Zut, and Other Parisians. Carryl Guy Wetmore
cream: while, to cap the climax, Pierre paid the addition with a louis, – and gave all the change as a tip! But it was unheard-of!
Afterwards they engaged a boat, and, with much alarm on the part of Mimi, and satirical comment from Caffiard, and severe admonitions to prudence by Pierre, pushed out into the stream and headed for Villennes, to the enormous edification of three small boys, who hung precariously over the railing of the terrace above them, and called Caffiard a captive balloon.
They made the three kilometres at a snail's pace, allowing the boat to drift with the current for an hour at a time, and, now and again creeping in under the willows at the water's edge until they were wholly hidden from view, and the voice of Mimi singing was as that of some river nixie invisible to mortal eyes. She sang "Bonsoir, Madame la Lune," so sweetly and so sadly that Caffiard was moved to tears. It was her favorite song, because – oh, because it was about Pierrot! And her own Pierrot responded with a gay soldier ballad, a chanson de route which he had picked up at the Noctambules; and even Caffiard sang – a ridiculous ditty it was, which scored the English and went to a rollicking air. They all shouted the refrain, convulsed with merriment at the drollery of the sound: —
"Qu'est ce qui quitte ses père et mère
Afin de s'en aller
S'faire taper dans le nez?
C'est le soldat d'Angleterre!
Dou-gle-di-gle-dum!
Avec les ba-a-a-alles dum-dum!"
Caffiard was to leave them at Villennes after they should have taken their apéritifs. They protested, stormed at him, scolded and cajoled by turns, and called him a score of fantastic names – for by this time they knew him intimately – as they sat in Monsieur Bodin's arbor and sipped amer-menthe, but all in vain. Pierre had Mimi's hand, as always, and he had kissed her a half-hundred times in the course of the afternoon. Mimi had a way of shaking her hair out of her eyes with a curious little backward jerk of her head when Pierre kissed her, and then looking at him seriously, seriously, but smiling when he caught her at it. Caffiard liked that. And Pierre had a trick of turning, as if to ask Mimi's opinion, or divine even her unspoken wishes whenever a question came up for decision – a choice of food or drink, or direction, or what-not. And Caffiard liked that.
He looked across the table at them now, dreamily, through his cigarette smoke.
"Pierrot," he said, after he had persuaded them to let him depart in peace when the train should be due, – "Pierrot. Yes, that is it. You, with your garret, and your painting, and your songs, and your black, black sadness at one moment, and your laughter the next, and, above all, your Pierrette, your bon-bon of a Pierrette: – you are Pierrot, the spirit of Paris in powder and white muslin! Eigho! my children, what a thing it is, la belle jeunesse! Tiens! you have given me a taste of it to-day, and I thank you. I thought I had forgotten. But no, one never forgets. It all comes back, – youth, and strength, and beauty, love, and music, and laughter, – but only like a breath upon a mirror, my children, only like a wind-ripple on a pool; for I am an old man."
He paused, looking up at the vine-leaves on the trellis-roof, and murmured a few words of Mimi's song: —
"Pierrette en songe va venir me voir:
Bonsoir, madame la lune!"
Then his eyes came back to her face.
"I must be off," he said. "Why, what hast thou, little one? There are tears in those two stars!"
"C'est vrai?" asked Mimi, smiling at him and then at Pierre, and brushing her hand across her eyes, "c'est vrai? Well then, they are gone as quickly as they came. Voilà! Without his tears Pierrot is not Pierrot, and without Pierrot" —
She turned to Pierre suddenly, and buried her face on his shoulder.
"Je t'aime!" she whispered. "Je t'aime!"
The Next Corner
ANTHONY CAZEBY was a man whom the felicitous combination of an adventurous disposition, sufficient ready money, and a magnificent constitution had introduced to many and various sensations, but he was conscious that, so far as intensity went, no one of them all had approached for a moment that with which he emerged from the doorway of the Automobile Club, and, winking at the sting of the keen winter air, looked out across the place de la Concorde, with its globes of light, swung, like huge pearls on invisible strings, across the haze of the January midnight. He paused for a moment, as if he would allow his faculties to obtain a full and final grasp of his situation, and motioned aside the trim little club chasseur who stood before him, with one cotton-gloved hand stretched out expectantly for a supposititious carriage-check.
"Va, mon petit, je vais à pied!"
Afoot! Cazeby smiled to himself at the tone of sudden caprice which rang in his voice, and, turning his fur collar high up about his ears, swung off rapidly toward the Cours la Reine. After all, the avenue d'Eylau was only an agreeable stroll's length distant. Why not go home afoot? But then, on the other hand, why go home at all? As this thought leaped suddenly at Cazeby's throat out of the void of the great unpremeditated, he caught his breath, stopped suddenly in the middle of the driveway, and then went on more slowly, thinking hard.
It had been that rarissima avis of social life, even in Paris, a perfect dinner. Cazeby had found himself wondering, at more than one stage of its smooth and imposing progress, how the Flints could afford to do it. But on each recurrence of the thought he dismissed it with a little frown of vexation. If there was one thing more than another upon which Cazeby prided himself, it was originality of thought, word, and deed, and he was annoyed to find himself, even momentarily, on a mental level with the gossips of the American and English colonies, whose time is equally divided between wondering how the Choses can afford to do what they do, and why the Machins cannot afford to do what they leave undone.
People had said many things of Hartley Flint, and still more of his wife, but no one had ever had the ignorance or the perversity to accuse them of inefficiency in the matter of a dinner. Moreover, on this particular occasion, they were returning the hospitality of the Baroness Klemftt, who had, at the close of the Exposition, impressed into her service the chef of the Roumanian restaurant, and whose dinners were, in consequence, the wonder and despair of four foreign colonies. After her latest exploit Hartley Flint had remarked to his wife that it was "up to them to make good," which, being interpreted, was to say that it was at once his duty and his intention to repay the Baroness in her own sterling coin. The fact that the men of the party afterwards commended Hartley's choice of wines, and that the women expressed the opinion that "Kate Flint looked really pretty!" would seem to be proof positive that the operation of "making good" had been an unqualified success.
Now, Cazeby was wondering whether he had actually enjoyed it all. Under the circumstances it seemed to him incredible, and yet he could not recall a qualm of uneasiness from the moment when the maître d'hôtel had thrown open the doors of the private dining room, until the Baroness had smiled at her hostess out of a cloud of old Valenciennes, and said, "Now there are two of us who give impeccable dinners, Madame Flint." Even now, even facing his last ditch, Cazeby was conscious of a little thrill of self-satisfaction. He had said the score of clever things which each of his many hostesses expected of him, and had told with great effect his story of the little German florist, which had grown, that season, under the persuasive encouragement of society's applause, from a brief anecdote into a veritable achievement of Teutonic dialect. Also, he had worn a forty franc orchid, and had left it in his coffee-cup because it had begun to wilt. In brief, he had been Anthony Cazeby at his extraordinary best, a mixture of brilliancy and eccentricity, without which, as Mrs. Flint was wont to say, no dinner was complete.
But the sublime and the ridiculous are not the only contrasting conditions that lie no further than a step apart, and Cazeby was painfully conscious of having, in the past five minutes, crossed the short interval which divides gay from grave. Reduced to its lowest terms, his situation lay in his words to the little chasseur. With the odor of the rarest orchid to be found in Vaillant-Rozeau's whole establishment yet clinging to his lapel, Anthony Cazeby was going home on foot because the fare from the Concorde to the avenue d'Eylau was one franc fifty, and one franc fifty precisely