by Edna Ferber
“I can’t figure out about you.”
“Is that why you whip your horses?”
In the back seat sat Kakaracou, an unwilling chaperon whose glare of disapproval would have seared their necks if their own emotional warmth had not served as counteraction. Cupidon had walked home—rather, after one wistful look at the fiery horses and the dashing equipage he had whisked off at an incredible pace on his own stumpy legs. Taking short cuts, dodging through alleys, there he stood, purple-faced and puffing what with haste and the heat, waiting at the carriage block when the turnout drew up before the house. He took the horses’ heads, one tiny hand stroking their necks and withers with the practiced touch of the horselover.
Clint Maroon handed Clio out. Agilely Kaka stepped down, but she stood waiting like a demon duenna. Maroon stared at the neat secret house, he looked around him at this neighborhood that had about it something flavorous, something faintly sinister, something shoddy, something of past dignity. He looked the girl full in the face.
She hesitated, she glanced at the waiting Kaka; like a young girl still a pupil at the school in France she said, primly, “Won’t you come in?”
He said, crudely, “Say, what kind of a game is this, anyway?”
Without a word she turned and walked swiftly toward the house. Cupide dropped the bridle-hold, Kakaracou seemed to flow like a lithe snake into the house, the front door closed with a thud, leaving him staring after them. As if by magic the three had vanished. The house-front was blank as a vault. From the sidewalk there was no hint of the garden at the back with its vines and shrubs, its magnolia tree, its courtyard green with moss, the tiny fountain’s tinkle giving the illusion of coolness.
For a week he haunted Rampart Street. At first he came with his horses and carriage and the neighborhood marked him and watched and waited, but the house door did not open to his knocking, and small boys, white and black, gathered to stare and the horses fidgeted. Clint Maroon felt a baleful eye upon him from somewhere within the house—an eye with yellowish whites in a prune-colored face. But there was no sound. He took to loitering in the neighborhood, he sauntered into the near-by provision shops and asked questions meant to be discreet. But the shopkeepers were sneeringly polite and completely noncommunicative; they looked at him, at his white sombrero, at his high-heeled boots with the lone star stitching in the top, at his wide-skirted coat and the diamond in his shirt front and at his skin that had been ruddied by sun and whipped by wind and stung by desert sand. They said, “Ah, a visitor from Texas, I see.” The inflection was not flattering. He had a room at the St. Charles Hotel, that favorite rendezvous of Louisiana planters and Texas cattle men. Its columned façade, its magnificent shining dome, its famous Sazaracs made from the potent Sazarac brandy, all contributed to its fame and flavor. From here he laboriously composed a letter to her, written in his round, schoolboyish hand and delivered in style by a dapper Negro in hotel uniform. He had spent an entire morning over it.
DEAR LADY,
You might be a countess like you said but you are a queen to me. I did not go for to hurt your feelings when I said that about how I did not understand about you. I guess back in Texas we are kind of raw. Anyway I sure never met anybody like you before and you had me locoed. I think about you all day and all night and am fit to be tied. You were mighty kind to me there in Begué’s eating house and I acted like a fool and impolite as though I never had any bringing up and a disgrace to my Mother. If you will let me talk to you I can explain. I have got to see you or I will bust the house in. Please. You are the most beautiful little lady I ever met.
Ever your friend and servant,
CLINT MAROON.
This moving epistle was wasted effort. Clio never saw it. Delivered into the hands of the ubiquitous Kakaracou, it was thrust into her capacious skirt pocket and brought out that evening under the kitchen lamplight. But reading was not one of Kaka’s talents. Discretion told her to throw the letter into the fire. Curiosity as to its contents proved too strong. Over the kitchen supper table with Cupide she drew out the sheet of paper and turned it over in her skinny fingers. She had deciphered the signature, and this she had torn off in the touching belief that without it the letter’s source would be a mystery to its reader.
It was characteristic of Kaka’s adaptability that, after an absence of more than fifteen years, the old New Orleans Negro patois and accent were creeping back into her speech. Gombo French, Negro English, Cajun, indefinably mixed; the dropped consonants, the softly slurred vowels, the fine disregard for tenses. Naturally imitative and a born mimic, she was likely to fit her speech to the occasion. Weary, she unconsciously slipped back into the patois of her childhood. To impress shopkeepers and people whom she considered riffraff, such as Clint Maroon, she chattered a voluble and colloquial French of the Paris boulevards and the Paris gutters. Her accent when speaking pure English was more British than American, having been copied from Clio’s own. Clio’s English had been learned primarily from the careful speech of Sister Felice at the convent. And Sister Félice had come by her English in London itself, during her novitiate. Not alone Kaka, but Clio and Cupide were adept in these lingual gymnastics. They were given to talking among themselves in a spicy ragoût of French, English and Gombo that was almost unintelligible to an outsider.
Kaka now fished the crumpled letter out of her capacious pocket, smoothed it, and turned upon Cupide an eye meant to be guileless and which would not for a moment have deceived a beholder much less astute than the cynical Cupidon.
“I find letter today in big armoire in hall I guess must be there many years hiding heself.”
“What’s it say?”
Kaka rather reluctantly pushed it across the table to him. St. Charles Hotel. New paper, palpably fresh ink. Cupide, his fork poised, read it aloud in a brisk murmur. Intently the old woman leaned forward to hear. Finished, Cupide said. “Tu mentis comme un arracheur de dents.” You lie like a dentist. And went on with his supper.
“What does it say, you monkey, you!”
He shrugged. “Wants to see her. He’ll break into the house if she doesn’t see him. Crazy about her. A la folie.’’’’
A flame of fear and hate flared in Kaka’s eyes. She pushed back her plate. She remembered the days when strange people had come into Rita Dulaine’s house, forcing their way into the room where she lay weeping after Nicolas was dead.
“We must leave here. It is no good for us here in New Orleans. It was good in Paris—triste but good.”
Cupide wiped his plate clean with a crust of crisp French bread and popped the morsel into his mouth. “Old prune sèche! What do you know! It’s fine here in America. Don’t you bother your addled head about little Clio. She knows her way about. Anyway, I like that big vacher from Texas. He knows about horses. Yesterday I heard he won a thousand dollars at the races. At night he gambles down on Royal Street and wins. At Number 18 they say he never loses.”
“Number 18, Number 18! What are you talking about!”
“That big marble building on the Rue Royal—the one that used to be the Merchants’ Exchange. Everybody knows it’s a gambling house now. You ought to see it! Mirrors and velvet, and supper spread out on tables—”
“So that’s where you’ve been at night! Leaving us here two women unprotected alone in the house.” A sudden thought struck her. “Has he seen you there? Have you been talking—”
“No, but I might if you don’t feed me better. You with your everlasting pineapple and strawberries with kirsch, you’re too lazy to prepare a real sweet—baba au rhum or a lovely crème brûlé.”
“Little One, I make you sweets—omelette soufflée—crêpe suzette—baba cake—pie Saint-Honoré—effen you not speak to her about letter.”
He strutted superior in his knowledge as a male. His answer fell into Gombo French. “Make no difference about letter, Old One. This going to be something. You see. You better go to voodoo woman get black devil’s powder. But if you do I tell. Anyway, I am si
ck of nothing but women in the house, here and in Paris. A man around suit me fine.”
Now Clio was definitely bored with her week of dignified seclusion. It was not for this that she had come to New Orleans—to sit alone in the dusk in a garden swooning sweet with jessamine and roses and magnolia. She dressed herself all in white and, with Kaka and Cupide keeping pace behind her, she walked to the Cathedral of St. Louis in the cool of the evening, prayer book in hand, eyes cast down, but not so far down that she failed to see him when he entered. For at last he was rewarded for his daily vigil at the corner of Rampart Street. He did not remain in the shadow of the dim cathedral columns but came swiftly to her and knelt beside her, wordlessly, his shoulder touching hers, and suddenly the candlelights swam before her eyes and there came a pounding in her ears. She did not glance up at him. She closed her eyes, she bowed her head, she thought, irreligiously, I must tell him not to use that sweetish hair pomade, it isn’t chic. When, finally, she rose, he rose. Together they moved up the aisle and, dreamlike, walked out into the tropical dusk. Kakaracou and Cupide fell in behind them.
“Send them away,” he said. It was the first word that had been uttered between them.
She turned and spoke to them in French. “Go home, you two, quickly. There will be two of us for supper. The cold daube glacé, soft-shell crabs—Cupide, fetch a block of ice from the épicier and get out a botde of the Grand Montrachet.”
They ate by candlelight with the French doors wide open into the garden. They ate the delicate food, they drank the cool dry wine, they talked a great deal at first and laughed and did not look at one another for longer than a flick of the eyelash; but then they talked less and less, their gaze dwelt the one on the other longer and more intently until finally, wordlessly, they rose and moved in a pulsating silence toward the French doors, down the cool stone steps into the velvet dark of the garden, and the white of her gown merged with the dark cloth of his coat and there was only the soft tinkle of the litde fountain. In the bedroom the gaunt figure of Kaka was silhouetted against the light as she made her mistress’s room ready for the night.
VI
Just as she had inherited all that remained of her mother’s magnificent Rue de la Paix jewelry, just as her mother’s exquisite Paris gowns fitted her as well as her own frocks, so Clio Dulaine had been bequeathed other valuables of courtesanship less tangible but equally important. Now, in the Rampart Street house, she slipped fluidly into the way of life that had been Rita Dulaine’s many years before. But with a difference. There was an iron quality in this girl that the other woman never had possessed.
From her lovely languorous mother and from her hearty jovial aunt Clio had early learned the art of being charming to everyone. A trick of the socially insecure, yet there was nothing servile about it. Clio had seen Rita Dulaine’s poignant smile and wistful charm turned upon the musty old concierge as he opened the courtyard door of the Paris flat. The same smile and equal charm had been bestowed upon any man numbered among her few Paris acquaintances whom she might encounter on her rare visits to the opera or while driving in the Bois. Her graciousness was partly due, doubtless, to the inherent good nature of a woman who has been beautiful and beloved for years; partly to the fact that gracious charm was a necessary equipment of the born courtesan.
So, then, the manner of the girl Clio Dulaine stemmed from a combination of causes: unconscious imitation of the two women she most loved and admired; observation, training, habit, innate shrewdness. She had, too, something of her buxon aunt’s lusty good humor; much of her mother’s sultry enchantment.
Without effort, without a conscious thought to motivate it, Clio had turned the same warm, personal smile on the waiter Léon and on Monsieur Hippolyte Begué; on the painters and glaziers who had smartened the Rampart Street house; on Clint Maroon.
The relation between these two, begun as a flirtation, had, in two weeks, taken on a serious depth and complexity. Though so strongly drawn together there was, too, a definite sex antagonism between them. Each had a plan of life selfishly devised, though vague. Each felt the fear of the other’s power to change that plan. Each, curiously enough, nourished a deep resentment against the world that had hurt someone dear to them. Hers was a sophisticated viewpoint, for all her youth and inexperience; his a naïve one, for all his masculinity and dare-devil past. Cautiously at first, then in a flood that burst the dam of caution and reticence, the two had confided to each other the details of their lives. Through long lazy afternoons, through hot sultry nights each knew the relief that comes of confidences exchanged, of sympathies expressed, of festering grievances long hidden brought now to light and cleansed by exposure. Adventurers, both, bent on cracking the shell of the world that was to be their oyster.
Though they did not know it, they were like two people who, searching for buried treasure, are caught in a quicksand. Every struggle to extricate themselves only made them sink deeper.
She had never met anyone like this dashing and slightly improbable figure who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of fiction.
“Tell me, the men in Texas, are they all like you?”
“Only the bad ones.”
“You’re not bad. You’re only mad at the world. You are like someone in a story book. When we lived in Paris I read the stories of Bret Harte. Do you know him? He is wonderful.”
“No. Who’s he?”
“Oh, what a great stupid boy! He is a famous American writer. His story-book men carry a pistol, too, like you, at the hip. I don’t like pistols. They make me nervous. You know why.”
By now he knew the story of Rita Dulaine. The Comtesse de Trenaunay de Chanfret had vanished early in their acquaintance. “This is different, honey. You don’t have to worry about a gun on me.”
“But why! Why do you wear it? It is fantastic, a gun on the hip, like the Wild West.”
“The West is wild, and don’t you forget it. Anyway, I wouldn’t feel I was dressed respectable without it, I’m so used to it. I’d as soon go out without my shirt or my hat.”
“Tell me, chéri, have you killed men?” He was silent. She persisted. “Tell me. Have you?”
“Oh, two, three, maybe. It was them or me.”
“They,” she said automatically and absurdly.
“Aim to make a genüeman out of me, don’t you, honey?”
“I don’t want to change you. You are perfect. But perfect!”
“Ye-e-es, you do. You’re like all the rest of’em. They all try to make their men over.”
“Their men! You are not my man. You belong to that little lady who you say is the finest littie lady in the world—she who made you the amazing white satin tie embroidered with the blue forget-me-nots. Oh, that tie!” She laughed her slow, indolent laugh.
“What’s the matter with it! You’re jealous, that’s all.”
“It is terrible. But terrible! Tell me about her—the finest little lady in the world who made you that work of art. Blue eyes, you said, and golden hair, and so little she only comes up to here. How nize! How nize!” When she mocked him she became increasingly French, but rather in the music-hall manner, very maddening. “Tell me, when are you going to marry, you two?”
She could not be sure whether the finest little woman in the world really existed back there in his Texas past or whether he had devised her as protection. Grown cautious, he would say, “I don’t aim to marry anybody. Me, I’m a lone ranger out for big game.”
She in turn had no intention of allowing this man to shape her life. She, too, had her armor against infatuation. “I shall marry. I shall marry a husband very, very rich and very respectable.”
“Yes, and I’ll be best man at the wedding.”
“Why not? But no, you would be too handsome. All the guests would wonder why I had not married you. Very, very rich and very respectable men are so rarely handsome. But then one can’t have everything.”
“Say, what kind of a woman are you, anyway!” he would shout, baffled. Back home in Tex
as the codes were simpler. There were two kinds of women; good women, bad women. But here was a paradoxical woman, gay, gende, fiery, prim; brazenly unconventional, absurdly correct; tender, hard, generous, ruthless. Sometimes she seemed an innocent girl; sometimes an accomplished courtesan.
Even after their first week together they were watching one another warily, distrustful of the world and of each other, stepping carefully to avoid a possible trap.
The very morning after their reunion in the church of St. Louis she had sat brushing her hair that hung a curtain of black against the sheer white dotted swiss of her gabrielle with its ruffled lace edging of Valenciennes. She wielded the silver-backed brush and sniffed the air delicately and half closed her eyes. “A house isn’t really a house,” she murmured, “unless it has about it the scent of a good cigar after breakfast.”
He stared at her, he strode over to her seated there before the rosewood duchesse. With one great hand he grasped her shoulder so that she winced. “Where did you learn that?”
“Mama used to say that, poor darling. Or maybe it was Aunt Belle.”
“Did, heh? Look here, all that stuff you were telling me last night in the garden—it’s the truth, isn’t it? I don’t mean that first stuff about being a countess, and all that. Sometimes you talk like a school girl—and sometimes I think you’ve been—”
She looked up at him from the low bench before the dressing table. He put his hand on her long throat, tipping her head still farther back so that his eyes plumbed hers.
“Ask Kaka. Ask Cupide.”
“Those two! They’d lie for you no matter what.”