Chapter XI: Part IV: Paris (1)

I

The noise of Paris came to him through the open windows, a confusion of trivial sounds utterly different from the solid, strong note that London gave forth. It was the noise of a nursery of children playing with toys--he heard the continuous jingle of bells round the necks of the horses that drew the cabs, the shouts of men crying newspapers, the squeaking horns of motor-cars, and, every afternoon, at this hour, the sound of some pedlar calling attention to his wares, with a trumpet that had a tinny sound.

At intervals the voice of Paris, modified by the height at which he lived and the distance he was from the Grands Boulevards, sent a shout to him that reminded him of London. That was when a heavy rumbling shook the narrow street which was one of the tributaries of the Boulevards, as a monstrous, unwieldy omnibus, drawn by three horses abreast, rolled upwards on its passage to the Gare du Nord. The horses' hoofs slapped the street with the clatter of iron on stone, and the passing of the omnibus drowned every other sound with its thunder, so that when it had gone, and the echoes of its passage had died away, the voice of Paris seemed more mincing and playful than before.

Humphrey had been in Paris six months now, but the first impression that the city gave had never been erased from his mind.

At first the name had filled him with a curious kind of awe: Paris and the splendour of its art and life, and the history which linked the centuries together; all the history of the Kings of France which he did not know, and the rest that he knew with the vagueness of a somewhat neglected education--the bloody days of the Revolution, the siege, the Commune; Paris, the cockpit of history and the pleasure-house of the world. There was some enchantment in the thought of going to Paris, not as a mere visitor, but as a worker, one who was to share the daily lives of the people.

And he had arrived in the evening of a February day, in the crisp cold, bewildered by the strangeness of the station. The huge engine had dragged him and his fellows--Englishmen chiefly, travelling southwards, and eastwards, and westwards in search of sunshine--across the black country of France, into the greener, sweeter meadows of the Valley of the Loire, with tall poplars on the sky-line, through the suburbs with their red and white houses looking as if they had been built yesterday, to the vaulted bareness of the Gare du Nord. There, as it puffed and panted, like a stout, elderly gentleman out of breath, it seemed to gasp: "I've done my part. Look after yourselves."

To leave the train was like leaving a friend. One stepped to the low platform and became an insect in a web of blue-bloused porters, helpless, eager to placate, afraid of creating a disturbance. It seemed to Humphrey in those first few moments that these people were inimical to him; they spoke to him roughly and without the traditional politeness of French people. The black-bearded ticket-collector snatched the little Cook's pocket-book from his hand, tore out the last tickets, and thrust it back on him, murmuring some complaint, possibly because Humphrey had not unclasped the elastic band. There was bother about luggage too; Heaven knows what, but he waited dismally and hungrily in the vast room, with its flicker of white light from the arc-lamps above the low counters at which the Customs-men, in their shabby uniforms, seemed to be quarrelling with one another, their voices pitched in the loud key that is seldom used in England.

He was required to explain and explain again to three or four officials; something of a minor, technical point, he gathered, was barring him from his baggage. His French was not quite adequate to the occasion; but it was maddening to see them shrug their shoulders with a movement that suggested that they rejoiced in his discomfiture.... It was all straightened out, somehow, by a uniformed interpreter, a friendly man who came into Humphrey's existence for a moment, and passed out of it in a casual way, a professional dispenser of sympathy and help, expecting no more reward than a franc or so for services that deserved a life-long gratitude.

But when the cabman had shouted at him, and the blue-bloused porters (one had attached himself to each of his four pieces of baggage) had insisted on their full payment, and after there had been an exchange of abuse between the cabman and an itinerant seller of violets, whose barrow had nearly been run down, Humphrey looked out of the window and caught his first glimpses of Paris ... of the light that suggested warmth and laughter.

He saw great splashes of light, and through the broad glass windows of the cafés a vision of cosy rooms, bustling with the business of eating, of white tables at which men and women sat--ordinary middle-class people. The movement of their arms and shoulders and heads showed that conversation was brisk during their meal; they smiled at one another.

As the cab sped softly along on its pneumatic tyres, he saw picture after picture of this kind, set in its frame of light. "I shall like living here," he thought. Chance decreed that the Rue le Peletier was being repaired, and the cab swung out of the narrower streets into the vivid and wonderful brilliance of the Boulevard des Italiens.

The street throbbed with light and life. He was in a broad avenue with windows that blazed with splendid colour in the night. The faces of the clocks in the middle of the avenue were lit up; the lamps of the flower and newspaper kiosks made pools of shining yellow on the pavement; and above him the red and golden and green of the illuminated advertisements came and went, sending their iridescence into the night. It was not one unbearable glare that startled the eyes, but a blend of many delicate and fine luminous tints: one café was lit with electric lights that gave out a soft pale rose colour, another was of the faintest blue, and a third a delicate yellow, and all these different notes of light rushed together in a lucent harmony.

Music floated to him as he passed slowly in the stream of bleating and jingling and hooting traffic. He saw the people sitting outside the cafés near braziers of glowing coal, calmly drinking coloured liquids, as though there were no such thing as work in the world.

And that was the thought that gave Humphrey his first impression of Paris. These people, it seemed, only played with life. There was something artificial and unreal about all these cafés: they played at being angry (that business at the Customs office was part of the game), an _agent_ held up a little white baton to stop the traffic--playing at being a London policeman, thought Humphrey. He wondered whether this sort of thing went on always, with an absurd thought of the Paris he had seen at a London exhibition.

The cab veered out of the traffic down a side-street between two cafés larger than the rest, and, at the last glimpse of people sitting in overcoats and furs by the braziers, he laughed in the delight of it. "Why, they're playing at it being summer," he said to himself.

Six months had passed since that day, and he had seen Paris in many aspects, yet nothing could alter his first impression. The whole city was built as a temple of pleasure, a feminine city, with all the shops in the Rue Royale or the Avenue de l'Opera decked with fine jewels and sables. Huge emporiums everywhere, crowded with silks and ribbons and lace; wonderful restaurants, with soft rose-shaded lights and mauve and grey tapestries, as dainty as a lady's boudoir. Somewhere, very discreetly kept in the background, men and women toiled behind the scenes of luxury and pleasure ... those markets in the bleak morning, and the factories on the outskirts of the city, and along the outer Boulevards one saw great-chested men and narrow-chested girls walking homewards from their day's work. But there was pleasure, even for these people: the material pleasure of life, and the spiritual pleasure of art and beauty. The first they could satisfy with a jolly meal in the little bright restaurants of their quarter with red wine and cognac; and of the second they could take their fill for nothing, if they were so minded, for it surrounded them in a scattered profusion everywhere.

* * * * *

Humphrey, in the Paris office of _The Day_, on the fourth floor of an apartment building in the Rue le Peletier, sat dreaming of all that had happened in the past six months. Wonderful months had they been to him! They had altered his whole perception of things. Here, in a new world and a new city, he was beginning to see things in a truer proportion. Fleet Street receded into the far perspective as something quite small and unimportant; the men themselves, even, seemed narrow-minded and petty, incapable of thinking more deeply than the news of the day demanded.

Humphrey, from the heights of his room in Paris, began to see how broad the world was, that it was finer to deal with nations than individuals, and from his view Fleet Street appeared to him in the same relation as Easterham had appeared to him in London.

The clock struck five. Rivers and Neckinger and Selsey would be going into the conference now in Ferrol's room to discuss the contents of the paper.

"Anything big from Paris?" some one would be asking, or "What about Berlin?"... And he knew that every night they looked towards Paris, where amazing things happened, and he, Humphrey Quain, was Paris. That splendid thought thrilled him to the greatest endeavour. He was _The Day's_ watchman in Paris, not only of all the news that happened in the capital, but of all the happenings in the whole territory of France.

A pile of cuttings from the morning's papers were on his desk. Here was a leading article on the Franco-German relations from the _Echo de Paris_--an important leading article, obviously inspired by the Quai D'Orsay. There was a two-column account of the Hanon case--an extraordinary murder in Lyons which English readers were following with great interest. There was a budget of "fait-divers," those astonishing events in which the fertility of the Paris journalist's imagination rises to its highest point. They supplied the "human interest." He had received a wire from London to interview a famous French actress, who was going to play in a London theatre, and that had kept him busy for the afternoon. The morning had been devoted to reading every Paris paper.

At five o'clock Dagneau arrived with the evening papers, bought from the fat old woman who kept the kiosk outside the Café Riche. He let himself into the flat with a latch-key, and appeared before Humphrey, a young man, immaculately dressed, with a light beard fringing his fat cheeks. Humphrey could never quite overcome the oddness of having a bearded man as his junior. Dagneau was only twenty-two, but he had grown a beard since he was twenty; that was how youths played at being men. Humphrey called Dagneau "the lamb."

"Hullo," he said. "Anything special?"

Dagneau's pronunciation of English was as bad as Humphrey's pronunciation of French, but in both cases the vocabulary was immense.

"They're crying 'Death of the President' on the Boulevards," said Dagneau.

Humphrey leapt up. "Great Heavens! You don't say so!" he shouted, going to the telephone.

"Be not in a hurry, _mon vieux_." (Though Dagneau was his assistant, they dropped all formalities between themselves.) "It is in _La Presse_."

"But--"

"Calm yourself. _La Presse_ is selling in thousands. The news is printed in great black letters across the front page."

"Is it true?" gasped Humphrey.

"It is true that the President is dead--but it is the President of Montemujo or something like that in South America, and not M. Loubet."

Dagneau laughed merrily and slapped the papers on the table. He took Humphrey by the shoulders and shook him playfully.

"I--would I let my old and faithful Englishman down?" he asked. The newspaper phrase spoken as Dagneau spoke it sounded delightful.

"By George, you gave me a shock," Humphrey laughed. "I thought I'd been dozing for an hour with the President dead. Dagneau, you are an _espèce de_--anything you like."

"Any telegrams from London?"

"One to interview Jeanne Granier. I've done it Will you go through the evening papers? Look out for the _Temps_ comments on the Persian railway ... they're running that in London. And the latest stuff about the Hanon case. I'll run round to _Le Parisien_ and see what they've got."

He went down the winding staircase, past the red-faced concierge and his enormous wife, who knitted perpetually by the door ("_Pas des lettres, m'sieu_," she said, in answer to his inquiring look), and so into the street. A passing cabman held up his whip in appeal, and, as moments were precious now, Humphrey engaged him. They bowled along through the side-streets, and at the end of each he saw, repeated, the glorious opal and orange sunset over Paris: those magnificent sunsets that left the sky in a smother of golden and purple and dark clouds edged with livid light behind the steeple of St Augustine. They came to the building of _Le Parisien_, with whom _The Day_ had an arrangement by which Humphrey could see their proofs evening and night, in exchange for extending the same privilege to the London Correspondent of _Le Parisien_ at the offices of _The Day_.

He crossed the threshold into the familiar atmosphere of Fleet Street. Hurry and activity: young Frenchmen writing rapidly in room after room. Some of them knew him, looked up from their work and nodded to him. From below the printing-machines sent tremors through the building, as they rolled off the first edition for the distant provinces of France, and for the night trains to every capital of Europe. The same old work was going on here: the same incessant quest and record of news.

He went to the room of Barboux, the foreign editor.

"Good-evening," said Barboux, black-bearded, fat and bald-headed. He pronounced "evening" as though it were a French word, and it came out "événandje."

Barboux offered Humphrey a cigarette he had just rolled with black tobacco, and asked him most intimate questions of his doings in Paris, so that Humphrey had either to acknowledge himself a prude or a Parisian.

"All the same," said Barboux, "Paris is a wonderful city, _hein_?"

"It is," said Humphrey.

Barboux continued: "Is it not the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most entrancing city in the world, young Englishman?"

"All except London," replied Humphrey.

"Rosbif--Goddam--I box your nose," laughed Barboux.

It was a set form of dialogue that took place every night between them, without variation, a joke invented by Barboux.

A man in an apron--a French version of the type in _The Day's_ printing-office--brought in a budget of proofs.

"There is nothing that is happening, ain't it?" remarked Barboux, who always rendered _n'est ce pas_ in this literal fashion.

"Apparently not," Humphrey agreed, glancing through the proofs. "When do they expect the verdict in the Hanon case?"

Barboux touched a bell. A young man appeared. His hair was fair and long, his clothes were faultless to the crease in the trousers turned up in the English style over patent-leather shoes with the laces tied in big bows. Barboux introduced him: "M. Charnac will tell you about the Hanon case."

The young man bowed in a charming manner, and spoke in a soft, delicious French, with a voice that was charged with courtesy and kindness.

"They do not expect a verdict to-night, m'sieu. The court has adjourned. I've just had the finish of our correspondent's message."

"_Merci_," said Humphrey.

"_Pas de quoi_," said Charnac, bowing.

Humphrey rose and bowed with the ultra politeness that was now part of his daily life. They shook hands.

"_Enchanté d'avoir fait votre connaissance_," and Charnac bowed once more.

"_Enchanté_," mumbled Humphrey.

Barboux was at the telephone, saying impatiently, "Ah-lo.... Ah ... lo." Humphrey put on his hat, Barboux extended his left hand--the greatest sign of friendship that a Frenchman can give, since it implies that he knows you too well for you to take offence at it.

"_À demain_," said Humphrey, as he went away.

When he came back to the office, work began in earnest. First of all he had to select from the budget of news on his table those items that would be most acceptable to English readers. That was no small matter on days when there were many things happening. It required sound judgment and a knowledge of what was best in news. Then there was always the question of the other correspondents of London newspapers: what were the other fellows sending?

He and Dagneau talked things over, and, finally, when they had decided what to transmit to London, the work of compiling the stories began. It was necessary to build up a coherent, comprehensive story out of the cuttings before him, in which all the points of the different papers should be mentioned. Dagneau helped him, making illiterate translations of leading articles, that needed revising and knocking into shape. Perhaps, even at the eleventh hour, a telegram might arrive from the London headquarters, setting them a new task, rendering void all the work they might have done.

After two hours' writing Humphrey laid down his pen. "Come along, my lamb," he said to Dagneau; "let us go to dinner."

Then they put on their hats and coats and went to Boisson's, a few doors away in the Rue le Peletier, where Père Boisson presided over a pewter counter, spread with glasses and bottles, and Mère Boisson superintended the kitchen, and Henri, the waiter, with a desperate squint, ran to and fro with his burden of plates, covering many miles every night by passing and repassing from the restaurant tables to the steamy recesses behind the door.

This was the part of Paris life that pleased Humphrey most.

They received him with cheery _Bons soirs_, and Henri paused in his race to set the chairs for them, and arrange their table. Yards of crisp bread were brought to them, and a _carafon_ of the red wine from Touraine, whither M. Boisson went on a pilgrimage once a year to sample and buy for himself.

Little French olives and _filet d'hareng saur_; soup with sorrel floating in it; fish with black butter sauce; a _contre-filet_ or a _vol au vent_ deliciously cooked; Roquefort cheese, and, to wind up with, what M. Boisson called magnificently _Une Belle Poire_--this was the little dinner they had for something under three francs, and, of course, there was special coffee to follow, and, as a piece of extravagance, a liqueur of _mandarin_ or _noyeau_.

"This is better than Fleet Street," said Humphrey, inhaling his cigarette and sipping at the excellent coffee. Boisson in his shirt-sleeves and apron came over to them and spoke to them with light banter. He also had a joke of his own: he conceived it to be the highest form of humour to interject "Aoh--yes--olright," several times during the conversation.

Madame Boisson waddled towards them, with an overflowing figure, and said, as if her future happiness depended on an answer in the affirmative, "_Vous avez bien diné, m'sieu_."

The smell of food was pleasant here: there was no hurry; men and women concentrated all their attention on eating and enjoying their meal. The light shone on the glasses of red and white wine. It was a picture that delighted Humphrey.

And Dagneau was telling him of his adventures on the previous night with a little girl, the dearest little girl he had ever met, kissing the tips of his fingers to the air, whenever his emotions overcame him ... and Humphrey smiled. This was a side of Paris of which he knew nothing. His thoughts went back to London where Elizabeth lived, beautiful and austere. "I must write to Elizabeth to-night," he thought.

At nine-twenty Dagneau caught the eye of Henri and made an imaginary gesture of writing on the palm of his left hand. "That's the way to get a perfect French accent," he said to Humphrey. Henri nodded in swift comprehension and appeared with a piece of paper on which illegible figures were scrawled. They paid and went away, with the Boissons and Henri calling farewells to them. Happy little restaurant in the Rue le Peletier!

They got back to the office just as the telephone bell was making a rattling din. Humphrey sat down and adjusted over his head the steel band that held the receivers close to his ears. Then, pulling the telephone closer to him, and spreading out before him all that he had written, he waited.

And, presently, sometimes receding and sometimes coming nearer above the hum and buzz that sounded like the wind and the waves roaring about the deep-sea cables, he heard the voice of Westgate coming from England. "Hallo ... hallo ... hallo.... That you, Quain.... Can't hear you.... Get another line ... buzz--zz--zz ... oooo. Ah! that's better." Westgate's voice became suddenly clear and vibrating as though he were speaking from the next room. But Humphrey could see the little box in the sub-editors' room, where all the men were working round Selsey, and the messenger-boys coming and going with their flimsy envelopes; he could see the strained, eager face of Westgate, as he waited, pencil in hand ... and he began.

He shouted the news of Paris for fifteen minutes, and at the end the perspiration wetted his forehead, and Westgate's good-night left him exhausted. Sometimes, when the wires were interfered with by a gale, the fifteen minutes were wasted in futile shouting and endeavour to be heard in London; sometimes Westgate would say bluntly: "Selsey says he doesn't want any of that story," when he began to read his carefully prepared notes. Those were desperate minutes, shouting to London against time.

"All well?" asked Dagneau, when he finished.

"I suppose so," Humphrey answered. "Westgate was in great form to-night--he was taking down at the rate of a hundred and twenty words a minute...." He rose and stretched himself. "Will you pay the late call at the newspaper offices? I'll be at Constans in case anything happens."

Out again into the bright glamour of the Boulevards to Constans at the corner of the Place de l'Opera, in the shadow of the opera-house, to meet the other correspondents, and wait on the events of Europe, and drink brandy and soda or the light lager-beer that was sold at Constans.

It was a place where most of the Paris correspondents gathered, and, sometimes, the "Special Correspondents" came also. They were lofty people, who had long since left the routine of Fleet Street; the princes of journalism, who passed through Paris on their way to St Petersburg, to Madrid--to any part of Europe or the world where there was unrest; war correspondents, and special commissioners; men who had letters of introduction from diplomat to diplomat, who talked with kings and chancellors, and interviewed sultans. They flitted through Paris whenever any big news happened, in twos and threes, only staying for a few hours at Constans to meet friends, and then on again by the midnight expresses....

They were a jolly lot of fellows who met in those days at Constans: O'Malley of _The Sentinel_, the fair-haired scholar who spoke of style in writing, and could speak French with an Irish accent and knew how to ask the waiter to "Apporthez des p'hommes de therrey"; Punter, who represented the Kelmscotts' papers, talked French politics late into the night, and wore a monocle that never dropped from his eye--not even in those exciting moments when Michael, his coal-black eyes and hair betraying his ancestry, crossed his path in argument.

At midnight Dagneau came in with word from the outside world. All was quiet. So Humphrey went back to the hotel in the Rue d'Antin, where he rented a room on the fifth floor by the month for eighty francs, including the morning roll and bowl of coffee. He wrote his letter to Elizabeth: he wanted her to come to Paris and share his life with him.

II

He wanted her very much to share in the delight of those days. It was all so new and beautiful to him, so different from London. He went about the city, sometimes alone, sometimes with Dagneau for a companion, to the Louvre, where the Venus de Milo filled him with awe and wonder, or to the Luxembourg, with its statuary set among the green trees. In the afternoons, when he had any spare time, he would take a book and read in the Tuileries, or on one of the seats in the Champs Elysées, where the fat Norman and Breton nurses, with their broad coloured ribbons floating from their _coifs_, wheeled perambulators up and down, or took the children to the Punch and Judy shows. And on Sundays in the season, there were the races at Longchamps, with a drive homewards in the cool of the evening, through the Bois, where his cab was one of a long line of vehicles making a moving pageant of the human comedy, with laughing bourgeois families riding five and six in a cab, and aristocracy and opulent beauty, artificial and real, rolling by in victorias and electric broughams.

Those rides down the Avenue du Bois to the Arc de Triomphe made him feel very poor: the women, lolling back in silken comfort, seemed lifted above the everyday world, away from all thought of squalor and sordidness. They were the rare hot-house flowers of society; the cold wind of life's reality would wither them in a day. So they passed before him, exquisitely beautiful and remote, looking with languid interest at the rest of the people in the incomparable vanity of their silk and lace and diamonds....

Yet again, his work took him behind the scenes of Parisian life, into places that are not familiar to the casual visitor to Paris. He would sit in the Chamber of Deputies to make notes of an important debate, or to watch the rigid semicircle of French legislators break up into riotous factions, with the tintinnabulation of the President's bell adding to the din. This would appear in _The Day_ with the head-line, "Pandemonium in the French Chamber." Perhaps it was necessary to interview a _juge d'instruction_ in his private room at the Palais de Justice, or to pass through the corridors of the Surété--France's Scotland Yard--to inquire into a sensational murder mystery.

And he found, too, that in Paris he had a certain standing as a journalist that was denied him in London. He was registered in books, and the seal of approval was given to him in the shape of a _coupe-fil_, which was a card of identity, with his portrait and the name of _The Day_ on it--a magic card that enabled him to do miraculous things with policemen and officials; it was a passport to the front row in the drama of life. There was no need in Paris to haggle with policemen, to wink at them, and win a passage through the crowd by subterfuge as in London: this card divided a way for him through the multitude.

So that now, when he felt that he had established himself in his career, when his salary was more than adequate for the needs of two, the strong need of Elizabeth came to him. The brilliant gaiety of Paris swirled about him, and tried to entice him into its joyous whirlpool. He knew the dangers that beset him: he knew the stories of men who had been dragged into the whirlpool, down into the waters that closed over their heads, bringing oblivion.

And he looked towards the ideal of Elizabeth, as he had always looked towards the ideal of the love which she personified, to save him from the evil things that are bred by loneliness and despair.

III

One Saturday night, when there was nothing else to do, he went up to Montmartre, and walked along the Boulevard de Clichy, past the grotesque absurdities of the _cabarets_ that are set there for the delectation of foreign and provincial strangers: _cabarets_ that mock at death and heaven and hell with all the vulgarity and coarseness that exists side by side with the love of beauty, art and culture in Paris.

For a franc you could watch the old illusion of a shrouded man turning to a grisly skeleton in his narrow coffin; or you could see a diverting burlesque of the celestial realms, and observe how sinners were burnt in a canvas hell with artificial flames. Humphrey had seen all these during his first week in Paris: he had laughed, but afterwards he had been ashamed of his laughter. They were a little degrading....

He passed them by to-night, in spite of the enticing blandishments of the mock mute, the angel and the devil by the doors of their haunts. He wandered aimlessly along this Boulevard, where women crossed his path, looking very picturesque, without any covering to their heads, shawls across their shoulders and red aprons down to the fringe of their short skirts. There was something savage and primitive about these women: they lacked the frankness and gaiety of the coster-girl in London; they were beautiful, with an evil and cruel beauty. Vicious-looking men slouched from the shadows. Their looks could not conceal the knives in their pockets. They were as rats in the night, creeping from pavement to pavement, preying on humanity.

The door of a café chantant opened, as Humphrey came abreast with it, and the sound of a jingling chorus, played on a discordant piano, arrested his steps. The man who was coming out, thinking that Humphrey was about to enter, held the door open for him politely. Something impelled Humphrey forward.

He went inside.

The room was heavy with tobacco smoke; it floated in thin clouds about the lights and drifted here and there in pale spirals as it was blown from the lips of the smokers. His vision was blurred by the smoke at first, and, as he stood there blinking and self-conscious, it was as though he had intruded into some private and intimate gathering. It seemed that every one in the room was staring at him. The impression only lasted a moment. He perceived a vacant chair by a table and sat down, with the bearing of one to whom the place was familiar.

All around him the men and women were sitting. There was an air of sex-comradeship that, in spite of its frankness, was neither indecent nor blatant. The people were behaving in the most natural way in the world. Sometimes a woman nestled close to a man and their hands interlaced; sometimes a man sat with his arm round the waist of a girl. Mild liquids were before them--the light beer of France, little glasses of cherries soaked in brandy, glasses of white and red wine. Their eyes were set towards the small stage at the end of the room, a narrow platform framed in crudely-painted canvas, representing trees and foliage; while at the back there was a drop-scene that showed a forest as an early Japanese artist might have drawn it, with vast distances and a nursery contempt for perspective.

His eye wandered to the walls painted with scroll-work and deformed cupids and panels of nude women, so badly done that they appealed more to the sense of humour than to the sexual. The pictures on the walls seemed to leave the men and women untouched; they concentrated all their attention on the entertainment. The only person in the place who showed any sign of boredom was the gendarme who sat by the door, the State's hostage to its conscience. Nothing, said the State, in effect, can be indecent if one of our gendarmes is there. This was not one of the _cabarets_ where the poet-singers of Montmartre chant, with melancholy face, their witty doggerel or their fragrant pastorals; where people came to hear the veiled obscenities of political satire or allusions to passing events; this was a second-rate affair, a _tingel-tangel_--a species of family music-hall.

A waiter in an alpaca jacket, a stained apron wound skirt-wise round his trousers, approached Humphrey with an inquiring lift of his eyebrows. He removed empty glasses dexterously with one hand and slopped a cloth over the table with the other.

"M'sieu, desire...?"

"_Un fin_," answered Humphrey.

The waiter emitted an explosive _Bon_ and threaded his way through the labyrinth of chairs to a high wooden counter, where a fat man, with his shirt-sleeves rolled back to his elbow, stood sentinel over rows of coloured bottles. The light shone on green and red liqueurs, on pale amber and dark brown bottles placed on glass shelves against a looking-glass background, that reflected the bullet shape of the _patron's_ close-cropped head.

Meanwhile the pianist had finished his interlude, and there was a burst of applause as a woman appeared on the stage. She wore an amazing hat of orange and white silk, in which feathers were the most insistent feature. There was something extraordinarily bold and flaunting in her presence. Her neck and shoulders and bosom were bare to the low cut of her bodice, and the cruel light showed the powder that she had scattered over her throat and shoulders to make them white and enticing; it showed the red paint on the lips and the rouge on the cheeks, and the black on her eyelashes and eyebrows. The crude touches of obvious artifice destroyed her beauty. Her waist was compressed into a painful smallness, and her skirt was flounced and reached only to the knees.

She sang a song that had something to do with a soldier's life. "Tell me, soldier," she sang, "what do you think of in battle? Do you think of the glory of the Fatherland and the splendour of dying for France?" And the soldier answers: "I think only of a farm in Avignon, and a maiden whose lips I used to kiss on the old bridge; I think only of my old mother and how she will embrace me when I come home."

When she sang the simple song, though her voice was false, and her gestures stereotyped, the rouge and the powder and the paint were forgotten for a moment. She was one of those unconscious artists belonging to a people who have art woven into the warp and woof of their daily life.

The audience took up the chorus. She nodded to them with an audacious smile. The pianist, with his cigarette stub hanging from his lips, under cover of the volume of voices, forsook the treble for a moment, and reached out with his hand for a glass of beer that rested above the piano.

It was the strange, fumbling motion of his hand that caught Humphrey's eye, trained to observe such details. He looked closer, and saw that the pianist's eyes were closed, and the lashes were withered where they met the cheek. He was blind; he never saw the faces and figures of the women who sang, he only heard the voices; he could see nothing that was harsh and cruel. And the picture of the blind pianist at the side of the garish stage, improvising little runs and trills and spinning a web of melody night after night, stirred Humphrey with an odd emotion.

There was a pause. The door opened and closed as people came and went. Humphrey sipped at the brandy; the fiery taste of it made his palate and throat smart. The price of the entertainment was one franc, including a drink.

Suddenly the pianist struck up a well-known air. A slim girl, in the costume of the district, slouched on to the stage, her hands thrust into the pockets of her apron. Her hair was bundled together in careless heaps of yellow, her eyes were pale blue and almost almond-shaped, her features finely moulded, with a queer distinction of their own. And when she took one hand out of her apron pocket, he saw that the fingers were long and exquisitely tapered, and tipped with pink, beautiful nails that shone in the light. Those finger-nails betrayed her. They were not in keeping with the part.

She started singing, walking the small stage with a swaying motion of her body; her young form was lithe and graceful; her movements tigrine. And as she sang her lilting chorus, her pale eyes gazed from their narrow slits at Humphrey, not boldly or coquettishly, but with an indeterminate appeal, as though she felt ashamed of her song.

"Quand je danse avec mon grand frisé
Il a l'air de m'enlacer
Je perds la tête
'Suis comme une bête!
'Y a pas chose--'suis sa chose à lui
'Y a pas mal--Quoi? C'est mon mari
Car moi, je l'aime
J'aime mon grand frisé."

The audience sang the swinging chorus, and she moved sinuously to and fro with the rhythm of it. Humphrey sat there, and he seemed to lose consciousness of all the other people in the room--the smell of the smoke, and the jingle of the piano, and the ill-painted pictures on the walls faded away from him; all his senses seemed to merge and concentrate on the enjoyment of this moment. She was singing on the stage for him, her narrow eyes never left him.

And her song was a pæan in praise of the brute in man.

She acted her song. Her face was radiant with the joy of being possessed, and her eyes shone as she abandoned herself to the words:

"Quand je danse avec le grand frisé
Il a l'air de m'enlacer...."

Then her wonderful hands with their glinting finger-nails went up to her head, and she half-closed her eyes, as though she were swooning:

"Je perds la tête...."

Now her eyes were opened, and they glared wildly, and her lips trembled, and her slim body quivered with animal hunger:

"'Suis comme une bête."

And now, she smiled, and pride was on her face; one hand rested on her hip, and she swaggered up the stage, as the words fitted into the opening lilt:

"'Y pas chose--suis sa chose à lui
'Y pas mal--Quoi? C'est mon mari...."

Her face became at once miraculously tender. She expressed great and overpowering love--a love so strong that it swept everything before it--a love that was without restraint, passionate, fierce and unquenchable. Her arms were outstretched. Her dark blouse, opened at the neck, revealed her white throat throbbing with her song:

"Car moi, je l'aime
J'aime mon grand frisé."

And when she sang "_Je l'aime_," she invested the words with passion and renunciation.

They clamoured for another verse, crying "_Bis ... Bis_," in throaty tones, but she only came on to bow to them, and walk off again with that swaying stride.

"_Eh, bien!_" said a voice at Humphrey's elbow, "she is very good, our little Desirée, _hein_?"

He turned half round in his chair. At first he did not recognize the immaculately clothed young man, with the fair, long hair, who smiled at him, and then he recollected that they had met in the office of _Le Parisien_.

"M. Charnac, isn't it?" Humphrey asked. "I didn't know you at once.... Yes, she's very good. What's her name?"

"Desirée Lebeau," Charnac answered. He looked at Humphrey again, still smiling.

"Do you often come here?" he asked.

"This is the first time.... I was wandering about.... I just dropped in."

Humphrey noticed that Charnac was not alone. A pretty girl dressed becomingly in black, with a touch of red about her neck, sat by his side.

"Allow me to present a friend, Margot," Charnac said to the girl. "He is an Englishman--a journalist," he added. And to Humphrey he said:

"Mlle. Margot Lebeau. She is the sister of our little Desirée."

"_M'sieu est Anglais_," said the dark-haired girl in a piping voice. "_Ah! que ça doit être interessant d'être Anglais._"

IV

The entertainment was near its end. A dainty figure came from the heavy curtains that hung from each side of the proscenium and hid the entertainers from the audience. Humphrey recognised Desirée, though she had forsaken her stage-costume and wore a simple dark-blue dress, with a black fur boa held carelessly about her shoulders. She came towards them with a smile, stopping on the way, as one or two men, of a better class than the bulk of the audience, hailed her. She bent down to them, and whispered conversations followed. She laughed and slapped the face of one man--an elderly man with a red ribbon in his button-hole. It was a playful slap, just the movement that a kitten makes with its paw when it is playing with long hanging curtains.

Charnac pushed out a chair for her invitingly. She came to them with a smile hovering about her lips, and a look of curious interest in her pale eyes as she saw Humphrey. She shook hands with Charnac, and kissed her sister Margot, and then, with a frank gesture, without any embarrassment, she held out her hand to Humphrey and said:

"_Bon soir, p'tit homme._"

There was a quality of friendship in her voice; her whole manner suggested a desire to be amiable; she accepted Humphrey as a friend without question, and, as for Charnac, she treated him as if he were one of the family, as a brother. The women in the room stared at the party every few moments, absorbed in the details of Desirée's dress, and the men glanced at her with smiles that irritated Humphrey.

"It is a little friend of mine--an Englishman," Charnac said to Desirée.

"An Englishman!" said Desirée, in a way that seemed to be the echo of her sister's remark a few minutes earlier. "I have a friend in England." She spoke French in a clipped manner, abbreviating her words, and scattering fragments of slang through her phrases.

"Is that so?" Humphrey said. "What part of England?"

"Manchestaire," she replied. "His name was Mr Smith. You know him?"

Humphrey laughed. "I'm afraid I don't--Manchester's a big place, you know."

"Is it as big as London?"

"Oh no. Not as big as London."

"I should like to go to London. I have a friend there--a girl friend."

"Oh! where does she live?"

"I forget the name of the street--somewhere near Charing Cross--that's a railway station, isn't it?"

"Yes."

Silence fell between them while a comedian, dressed as a comic soldier, sang a song that made them all laugh; though Humphrey could not understand the _argot_, he caught something of the innuendo of the song. Strange, that in France and Germany, in countries where patriotism and militarism are at their highest, the army should be held up to ridicule, and burlesqued in the coarsest fashion. The song gave Humphrey an opportunity of studying Desirée's face. He saw that the yellow hair was silky and natural; her eyebrows were as pale as her hair, and when she laughed, her red lips parted to show small white teeth that looked incredibly sharp. She was not beautiful, but she held some mysterious attraction for him. She was of a type that differed from all the women he had met. Though her face and figure showed that she was little more than twenty, her bearing was that of a woman who had lived and learnt all there was to know of the world. One slim, ungloved hand rested on the table, and he noted the beauty of it, its slender, delicate fingers, and the perfect shape of her pink, shining nails. In the making of her, Nature seemed to have concentrated in her hands all her power of creating beauty.

The song finished to a round of applause.

"_Il est joliment drôle_," said Desirée to Charnac. "Ah! zut ... I could do with a drink."

"We won't have anything here," Charnac said. "They only sell species of poisons. Let's go and have supper at the Chariot d'Or.... Will you join us, Mr Quain?"

Why not? It was a perfectly harmless idea. Every experience added something to his knowledge. And yet, he hesitated. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, a feeling of uneasiness awoke in him. Charnac would pair off with Margot, and he would have to sit with Desirée during the meal. The thought carried with it a picture of forbidden things. Conscience argued with him: "You really oughtn't to, you know." "Why not? What harm will it do?" he urged. Conscience was relentless. "You forget you have a duty to some one." "Nonsense," he said, "let's look at the thing in a broad-minded way. It won't hurt me to have supper with them, surely."

Desirée laid a hand upon his sleeve gently.

"_Tu viens--oui_," she asked, in a low, caressing voice. Their eyes met. He saw the pupils of her narrow eyes grow larger for a second, as though they were striving to express unspoken thoughts. Then they receded and contracted to little, dark, twinkling beads set in their centre of pale blue circles.

"_Oui_," he said, with a sigh.

* * * * *

They came out into the noisy night of the Boulevard. They walked together, Charnac and Margot with linked arms. The lower floors of the night restaurants were blazing with light, but in the upper rooms the drawn blinds subdued the glare, and transformed it into a warm glow. Cabs and motor-cars came up the steep hill from the Grands Boulevards below for the revelry of supper after the theatre. The great doors of the Chariot d'Or were continually moving, and the uniformed doorkeeper seemed to enjoy the exercise of pulling the door open every second, as women in wraps, accompanied by men, crossed the threshold.

They went upstairs into a long brilliant room, all gold and glass and red plush, with white tablecloths shining in the strong light. In the corner a group of musicians, dressed in a picturesque costume--it might have been taken from any of the Balkan States, or from imagination--played a dragging waltz melody.

A dark woman sat by them, wearing a Spanish dress, orange and spangled, the bodice low-cut, and the skirt fanciful and short, showing her thin legs clad in black open-work stockings. She regarded the room with an air of detached interest, unanswering the glances of the men. She was the wife of the first violinist.

Charnac led the way to a table; he placed himself next to Margot on the red plush sofa-cushions, and Humphrey sat with Desirée. While Charnac was ordering the supper and consulting their individual tastes, Humphrey glanced round the room at the men who sat at the little tables with glasses of sparkling amber wine before them, some of them in evening-dress, with crumpled, soft shirt-fronts, others in lounge suits or morning-coats. Not all had women with them, but the women that he saw were luxurious, beautiful creatures, with indolent eyes and faces of strange beauty.

The lights gleamed under rose-coloured shades on the table, on the silver dishes piled high with splendid fruits, on bottles swathed tenderly with napkins, set in silver ice-pails, on tumblers of coloured wines and liqueurs.

"It's pretty here, eh?" said Desirée.

"It's not so bad. I've never been here before. Do you come often?"

"Oh no! not often: only when Margot brings Gustave to come and fetch me after I've been singing."

She clapped her hands gaily as the waiter set a steaming dish of mussels before them. The house was famed for its _moules marinières_. "I adore them," she said, unfolding her serviette, and tucking it under her chin. Charnac ladled out the mussels into soup-plates. Their blue iridescent shells shone in an opal-coloured gravy where tiny slices of onion floated on the surface. Her dainty fingers dipped into the plate, and she fed herself with the mussels, biting them from the shells with her sharp white teeth. She ate with an extraordinary rapidity, breaking off generous pieces from the long, crisp roll of bread before her, and drinking deeply of her red Burgundy.

She was simply an animal. Margot ate in much the same way, with greedy, quick gestures, until her plate was piled high with empty mussel shells. And, during the meal, they chattered trivialities, discussing personal friends in a slangy, intimate phraseology.

The sharp taste of the sauce, with its flavour of the salt sea-water, made Humphrey thirsty, and he, too, drank plenty of wine; and the wine and the warmth sent the colour rushing to his cheeks, and filled him with a sense of comfort. The whole atmosphere of the place had a soothing effect on him.

The orchestra started to play a Spanish dance, and the woman in orange rose from her seat, and tossing her lace shawl aside, moved down the aisle of tables in a sidling, swinging dance, castanets clicking from her thumbs, marking the sway and poise of her body above her hips. It was a sexual, voluptuous dance, that stirred the senses like strong wine. Now she flung herself backwards with a proud, uplifted chin. One high-heeled satin shoe stamped the floor. Her eyes flashed darkly and dangerously; she flaunted her bare throat and bosom before them; now she moved with a lithe sinuous motion from table to table, one hand on her hip, and the other swinging loosely by her side.

There was something terrible and triumphant in her dance to the beat of the music with its rhythm of a heart throbbing in passion.

"Bravo! bravo!" they cried, as the dance finished. "_Bis_," shouted Charnac, lolling back in his seat with his arm round Margot's shoulder.

"She dances well," said Humphrey.

Desirée turned her pale eyes on him. "I can dance better," she said, and before he had realized it, she was up and in the centre of the room, and everybody laughed and clapped hands, as Desirée began to dance with stealthy, cat-like steps. Her face was impudent, as she twined and twisted her thin body into contortions that set all the men leering at her. It was frankly repulsive and horrible to Humphrey; she seemed suddenly to have ceased to be a woman, just as when she had started to eat. She was inhuman when she sang and ate and danced.

The blur of white flesh through the smoke, the odour of heavy scents, and the sight of Desirée writhing in her horrid dance, sickened him. He saw her white teeth gleaming between her lips, half-parted with the exhaustion of her dance, he saw her eyes laughing at him, as though she were proud and expected his applause, and he felt a profound, inexplicable pity for her that overwhelmed his disgust.

She flung herself, panting, into her seat, and pushed back her disordered yellow hair with her hands. "_Oh la! ... la!_" she cried, laughing in gasps, "_c'est fatiguant, ça_ ... my throat is like a furnace." And she clicked her glass against the glass that Humphrey held in his hand, and drained it to the finish.

"Why did you do that?" asked Humphrey, huskily.

"Do what?"

"Dance like that--in front of all these people?"

"Why shouldn't I, if I want to?"

"I don't like it," he said, wondering why he was impelled to say so.

"Well, you shouldn't have said she dances well," Desirée replied.

"I must be going," Humphrey said.

"Oh, not yet," Charnac said. "Let's all go together."

"No," he pushed his chair away with sudden resolution. "I must go."

"But, my dear--" Desirée began.

"I must go," Humphrey repeated, slowly. It was like the repetition of a lesson. "I must go now."

"Oh, well--" Charnac said.

The waiter appeared with a bill. "You will allow me to pay?" Humphrey asked Charnac.

"_Mais non, mais non, mon ami_," he replied, good-naturedly. "It was I who asked you to come, wasn't it? Another night it will be your turn."

"Another night," echoed Margot, in her high-pitched voice. "_J'adore les Anglais, ils sont si gentils._"

"And why cannot you stop?" Desirée asked.

He avoided her eyes. Never could he explain in this room, with its scent and its music and its warmth, that turned vice into happiness and made virtue as chilling and intractable as marble. He only knew that he had to go. He made some excuse--any excuse--work--a headache ... he did not know what he was saying; he was only conscious of those narrow eyes beneath pale eyebrows, and red parted lips, and the soft hand that lay in his--the soft hand with the finger-tips as beautiful as rosy sea-shells.

They were not to blame; they could not be expected to know his innermost life, nor why it was that he felt suddenly as if he had profaned himself, and all that was most sacred to him. But that finer, nobler self that was always dormant within him, as eager to awaken to influences as it was to be lulled to sleep by them, became active and alert....

There was a hint of dawn in the sky as he came out into the empty street, his mind charged with a deep melancholy. But, as the cool air played about his face, he breathed more freely after the stuffy warmth of the room, and he walked with a firm step, square-shouldered, erect and courageous.

V