Chapter IV (4)

He saw her narrow her eyes as she looked at him, and heard the sharp intake of her breath. “Oh, my God!” thought Ventrillon, “I am ruined! I have gone too far!”

“Audacious!” she murmured. “I like audacity.” She flashed all her teeth upon him and for the moment blinded him. “Come and talk to me.”

She sat down, letting her long arms drift from the arms of her chair. “I hope you don’t fox trot. I refuse to fox trot. It is so vulgar. When that Fanny Max began to fox trot, the Belletaille ceased. Now tell me all about yourself. I am a person in whom one can confide. Everybody tells me everything. I am always so interested in other people. It is my character. That is why I am never bored. Only the stupid are bored. And then my life has been so interesting, so full of such strange coincidences and such fascinating episodes.” Then, before allowing him one word of the telling all about himself, or herself the time to catch her breath, she shrieked the length of the room to the Minister of Public Services, who had at that moment entered again, “What did she say, Théodule?”

“She will send the gown at once,” said the minister, mopping his forehead. “But what a devil of a time I had getting her! Telephonists have lost all respect. I did not remember the number and I did not want to waste the minutes, so I said to the telephonist, ‘I know, my girl, it is forbidden to call without a number, but this is the Minister of Public Services who speaks.’ And figure to yourselves what she says! ‘_Flute alors!_’ she says. ‘Go on with you! That is what they all say!’”

“Oh,” laughed red-haired little Mme. Ribot, “that is exactly what happened to Fanny Max, the new soprano everybody is talking about, you know.” Ventrillon saw Mme. Sutrin give the little woman a warning glance, and knew that Belletaille had stiffened at the mention of the name. But Mme. Ribot wore a gown which had been ruined by the Minister of Public Services, and she was about to make him pay through the nose. Nothing could have stopped her. “Excepting that _she_ said she was the _wife_ of the Minister of Public Services; and the telephone girl said----”

Mme. Sutrin, having not the vaguest idea what that telephone girl had said, but knowing Mme. Ribot’s tongue only too well, made a desperate gesture to the leader of the jazz band, hoping to drown it in cacophony. The Negro had gone out for a drink. Mme. Sutrin subsided hopelessly.

“The telephone girl said,” Mme. Ribot continued calmly and deliberately--“she said, ‘Oh, the pig! _He has deceived me!_’”

The minister went a violent shade of royal purple.

“And that very day,” the shameless red-haired little creature went on, “Fanny Max went to the telephone bureau with a riding whip, and it required six men to eject her. Ministers of public services must be fascinating.” She looked up wickedly at the minister, who looked down at her in turn as if he would have liked to bite her. She was obtaining royal indemnities for her gown.

“Oh, spare me!” cried the Belletaille. “I suffocate! All one hears is Fanny Max! Fanny Max! Fanny Max! The newspapers are full of her. Why people will discuss such a creature I cannot understand. Such vulgarity! It makes me ill. And she will do anything for notoriety. I abhor notoriety myself. I loathe notoriety. And voice? It is like the screech of a rusty hinge. Really, Madame Sutrin, if we are to have nothing but Fanny Max----”

“I assure you, madame,” said the minister to Mme. Ribot, striving to keep his rage from his voice, “that I have not the honour of knowing Mademoiselle Max----”

“Oh,” she cried quickly, “never fear! Your wife will not hear it from _me_.”

“Ugh!” said the Belletaille to Ventrillon, “it continues! It is disgusting! It is unspeakable! It is----”

“Mademoiselle,” interrupted Ventrillon, “why speak of her? She exists only to be ignored by you.”

The Belletaille gave him her grateful full face. “I knew it the moment I saw you,” she declared. “You are a mystic, and I think mysticism is so fascinating. You have the eyes. I am a mystic myself. Everybody notices it. Sometimes I think we mystics alone know the true soul of things. What a truth that is, ‘She exists only to be ignored by me!’ You are a painter, aren’t you? It is these young ones, these young mystics, who do the great things. Why do you not paint my portrait?”

Ventrillon gulped.

“I dared not ask it,” he said.

“Then that is settled. We shall begin to-morrow afternoon. But come, take me to my car. It is evident that these surroundings are not for us. Ah, Madame Sutrin,” she said sweetly as she took her hostess’s hand, “it has been _so_ interesting! One finds so many people at your house one would never dream of meeting anywhere else.”

When she passed the minister, Ventrillon heard her hiss something into his face. It sounded extraordinarily like, “Never speak to me again!” But Ventrillon was never sure of this, for the jazz band had begun anew. Nevertheless, he distinctly saw little Mme. Ribot look up from under her red hair to observe this brief passage, and then down to contemplate a large wet stain on her satin skirt with a smile of enormous satisfaction.

“After all,” reflected Ventrillon, “the great are all ridiculous. It is easier than I had thought.”

FOURTH REFLECTION

At the curb Ventrillon handed the Belletaille into her limousine.

“Till to-morrow,” she said graciously as he stood there bowing, with the hat of eight reflections in his hand. The car, purring, was about to move off, but she signalled the driver with a vibratory gesture of both her long white hands, and then tore with them at the vivid bouquet at her waist. She leaned from the car and thrust a scarlet amaryllis into Ventrillon’s buttonhole. “It is my flower,” she said, “the guaranty of our bargain.”

As the car rolled silently from the curb into the traffic, he raised the lapel of his coat and gallantly pressed his lips to the flaming lily. He saw her smile with all her teeth and wave her hand.

“Undoubtedly,” he said to himself as he strolled leisurely on down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, “it is because I happened to be designed by nature to wear a hat of eight reflections.”

His recent success ran in his blood like champagne. The scarlet badge of it was brave in his buttonhole, and if he had been wearing his old black felt and strolling down the Boulevard St.-Michel, he would have sung. But such behaviour was not for the man he had become. Neither was the company at the Closerie des Lilas.

In the Champs-Élysées he passed his good old friend Sabrin, who was promenading Clo-clo on his arm. Clo-clo shook her golden ringlets and giggled.

“Regard me that, if you please!” she cried. “Ventrillon has become a bourgeois! Ventri in a hat of eight reflections!”

How shabby they looked!

Ventrillon lifted the hat of eight reflections and bowed--with a grace, and hoped nobody saw him do it. Sabrin’s mild eyes deepened as if he had been a dog and Ventrillon had struck him, but Clo-clo gave a delighted little scream of amusement.

“I do not think,” reflected Ventrillon, his ears blazing as he walked on, “that I shall frequent the Closerie des Lilas any more.”

As that was the only place in Paris where might be found a friend to buy him a dinner, and the reason for his walking the long distance from the Étoile to the Rue Jacob was that he had not even the price of a Métro ticket, Ventrillon went to bed early that night, imploring sleep to quiet his hunger.

FIFTH REFLECTION

If it had not been for the sandwiches the Belletaille served with her tea and the suppers to which she had him invited, Ventrillon might have starved. But in the smart company at those suppers in fashionable restaurants he had begun to wonder how he had ever been able to endure the shabbiness of the Closerie des Lilas. And every day he could glimpse his image in the shop windows as he wore the hat of eight reflections along the boulevards to the doorway of the greatest singer in Paris.

She had arranged with Volland for a public exhibition of the portrait in his celebrated galleries on the day after it was finished. Volland well knew that the portrait of such a woman could not fail to bring _tout Paris_ in crowds to his doors. After the _cachet_ of a commission from the Belletaille and an exhibition at Volland’s, other commissions would begin to pour in to Ventrillon, and complete success would follow rapidly. He who now wore a hat of eight reflections with bravado could then wear it with authority. Ventrillon would be a personage of _tout Paris_. Cannot one well bear one’s hunger for that?

Enthroned in a tall-backed Spanish chair draped with cloth of gold, the Belletaille sat in emerald green and all her make-up. She insisted upon the make-up.

“Without it,” she said, “the portrait would not be decent. You might as well paint me in the nude.”

Ventrillon worked in rapt absorption. He was doing the most brilliant bit of painting he had ever done, and this youth with the bright face of an archangel could paint like the devil himself. “It is my chance,” he said to himself as the composition took form on the canvas with which the Belletaille had supplied him, “and I am going to startle the natives.”

She refused to look at the portrait.

“The Belletaille is beautiful,” she said, “and an unfinished painting is not. I shall wait until it is hung in a good light at Volland’s.”

During the _repos_ she would sing to him, or feed him with sandwiches and tea. The number of sandwiches he ate astonished and delighted her. “He is a true original,” she thought. “They always eat like that. Besides, he has such nice eyes.”

She sang for him, without accompaniment, songs which she said she reserved from the public for her dearest friends alone. It was a curious collection of unknown things: strange, wild songs of the Sicilian peasants, weird, lonesome songs of Siberian slaves; and sad, earthy songs from the Hebrides, all unwritten, and passed down by tradition.

“These songs are old; God knows how old,” she would say. “They are ageless, cosmic things. That is why they are so amusing.”

“One must confess,” thought Ventrillon, “that it is better than hearing Pinettre squeal ‘O Sole mio!’ at the Closerie. And to think that I am hearing it all free! Evidently I was born for this.”

They worked in the music room, and whenever she sang she opened the windows, all of which faced the street.

“It is for my children,” she would say, “the people of Paris. Sometimes they gather in crowds beneath my windows, and it is touching to hear their applause. You will not envy them the crumbs of your feast.”

On the last day Ventrillon placed a slender high light down the length of the nose, and heightened the green reflection of her gown under the curve of the chin. With these two strokes the portrait sprang into solidity and completion. Ventrillon stood back, astonished.

“_Nom de dieu!_” he swore, completely forgetting how far he had risen out of the atmosphere of the Closerie des Lilas. “I shall not only startle the natives, but, _ma foi_, I have startled myself!”

“Is it really like that!” cried the Belletaille, eagerly, and ran to the easel. But she restrained herself, covering her eyes with her hands. “No, I shall not look! My children must see me when I look upon it for the first time at Volland’s. I must give them that privilege. But I know that you have done me a great portrait. I said at the beginning that you had the eyes. I shall sing for you. I shall sing for you a song I almost never sing. It was written for me by Rimsky-Korsakof himself. Even Rimsky had no copy. ‘It is for you alone,’ he said to me; but, my friend, I shall sing it for you!” She opened the windows, and went to stand in the curve of her piano.

“Ah,” she said, “but this song is _bitter_! Bitter, bitter. You will hear how bitter it is.” She thrust one bony knee forward, and clasped her long thin hands upon her head, crushing her hair down into her eyes. Her rouged lips taut, she sang through her teeth, and her eyes became malignant slits under her hair. Slowly, in the deepest, the most troubling tones of all her extraordinary range, she began:

“Tr-r-r-r-a...................... la! La!
Tr-r-r-r-a...................... la! La!
I will not allow my heart to br-reak!
Tra-la-la! Tra-la-la!”

She stopped.

“Now, do you hear? Is it not _bitter_? Is there anything else so bitter in all the world? But wait until you hear the A in altissimo at the end! That is the bitterest of all. I give it my full voice, and it is terrible. You will never hear anything like it as long as you live. Never! Listen!

“Her lamplight shines upon his face, Tra-la-la!
His mouth is hot against her throat, Tra-la-la!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! I do not care! Tr-r-r-r-a-la-la!
Tra!--_La!_--LA!”

Her full voice, loud, hard, and colourless, cut the last syllable out of its shrill heights like an ominous, sharp-edged knife. Shiver followed shiver down Ventrillon’s spine. He sat spellbound. When she sang she was truly great.

Outside the windows rose a burst of applause from a crowd which had gathered in the street.

“Listen!” cried the Belletaille, shaking her widespread, long white fingers above her head with joy. “My children!” She darted to a window.

As she stood in the window, holding the draperies apart with her hands, the radiance upon her face flickered and died. Her chin thrust steadily forward from between her thin shoulders, and the cords of her neck stood out like wires under her skin.

“Ah-h-h-h!” she gasped, hoarse with rage, “the cow! the camel! the pig! the poiasse! The’--the--agh-h-h-h-h-h!” She could not think of words terrible or scorching enough to soothe the hot desire of her throat for exacerbation. Ventrillon felt like stopping his ears against what she would say next. “The--the _species of indelicate_!” she cried at last, and subsided, thwarted by the French language.

Ventrillon went to her side and looked out. One side of the street was packed with a mass of excited people, gesticulating, laughing, applauding. The other was deserted save for a little Dresden-china figure in a ridiculous frilly frock, with a tiny absurdity of a hat cocked down above her impertinent, tip-tilted nose, and the two huge black leopards she was promenading through the streets of Paris on a leash. The muscles of the black beasts slid like snakes beneath their sleek hides, their soft muzzles slobbered, their red tongues lolled, and their jade-green eyes shifted uneasily as they dragged the foolish little creature behind them along the pavement on her stilted heels. She was laughing with delight, and flicking them frivolously with a jewelled riding whip. It was Fanny Max.

Four _gendarmes_ stood in the street, consulting in whispers. The one with the longest moustache took his courage in his hands and advanced with his chest out. The others gallantly followed. The crowd cheered again. Fanny Max touched her beasts toward the _gendarmes_. One leopard snarled. The _gendarmes_ ignominiously fell back. Fanny Max laughed a silvery little “ha! ha!” and continued her triumphant progress. The crowd cheered wildly and howled with delight. The Belletaille burst into wild tears.

“T-to think,” she sobbed, “that she would have the impudence to come _here_! In _my_ street! She does it purposely! I _know_ she does it purposely. Oh, but she is vulgar! And her notoriety! How it is disgusting! How I ab-b-bominate n-n-notoriety!”

Suddenly the Belletaille straightened. She turned to clutch both Ventrillon’s arms with hands like steel fetters.

“Tell me,” she demanded hungrily, “it is true that this portrait is great, is it not? It is something incredible, it is an amazing portrait, it is true that it will startle them, is it not?”

“Mademoiselle,” said Ventrillon, “have I not said that it startles even me?”

“Ah,” murmured the Belletaille, reassured, “then to-morrow! To-morrow! I will not look. I could not recapture the emotion. I must give them that emotion to-morrow! To-morrow at Volland’s! Let me kiss you upon your forehead--like a mother.”

Ventrillon had not fully realized that no more than a single day lay between him and his triumph. Thus far, to _tout Paris_, he had been only a protégé of the Belletaille. That in itself was no small distinction. But within twenty-four hours, to-morrow, to-morrow at Volland’s, he would be Ventrillon, the most celebrated portrait-painter in Paris. As the Belletaille pressed her painted lips to his forehead, the remunerative applause of _tout Paris_ already resounded in his youthful ears. His heart began to beat faster, and his blood throbbed in his temples.

“To-morrow!” he said, with eyes like stars. “To-morrow at Volland’s!”

SIXTH REFLECTION

Ventrillon brushed the hat of eight reflections until it shone again. He had eaten no luncheon, and was compelled to walk all the way, but he had become accustomed to both these facts. Besides, from under the gay awnings of the cafés along the boulevards people pointed him out to one another as he passed, and that was a compensation. As he neared the doorway of Volland’s his heart was beginning to swell in his chest, and his head was growing dizzy beneath the refulgent hat.

To the point of discomfort the great exhibition salon was packed with _tout Paris_. Volland shoved his way about amid richly dressed shoulders, beaming upon them with his little pig-like eyes, and tugging at his goatee with joy. Luminous with electric light, and the only ornament of the barren gray expanse of his walls, the portrait dominated the hall. It was a tremendous success. Not only was it the portrait of the most conspicuous figure in Paris, but the brilliancy of colour and design was sensational. On every hand one heard: “Superb! Magnificent! One expects her to speak!” The crowd, already too closely pressed, increased, but nobody left the salon; for _tout Paris_ was waiting for a still greater sensation. The morning papers had announced that the Belletaille would arrive that afternoon to look upon her portrait for the first time. The Belletaille had seen to that.

A new enthusiasm developed near the door and spread rapidly through the entire assembly. “It is she herself!” they whispered, and made way for her. It was the Belletaille. She was entering.

She advanced to within a few yards of the portrait and halted for a magnificent moment, confronting her painted self.

A young girl whispered excitedly:

“It is exactly like her! One knows not which is which!” Then she gave a little frightened shriek and shrank back into the crowd, for the Belletaille had turned on her like an angry tigress.

It is a curious fact that every one of us carries in his secret heart an image of himself totally different from the person that others see. The hardened portrait painter strives to approximate that image. But the portrait which Ventrillon, the novice, had painted was more like the Belletaille than was the Belletaille herself. For that great lady was, in every moment of her life, hard at work being something else. Perhaps that is the true cause of what followed, and perhaps it is not.

She collected herself. Opening her vanity case with splendid quick movements of those famous chalk-white hands, she took out a little ivory-handled manicure implement to do with it a thing for which it had not been designed.

She advanced upon the portrait, and with the gesture that she had until that moment reserved for slaying the baritone, slashed the tiny knife through and through the canvas until it dangled from the frame in twisting, slattern shreds. Then she turned to face her awestruck audience.

“The Belletaille is beautiful!” she cried in a sonorous middle voice. “None but the hand of time shall dare to deface her!”

Whereupon, with the magnificent walk of her second act of “Tosca,” she strode toward the door. As she reached it, Ventrillon was entering, his young cheeks hot, and his eyes shining with elated expectancy.

Those who saw the ensuing event were to boast of it afterward, and those who had not seen it were to pretend that they had.

“Pig!” she cried full in his face, and swinging high her parasol, broke it over the hat of eight reflections. Carrying the remains of the parasol with her, she stalked, always magnificent, into the street.

Vaguely, Ventrillon removed the ruin from his head, and stared at it, stupefied. The crowd was wild with restrained excitement, but he heard not their whispers, or even their sudden, suppressed little outbursts of high-strung laughter. The portrait was destroyed. The Belletaille hated him. She had made him ridiculous. _Tout Paris_ would reject him. There were now no future commissions on which to count. He was hungry, he had not a sou, and even the hat of eight reflections was a wreck in his hand.

Ventrillon reflected. This was his to-morrow, his to-morrow at Volland’s.

SEVENTH REFLECTION

But certain fierce and earnest words whispered in his ear with excited persistency began at last to penetrate the vacuum of his deadened brain. Puzzled, he turned to face the speaker.

A thin, blond young man with white eyelashes was begging anxiously:

“I’ll give you a hundred francs for that hat! I’ll give you two hundred! I’ll give you five hundred----”

Ventrillon blinked. Then his brain cleared, as does the atmosphere with lightning.

“No!” he thundered in a voice which filled the room. “_Nom de dieu!_ No!” And Ventrillon was himself again.

“A chair!” he shouted. “Somebody find me a chair!”

Nobody knew what was going to happen next, but everybody was ready and delighted to do anything which might promote its happening. From somewhere a chair was passed over the heads of the crowd. Ventrillon mounted upon it.

For a moment he paused. The beauty of his young face and the verve of his pose commanded a spontaneous burst of applause; but as he opened his mouth to speak, the noise died quickly into breathless silence.

“_Messieurs et ’dames_,” he cried, “Regard me this hat! There is none other like it. Never has such a thing happened before, and never will it happen again. Here is the unique hat crushed by the umbrella of the great Belletaille, and merely to own it is to render yourself famous. Now attend to this extraordinary fact! I, Odillon Ventrillon, stand here upon this chair, willing to part with this treasure. It is incredible, but, _messieurs et ’dames_, how much am I bid?”

This turn of affairs was not banal; it was not at all banal. And it was perfectly true that the shapeless hat which Ventrillon was offering was already historic. It was on a par with the shoes of Catherine de’ Medici in the Musée de Cluny. The highest bidder would be the envied of _tout Paris_.

“Six hundred francs,” piped the tenor of the blond youth, breaking the silence.

“A thousand francs,” cried an extravagantly dressed South American, enjoying himself hugely. There was a burst of applause.

“Ah, no, monsieur,” regretted Ventrillon; “there will be higher bids than that.”

“Two thousand,” abruptly announced an ambitious lady, wearing pink pearls, from the midst of a group of her three daughters dressed exactly alike in yellow cotton.

“Only _two thousand francs_!” shouted Ventrillon. “Madame, you do yourself the injustice of underestimating its value.”

“Two thousand, five hundred,” recklessly screamed the blond youth. The ambitious lady turned pale.

“O _Maman_,” cried the eldest of her three daughters, “bid again! We are so rich, and he is so beautiful!”

“Yes, _Maman_!” urged the other two, breathlessly. A ripple of amusement spread through the crowd.

“Two thousand, five hundred, and seventy-five,” announced that lady with excessive poise, and switched a superior smile over the entire assembly.

But the bidding became general, and little by little the price went up. The hat was now the sensation of Paris; every franc bid increased the sensation; and _tout Paris_, which lives on sensation, bid on. Then entered the lists a modest little gentleman with a pince-nez, a _nouveau riche_ of the war, who felt himself intruding wherever he went. His timid voice becoming weaker with every increase until at last it was only a whisper, he began persistently overtopping every bid made.

“Four thousand, forty-five,” bid the blond youth.

“Four thousand, fifty,” bid the gentleman in the pince-nez.

“Four thousand, fifty-five,” bid the lady in pearls.

“Four thousand, sixty,” bid the gentleman in the pince-nez, almost automatically.

The lady in pearls set her jaw.

“Four thousand, sixty-one,” she pronounced grimly.

The blond youth mopped his overheated brow and shot his bolt.

“Four thousand, _eighty_!” and, immediately over-bid by the little gentleman in the pince-nez, rushed frantically from the room. Another bid in a voice without identity.

“Five thousand miserable little francs!” thundered Ventrillon, scornfully. “And the rate of exchange, what it is? _Bon dieu!_ It is an insult to Mademoiselle Belletaille!”

But the sum was already beyond even reason of unreason; it was as if a cold wind had blown into the room. Ventrillon became sensitive to the situation.

“Five thousand, five hundred,” suddenly whispered the little gentleman in the pince-nez.

“Five thousand, five hundred,” shouted Ventrillon, quickly. “Going, going---” For a moment there was dead silence.

“O _Maman_,” excitedly cried the eldest daughter of the lady in pearls, “is it too late?”

“_Chut!_” hissed the mother, pinching her daughter’s arm until she squealed.

“Gone,” thundered Ventrillon, with finality--“gone to the dignified monsieur in the pince-nez.”

That little man advanced conspicuously to take possession. The crowd cheered wildly. Volland made his way in through the uproar.

“Of course, my friend,” he said genially, rubbing his hands before the chair of Ventrillon, “you will not forget my commission. A hat is not art, to be sure, but I am accustomed to 10 per cent. on sales made in my galleries.”

Ventrillon, with an air, peeled off five hundred-franc notes and one fifty from the huge packet the dignified little monsieur with the pince-nez had produced from his pockets, and presented them to Volland.

He who was accustomed to wearing a hat of eight reflections went bareheaded that evening to his garret.

“But,” reflected Ventrillon, “one _never_ wears a hat to eat. Politeness forbids.” And that night he would dine extravagantly.

EIGHTH REFLECTION

At noon the next day Ventrillon woke from the long slumber of the well fed to a nervous knocking at his door.

“Who is there?” he roared angrily.

“_Chut! Chut!_ But it is I,” loudly whispered the awed voice of the concierge. “There is a lady below----”

“Tell her I cannot see her.”

“_But_, monsieur, she _says_ that she is the great Mademoiselle Belletaille of the Opéra Comique.”

Ventrillon started in alarm. Perhaps that astonishing woman had come with a gun.

“Tell her I cannot see her.”

“But, monsieur, she resembles precisely her photographs in ‘Excelsior’----”

“I don’t care whose photographs she resembles----” But he stopped short, for he heard the footsteps of the Belletaille herself running up the stairs.

Ventrillon leaped from his bed, and in his bare legs and shirt flung himself against the door.

“Open your door to me!” cried the ecstatic voice of the Belletaille. “Have you seen the morning papers? You cannot refuse me the pleasure of grasping your hand! The name of that Fanny Max does not appear. There was no room for it. She had not even the distinction of being among those present.”

“But, mademoiselle,” protested Ventrillon, “I cannot see you.”

“_Tout Paris_ is wild with the news,” the Belletaille rushed on; “even your head-size appears in the papers. It was a clever idea of me to destroy that portrait, was it not? Even as I plunged it into my own likeness, I felt that I plunged my little knife into the heart of that creature. But you have surpassed me. It was a stroke of genius. And what an advertisement for my American tour! I must kiss you on both your cheeks----”

“But, mademoiselle,” cried Ventrillon, in agony. “I am not dressed. Would you have me receive you in my shirt?”

“Then open your door a little way. All the world will want to know you now; but can you not come to me this afternoon? We must begin another portrait. Open it only a little way! Permit me to give you the present I have brought you.”

Ventrillon allowed her to intrude a large bandbox through the gap of the partly opened door. When she had gone, he examined it, gingerly; he wondered if she had handed him an infernal machine. He had heard of such things, and could not trust her honeyed words.

He placed it on his table, and opened it by cautiously cutting away pieces of its sides with his pocket-knife. When all the cardboard had been cut away, there stood upon his table, crown-side down, and filled with scarlet amaryllis, a hat, a magnificent hat, an elegant hat, a formidable hat, a hat which was all there was of chic, a genuine glistening stove-pipe hat, an authentic hat of eight reflections.

Ventrillon stared. It was really true that he was higher in the favour of the Belletaille than ever. He was probably the most talked-of person in Paris. He could that afternoon begin another portrait, and a greater celebrity than he had ever hoped for was within his grasp. There was even before him on his table a shining hat of eight reflections in which to walk before the admiring eyes of _tout Paris_.

Now the concierge, who, fascinated, had remained behind to peek in at the crack of the door, saw a strange thing. When she reported it eagerly to him that evening, her worthy spouse remarked that now he knew what had become of that bottle of _eau-de-vie_ his uncle had sent up from the country, and he was not a man to be taken in by a woman’s lies, even when she was sober.

Slinging its contents of scarlet amaryllis about the floor, Ventrillon snatched the hat from the table, placed it accurately in the seat of his chair, and sat upon it.

“It is curious, old fellow,” he reflected aloud, without rising from the inchoate mass it had become--“it is curious how strange one always feels when one discovers that one has been human. But to-night you and I--_you_ and _I_ are going together to the Closerie des Lilas. May the francs in my pocket persuade our friends to be merciful!”

So far as the concierge could ascertain, he was addressing a rusty, broad-brimmed black felt hat which hung shapeless from a nail on the opposite wall.

Which, of course, was absurd.

HOME-BREW

BY GRACE SARTWELL MASON

From _Saturday Evening Post_

“Of course, they’re all dears, my family,” said Alyse; “but as fiction material there is nothing to them; no drama, you know; no colour; just nice, ordinary, unimaginative dears. They’re utterly unstimulating. That’s why I can’t live at home, and create. They don’t understand it, poor dears; but what could I possibly find to write about at home?”

She crushed down upon her hair, with its Russian bob, a sad-coloured hat of hand-woven stuff, and locked the door of a somewhat crumby room over the Rossetti Hand-Loom Shop, where she worked half time for a half living. A secondhand typewriter accounted for the other half; or, to be quite truthful, for a fraction of the other half. For her father, plain George Todd, helped out when the typewriter failed to provide.

She then betook herself on somewhat reluctant feet to the nearest Subway. For this was her evening at home with her unstimulating family; and though she was fond of them all, her predominating feeling for them was a mixture of amusement, tender tolerance, and boredom. Moreover, they lived in Harlem, which was a deplorable wilderness, utterly lacking in atmosphere and a long, long way from the neighbourhood of the hand-loom shop.

In the Subway, miraculously impelled through the bowels of the earth, Alyse--or Alice, as she had been christened--refrained from looking at the faces opposite her. The Subway does something curious to faces. It seems to drain all life out of them; it strips from them their defensive masks and exposes the deep and expressive scars of existence. A secret and hidden soul comes out in each Subway face. But Alyse averted her eyes.

“Dear me,” she sighed, “how dull they are! Isn’t there any beauty left in the world?”

Her father and his chum, Wally, were just ahead of her as she came up from the Subway depths. They were wending their way to their respective homes, having come up from downtown together, as was their invariable custom. Alyse gazed at their middle-aged backs without seeing anything unusual about them. Just two plodding men, getting tubby about the waist, with evening papers under their arms, walking along, not saying much. But when they reached George Todd’s door, they would look at each other, and the passer-by might well have stopped and taken off his hat, as before something rare and soul-satisfying. For here was perfect peace in friendship.

But all they said was: “S’long. See you to-night, ol’ hoss.” Or, “See you t’morrow mornin’, Georgie.”

Alyse had heard the tale of her father’s miraculous re-union with Wally so many times that it meant nothing to her. It seemed that as boys they had lived within two doors of each other in a small New England town, and they had been inseparable. First thing in the morning and last thing at night they were whistling outside each other’s windows; they owned a dog in common; and when George had scarlet fever, Wally nearly died from anxiety. Then, at sixteen, life had borne them in different directions. Wally drifted finally to Alaska and George got a job in New York. For a time they corresponded, but after a while letters began to come back to George marked Not Found, and then in a roundabout way he heard of Wally’s death.

Although George Todd was happily married, with a growing family, he admitted that the world would never seem quite the same to him with Wally out of it. Then came the happening that convinced him there are mysterious and unexplainable things in the world, say what you like. He was coming home from work one night, walking from the Subway rather more slowly than usual and enjoying the spring twilight, when in some strange way his heart stirred. He remembered how on evenings such as this he and Wally used to play a game in which one tossed a ball over the house to the other and gave a peculiar call. The middle-aged George declared that all of a sudden he could hear this call, and wanting to fix it in his memory, he endeavoured to imitate it by whistling its rather melancholy intervals.

And at his whistle a man walking in front of him suddenly whirled and stared at him. It was Wally--Wally, with a newspaper in his pocket and a bundle of shirts from the laundry under his arm. He had been living within half a block of George for two years.

When her father told this story to Alyse he always at this point gave her an affectionate poke.

“Now there’s a story for you, Allie. You write up about Wally being washed out to sea and given up for dead and working his way around the world, and finally settling down in Harlem right next door to his old chum. And that about the whistle. What was it made me think of that old call?”

Alyse would explain that it was coincidence, and coincidence was the lowest form of literary life. She was patient about it, but there was nothing stimulating to her creative imagination in Wally and that come-and-find-me voice he had listened to half his life. Still less was she stimulated by her father, George Todd, owner of a feed and grain business of the most eccentric instability. He was a dear, and she loved him; but she hoped as they all sat down to supper that he wouldn’t begin to joke her about her work or offer her the plot for a story.

It was a spring evening and the dining-room windows were open to the two lilac bushes which Alyse’s mother had nursed for years in the narrow, sooty back yard. The room was filled with an unreal light, as if the air was full of golden pollen dust. And something else, invisible and palpitant, was in the air of the homely room, something not to be seen but only sensed. Some intense preoccupation a sympathetic eye could have noted in three of the faces around the table.

“Well, well, we’re all dressed up to-night,” said George Todd, unfolding his napkin. “Look at Miggsy, Allie. Won’t she knock somebody’s eye out to-night?”

Alyse looked at her young sister, Mildred, aged sixteen. Mildred blushed, fidgeted, pouted entreatingly at her father. She was a thin little beauty, with a soft cloud of corn-silk hair about her face. In her red mouth desire and wistfulness mingled. To-night her eyes were stretched and brilliant. She twitched at the table silver and appeared to have no appetite.

“Eat your spinach, dearie.” Her mother’s eyes brooded over her tenderly. “I thought you liked it creamed.”

“I do, but---- Goodness, mother, is that clock right? I must fly!”

“But there’s chocolate pudding for dessert, dear.”

“Now, Miggs, finish your dinner. Why be so fidgety?”

Mildred looked in desperation from her father to her mother.

“But I don’t want any dinner, please! I--I have to be there early. Please let me go now, Mother.”

She danced from one foot to the other, the secret excitement in her eyes threatening to change to anger. She had spent most of the time since she came home from school that afternoon in front of her mirror, and she was now exquisitely polished, powdered, and perfumed. From under the fluff of hair over each ear an earring of blue to match her eyes dangled.

Alyse disapproved of the earrings and of the general effect of Milly to-night. She made a mental note to speak to her mother about letting the child go out so many evenings. But beyond the earrings and the general overstrung and overdressed effect she did not penetrate. She made no attempt to interpret the secret excitement in her young sister’s eyes. The affairs of a girl of sixteen were too inane and foolish to be taken seriously.

At the table when Milly had gone flying up the stairs there remained Alyse, her father and mother, Eddie, twenty-one, and Aunt Jude. Alyse glanced around the table and suppressed a sigh. The monotony of the lives of her family sometimes oppressed her. Take her mother, for instance. She seldom went outside the house except to church or to an occasional motion picture with Wally and George. All day she did housework or looked after Grandma Todd when Aunt Jude was at work. She did not have a cook because of a queer passion for feeding her family herself. But when she had them all there in front of her, ranged around the long table, and she had put on to their plates the well-cooked, savoury dishes they liked, she would sit eating little herself, looking from one to the other with her slightly anxious, tender glances, while gradually an expression of peace and satisfaction stole into her face; and Alyse wondered what her mother was getting out of life.

Take Eddie, also. No one, except perhaps his mother in odd moments, ever got a peep-in at Eddie’s thoughts. Alyse was of the opinion that he didn’t have any. There had been a time when she had tried to bring Eddie out by coaxing him down to her rooms over the hand-loom shop and introducing him to some of the girls she knew. But those clever and voluble maidens had abashed Eddie unspeakably, and Alyse had let him lapse back into his own plodding life. He apparently had no imagination. Soon after he left high school he had gone to work for a seed house downtown--George Todd badly needing help that year with the family expenses--and there he still was. Alyse hadn’t the slightest idea what were his amusements. Saturday and Sunday afternoons he generally disappeared, and when asked what he had been doing, he had been to a ball game or just taking a stroll around. He subscribed to a marine journal, which seemed strange reading for a packer in a seed house.

And there was Aunt Jude. Really, when you considered everything, what had Aunt Jude to live for?

Judith Todd was at that moment preparing a tray for Grandma Todd, who was having one of her faint spells and declined to come down to supper. With her long, slender fingers moving deftly, Judith made the tray inviting with the china she had bought especially for it. She had hurried her own supper so as to have plenty of time for the tray, and she moved from the table to the sideboard with the air of detached and ironic competence she sometimes wore when she was, as Alyse said, spoiling Grandma Todd. She was George Todd’s younger sister, thirty-eight, a spinster with the reputation of having been in her youth very high-spirited, adventure-loving, and moreover with a streak of queerness about her. As, for instance, her ambition to be a sculptor. In those days and in the Todds’ native village a girl might as becomingly have wanted to be a circus rider. It was said there had been some stormy scenes over days wasted in the attic with messy clay. But finally life itself had put a bit between her teeth--life and her mother’s well-timed heart attacks. Her father had failed in business and died, George had married early, and the brunt of taking care of her mother had fallen to Judith.

After a while she had brought her mother to George’s house, which helped George out with expenses and enabled Judith to make a living for herself. It was the nature of her job that convinced Alyse there couldn’t be anything in that old story about Aunt Jude’s having wanted to be an artist. It was such an absurd job. She worked for one of those concerns that produce novelties--favours, table decorations, boudoir dolls--designing many of these silly fripperies, often making them with her own hands. She had remarkable hands.

If she had an ounce of talent, Alyse decided, how could Aunt Jude go on, year after year, squandering herself on these silly and often grotesque objects? Alyse felt that it would have killed her to have so degraded her talent.

But Judith actually appeared to get a certain amount of fun out of the dreadful things. She would bring home samples of her handicraft and bedeck the supper table with tiny fat dolls in wedding veils, droll birds and beasts in coloured wax, and so on. And in one of her high moods she could set the family to laughing with a single tweak at one of these grotesqueries. On these occasions a gay and malicious sparkle would come into her dark eyes, and her laugh would be high and reckless, rather like a person who has taken a stiff drink to ease up an ancient misery.

Two evenings a week she went out, no one knew where. Alyse had seen her once at the opera, leaning far out from the highest gallery, a frown between her brows, seeming to watch rather than to listen, with a wild brightness in her dark eyes. The general impression of the family was that these regular evenings away from home had something to do with her work. On these particular evenings there was always a breathless air about her. She would hasten in from the street, and as she climbed the stairs to her mother’s room her face would stiffen as if for conflict. For Grandma Todd resented these evenings.

“Traipsin’ off,” she called it. “Lord knows where. Something will happen to you, coming home alone after ten o’clock. I don’t think you’d better go out to-night, Judith. My heart has been fluttering this afternoon. If I have to lie here worrying all evening I shall probably have a bad spell.”

And then into her daughter’s face would come the expression of a person swimming painfully against the tide. Love and pity had overcome her at every turn of her life, until at last she had almost nothing of herself left, except her freedom for these two evenings. As if the call of them was more imperative, even than her long habit of abnegation, she fought for them with a sort of desperation.

To-night as she arranged her mother’s tray her fine hands trembled a little; she looked more than ever as if she were straining at a leash. There was an unusual colour in her face, a sort of flame, which for an instant attracted Alyse’s attention. Aunt Jude, she reflected, must have been almost beautiful when she was younger, before the expression of half-defiant endurance came into her face. Her dark hair was still lovely, with its blue-black shadows. Over her brow was a white lock, which she took no pains to conceal. She wore it rather like a defiant banner, and it went well with a certain gallant air she sometimes had.

As soon as supper was finished the family began to melt away. Wally called for George Todd and they went out. They admitted, grinning, that they were going to an express-company auction of unclaimed packages. It was one of their pet forms of entertainment, and they frequently brought home queer bundles, which they opened with shouts of amusement. Alyse thought they were dears, but rather foolish. She could not guess that when they started out of an evening arm-in-arm they became boys again and forgot that life had been a somewhat niggardly affair for them.

A moment later Miggs made a dash for the door, pulling on her long gloves. Her face was flushed and exquisite under her modish hat.

“I’ll have Eddie come around to Jane’s for you, Milly,” her mother called to her.

A shadow of fright and annoyance came over Miggs’s face.

“No, please don’t, Mamma. Jane, or somebody, will come home with me. Besides, we--we may go to a movie. Don’t fuss over me, Mamma. I’m not a baby.”

Then she darted back into the room, caught her mother’s head in her slim arms, snuggled her little powdered nose into her neck.

“Oh, mamma, I’m all right. I’m just so full of pep to-night I’m--I’m snappy. Don’t you worry, darling.”

And licking her scarlet lips, glancing once more into the mirror of the old-fashioned sideboard, she was off--a humming bird caught in a mysterious gale.

Then appeared Aunt Jude, her jacket over her arm, the tray in her hands. Her dark eyes were feverishly bright, but her face looked pale and strained. Would they mind just cocking an ear now and then toward Mother’s room? She would probably drop off to sleep soon, though she had made up her mind she wouldn’t.

“But I must go to-night,” she said, “just to-night. Perhaps after this I--won’t be going out Tuesday and Thursday evenings.”

She stood still, staring down at the tray she had put on the kitchen table. Then she threw up her head with the familiar defiant movement, made a sound as if of scorn at her own weakness, and shrugging herself into her old blue serge jacket, she, too, darted out into the evening.

Eddie stood by the window. He stooped to look up at the dark blue of the night sky--a gesture habitual with him--fiddled wistfully for a long moment with the shade, and then pulled it down as if resolutely shutting something out. But a moment or two later he took his hat down from the hall rack, muttered to his mother “Be back early,” and slid out the front door, as if suddenly afraid of being late for something.

The house fell silent. Alyse’s mother put a dark-red spread on the dining-room table and placed her darning basket under the light.

“Now this is cozy,” she said happily. “We’ll have time for a nice visit. Tell me about your work, dear. I’ve been hoping maybe you’d feel like coming home to stay as soon as you’d got some material to work on. Of course, I understand,” she added humbly, “you have to have something to inspire you.”

“That’s exactly it, Mother. I must know interesting persons. It’s very important to be stimulated. Sometimes I’ve thought that if I could only go to Russia or Austria or some place where there is a sense of crisis, a--a vividness, you know; strife of souls. That’s what I want to study. You see, Mother? And of course, here at home----”

Her mother sighed.

“I know we’re all pretty ordinary, and nothing much happens, here at home.”

She looked apologetic, as if she realized the family’s limitations and wished she could offer something more interesting to her talented daughter. She dropped the old darning egg into the heel of a sock. The homely house was very quiet.

And a few miles farther south Milly was running breathlessly up the Subway stairs, an eager, half-frightened Proserpine coming up from the bowels of the earth into flowery meadows, into the glare of the electric flowers of Broadway.

And a few blocks north Judith Todd stood in a dark doorway and whispered: “I mustn’t hope for anything. If nothing comes of to-night, I must go on. But, O God, make something come out right for me at last, at last!”

And Eddie----

At about this moment Eddie’s mother was rolling a pair of his socks into a neat ball. She sighed unconsciously.

“Sometimes it seems to me,” she said, “as if Eddie has never really waked up. I--I can’t express it the way you would, Alice; but as if he was driving himself--dumb, you know.”

“Doesn’t he like his job?”

“I don’t know. He never says. But sometimes he looks---- And then there’s that Haskins girl. I’m afraid he’s let her push him into being engaged. I wish I knew--he’s so silent lately.... When he was a little boy he used to lie on the floor by the hour, so happy, drawing pictures of ships.”

Ships! Alyse had never noticed them, but they lay like a fringe about the tall city, slowly rising and falling with the tide, lying there waiting to be unloosed to the seven seas. But Eddie knew they were there. All the miles of wharves he knew, from Sunday and evening rambles, from noon hours when he went without food to stand looking at some lovely visitor from an unknown port. And now at this moment he was making his way as fast as he could to say farewell to one that had become the very core of his heart.

More eagerly, and more swiftly than he ever had made his way to the Haskins girl he travelled toward the North River. Just before he reached the corner beyond which he could look down upon the river he felt his heart grow cold with the fear that sometime during the day she might have slipped out to sea. It seemed to him that if she had gone he could not bear it; and yet he told himself that to-morrow night she would not be there; they had begun to ship her cargo.

But when he had rounded the corner, there were her masts against the deep blue of the night sky--five masts, the beauty! He had seen them two weeks before one night when he was leaning over the wall of Riverside Drive, and his heart had leaped. He had made his way down to the wharf alongside which the schooner lay, and stood there studying her, feasting his eyes on her. The tall cliffs of houses towered above her, but she smelled of many cargoes and of the sea. He could imagine her furled canvas slowly shaking out to the breeze, the deck tilting. The mate had come up on deck with his pipe and talked to him over the side.

Next evening Eddie was there again, and the mate invited him on board; he talked about the schooner as a man might about a wife whose very faults he loved. And Eddie had asked him questions which had been storing up in his heart since he was a boy. He could talk to this man Jennings, for they had a passion in common. Evening after evening they leaned over the deck rail or sat in the cabin, smoking and talking, and a deep friendliness developed between them.