CHAPTER III
THE CITY OF LIGHT
“Little Thing,” I say severely, “you must never say ‘Damn.’”
“But you say it, darleen.”
“Yes, but men may do and say things women must not even think of. Say ‘Dash’ if you want to say anything.”
“Oh, you are funny. You tell me I must not say certeen words in English, yet in France everybody say ‘Mon Dieu.’”
“Yes, it’s not good form to say those words in English; just as you tell me in France in polite society one never refers to a thousand sacred pigs. Profanity is to some extent a matter of geography.”
But if I succeed in prohibiting the profanity of my country, I cannot prevent her picking up its slang. For instance, “Sure Mike” is often on her lips. She has heard me use it, and it resembles so much her own “Surement” that she naturally and innocently adopts it. I tremble now when she speaks English before any punctilious stranger, in case, to some polite inquiry, she answers with an enthusiastic: “Sure Mike.”
I have insisted on her recovering her fur from the Mont de Piété, and she in her turn has made me buy a long, black brigandish cape that has previously been worn by some budding Baudelaire or some embryo Verlaine.
“Seems to me,” I grumble, “now I have this thing I might as well get one of those bat-winged ties, and a hat with a six-inch brim.”
“Oh, you will be lovely like that,” she assures me with enthusiasm. “And you must let your hair grow long like hartist. Oh, how chic you will be!”
“Perhaps you’d also like me to cultivate an Assyrian beard and curl my hair into ringlets like that man we sat next to at the café du Dome last night.”
“No, no; I do not want that you hide your so nice mouth, darleen. I am prefair American way now.”
“You prefer Americans to Frenchmen, then.”
“All French girls prefer American and English to Frenchmans. They are so frank, so honest. One can trust them.”
“So you would rather be married to an Englishman than a Frenchman?”
“Mon Dieu! yes, The Frenchmans deceive the womans very much, but the Englishman is always comme-il-faut. If ever I have leetle girl I want she shall marry Englishmans. Ah! she shall be like her fazzer, that leetle girl, wiz blue eyes, and colour so fresh; and I want she have the lovely blond hair like all English children.”
“What if you have a boy?”
“Ah no! I no want boy. I know I am selfeesh. The boys have the best sings in the life, and it is often hard for the womans. But if I have girl, I keep her love always. If I have boy soon I lose heem. He get marry, and zen it is feenish. But leetle girl, in trooble she always come back to her mosser.”
“And suppose you don’t have either?”
“Oh, I sink zat would be very, very sad.”
Often have I marvelled at the passion for maternity that burns in Anastasia. Her eyes shine so tenderly on children, and she will stop to caress some little one so yearningly.
“By the way, have you ever noticed the child on the ground floor apartment?—a little one with hair the colour of honey.”
“Oh yes; she’s good friend of me. She is adorable. Oh how I love have childs like zat. She’s call Solonge. She’s belong Frosine.”
“Who’s Frosine?”
“She’s girl what sew all day. She work for the Bon Marché. It’s awfool how she have to work hard.”
“Poor woman!”
“Oh no; she’s very ’appy like that. She’s free, and she have Solonge. She sing all day when she sew. Oh, she have much of courage, much of merit, that girl.”
“But,” I say, “would you like to have a child like that?”
“Why not, if I can care well for it and it make me ’appy?”
“But—it wouldn’t be moral.”
“No, but it would be natural.”
“Yes, but sometimes isn’t it wicked to be natural?”
“I do not understand. I do not sink Frosine is wicked. She’s so kind and gently. She adore Solonge. She’s brave. All day she work and sing. You do not sink she is all bad because she have childs?”
I did not immediately reply. I am wondering....
Have social conditions reached a very lofty status even yet when the finest, truest instincts implanted in humankind are often denied? Does not life mean effort, progress, human triumph? Can we not look forward to a better time when present manifestly imperfect conditions will be perfected?
“Yes, Anastasia,” I conclude; “the greatest man that ever lived should take off his hat to the humblest mother, for she has accomplished something he never could if he lived to be a thousand. But come! Let’s go out on the Grand Boulevard. I’ve been working too hard; I’m fagged, I’m stale, there’s a fog about my brain.”
Very proudly she dons her furs of electric rabbit, and rather ruefully I wreathe myself in my conspiratorial cloak; then together we go down into the city.
The City of Light! Is there another, I wonder, that flaunts so superbly the triumph of man over darkness? From the Mount of Parnassus to the Mount of the Martyrs all is a valley of light. The starry sky is mocked by the starry city, its milky way, a river gleaming with gold, shimmering with silver, spangled with green and garnet. The Place de la Concorde is a very lily garden of light; up the jewelled sweep of the Champs Elysee the lights are like sheeny pearls with here and there the exquisite intrusion of a ruby; beneath a tremulous radiance of opals the trees are bathed in milky light, while amid the twinkling groves the night restaurants are sketched in fairy gold. The Grand Boulevards are fiery-walled canyons down which roar tumultuous rivers of light; the Place de l’Opera is a great eddy, flashing and myriad-gemmed; the magasins are blazing furnaces erupting light at every point: They are festooned with flame; they are crammed with golden lustre; they blaze their victorious refulgence in signs of light against the sky. And so night after night this city of sovereign splendour hurls in flashing light its gauntlet of defiance to the Dark.
The pavements are packed with people, moving slowly in opposing streams. Most are garbed in ceremonial best; and many carry flowers, for this is the sacred day of family gathering. The pavement edge is lined with tiny booths and shrill with importunate clamour.
We stop to gaze at some of the mechanical toys. Here are aeroplanes that whirl around, peacocks that strut and scream, rabbits that hop and squeak, shoe-blacks, barbers, acrobats, jugglers, all engaged in their various ways. But what amuses us most is a little servant maid who walks forward in a great hurry carrying a pile of plates, trips, sends them scattering, then herself falls sprawling. How I laugh! Yet I am at the same time laughing at myself for laughing. Am I going back to my second childhood? No! for see; all those bearded Frenchmen are laughing too, just like so many grown-up children.
“Come,” I suggest, after we have ranged along a mile or so of these tiny booths, “let’s sit down in front of one of the cafés.”
With difficulty we find a place, and ordering two cafés créme watch the dense procession. The honest bourgeois are going to New Year’s Dinner, and their smiles are very happy. Soon they will frankly abandon themselves to the pleasures of the table, discussing each dish with rapture and eating till they can eat no more.
“What a race of gluttons are the French,” I remark severely to Anastasia. “Food and dress is about all they seem to think of. The other day I read in the paper that a celebrated costumier had received the cross of the Legion of Honour, and this morning I see that a well-known restaurateur has also been deemed worthy of the decoration. There you are! Reward your tailors and your cooks while your poets and your painters go buttonless. Oh, if there’s a people I despise, it’s one that makes a god of its stomach! By the way, what have we got for dinner?”
“Oh, I got chickens.”
“A good fat one, I hope.”
“Yes, nice fat chickens. I pay five franc for it. You are not sorry?”
“No, that’s all right. We can make it do two evenings, and we allow ourselves five francs a day for grub. I fancy we don’t spend even that, on an average?”
“No, about four and half franc.”
Every week she brought her expense book to me, and very solemnly I wrote beneath it: Examined and found correct. Another habit was to present for my approval a menu of all our meals for the coming week beneath which I would, in the same serious spirit, write: Approved. To these impressive occasions she contributed a proper dignity; yet at a hint of praise for her house-keeping nothing could exceed her delight.
Presently we rise and continue our walk. Everywhere is the same holiday spirit, the same easily amused crowd. There are song writers hawking their ditties, poor artists peddling their paintings, a “canvas for a crust.” Every needy art is gleaning on the streets.
“Stop!” she cries suddenly. Drawing me in the direction of a small crowd; “let’s watch the silhouette man.”
He is young, glib, good-looking. He has audacious eyes and a rapscallion smile. This smile is sometimes positively impish in its mockery; yet otherwise he is rather like a cherub. His complexion is pinkish, his manner mercurial, his figure shapely and slim. He is dressed in the cloak, broad-brimmed hat, and voluminous velveteen trousers of the rapin. I stare at him. Something vaguely familiar in him startles me.
In one hand he holds a double sheet of black paper, in the other a pair of scissors. For a moment he looks keenly at his subject, then getting the best angle for the profile, proceeds without any more ado to cut the silhouette. It is a very deft, delicate performance and all over in a minute.
“Just watch him, Anastasia,” I say after a pause; “I think there’s something interesting going to happen.” Then in a drawling voice I remark:
“Well, if that’s not a dead ringer for Livewire Lorrimer!”
He hears me, looks up like a flash, scrutinises me in a puzzled way.
“I haven’t heard that name for fifteen years. Of all the—why, if it isn’t Jimmy Madden, Mad Madden, Blackbeard the pirate, Red Hand the scout, friend of my boyhood! I say! there’s a dozen people waiting and this is my busy day. Ask your friend to stand up to the light and I’ll make a silhouette of her while we talk.”
“My wife.”
“Bless us! Married too! Well, congratulations. Charmed to meet Madame. There! Just stand so.”
With great dexterity he proceeds to cut Anastasia’s delicate features on the black paper.
“Great Scott! I haven’t heard a word about you since I left home. But then I’ve lost track of all the crowd. Well, what in the world are you doing here?”
“I’m trying to break into the writing game. And you?”
“For ten years I’ve been trying to become an artist. Occasionally I get enough to eat. I have to work for a living, as you see at present; but when I get a little ahead I go back to my art. Where do you live?”
I tell him.
“Oh, I know, garden and statuary in the court. I lived in that street myself for a time, but my landlord and I did not agree. He had ridiculous ideas on the subject of rent. My idea of rent is money you owe. He was so prejudiced that one night I lowered all my effects to a waiting friend with a voiture à bras, and since then rue Mazarin has seen little of me. But I’d like to come and see you. We’ll talk over old days.”
“Yes, I do wish you would come.”
“I will. Ah, Madame, here is your charming profile. I only regret that my clumsy scissors fail to do you justice. Yes, Madden, I’ll come. And now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a dozen people waiting. I must make my harvest while the sun shines. Good-bye, just now. Expect me soon.”
He waves us an airy farewell, and a moment after, with the same intent gaze, he is following the features of a fat Frenchwoman, who laughs immoderately at his pleasantries.
We walk home almost without speaking. Anastasia has got into the way of respecting my thoughts. To her I am Balzac, Hugo and Zola rolled into one, and labelled James Horace Madden. Who is she that should break in on the dreams of this great author? Rather let her foster them by sympathetic silence. Yet on this occasion she looks up in my face and sighs wistfully:
“What are you sinking of, darleen?”
Now, here’s what I think she thinks I am thinking:
“Oh, this fiery, fervid Paris, how can my pen proclaim its sovereignty over cities, its call to high endeavour, its immemorial grace? How can I paint its folly and its faith, its laughter and its tears, its streets where tragedy and farce walk arm in arm, where parody hobnobs with pride, and beauty bends to ridicule! Oh, exquisite Paris! so old and yet so eternally young, so peerless, yet ever prinking and preening to make more exorbitant demands on our admiration....” And so on.
Here’s what I am really thinking:
“Funny I should run into Livewire like that. To think of it! We swapped the same dime novels, robbed the same cherry-trees. Together we competed for the bottom place in the class. (I think I generally won.) By pedagogic standards we were certainly impossible. And yet at some studies how precocious! How I remember that novel I wrote, The Corsair’s Crime, or the Hound of the Hellispont, illustrated by Livewire on every page. Oh, I’d give a hundred dollars to have that manuscript to-day!” and so on.
Here’s what I say I am thinking:
“I was wondering, Anastasia, if when you bought that chicken, you let them clean it in the shop. Because if you do they just take it away and bring you back an inferior one. You can’t trust them. You should clean it yourself. Be sure you roast it gently, so as to have it nicely browned all over....” And so on.
It is night now and I am working on my articles while she sews steadily. It has been a long silent evening, a fire of boulets throws out a gentle heat, and she sits on one side, I on the other. About ten o’clock she complains of feeling tired, and decides to go to bed. After our habit I lie down on my own bed, to wait with her till she goes to sleep; for she is just like a child in some ways. I am reading, and the better to see, I lie with my head where my feet should be.
As she is dropping off to sleep, suddenly she says:
“Will you let me hold your foot, darleen?”
“Yes, it’s there. But if you want to look for holes in the sock, you won’t find any.”
“No, it’s not zat. I just want to pretend it’s leetle bébé.”
“So she holds it close to her breast, and ever since then she will not sleep unless she is holding what she calls ‘her poupée.’”