Chapter TWENTY-ONE

It was almost ten o’clock, but according to Geoffrey it was yet too early for what he planned to do. Catherine asked no further questions and possessed her soul in patience as they drove slowly about for half an hour, along the _quais_, up to the Bois and back, and around the Cité and the Ile St. Louis. The night was perfect. The twin truncated towers of Notre Dame stood out in bold relief against a starlit sky; the river, swiftly flowing between its inky parapets, was studded with gems of light. One after another they passed the stately Palais de Justice, the Hôtel Dieu, and the tall house where Abelard introduced the classics into the head of Heloïse and love into her heart.

At last Geoffrey re-crossed the river, and threading the garishly lighted Boul’ Mich’, teeming with humanity, turned into the Boulevard Montparnasse. Here, a few hundred yards to the right, he parked his car at the tail end of a long queue of motors drawn up before a small building, the lower walls of which were painted in the crudest possible version of the Futurist style. Catherine looked at it with surprise. The name, “Tattenham Corner,” roughly inscribed over the door, told her that it was a night-haunt then much in vogue, but which she had not visited and had heard her companion mention with contempt. Why he had brought her here she could not guess.

A blare of strident jazz music greeted them together with a hot rush of fœtid air, heavily laden with scent, stale smoke and the odour of perspiring bodies. Shrill laughter and the babel of many tongues rose above unvibrant saxophones, and as they lifted a grimy curtain hung over a doorway and looked in upon the single cramped and crowded room, they had a confused impression of seething, jostling couples, hugged in tight embraces and swaying, cheek to cheek, upon a dance-floor little larger than a hearth-rug. Hell let loose was all Catherine could think of. Amusing but loathsome! Instinctively she drew closer to Geoffrey, who put out a strong arm to shield her from the horde of boisterous students who surged in behind them, shoving their way to the fore by brute force.

No one paid the least attention to them, and it was with difficulty that Geoffrey attracted the notice of the one frowsy waiter who plied his way among the jammed tables, executing orders and making charge with an air of stolid indifference. Finally the man approached, wiped his hands on a dirty apron, and listened with dull eyes while Geoffrey said a few words to him in French. After a second he nodded, cast a glance over the room, and undertook to pilot them towards the far end, where they managed to squeeze their way to the only vacant places, fortunately against the wall.

“We shall have to order something,” Geoffrey said, “but I warn you it will be bad.”

Whereupon he commanded a _fine_, while Catherine chose an orangeade, thinking it would be comparatively harmless. However, she was wrong. The drink, in a smudged tumbler, arrived, poisonous red in colour, syrupy and strangely chemical to taste. The _garçon_ slopped it over on the table and made an ineffectual effort to mop it up with a filthy swab, his attention busy in other quarters.

What a place! Yet half the clients were of the leisured class, jaded but immaculately attired men, with women severely exquisite in the smartest of hats and the newest of ornaments. Why did they come here to stew in this stifling atmosphere, be served with nauseous drinks, and sit pressed like sardines against the unwashed bodies of midinettes, models and cocottes of the lowest type? It was a question only Paris can answer. They did not appear to be extracting any enjoyment from the experiment.

The music stopped, the dancers wormed their way to their seats. A thin girl with a chalked face, mouth like a vermilion scar, and hair plastered in dagger-points against her cheeks, threw herself into the chair opposite with a loud laugh and a wriggle of her snake-like figure. Her escort leered on her with a thick-lipped grimace, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and hammered loudly upon the table.

“Ent she sweet?” he carolled jocosely. “A walk-eeng down zhe street--I ask you confidont-zhallee, ent she sweet?” and he tweaked his lady’s ear, to be rewarded by a smack on the jaw.

In the comparative lull the curtain swayed, and an ancient dame, familiar to Montparnassians, stood like an image peering into the smoky interior. On her sparse grey hairs perched a man’s hat ornamented with a tiny bedraggled feather, while a soiled muffler was tied about her neck. Her toothless mouth was sunken between nose and withered chin, her bleared eyes ran slowly round with a knowing smile.

“_A’ Ami du Peuple--A’ Ami du Peuple_,” she piped in a monotonous sing-song, making it into a little tune.

No one noticed her, and presently she vanished, elbowed on her way by the waiter. She was promptly replaced by a little girl in a shawl, bare-headed, feet in ragged _pantoufles_, who carried a tray filled with bunches of flowers, one of which she extended in a grubby hand towards first one reveller, then another.

“_Des violets--des muguets--touts frais--messieurs, mesdames, des violets, des muguets.…_”

Then she, too, gave way before a jerk of the _garçon’s_ head and departed without disposing of a single posy, but undaunted, calmly philosophical.

Geoffrey bent his head towards Catherine.

“I want you to notice the couple beside you,” he whispered, his lips barely moving. “Watch the girl particularly and try to catch what she’s saying. She is the person I brought you here to see.”

She looked at him with amazed inquiry, then turned her head and surveyed her neighbour, whom till now she had scarcely noticed.

What she saw was a little wren-like creature of about twenty, jauntily arrayed in a bright blue jacket and skirt with a red-spotted neckerchief knotted round her throat and a hat like an aviator’s helmet worn so as to display a fringe of hennaed hair. Her perfectly round blue eyes had a babyish stare amidst black-beaded lashes raying out like the petals of a flower, her nose tilted up, and there was a circular patch of crimson painted upon each cheek, giving her the look of one of those naïve, slightly grotesque dolls seen in French shops. In a high, chirping falsetto she was chattering with an air familiar and inconsequent to a companion more than twice her age, a sober, hollow-eyed man, just now regarding her attentively while his bony fingers fumbled in a yellow packet of Maryland cigarettes.

“Who is she?” murmured Catherine, returning to Geoffrey in complete mystification.

“Never mind who she is. Listen.”

She obeyed wonderingly. For a few minutes she caught nothing of interest, only a childish description of some escapade at _Mi-Carême_, punctuated with argot and laughter. At the end of it the young person drained her glass, set it down with a smack of the lips, and gazed at her escort blandly, eyelashes in full play. At once the middle-aged man beat solemnly upon the marble with a coin till the waiter looked his way.

“_Encore un porto pour mademoiselle_,” he called, abstracting a note from a battered pocket-book.

Not until the full glass was brought did he speak, and though his tone was low, Catherine heard every syllable.

“And that was the last time you saw this Monsieur Blom?” he asked purringly.

Monsieur Blom!--Catherine repressed a start.

“Did you hear?” she whispered to Geoffrey.

He nodded and signed to her to continue listening. The girl at her side had risen to the bait like a hungry trout.

“_Comment c’etait la dernière fois?_” she retorted shrilly. “_Ta mère accouchait un singe, alors!_” she added with rude raillery, and sipped her port.

“No,” she continued more seriously. “I saw him lots of times after that. It wasn’t till a month after that Bordeaux visit that I told him he could go to the devil, nasty little toad! As if I was going to play second fiddle to that bag of bones. There are too many chances for a girl like me, I can tell you.” She sniffed contemptuously and ran a wetted thumb over her pencilled brows.

“I don’t know where his eyes were,” murmured her companion flatteringly, “to prefer this Madame Baron to you. Old, isn’t she?”

“Is she old?” chirped the damsel rhetorically. “Older than God, and a skin like an ostrich! Eyes--my word! They’re sharper than yours are, I’ll wager. They see where she’s got her savings hidden, Rich she must be, although you’d never guess it to look at her! That’s all he really cares about--money. He’d sell his soul to the devil for ten thousand francs!”

“But he must do pretty well, what with one thing and another,” suggested the other persuasively. “Shouldn’t you say so?”

“Oh, I daresay. He’s no spender, though. He was precious mean where I was concerned.”

“Ever hear him mention any pictures?”

There was a blank stare.

“Pictures? Never--unless you count some postcards he showed me once--filthy little beast!”--and with a grimace she produced her lipstick and applied it freely, studying her reflection in a small mirror.

“But what took him to Bordeaux? Have you any idea of his business there?”

“Bah! He never told me his affairs. Never talked much at any time--just sat drinking his beer and staring like this with his spotted eyes. _Sacré!_ It used to get on my nerves!”

“Secretive sort of man, was he?”

“Man! He’s not a man at all, he’s an animal, a crawling reptile, who has no knowledge of life. Mind you, he’s not French.”

The all but untranslatable phrase, “_qui n’a pas de savoir vivre_” was indescribably ludicrous, coming from these childish lips with an air of arrogant authority.

So this little piece of painted femininity had known the _notaire_ on the most intimate terms, might perhaps be acquainted with his secrets. Was she going to divulge anything important? Catherine listened eagerly.

“Did you ever hear him mention a client of his by the name of Jeanne Laborie?” pursued the agent smoothly, always with the manner of one not particularly concerned.

“Laborie? Never. Who is she? Friend of yours?”

“Only a lady’s maid, working at a place in the Avenue Henri Martin.”

She repeated the name of the street musingly.

“He had a man friend in the Avenue Henri Martin. Drove a big car, a Rolls-Royce. One Sunday we went for a drive with him, all the way to Chartres--had dinner at a hotel, and the friend stood us a bottle of champagne. It was just before Blom went away. I remember it, because I ruined my new skirt getting champagne on it, and the stingy little brute wouldn’t pay to have it re-pleated.”

“What was the friend like? A Frenchman?”

“No--Italian, or maybe Spanish. I don’t know which, but he could speak French well enough. Oh, he was quite _chic_, the friend. I could have had a good time with him, but I didn’t get a chance. I was a bit tight after dinner, and slept all the way home. He and Blom sat in front and talked.”

“What about?”

“How should I know? Didn’t I say I was asleep?” She gave him a push. “I only woke up to hear the Spaniard, or whatever he was, telling Blom the name of a hotel.”

“Ah! Can you remember what hotel it was?”

“No, of course I can’t. I wasn’t interested. But--well, now you speak of it, I believe I do know. It was the Hôtel des Négociants. Yes, that was it.”

“In Paris?”

She shook her head indifferently.

“Perhaps. I haven’t an idea. Anyhow, as he went away the next day, it may have been in Bordeaux.”

“Did he write to you from Bordeaux?”

“Not a line! But he was like that. I might have died for all he bothered.”

She sighed, but did not appear deeply affected. The agent continued to probe skilfully into her shallow little brain, but although the girl seemed quite willing to talk, there was no further information to be gained. However, just as Catherine was beginning to feel disappointed, she caught something which held her interest with a sort of fascination.

“No, I’m not sorry he’s gone,” observed the little creature callously. “I’m glad. I feel I can breathe again. I tell you, there was something about that little man I didn’t half like. So cold, so calculating--always planning, always thinking about something, I never knew what. He would sit and sit.… Say we were in a café, a gay place like this. He used to forget all about me, just sit and stare without blinking. If I spoke to him he didn’t answer, but kept his spotted eyes fixed on me with a sort of stillness, like…”

She broke off, wrapped in thought. Then with a laugh oddly nervous she went on again:

“I’ll tell you what it was like. Once in the packing-room at our place I found a huge spider in the middle of a web. Such a wicked devil--oh, a monster! It didn’t move, just stayed still and watched me. I screamed! You may laugh, but it was terrifying. There were flies tangled in the web, they couldn’t get away. I felt if he looked at me much longer I wouldn’t be able to get away either. You see? Well then, that is how I used to feel about Blom. He made me think of that spider, just sitting quiet in the midst of its web, waiting--and waiting. I wanted to shriek and run, and then it was as though my legs were tied together. Ah! It was frightful. If that Honorine can stand it, it’s more than I could!”

Her high-pitched voice trailed away, and she remained with round eyes staring at space, while one coarse little hand plucked at the scarf about her neck. At last she shook herself free from the disagreeable memory.

“Here, this is no good!” she cried brusquely, jumping to her feet. “What did you bring me here for, a funeral? Let’s dance.…”

When the space beside her was vacant Catherine drew a deep breath and turned to Geoffrey.

“Could you hear?” she asked, her eyes blazing.

He nodded with vexation.

“Total failure. The girl knows nothing against Blom.”

“Perhaps,” replied Catherine shaking her head. “But all the same she’s terrified of him. Did you notice her face when she spoke about the spider? She positively shuddered! She’s right, too, Geoffrey. There is something rather horrible about that little man. He gives me exactly that feeling of repugnance and--well, terror. I am quite, quite sure he is up to something evil.”

“Catherine, what a romantic imagination! Hermione Cushing couldn’t do better. I must take you home quickly, or you’ll be seeing spiders in your sleep!”

She laughed, crest-fallen.

“Am I such a fool? I wonder… Tell me, what did you gather from all this?”

“Very little, except the fact that Blom is evidently marrying the widow for her money. Moreover, the suddenness with which he began to pay court to her suggests that he wanted financial help in a hurry, for some definite purpose.”

It had, in fact, occurred to him that perhaps the _notaire_ intended to set up as a picture-dealer in some other country, probably America, in which case he would need capital for the enterprise. He could even be buying the pictures from Jeanne and Eduardo, meaning to pay for them with his future wife’s savings. If this were true, the visit to Bordeaux, a seaport, no doubt had a connection with his plans, since he would most likely consider it safer to remove the paintings away from Paris, preparatory to smuggling them out of France. Here at last was a clue for Bernard to work on.

“Come along, let’s get out,” he said, reaching for Catherine’s coat. “This air is unbearable.”

In the fresh night outside the clamour they had left behind seemed as unreal as a drunken dream.

“My poor lilies-of-the-valley!” exclaimed Catherine, touching the fading flowers at her breast.

“You must be wilted too. Do you realize I’ve dragged you about with me for eleven long hours?”

“Eleven hours! It has gone like a flash.”

Twenty minutes later, inside the dark hall of the apartment, she held out her hand to bid him good night.

“Not just yet,” he whispered, “Listen…”

Out of the spring night floated the strains of a violin, piercingly sweet. She held her breath, her eyes lit with reminiscence.

“Is it--? It is! The Albeniz Tango again! How wonderful it sounds, coming out of nowhere, like music from another world!”

They looked at each other, and suddenly under the influence of the darkness and the wooing notes the air became charged with electricity. Before she knew what had happened his arms were around her, his lips upon hers.

Strength ebbed away, she gave herself up to moments of exquisite rapture, during which time stood still. Under her fingers she felt his arm muscles tighten, while the odour of his warm skin and hair, so close to her nostrils, swept her away with subtle intoxication.

Seconds passed while they clung thus hungrily together. Then with a gasp Catherine pushed him from her.

“Don’t! You mustn’t!” she murmured, frightened. “I--I didn’t want you to do that!”

“Didn’t you?” he demanded, holding her hands fast in his. “I don’t believe it!”

Her face burned. They were still so near each other that she could hear the pounding of his heart.

“Why?” he insisted urgently. “Catherine, I mean this--with my whole soul. Don’t tell me you don’t care too. Since that day in the train I’ve thought of nothing but you. I’ve never felt like this about any woman. I want you to marry me as soon as possible. Will you?”

The force of his tone took away her breath. She retreated a step, eyes wide and dark, trying desperately to think clearly.

He loved her, then! After all these weeks of calm, unemotional behaviour, he was begging her to marry him! She could hardly believe her senses.

“Oh, Geoffrey,” she managed to answer in a shaking voice. “I--I don’t know. You see, for a whole year I was engaged to a man I didn’t love, and I swore never to make such a ghastly mistake again. I almost think I daren’t be engaged at all, but that some day, when I’m quite sure, I’ll marry someone all at once, before I can change my mind!” She finished with a wavering laugh.

“I’m not asking you to be engaged,” he muttered, smiling a little.

“But marriage is so irrevocable, isn’t it? I mean I’ve got to think things over… All the same, I did love--that.” Her breast rose. “Only, because I loved it I must be all the more cautious and not be carried away. It mayn’t be the real thing, and until I’m quite sure I mustn’t let you kiss me again.”

“Very well, then,” he said briefly. “But it will be hard-going--now.”

“Perhaps it will be hard for me, too,” she answered with shining eyes. “But I must stick to it, for I know I’m right.”

He was gone. She heard his car start, then with fluttering pulses groped her way towards the staircase.

Yes, she was right. Until she could determine the depth of this new emotion she dared not repeat the embrace which had robbed her of all reasoning power. Yet, oh, how terribly she longed to do so! She clung to the newelpost, weak with the memory of physical ecstasy.

Round her was heavy stillness, broken only by the ticking of the hall clock. Then, out of the enveloping gloom, her ear detected a faint, distant sound which rose and fell spasmodically. She raised her head and listened.

It came from the court side of the apartment, a stifled piteous sobbing, heart-rending to hear. Could it be Germaine, and if so, was she alone? At this hour, too, past midnight?

Without stopping to think she crept quietly along the passages to her cousin’s room.