat and hat from him. She was as tall as he, and, as their hands touched and their eyes met, a shining net of intimacy was thrown about them. They were caught in it and stared startled into each other’s eyes, scarcely conscious of the presence of Diego.

He lolled on a sofa, smiling calculatingly at them. He said:

“It’s a good thing you’ve come, Purley. We were just beginning to quarrel.”

“What about?”

“You.”

“Oh, we were not!” said Fay Palmas. “We were just—I was just saying that you would come to the rescue—Diego, that you would not.”

“With advice, of course,” said Diego. “We didn’t mean money.”

“Scarcely,” added Fay. “No one in Saltport has any money to spare.”

“But the market is glutted with good advice,” went on Diego. “Everybody that comes into the bakery to buy a loaf hands back a large slab of advice. They all seem to think that Fay and I are going to make fools of ourselves now that Father’s gone.”

Bond stood, with his hand on the back of the chair she had placed for him, looking from one to the other under his frowning yellow brows, trying to understand them. They were so disconcertingly candid, yet, behind the candour, lay something—if not exactly devious, still very different from his own straightforwardness.

“Do sit down,” said Fay Palmas and touched him persuasively on the arm.

He sat down obediently, following her with his eyes as she moved to a seat beside her son.

Though she spent her days indoors she moved beautifully, with a strong swift suppleness unlike Diego’s feline grace. There was something animal about them both, but, in her, it was the strong-boned lightness of the deer; in him the muscular softness of the cat tribe. Yet they were alike, Bond thought, in their swarthiness, the dark flash of their eyes, their concentration on their own needs.

Diego’s needs did not particularly interest him. The desires of Fay Palmas fired his own. He sat staring dumbly at her poised upright on the end of the sofa backed by shelves filled with the books of her schoolmaster father. They were all he had left to her.

“What’s it all about?” Bond got out at last. “Had an offer for the business?”

Diego and Fay Palmas looked at each other, then turned to him smiling. “Yes,” she said, “there was a man here to-day. It’s the first promising offer we’ve had.” There was a bright flicker of excitement in her eyes.

“How much?” Bond’s tone was almost surly. How glad she seemed at escaping from Saltport—her old life!

“When the mortgage is paid off I would have fifteen hundred dollars left.” She looked defiantly at him.

“H’m—and how long do you think that will keep you?”

“It will give us a start—somewhere.”

“But, Mrs. Palmas”—he always called her stiffly by her married name, though he had pulled her black pigtails as a little girl—“you must remember that there are three of you, and that Diego should not throw up his art studies, especially when he is taught for nothing here.”

“I’ll sell some things! Pa’s books, for instance.”

Bond uttered a grim sound. “No one would give you twenty-five dollars for those books.”

“Why, Purley”—she called him by his Christian name, with a sliding caress on the R—“I think I have several first editions!”

“First editions of what?”

“Oh, I don’t know exactly. That Ivanhoe looks old.” She indicated a battered book on the table. Evidently she had been mustering her resources. “There’s a fortune in first editions.”

He picked up the book. “Philadelphia, 1857,” he read from the title-page.

“Well, that’s terribly old, isn’t it?”

He looked at her with irritation and compassion in his blue eyes. “Now, see here, Mrs. Palmas, you’ve got to be more practical. 1857 is young for Ivanhoe. It’s no more old than Diego is old.”

“He’s my first edition,” she laughed, “and a valuable one—to me!” She laid her hand on the boy’s knee. So lightly did she turn from her disappointment. “However, there are other books.”

“I’ll look them over and see if there’s anything promising. But I wish you would tell me just what it is you think of doing when you leave Saltport.”

“Now you’re trying to corner me.”

“How can I advise you when I don’t know what’s in your mind?”

“And we have other means,” she parried. “Josie will be twenty-one in January. She gets a thousand dollars then—inherited from the estate of her grandfather.” She spoke grandiloquently, her bright eyes flickering into his.

“An heiress, eh? Poor little Josie!”

“You needn’t say poor about her,” put in Diego. “She’s able to look after herself.”

“What I mean is,” said Fay Palmas, “she’ll not be dependent. A thousand dollars would keep Josie for a long while.”

“Yes—if she stayed in Saltport! It would keep her for a couple of years. But when the money is gone what can she and you do for a living? You know how to do—only one thing.” He did not like to say “bake bread and cakes.”

“We don’t care!” She got up and began to walk about the room. “We’ve got to get out of this town! Our people have been here for generations. We’re stale! Do you think I want to see these two children stay here and marry here?”

“Not palates enough to go round,” mumbled Diego, and he mimicked—“Pleh I wah a bohhle o’ cahor oil.”

His mother frowned at him. “This is a serious matter. . . . Oh—if only I hadn’t lost my voice! I’d make money for all of us! I’d go out into the world and sing! I’d make a name for myself.”

The two men watched her as she moved with a distraught air in the restricted space—Bond, pitying but embarrassed by the demonstration: Diego with an inscrutable, half-sulky smile.

She stopped in front of Bond. “You know that I had a wonderful voice, Purley! It was a glorious voice, wasn’t it? You’ve heard me sing, haven’t you?” Her brilliant eyes blazed down into his.

He looked steadily back, but his lip quivered. Yes, he had heard her sing in a concert in the Town Hall and at a Presbyterian Social, years ago. He had no music in him. He had known the voice was good—high, clear, passionate—but he remembered only her standing there on the platform, above everyone else, where she always was in his mind.

“Oh, how I could sing!” she went on. “I could sing like a bird. Terazzi, the singing master from Boston, heard me . . . a voice like a lark, he said. He was mad to teach me but—I was a fool. I gave up my young life to baking bread———”

“Oh, no, no,” interrupted Bond, too much pained. “Your husband baked the bread.”

“I baked it in spirit! I sacrificed myself to lumps of dough . . . think of it! And I was always in by the heat and out again into the draught of the shop. Half the time I had my throat inflamed. And now this last winter and spring . . . this summer—have finished it. . . . That’s true, isn’t it, Diego? Tell him the truth. Don’t spare me.”

Diego looked at her stupidly.

“Tell him that my voice is gone!”

Diego still stared, unable to bring himself to speak. Both men were unhappy but Fay Palmas was not unhappy, in spite of her tragic attitude. She had an audience. The exhilaration of throwing off old bonds gave her a sense of power. . . . She swept away from them, then turned and faced them, and raised her arm in a dramatic gesture. She began to sing:

“Way down upon de Swanee River—

Far, far away,

Dere’s where my heart am turning ever—

Dere’s where de old folks stay. . . .”

Her voice swung, in a strong plangent swing:

“All de world am sad and dreary,

Eberywhere I roam,

Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary”

The sweet notes grew husky, faltered, broke. She stared fixedly at Bond. There was a moment’s dead silence. Then, pursing her relaxed lips, she finished the last bars in a limpid whistle.

Diego slanted his head towards Bond. He had an expression of childlike pride.

“She always does that,” he said. “Her voice goes—then she finishes in a whistle. It’s funny. She never lets it just die down. She always finishes in a whistle.”

Bond searched his mind for something to say, in praise, in comfort, he knew not what. But he could find nothing. He pulled at his lip. He had a vision of her, standing on a platform, the world at her feet.

“I think if she could get away from this place,” said Diego, “her voice would soon come back to her.” He looked calculatingly at Bond.

Fay Palmas gave a short laugh. She was suddenly quite calm, though flushed. She went to the bookshelves and took out a book.

“Now here’s another,” she said, carrying it to Bond, “that must be pretty old. What do you think?”

He accepted it with great relief. The singing, her emotion, had been a strain on him. He examined the dog-eared copy of Huckleberry Finn. “This looks more promising. It may be worth something. May I take it and shew it to a fellow I know who buys old books?” He had no hope of it, but he wanted to say something to comfort her.

She went and threw up a window. “How hot it is in here. I feel as though I should suffocate!”

“Now that’s not good for your voice, you know,” said Bond. “That air is frosty.”

“I don’t care,” she said indifferently. “It doesn’t matter about my voice.”

Again the two men stared at her in discomfort. Frosty air, smelling of the sea, swept like a wave into the room. Diego shivered and drew one of the sofa cushions on top of him. Instantly Fay Palmas closed the window.

“I wish,” she said, “that Josie would come down and make us some coffee. No one can make coffee like she can. Whatever she does in her room for hours at a time I can’t imagine.”

“Let her have a little peace, can’t you?” said Diego. He was thinking that Josie might be working on his picture.

Bond thought his tone was rude. He threw him an angry glance. Fay went to the foot of the stairs and called loudly:

“Josie! Josie! Come down and make us some coffee. Purley thinks you’re very queer to go off like that.”

But Josie took her own time. Every now and again Fay Palmas looked impatiently toward the stairway. She wanted the coffee so badly she could think of nothing else. She could not talk. She looked almost stupidly at the two men as though she wondered what they could find to say. At last Diego rolled himself in one supple movement to his feet. “I’ll go and get her,” he said. As he passed behind his mother’s chair he stroked the back of her neck with his hand. She caught at it, wanting to press it against her neck, but he was gone.

Bond looked after him, trying to imagine what it had been like to touch the brown rounded neck, to have laid his hand for an instant just beneath the dark hair that sprung, strong and yet fine, and was coiled firmly in an unfashionable way that became her. He wished that Diego had not left them. It was too disturbing, too strange, to be left alone with her. His heart began to pound uncomfortably. He wished that he could see her as she was, clarify his romantic conception of her, but no—everything about her was strange and beautiful to him. He could no more see her reasonably than he could control the beating of his heart.

She was looking at him, a little puzzled. She said:

“It’s good of you to try and help me, Purley.”

“I wish I could help you.”

“Why, you do! You certainly do! Coming here to-night. And giving me good advice.”

“Advice! As though you’d take my advice!”

“But I will!” She hooked her arm over the back of her chair and bent her head toward him almost meekly.

“Then I advise you to wait for a better offer for the business.”

“I’ve promised Diego to accept this.”

“I see. . . . Well—I’ll miss you.”

“You’re the only person in this hateful town I mind leaving.”

“Then—why leave me?”

She knit her brows, trying to make him out.

“You might marry me.” His voice came from his pounding heart—rather thick and husky.

“You’re not in earnest!”

“I’m in dead earnest.”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of that—just yet!”

“But you’ll think about it—after a little?”

“Oh—I don’t know. . . . You’ve given me a mighty big surprise.” She had gone pale.

“I’d no intention of asking you to-night. I suppose it’s too soon to be decent.”

“It isn’t that. . . . It’s only that I want to feel free for a spell . . . I sort of want to spread my wings.”

“I’ll miss you terribly.”

“Oh, Purley, you are kind!” She put her hand on his. Perhaps it was the coldness of his that made hers feel so feverishly hot.

He sat rigid, looking down at their two hands.

“I know I shouldn’t have spoken,” he said, with a stubborn desire to blame himself.

“I’m glad you did. Because—because—I’d a kind of feeling you despised me.”

“Despised you!”

“Well—for going on about my voice and getting up in the air over things. You’re so sensible.”

Diego found Josie, just as he had expected, standing before an easel on which was propped his picture, with an expression of complete absorption.

“You’re to come down and make coffee,” he said from the doorway.

She backed away a little from the picture, still staring at it, ignoring him.

“Have you been doing anything to it?” he asked, coming up behind her.

“Idiot! Could I do anything in this light?” The attic room was lighted by a kerosene lamp with a somewhat smoky chimney. The light from this shewed the walls covered with pictures, finished and unfinished, all the work of Diego, excepting one which hung by the dressing-table, a head of him in oils, an indifferent likeness, by herself. It shewed, too, the bed covered by a bright silk patchwork quilt, the patches joined by black feather-stitching. The window, under the sloping roof, looked out across the harbour, black save for a quietly rocking light or two and the intermittent beam of the lighthouse.

He looked over her shoulder at the picture on the easel. “Come on down, Josie, and make the coffee.”

“Let someone else make it. I don’t want to go down when Purley Bond’s there.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll never notice you! He just sits staring at Fay.”

Josie made a contemptuous sound with her lips. “People make me sick! I’m going to stay up here.”

“You won’t get any coffee.”

“I don’t want any. . . . I wish you’d leave me alone.” She turned and looked at him, and continued to look with something of the same absorption as she had given his picture.

“Well,” he said ironically, “do you think you can do anything with me in this light?”

Her cheeks flamed bright and angry.

“Now you’re getting a pretty colour,” he jeered. “What will they think if you go down looking like that? See here—I’ll tone it down for you!”

He picked up a brush and a palette and squeezed a worm of white paint from a tube on to it. She did not realise what he was going to do until he came toward her brush in hand. She drew back against the wall but he caught her, pinning her arms to her sides. They struggled silently. Then he mastered her, held her tight while he painted a white spot on each of her cheeks, covering the red. She stared up into his eyes, her mouth compressed, making no sound, feeling the smooth stroke of the brush on her cheeks, the press of his strong body against hers.

He drew back and looked at her. He said:

“Now you look nice and ladylike. Let’s go down.”

She went to the looking-glass, gave her face one furious look, then marched to the stairway. He followed her laughing softly to himself.

The kettle was always on the range. It sat there singing now as if cheerfully ready for any emergency. With a set face Josie went about making the coffee. Diego lounged in the doorway watching her.

When she appeared in the sitting-room carrying the tray, Fay Palmas screamed at the sight of her. “Good heavens, Josie! Have you gone crazy?”

“Diego did it,” answered Josie sullenly. “I had no time to take it off if you were to get your coffee.”

Fay laughed loudly and threw a mischievous look at Diego. Bond stirred his coffee with a feeling of dislike for the girl. He felt that she was proud of what Diego had done to her, that she was shewing off.

“You look a perfect little clown,” said Fay. “I’m sure Purley’s disgusted with you.” She got up and went into the bakeshop. She took a pumpkin pie from the case. “Get that bowl of whipped cream, Josie,” she called.

When the large slice of pie, topped by a mound of whipped cream, was set in front of Bond, he seemed to remember having seen something like it before. Why, it was only a couple of hours since he had eaten a similar slice, probably from the same oven. But he meekly took the fork given him by Josie and set about devouring it.

“How do you like it?” asked Fay.

“It’s mighty good,” he answered. “Did you make it?”

“I? No—Josie. I suppose it’s good. But you get tired of sweet things when you smell them all day. I hear that the French don’t eat pie. I guess that is one reason why I’m going to Paris.”

A mouthful of pie crust was stuck motionless in Bond’s throat. Then he bolted it.

“Paris!” he exclaimed. “You’re not in earnest.”

She laughed at his astonishment. There was an intimate note in her laughter that separated them from the others. “Yes. Paris. Why not?”

“Well, I suppose it’s no more expensive than Boston———”

“Me go to Boston? Half the people in Boston have heard of Palmases’ Bakery.”

Bond scarcely agreed with this, but he would not belittle the bakery to her. He said:

“Well, then, why not try New York?”

“Not if I know it! I have five cousins and a sister-in-law there. Everyone we met would hear about the bakery.”

“I don’t believe they would. New York’s a pretty big place. And if they did—what would be the difference? There’s no disgrace in being a baker. And Diego’s artist friend would be useful. He’d introduce him to other artists. . . .”

Her anger flamed intimately against him as her laughter had sounded intimately. “Yes—and tell every one of them that we kept a bakery! No—my husband was an engineer when I married him—my father was the principal of the school—Josie’s father was—well—Josie’s father never seemed to settle down to anything. But he was always a gentleman. Good heavens, Josie, I wish you’d take that paint off your face! You look like a clown.”

The girl sat in a corner invincible, drinking coffee. Diego lay like a spoiled child, half asleep, on the sofa. His half-shut eyes rested on Josie’s face. He had a feeling of sleepy power.

“I see what you mean,” said Bond gravely. “What I don’t see is how you’re going to live for any length of time in a city like Paris. It will take quite a lot of money to get you over there, and I should think it would be a bad place to be poor in.”

“We’re willing to risk it. We want to live. We don’t care if there is danger in it. And I have faith in us. I don’t believe anything can hold us down. Diego has genius. Mr. Selby is a grudging sort of man, but I made him acknowledge that. I just pestered him till he did.” She clasped her long slender fingers together and looked beseechingly at Bond. “You do understand, don’t you? I’m thinking about my voice. A complete change and rest may bring it back. A singing teacher told me that this summer. Perhaps you’ll live to see me having a great success in Paris. And even if I don’t—we’ll be living—living dangerously! That’s what we want—isn’t it, children?”

A great compassion for her moved Bond to his depths. She had had an awful life. She was calling those others “children” when she herself was more of a child than they. Three children setting out on a risky adventure. And he envied them too. Wished that he might be going with them to Paris. Supposing that she had accepted him. . . .

“Then it was all settled,” he said, “before I came. You didn’t really want my advice at all.”

“Purley, don’t throw that up to me! I just wanted to get you here to tell you about it. You’re the only one we have to talk things over with.”

Bond turned to Diego. “You’re the man of the family. You’ll have to look after these two.”

Josie gave a sneering laugh. Bond turned and looked sharply at her. She was sitting looking straight before her, the grotesque painted spots on her cheeks shining white. She did not look as though she had uttered a sound.

Bond said to Fay Palmas:

“It’s the money that I’m worrying about. We must see if we can get you more money to start out on.”

An idea had come into his head, but he did not tell them that night what it was.