“You frightened me to death,” he told her. “Thought maybe you were going to have a baby . . . or something.”
“I wish we were, don’t you, Chris?”
“I should say I did, only I’d just as lief he wouldn’t arrive while we’re so desperately poor.”
“That reminds me. Where did your mother get the money to go abroad?”
“It seems she had about seven hundred dollars put away in a bank in New York. How’s that for foresight? That’s where she is now, by the way; she’s getting her passport and everything over there. Well, I hope she has a pleasant voyage.”
“Chris, you sound so hard-hearted.”
“Well, she’s been hard-hearted enough with us. I made up my mind long ago she shouldn’t spoil my life. Dad says she shan’t either.”
“How’s she going to live over there on seven hundred dollars?”
“Darling, I tell you, Dad’s coming back into form. We’re getting out a new shingle. Like this.” He wrote it down for her.
DR. CHRISTOPHER FIDELE CARY
DR. CHRISTOPHER BLANCHARD CARY
“Don’t it look great? Darling we’re going to be on the up and up. Pretty soon you’re going to leave that dress shop too.”
“Oh, don’t say that!”
“You’ll have to quit it, if we have a lot of little Carys. . . .”
“Not such heaps of them . . . say about three.”
“Fine. And I hope they all look like you, Phebe. Except the first one, I hope he’ll be a boy and I want him to look just like . . .”
“Oliver,” she said gently. “Yes, I understand, Chris. . . . I hope so too. . . . And, Christopher, I’ll love him to death.”
“I know you will, darling. You’re a sweet girl, Phebe, and I want to tell you now a thousand times . . . I love you. So when I come in tired and sleepy and stupid you’ll reach back in your memory and haul one of them out.”
“Darling Silly!” She put her arms about him. “Hold me tight, Chris. Don’t ever let me get away from you again.”
“You can bank on that. . . . Do you know I had the queerest feeling last night . . . or rather this morning because Dad kept me up talking until about three . . . I kept thinking: Maybe I’ve let her in for too much. Maybe she’s gone and chucked us for good. And then I remembered how sweet and true and utterly decent you were. And I said to myself: ‘Not Phebe, you chump; she’s not that kind.’ And I turned right over and went to sleep. . . . Love me, darling?”
“I adore you, Christopher!”
He could not understand why she cried when he kissed her.
VI
CURTAIN
CHAPTER I
IN PARIS Olivia Blanchard Cary walked about fifty steps down la rue Vaneau and then turned about and retraced the same fifty steps to the corner of la rue Sèvres. The American woman whom she had met in the tiny Beauty Parlor in la rue Romain often passed here at this hour. If she happened to run into her perhaps she, Olivia, could induce her casually, of course, to come around to her room and sit before the fire and talk. They could play bézique, or casino or even Black Jack. She did not hold so much with Black Jack, because naturally there was no point in playing it without stakes and she was not very lucky at cards.
It was seven o’clock now; evidently Mrs. Reynolds was not coming. Or perhaps she had already passed while Olivia’s back was toward the corner. . . . No, there she was . . . a slender, typical American figure in her well-cut but slightly shabby black dress. Olivia hastened her step.
“Oh, how do you do?” Olivia exclaimed in well-feigned surprise. “I was just going in the tabatière’s here to buy some cigarettes. My husband always used to fuss so about French tobacco. Miss Blanche is the only brand positively that you can smoke at all. Come on in with me.”
Mrs. Reynolds entered, nothing loth.
“Are you going anywhere in particular?” Olivia asked, trying not to appear too eager, but she was desperately afraid of having the long dull evening close in upon her once more. “You might come over to my room for a smoke and a chat.”
Mrs. Reynolds, it transpired, was on her way to the little pâtisserie to buy a croissant or two for her simple morning meal. “If I buy them myself,” she said darkly, “I know they’re fresh. . . . Yes, I don’t mind if I do go around to your place, Mrs. Cary. I haven’t anything to do this evening. Though really I shouldn’t come over to see you . . . I’ve been there so many times. You really must come to see me next time.”
Olivia knew from long experience that the invitation would never be realized. But that was all right . . . as long as she was not to be lonely this evening.
They walked down teeming rue Sèvres, entered the pâtisserie, then passed the delicatessens with the horrid little stuffed larks, reassembled in the window with their miserable feathers and their toothpick legs. They turned the corner past the cobbler, in his five-by-six-foot shop, working slowly, painfully under the light of a kerosene lamp. At the far end of la rue Romain they entered the courtyard of Olivia’s pension. Past the concierge’s rooms, across the yard into the hallway, up the beautiful winding staircase. Then they were in Olivia’s room. She turned on the dim light, which served only to emphasize its shabby neatness.
“It gets chilly in Paris so early,” she complained and built a fire with a few twigs and the fewest possible briquettes. At least it looked cheerful.
Mrs. Reynolds drew up to the fire; rubbed her hands. The electric light softened the contrast between the too youthful vividness of her hennaed hair and her tired disillusioned face. Seen thus she appeared merely a weary, saddened woman without any of the pride and hardness with which she faced the customers in the shop.
“I had a letter from my daughter today,” she said proudly. “She always wants me to come home. Her stepmother and her father, my husband—well, I don’t suppose he’s my husband now . . . are simply devoted to her. But you know how girls are . . . they always want their mother. . . . She says she can take care of me . . . can give me everything I need. But I don’t know. I always ask myself: ‘Can she give me Paris, its charm, its freedom?’ I’d rather stay here on my own.”
Olivia had by now got together her small largesse, two glasses of sickeningly sweet sirop and a few sweet biscuits. Mrs. Reynolds stopped speaking immediately and picked up one of the biscuits with a hand that trembled very slightly. Olivia wondered again if she really got enough to eat.
Aloud she said: “Oh, yes, I know just how you feel. I have a daughter too, in Toulouse. She’s married to one of the professors at the university there, a brilliant fellow and so charming! My daughter is always writing me to come there and live with them. But I always say young folks should be by themselves. . . . And when my daughter isn’t writing me from Toulouse, my husband is writing me to come home to Philadelphia. I had a letter from him today.”
Mrs. Reynolds turned and looked at her. “Your husband wrote you! Oh, you’re not divorced? He isn’t married to anybody else?” she asked hoarsely. “My advice to you, Mrs. Cary, is to go home to him as quickly as possible.”
“Divorced, married?” Olivia echoed in genuine surprise. “I should say not. . . . But as to going back just now . . . I’m like you, Mrs. Reynolds, I love the life and the freedom of Paris. It is so broadening to live here. Think of the people one meets,” said Olivia, oblivious to the fact that she had met no one in Paris, not a soul, except this woman from Connecticut who had a part interest in the world’s smallest hairdressing establishment.
Mrs. Reynolds, suddenly weary, thought she must go. Tomorrow she would, she knew, be her old chipper, assured self. But tonight it made her sick to see a woman, past middle age, with a home and husband in God’s country, pass them up for the fabled freedom of Paris.
CHAPTER II
AFTER her departure Olivia sat ruminating. She had a daughter married to a professor at the University of Toulouse . . . a brilliant fellow and charming! She had a daughter married to a Frenchman who was indifferent, miserly and hardheaded wi
th the cold pitiless logic of the French.
She had gone to Teresa, so sure of a welcome from both her and Aristide, whom surely she had benefited.
She found Teresa silent, pale, subdued, the ghost of her former self, still wearing dresses taken from the wardrobe which her mother had chosen and bought for her during her last year in college. The dresses had been turned, darned, cleaned and made over, combined in new and bizarre fashions. Their only merit was that they were quite large enough. Certainly Teresa had put on no weight.
Aristide, furious because those presents of money which Olivia had so glibly promised, were no longer forthcoming, refused to give his wife a sou. His mother held the purse-strings and if it were not for odd jobs of sewing which Teresa had obtained from American students who once had counted it a privilege to drink tea in her little drawing-room, the girl would have forgotten the feel of money.
All of this she related to her mother with no showing of fire . . . so completely had Aristide’s utter indifference, his cold dislike, his erratic whimsies reduced her. After Oliver’s death she had thought she must lose her mind. During these last two years she had more than once contemplated suicide. Her only salvation was the memory of a phrase which Phebe had written in one of her rare letters.
“Teresa, you know we are all terribly hard hit over here by the depression. But Christopher swears as soon as he gets on his feet he’s going over there and bring you home.”
Olivia was greatly indignant at Teresa’s dispassionate account of Aristide’s attitude. “Hoity-toity!” she exclaimed; she actually used those words. “Who does he think he is? I’ll bring him to his senses!”
She met him, in his own house, when he came home that night. Teresa remained in her room, but old Mrs. Pailleron managed to be on the scene, her mouth twisted in a sour smile. Rose, too, was hovering in the background, nervously fingering her apron but eager to hear the fray. She would put her last cent on the patron’s being able to hold his ground, but the American lady would undoubtedly make him look to his laurels.
When Aristide entered, his mother greeted him with a rapid flow of French which Olivia was unable to follow. . . . Without an instant’s hesitation he charged.
“So,” he said, in his shrill voice, “you come now to interfere! You who have lied to me about money. About money, the most precious thing on earth! Rose, take this lady’s bags out of here. Deposit them on the sidewalk. . . . Do me the honor to leave my house immediately, Madame.”
Olivia, considerably taken back, made some show of holding her ground. “If I go, my daughter goes, too.”
He was a little man, but he seemed to tower above her. “You r-rob me of my dowry, of money which is due me . . . and now you p-r-ropose to rob me of my wife. Go! Go, Madame, I entreat you! You do not know the laws of this country.”
Well, that was true; she did not know the laws.
She went to Paris and stayed at the same hotel where she had put up once with Teresa. Suddenly realizing how rapidly her funds were oozing away, she moved to another hotel, far cheaper. But she did not like this life. It was no fun, there was no zest in being poor in Paris. Reluctantly, down to her last eighty dollars, she moved to the pension in la rue Romain . . . the pension with its horrid meals . . . with its decayed and frigid gentlewomen. With the exception of the lady and her son across the hall there was not a soul to whom she cared to speak. Unfortunately, the lady in question did not seem to feel the same way about her.
She must get out of this. There was nothing for her to do but to write to her husband for her passage home.
His answer was in the letter which she received today.
“Olivia,” the letter read thus curtly, “what you ask is not only out of reason. It is impossible. I am much better. I am hoping to regain some of my old practice. But it will be a long while before I can send you any such sum as you require. The best I can do is to promise you fifty dollars a month. When I am able I will send you more.”
The sirop had made her head ache. Tomorrow she would stay in bed. Or, if she felt better, maybe she would look through her diminishing store of clothes, engage in a little repairing.
But in the morning, although the headache was gone, she was too listless to work. She would, she finally decided, sit by the window in her room and look out at the tangled garden rendered less dreary than usual by the thin watery sunshine which hovered above it.
Presently, as she had hoped, the lady who lived across the hall came out accompanied by her son. They sat on a bench together and he began to read to her out of his book. It must have been a very funny story, for they laughed a great deal; once, the mother, resting her dark head against his fair one, looked and laughed long and clearly at something he was pointing to on the printed page.
He was a slender, rather tall lad, but young. About the age of Oliver in the days when he used to come running up to his mother’s room to confide in her about his algebra.
FINIS
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