Читать книгу The Azure Rose - Reginald Wright Kauffman - Страница 6

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Dans ces questions de crédit, il faut toujours frapper l’imagination. L’idée de génie, c’est de prendre dans la poche des gens l’argent qui n’y est pas encore.—Zola: L’Argent.

Until just before the appearance of Charlie Cartaret’s rosy vision, this had been a day of darkness and wet. Rain—a dull, hopeless, February rain—fell with implacable monotony. It descended in fine spray, as if too lazy to hurry, yet too spiteful to stop. It made all Paris miserable; but, as is the way with Parisian rains, it was a great deal wetter on the Left Bank of the Seine than on the Right.

No rain—not even in those happy times before the great war—ever washed the Left Bank clean, and this one only made it a marsh. A curtain of fog fell sheer between the Isle de la Cité and the Quai des Augustins; the twin towers of St. Sulpice staggered up into a pall of fog and were lost in it. The gray houses hunched their shoulders, lowered their heads, drew their mansard hats and gabled caps over their noses and stood like rows of patient horses at a cabstand under the gray downpour. Now and again a real cab scuttled along the streets, its skinny beast clop-clopping over the wooden paving, or slipping among the cobbled ways, its driver hidden under a mountainous pile of woolen great-coat and rubber cape. Even the taxis lacked the proud air with which they habitually splash pedestrians, and such pedestrians as business forced upon the early afternoon thoroughfares went with heads bowed like the houses’ and umbrellas leveled like flying-jibs.

In front of the little Café Des Deux Colombes, the two marble-topped tables which occupied its scant frontage on the rue Jacob were deserted by all save their four iron-backed chairs with wet seats and their twin water-bottles into which, with mathematical precision, water dropped from a pair of holes in the sagging canvas overhead. Inside, however, there were lighted gas-jets, the proprietor and the proprietor’s wife—presumably the pair of doves for whom the Café was named—and a man that was trying to look like a customer.

Gaston François Louis Pasbeaucoup had an apron tied about his middle, and, standing before the intended patron’s table, leaned what weight he had—it was not much—upon his finger-tips. His mustache was fierce enough to grace the upper lip of a deputy from the Bouches-du-Rhône and generous enough to spare many a contribution to the plat-du-jour; but his mustache was the only large thing about him—always excepting Madame his wife, who was ever somewhere about him and who was just now, two hundred and twenty pounds of evidence to the good food of the Deux Colombes, stuffed into a wire cage at one end of the bar, and bulging out of it, her eyebrows meeting over her pug-nose and the heap of hair leaping from her head nearly to the ceiling, while her lips and fingers were busy adding the bills from déjeuner.

“It would greatly pleasure me to accommodate monsieur,” Pasbeaucoup was whispering, “but monsieur must know that already——”

The sentence ended in a deprecating glance over the speaker’s shoulder in the general direction of mighty Madame.

“Already? Already what then?” demanded the intending customer.

He was lounging on the wall-seat behind his table, and he had an aristocratic air surprisingly at variance with his garments. His black jacket shone too highly at the elbows, and its short sleeves betrayed an unnecessary length of red wrist. His black boots gasped for repair; a soft black hat, pushed to the back of his black hair, still dripped from an unprotected voyage along the rainy street, and his neckcloth, which was also long and soft and black, showed a spot or two not put there by its makers. These were patently matters beyond their owner’s command and beneath the dignity of his attention. Against them one was compelled to set a manner truly lofty, which was enhanced by a pair of burning, deep-placed eyes, a thin white face and, sprouting from either side of his lower jaw, near the chin, two wisps of ebon whisker. He frowned majestically, and he smoked a caporal cigarette as if it were a Havana cigar.

“Already what?” he loudly repeated. “If it is possible! I patronize your cabbage of a café for five years, and now you put me off with your alreadys!”

Pasbeaucoup, his fingers still resting on the table, danced in embarrassment and rolled his eyes in a manner that plainly enough warned monsieur not to let his voice reach the caged lady.

“I was but about to say that monsieur already owes us the trifling sum of——”

“Sixty francs, twenty-five!”

The tone that announced these fateful numerals was so tremendous a contralto as to be really bass. It came from the wire cage and belonged to Madame.

Pasbeaucoup sank into the nearest chair. He spread out his hands in a gesture that eloquently said:

“Now you’ve done it! I can’t shield you any longer!”

The debtor, albeit he was still a young man, did not appear unduly impressed. The table was across his knees, but he rose as far as it would permit and removed his hat with a flourish that sent a spray of water directly over Madame’s monument of hair. Disregarding the blatant fact that she was quite the most remarkable feature of the room, he vowed that he had not observed her upon entering, was desolated because of his oversight and ravished now to have the pleasure of once more beholding her in all her accustomed grace and charm.

Madame shrugged her shoulders higher than the walls of the cage.

“Sixty francs, twenty-five,” she said, without looking up from her task.

Ah, yes: his little account. Monsieur recalled that: there was a little account; but, so truly as his name was Seraphin and his passion Art, what a marvelous head Madame had for figures. It was of an exactitude magnificent!

When he paused, Madame said:

“Sixty francs, twenty-five.”

“But surely, Madame——” Seraphin Dieudonné was politely amazed; he did not desire to credit her with an impoliteness, and yet she seemed to imply that, unless he paid this absurdly little sum, there might be some delay in serving him in this so excellent establishment.

“C’est ça,” said Madame. “The delay will be entire.”

“Incomprehensible!” Seraphin put a bony hand to his heart. “Do you not know—all the world of the Quartier knows—that I have, Madame, but three days’ work more upon my magnum opus—a week at the utmost—and that then it can sell for not a sou less than fifteen thousand francs?”

Madame’s face never changed expression when she talked; it always seemed set at the only angle that would balance her monument of hair. She now said:

“What all the world of the Quartier knows is that your last magnum opus you sold to that simpleton Fourget in the rue St. André des Arts; that even from him you could squeeze but a hundred francs for it; and that he has not yet been able to find a customer.”

At first Seraphin seemed slow to credit the scorn that Madame was at such pains to reveal. He made one valiant effort to overlook it, and failed; then he made an effort no less valiant to meet her with the ridiculous majesty in which he habitually draped himself. It was as if, unable to make her believe in him, he at least wanted her to believe that his long struggle with poverty and an indifferent public had served only to increase his confidence in his own genius and to rear between him and the world a wall through which the arrows of the scornful could hardly pass. But this attempt succeeded no more than its predecessor: as he half stood, half bent before this landlady of a fifth-rate café, a tardy pink crept up his white face and painted the skin over his cheek-bones; his eyelids fluttered, and his mouth worked. The man was hungry.

“Madeleine!” whispered Pasbeaucoup, compassion for the debtor almost overcoming fear of the wife.

Seraphin wet his lips.

“Madame——” he began.

“Sixty francs, twenty-five,” said Madame. “Ca y est!”

As she said it, the door of the Deux Colombes opened and another patron, at once evidently a more welcome patron, presented himself. He was a plump little man with hands that were thinly at contrast with the rest of him. He was fairly well dressed, but far better fed, and so contented with his lot as to have no eye for the evident lot of Seraphin. He was Maurice Houdon, who had decided some day to be a great composer and who meanwhile overcharged a few English and American pupils for lessons on the piano and borrowed money from any that would trust him. He stormed Dieudonné, leaned over the intervening table and embraced him.

“My dear friend!” he cried, his arms outflung, his fingers rattling rapid arpeggios upon invisible pianos. “You are indeed well found. I have news—such news!” He thrust back his head and warbled a laugh worthy of the mad-scene in Lucia. “Listen well.” Again he embraced the unresisting Seraphin. “This night we dine here; we make a collation—a symposium: we feed both our bodies and our souls. I shall sit at the head of the table in the little room on the first floor, and you will sit at the foot. Armand Garnier will read his new poem; Devignes will sing my latest song; Philippe Varachon and you will discourse on your arts; and I—perhaps I shall let you persuade me to play the fugue that I go to write for the death of the President: it is all but ready against the day that a president chooses to die.”

But Seraphin’s thoughts were fixed on the food for the body.

“You make no jest with me, Maurice?”

“Jest with you? I jest with you? No, my friend. I do not jest when I invite a guest to dine with me.”

“I comprehend,” said Dieudonné; “but who is to be the host?”

At that question, Pasbeaucoup rose from his chair, and Madame, his wife, tried to thrust her nose, which was too short to reach, through the bars of her cage. The composer struck a chord on his breast and bowed.

“True: the host,” said he. “I had forgotten. I have found a veritable patron of my art. He has had the room above mine for two years, and I did not once before suspect him. He is an American of the United States.”

Madame’s contralto shook her prison bars:

“There is no American that can appreciate art.”

“True, Madame,” admitted Houdon, bowing profoundly; “there is no American that can appreciate art, and there is no American millionaire that can help patronizing it.”

“Eh, he is a millionaire, then, this American?” demanded Madame, audibly mollified.

“He has that honor.”

“And his name?”—Madame wanted to make a memorandum of that name.

Houdon struck another chord. It was as if he were sounding a fanfare for the entrance of his hero.

“Charles Cartaret.” He pronounced the first name in the French fashion and the second name “Cartarette.”

Seraphin’s reply to this announcement rather spoiled its effect. He laughed, and his laughter was high and mocking.

“Cartaret!” he cried. “Charlie Cartaret! But I know him well.”

“Eh?”—The composer was reproachful—“And you never presented him to me?”

“It never happened that you were by.”

“My faith! Why should I be? Am I not Houdon? You should have brought him to me. Is it that you at the same time consider yourself my friend and do not bring to me your millionaire?”

Seraphin’s laughter waxed.

“But he is not my millionaire: he is your millionaire only. I know well that he is as poor as we are.”

The musician’s imaginary melody ceased: one could almost hear it cease. He gazed at Seraphin as he might have gazed at a madman.

“But that room rents for a hundred francs a month!”

“He is in debt for it.”

“And his name is that of a rich American well known.”

“An uncle who does not like him.”

“And he has offered to provide this collation.”

Seraphin shrugged.

“M. Cartaret’s credit,” said he, with a glance at Madame, “seems to be better than mine. I tell you he is only a young art-student, enough genteel, and the relation of a man enough rich, but for himself—poof!—he is one of us.”