Bliss, and other stories
delighted. “. . . Going over to the window he drew apart the curtains
and looked out at the Paris trees, just breaking into buds and green. .
. . Dick! Dick! My English friend!”
I didn’t. I merely felt a little sick. Having been up for my first ride
in an aeroplane I didn’t want to go up again, just now.
That passed, and months after, in the winter, Dick wrote that he was
coming back to Paris to stay indefinitely. Would I take rooms for him?
He was bringing a woman friend with him.
Of course I would. Away the little fox-terrier flew. It happened most
usefully, too; for I owed much money at the hotel where I took my
meals, and two English people requiring rooms for an indefinite time
was an excellent sum on account.
Perhaps I did rather wonder, as I stood in the larger of the two rooms
with Madame, saying “Admirable,” what the woman friend would be like,
but only vaguely. Either she would be very severe, flat back and front,
or she would be tall, fair, dressed in mignonette green, name—Daisy,
and smelling of rather sweetish lavender water.
You see, by this time, according to my rule of not looking back, I had
almost forgotten Dick. I even got the tune of his song about the
unfortunate man a little bit wrong when I tried to hum it. . . .
I very nearly did not turn up at the station after all. I had arranged
to, and had, in fact, dressed with particular care for the occasion.
For I intended to take a new line with Dick this time. No more
confidences and tears on eyelashes. No, thank you!
“Since you left Paris,” said I, knotting my black silver-spotted tie in
the (also unpaid for) mirror over the mantelpiece, “I have been very
successful, you know. I have two more books in preparation, and then I
have written a serial story, _Wrong Doors_, which is just on the point
of publication and will bring me in a lot of money. And then my little
book of poems,” I cried, seizing the clothes-brush and brushing the
velvet collar of my new indigo-blue overcoat, “my little book—_Left
Umbrellas_—really did create,” and I laughed and waved the brush, “an
immense sensation!”
It was impossible not to believe this of the person who surveyed
himself finally, from top to toe, drawing on his soft grey gloves. He
was looking the part; he was the part.
That gave me an idea. I took out my notebook, and still in full view,
jotted down a note or two. . . . How can one look the part and not be
the part? Or be the part and not look it? Isn’t looking—being? Or
being—looking? At any rate who is to say that it is not? . . .
This seemed to me extraordinarily profound at the time, and quite new.
But I confess that something did whisper as, smiling, I put up the
notebook: “You—literary? you look as though you’ve taken down a bet on
a racecourse!” But I didn’t listen. I went out, shutting the door of
the flat with a soft, quick pull so as not to warn the concierge of my
departure, and ran down the stairs quick as a rabbit for the same
reason.
But ah! the old spider. She was too quick for me. She let me run down
the last little ladder of the web and then she pounced. “One moment.
One little moment, Monsieur,” she whispered, odiously confidential.
“Come in. Come in.” And she beckoned with a dripping soup ladle. I went
to the door, but that was not good enough. Right inside and the door
shut before she would speak.
There are two ways of managing your concierge if you haven’t any money.
One is—to take the high hand, make her your enemy, bluster, refuse to
discuss anything; the other is—to keep in with her, butter her up to
the two knots of the black rag tying up her jaws, pretend to confide in
her, and rely on her to arrange with the gas man and to put off the
landlord.
I had tried the second. But both are equally detestable and
unsuccessful. At any rate whichever you’re trying is the worse, the
impossible one.
It was the landlord this time. . . . Imitation of the landlord by the
concierge threatening to toss me out. . . . Imitation of the concierge
by the concierge taming the wild bull. . . . Imitation of the landlord
rampant again, breathing in the concierge’s face. I was the concierge.
No, it was too nauseous. And all the while the black pot on the gas
ring bubbling away, stewing out the hearts and livers of every tenant
in the place.
“Ah!” I cried, staring at the clock on the mantelpiece, and then,
realizing that it didn’t go, striking my forehead as though the idea
had nothing to do with it. “Madame, I have a very important appointment
with the director of my newspaper at nine-thirty. Perhaps to-morrow I
shall be able to give you . . .”
Out, out. And down the métro and squeezed into a full carriage. The
more the better. Everybody was one bolster the more between me and the
concierge. I was radiant.
“Ah! pardon, Monsieur!” said the tall charming creature in black with a
big full bosom and a great bunch of violets dropping from it. As the
train swayed it thrust the bouquet right into my eyes. “Ah! pardon,
Monsieur!”
But I looked up at her, smiling mischievously.
“There is nothing I love more, Madame, than flowers on a balcony.”
At the very moment of speaking I caught sight of the huge man in a fur
coat against whom my charmer was leaning. He poked his head over her
shoulder and he went white to the nose; in fact his nose stood out a
sort of cheese green.
“What was that you said to my wife?”
Gare Saint Lazare saved me. But you’ll own that even as the author of
_False Coins_, _Wrong Doors_, _Left Umbrellas_, and two in preparation,
it was not too easy to go on my triumphant way.
At length, after countless trains had steamed into my mind, and
countless Dick Harmons had come rolling towards me, the real train
came. The little knot of us waiting at the barrier moved up close,
craned forward, and broke into cries as though we were some kind of
many-headed monster, and Paris behind us nothing but a great trap we
had set to catch these sleepy innocents.
Into the trap they walked and were snatched and taken off to be
devoured. Where was my prey?
“Good God!” My smile and my lifted hand fell together. For one terrible
moment I thought this was the woman of the photograph, Dick’s mother,
walking towards me in Dick’s coat and hat. In the effort—and you saw
what an effort it was—to smile, his lips curled in just the same way
and he made for me, haggard and wild and proud.
What had happened? What could have changed him like this? Should I
mention it?
I waited for him and was even conscious of venturing a fox-terrier wag
or two to see if he could possibly respond, in the way I said: “Good
evening, Dick! How are you, old chap? All right?”
“All right. All right.” He almost gasped. “You’ve got the rooms?”
Twenty times, good God! I saw it all. Light broke on the dark waters
and my sailor hadn’t been drowned. I almost turned a somersault with
amusement.
It was nervousness, of course. It was embarrassment. It was the famous
English seriousness. What fun I was going to have! I could have hugged
him.
“Yes, I’ve got the rooms,” I nearly shouted. “But where is Madame?”
“She’s been looking after the luggage,” he panted. “Here she comes,
now.”
Not this baby walking beside the old porter as though he were her nurse
and had just lifted her out of her ugly perambulator while he trundled
the boxes on it.
“And she’s not Madame,” said Dick, drawling suddenly.
At that moment she caught sight of him and hailed him with her minute
muff. She broke away from her nurse and ran up and said something, very
quick, in English; but he replied in French: “Oh, very well. I’ll
manage.”
But before he turned to the porter he indicated me with a vague wave
and muttered something. We were introduced. She held out her hand in
that strange boyish way Englishwomen do, and standing very straight in
front of me with her chin raised and making—she too—the effort of her
life to control her preposterous excitement, she said, wringing my hand
(I’m sure she didn’t know it was mine), _Je ne parle pas Français._
“But I’m sure you do,” I answered, so tender, so reassuring, I might
have been a dentist about to draw her first little milk tooth.
“Of course she does.” Dick swerved back to us. “Here, can’t we get a
cab or taxi or something? We don’t want to stay in this cursed station
all night. Do we?”
This was so rude that it took me a moment to recover; and he must have
noticed, for he flung his arm round my shoulder in the old way, saying:
“Ah, forgive me, old chap. But we’ve had such a loathsome, hideous
journey. We’ve taken years to come. Haven’t we?” To her. But she did
not answer. She bent her head and began stroking her grey muff; she
walked beside us stroking her grey muff all the way.
“Have I been wrong?” thought I. “Is this simply a case of frenzied
impatience on their part? Are they merely ‘in need of a bed,’ as we
say? Have they been suffering agonies on the journey? Sitting, perhaps,
very close and warm under the same travelling rug?” and so on and so on
while the driver strapped on the boxes. That done——
“Look here, Dick. I go home by métro. Here is the address of your
hotel. Everything is arranged. Come and see me as soon as you can.”
Upon my life I thought he was going to faint. He went white to the
lips.
“But you’re coming back with us,” he cried. “I thought it was all
settled. Of course you’re coming back. You’re not going to leave us.”
No, I gave it up. It was too difficult, too English for me.
“Certainly, certainly. Delighted. I only thought, perhaps . . .”
“You must come!” said Dick to the little fox-terrier. And again he made
that big awkward turn towards her.
“Get in, Mouse.”
And Mouse got in the black hole and sat stroking Mouse II and not
saying a word.
Away we jolted and rattled like three little dice that life had decided
to have a fling with.
I had insisted on taking the flap seat facing them because I would not
have missed for anything those occasional flashing glimpses I had as we
broke through the white circles of lamplight.
They revealed Dick, sitting far back in his corner, his coat collar
turned up, his hands thrust in his pockets, and his broad dark hat
shading him as if it were a part of him—a sort of wing he hid under.
They showed her, sitting up very straight, her lovely little face more
like a drawing than a real face—every line was so full of meaning and
so sharp cut against the swimming dark.
For Mouse was beautiful. She was exquisite, but so fragile and fine
that each time I looked at her it was as if for the first time. She
came upon you with the same kind of shock that you feel when you have
been drinking tea out of a thin innocent cup and suddenly, at the
bottom, you see a tiny creature, half butterfly, half woman, bowing to
you with her hands in her sleeves.
As far as I could make out she had dark hair and blue or black eyes.
Her long lashes and the two little feathers traced above were most
important.
She wore a long dark cloak such as one sees in old-fashioned pictures
of Englishwomen abroad. Where her arms came out of it there was grey
fur—fur round her neck, too, and her close-fitting cap was furry.
“Carrying out the mouse idea,” I decided.
Ah, but how intriguing it was—how intriguing! Their excitement came
nearer and nearer to me, while I ran out to meet it, bathed in it,
flung myself far out of my depth, until at last I was as hard put to it
to keep control as they.
But what I wanted to do was to behave in the most extraordinary
fashion—like a clown. To start singing, with large extravagant
gestures, to point out of the window and cry: “We are now passing,
ladies and gentlemen, one of the sights for which _notre Paris_ is
justly famous,” to jump out of the taxi while it was going, climb over