by Guy McCrone
Robin’s curiosity was lively. His perceptions were quick. Thus on this, his first sojourn abroad, it was not surprising that his response to what he found around him, so much of it beautiful, should be continual and stimulating.
The sense of being alone, of being his own master, of being somehow at one with this crisp, dazzling brightness, of being a young gentleman staying in a Riviera hotel—a character in a fashionable novel—lifted up his spirits.
The hotel cat, a black Persian, was sitting polishing his ears on one of the little garden tables laid ready with coffee-cups for those who cared to have their breakfast out here in the sunshine.
“Good morning, Grimaldi,” Robin said, running his hand over the velvet head. “Did you ask permission to sit up there?”
But the cat, interrupting its toilet, merely sat blinking yellow slits in the strong light and waving its black, feathery tail.
“I beg your pardon.” Robin shook it by one fore-paw. “I forgot you were a French cat.”
At this the cat, whose days of kittenhood were not yet in the far distance, leapt from the table, scrabbled halfway up the trunk of a palm-tree and turned to look down at him mischievously.
“No, Grimaldi! Don’t ask me to play with you this morning. I’ve got other things to think about.” Robin turned, and, quitting the hotel garden, stood at its entrance for a moment, deciding which way to take.
He looked across at the piled-up houses of the old town. He could see windows and balconies that seemed as inaccessible from here as caves high up on the face of a precipice. Yet heads appeared at these windows, and whole families could be seen out on these balconies. How did they get there? He must find out.
Now he was walking up a back road looking into steep hillside gardens or down upon the roofs of buildings he already knew. Presently he had passed under the remains of an old town gateway and was in the Rue Longue, the main street of the little mediæval town of Mentone. Here, as he had hoped, was the access to these houses he had been looking at from shore level. Dark stairs led up from the narrow street to rooms that must be lit by these high windows, that must have access to these hanging balconies. On the other side, stone staircases, some of them named streets, led steeply up through arches to yet more stairs and yet higher houses. The place was a warren, a hillside labyrinth, built at a time when the peoples of this coast must crowd together for safety.
Robin’s curiosity had eyes for everything. The shafts of morning sunshine, striking narrowly down between high buildings, and through chance openings, robbed these old conglomerate buildings of any feeling of slumdom or menace. He had seen the overcrowded quarters of his own Glasgow. And he sensed the difference. Here, the native population had long since learnt the art of living close-packed together.
The narrow street was cheerful with the noise and motion of any southern town. On a stool placed at random on the cobblestones a woman sat cutting up vegetables for the pot, while she gossiped with her neighbours. Young children crawled near her. In a doorway a young man, dark and aquiline as the god Pan, squatted on his haunches plaiting a basket. He wore a coarse linen cap pushed to an angle on his black, thick curls. An old woman sat on the first steps of an ascending street, making up little bunches from the violets she had bought early this morning in the market, and was now getting ready to re-sell to visitors down in the modern town. A peasant went by leading a mule. In one of its panniers was a wooden chair while in the other crouched a tiny brown boy. A carnation and a twig of mimosa decorated the animal’s halter. In a little den of a shop Robin could see garlic heads, wine, oil, long, strange sausages and ropes of macaroni. In another an old man sat fashioning rope soles.
All these sights, common enough to those who know the Middle Sea, were new to Robin. He took them in and savoured them.
II
Presently coming to a staircase, he glanced upwards. He could see a window at the top of the first flight. Curiosity got the better of him. If he went up there, would he not have a view over the whole of the Bay of Garavan? Would he not, indeed, be looking from one of these very windows that seemed so inaccessible from below? Turning, he climbed the stairs. He had guessed rightly. He stood now looking down upon the little harbour, the bay with its promenade and, in the middle distance, the garden of his own hotel.
He was busy picking out familiar landmarks, pleased at having got himself there, when he heard steps descending, then was surprised to hear himself addressed.
“You’re not the young man I saw in the hotel, are you?”
He turned. The American of last night was coming down towards him. She was the last person he would have expected to find on this old staircase. Then a scrap of her talk with Mrs. Hamont came back to him. She hoped to find a place in the old town to work, she had said. This was a pleasant encounter.
“Good morning!” he called to her. “Looking for your studio?”
“How do you know I’m looking for a studio?”
“Because I heard you say so.”
“Oh, well, I am. And there’s one up there I want to have a look at. But I can’t get in. I think they’ve given me the wrong key.”
“Let’s see it.”
She held out a key, so large and old that it might have belonged to the gates of an ancient city. “Oh, it’s a handsome key, all right. There’s no mistake about its handsomeness,” she said drily. “But it doesn’t seem to do what keys are meant to do. I’ll have to go back down town, I suppose, and see the agent,” she added ruefully. “You’re not looking for a studio, too, are you?”
“No. I came up here just to look out of this window.”
“It’s a grand view, if you feel like looking at it.”
The head with its short curls and its Greek profile was now beside him on the landing. For the first time in his life, Robin felt sharply the nearness of a beautiful woman. “Look here. Let me go up and try,” he said.
“That’s very nice of you. But I haven’t much hope. Still, a man’s always a man when it comes to things like locks and bicycles and sewing-machines. It’s right at the top, if you don’t mind.” She followed Robin.
At the top there was an open landing. The walls here had been newly coated with whitewash, and a door, old and solid, was newly painted bright blue.
“Well, there it is!” she said, looking at her companion.
“I’ll try in a moment, when I get my breath.”
“Of course.” There was an alarmed, questioning look.
And then, quite suddenly, a smile of understanding sympathy broke over her face.
To Robin, to whom it was directed for the first time, Denise’s smile conveyed a world of tenderness. It was, in its way, quite breathtaking. Friends of longer standing and less impressionable, perhaps, knowing it well, had been heard to say that, yes, Denise St. Roch’s smile was, of course, quite a smile, but that she was born lucky, that her face just did that. But to the young man it was a mystery and a wonder. And this time, indeed, the friends’ implications would have been wrong; for the impulse behind this smile had the kindness it implied.
“I’ll see what can be done,” Robin said, glad now to bend down and hide his boyish confusion. For a time he wrestled. But presently it struck him that if he did not try to thrust the key as far as it would go, but drew it back a little, seeking to turn it as he withdrew it, then it might find its groove. He was right. Almost at once the key found its place, and the old lock, recently oiled, turned easily.
“Good! Didn’t I say it took a man to do these things?” She followed him into the empty room he had just thrown open.
It was a large room, bare and whitewashed, with a stove in one corner. It had been several rooms in earlier days. But now that good rents were to be had from foreign artists, someone had thrown these smaller rooms together to make a large studio. Lesser rooms, deep cupboards almost, led from it. And there was running water. But the glory of the place was the long window at one end, a window that could be thrown open to give access to a long balcony.
“Oh! Come and look at this!” She had thrown the glass door open and was out on the balcony, hanging over and looking at the harbour and the bay below them. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Down there, the Quai Bonaparte with its crowded life of fisher-folk, artisans and visitors. The plane trees that bordered it on the seaward side waved in the sunlight. An open carriage was passing. From here they could see the glossy backs of the horses, the top of the driver’s silk hat and two coloured parasols. They could look down upon the decks of the yachts and the fishing-boats in the harbour. And farther over, the magnificence of the green mountain slopes and the high, grey cliffs that stand between France and Italy.
Robin was uplifted by his adventure. He had eyes for everything. “And now,” he asked, “what about your neighbours?”
Tall houses stood encrusted irregularly against the hill, even as this one was. They could look down on jutting roofs and other balconies. One or two of these balconies had shrubs and garden chairs; used, perhaps, by unconventional foreigners or artists. But most of them had clothes hanging out to dry, crawling children, and kitchen tables.
“Fun, isn’t it?” Denise turned to him.
“Renting this?”
“Oh, I think so! Wouldn’t you? It won’t need much furnishing.”
Robin’s enthusiasm was certain it would not.
III
As they went from the balcony to look once more at the studio room, a sudden draught of wind slammed the main door shut.
Denise turned to Robin. “Hullo! Got our key, I hope?”
“No. I left it on the outside. But the door won’t have locked itself.” He crossed to examine it. “It has! We’re locked in!” he said, with a sheepish grin. “What can we do now?”
“I really don’t know.”
It was a new experience for Robin to find himself shut into an empty house—if this eyrie of a place could be called a house—with a young woman. And by no means did he dislike it. She had said last night that she had come to Mentone to work, not to meet people. But now, until they could devise a way of escape, she would have to go on meeting him!
“Well? Can’t you think of anything? A clever boy like you!” There was a ring of annoyance in her laughter.
“Think of what?”
“I’m asking you.” She went to the door and banged upon it noisily, hoping that someone lower down on the staircase might hear them. But presently, as this brought no one, she came back to Robin. “They’ll find our whitened skeletons in about a month, I reckon,” she said. She was hoping this young man would stop merely gaping at her and do something.
Robin took hold of himself. The situation had put him on his mettle. They had got in by his ingenuity, now they must get out. It was a real hanging balcony, he saw, supported by a bracket on the wall. “We might pitch something down,” he said.
He turned back, searching everywhere. But there was nothing that could be thrown to attract the attention of those beneath them. The place had been swept bare and clean.
“There’s too much noise in the street for shouting to be heard up here,” he said presently. “But what about pitching down some water? We might hit one of these balconies. I’ll see if there’s water in the tap.” Finding this was so, Robin cupped his hands, and thus, by going to and fro quickly, he was able to bring it and throw it down.
This device worked, for presently an angry woman came out upon a flat roof far below them. Signs, calls, and the glint of money in the sun, at last brought the plight of these gesticulating foreigners to her understanding.
In turn she signed that she would come up and try to release them.
“Well, that’s that,” Denise said. “Now I guess we’ll have to wait quite a while until she finds us. What can we do? Tell each other the story of our lives?”
IV
Now, since there were no chairs, they had settled down at either end of the high balcony, sitting facing each other.
“Well?” There was a smile of amused inquiry on Robin’s face.
“Well what?”
“What are we going to talk about?”
But Denise said nothing. Her mood, it seemed, had changed. Her head, shining in the sunlight, was turned now, looking down through the patterned iron balustrade at the movement on the street and in the harbour. After a time she turned back and took to examining Robin, detached and abstracted. “You look very like a young man I used to know. It gave me quite a shock when I saw you last night.” She was speaking almost to herself.
To the young man at the other end of the balcony, these words held all kinds of implications. To be like a friend of Miss St. Roch! And had he merely been a friend? Or had she loved him? What was he like? Robin wished she wouldn’t turn away again, but would go on talking. “Was he a great friend?” he asked.
She turned back slowly. “What? Well, I guess I thought so, anyway.”
This was maddening to Robin’s curiosity. His mind was full of a hundred questions. Yet he only dared to say: “And where is he now?”
But she only shrugged her shoulders and continued in her reverie, leaving Robin to watch her gloomily, assuring himself the while, that even as he felt now, so also must Tantalus have felt.
Denise was far away. Her eyes saw what was going on down there before her, but her thoughts were busy with memory.
Like many another daughter of Louisiana, Denise St Roch had been sent to finish her education in Paris. At the end of the nineteenth century it was still a point of rank among French Creoles that their children should not, when they chose to speak their ancestral language, speak it with an accent that was impure.
France had gone to the young girl’s head. It was there she felt she belonged. She was clever and high-spirited; and if her New Orleans upbringing had been, in most respects, traditionally French, her sense of independence, of personal freedom, had become very American; particularly after meeting other young people of her own nation in the pleasant liberty of the large American circle in Paris.
After two years in France she had gone home to New Orleans—half with reluctance, half with pleasure. Reluctance to leave Paris. Pleasure at the thought of seeing once more the handsome cousin who had been chosen by her parents as her husband. At the sight of him, after the long separation, her maturing affection had blossomed into love; the sky seemed clear and the future promised settlement and happiness. But presently she began to find out things. His ways were said to be dissipated, even in this uncensorious town. He was spending borrowed money. He was supporting a coloured girl. Down here, as Denise knew, generations of Creole girls before her had been forced to accept this treatment; but her newfound independence would not let her do so. Yet she had taken it sorely and become, in some ways, hardened.
Sitting nursing her knees on the floor of the balcony, Denise St. Roch sighed and turned again to look at this strange young man whose strong chance resemblance to the cousin she had once loved and almost married had at first startled her and even now was re-awakening disturbing memories. Yes, absurdly like. The same young handsomeness. The same dark eyes. The same hair perpetually falling over his brow. Her cousin would be different now, she supposed. He would be older, fatter perhaps. Indulgence would have had time to leave its marks upon him.
“I wonder how much longer she’s going to be?” Robin said, meeting her gaze.
But Denise only smiled dreamily, shrugged once more and closed her eyes. “This sunshine makes me sleepy,” she said.
Yes. It had been a life-and-death struggle to get away again. But after a sharp family battle she had been allowed to return to Paris for yet another year, to study music and to heal her wounded spirit. Her short allowance, her father hoped, would put an end to Parisian glamour. Whether it did or not, he never quite found out. For Denise refused to return home. She had found her profession, she wrote, and was able to keep herself.
Music had been merely an excuse to get away. But she was well-educated, had a sense of words and could string together situ
ations. A meeting with an English writer of serials living in Paris gave her the answer to her problem. During their attachment he had taught her what the fiction market wanted.
And now, at the age of thirty, Denise St. Roch was a finished product. Her strange good looks made her popular, and she knew how to turn them to account, together with that soft gaiety inherited from generations of well-bred, plantation Frenchwomen, women brought up, it would seem, only to please. Yet she was a modern, living independently, industriously and well; receiving profitable sums for stories sold to America and Britain—and sometimes even to France, for she was bilingual—stories that had as high a polish and were as well-made and glossy as the paper upon which they were coming, just at that time, to be printed.
And her life had given her the materials for her purpose. If she wanted sultry backgrounds, then she was at home among the swamps and bayous, the magnolias, the live oaks and the mockingbirds of her native State. In these days the French quarter of New Orleans was under a cloud, and as a young woman of good family she had not been allowed to see much of it. But she knew it by hearsay and could use it now and then as a condiment in her literary cooking. She was familiar with the Paris of studio life, and, whatever she knew of its reality, could give it the air of gaiety her kind of stories demanded. Monte Carlo was, of course, an open book, and from the people she saw there, it was not difficult for her to imagine a brightly coloured Mayfair, although she had not, so far, bothered to cross the Channel.
The young man opposite to her was rising to his feet. “I think I hear someone at the door now,” he said.