by Susan Barrie
Looked at in a purely dispassionate way, they were two people who ought to have married!
Toni had an almost sleepless night that night, and in the morning her pallor was slightly noticeable. Her uncle pinched her cheek.
“You can do with a change of scenery, my dear,” he told her. “I know the mountains are wonderful, and I can fully appreciate them, but a young girl like you wants a little more life—shops, and things like that ... When you’re married you’ll have to persuade Kurt to take you on your travels occasionally. It won’t do to rusticate all the time.”
Toni felt she wanted to defend the Rosenhorn, and Kurt’s way of life, with every breath in her body; but she was tired and dispirited after her sleepless night, and somehow the sight of Kurt’s equally grim face when they met did nothing to lift her spirits.
He wasn’t quite as loverlike as he might have been when he saw them off. He even changed his mind about accompanying them to Innsbruck at the last moment.
Their cases were stacked in the boot of a hired car, and the car swung out of the hotel courtyard. Kurt walked beside it for a few steps, and then he waved a hand almost perfunctorily. Toni, sharing the back seat with her uncle and Philip Gresham—who had decided to accompany them at almost the last moment—waved back and watched, her head bent almost painfully, until the hotel was out of sight.
Her lips felt cold as if they had been touched by ice instead of Kurt’s last kiss, and her hands inside her gloves were cold, too. It was a beautiful mountain morning—a wonderful mountain morning—but as yet the atmosphere was chill.
Somehow it affected her with the queer sensation that she was chilled to the heart.
When they boarded the train she was still thinking of Kurt walking back into his office and being welcomed by Mademoiselle Raveaux. Marianne would probably see to it that he had some coffee brought to him almost at once. She would chat brightly about the affairs of the day, and gradually the Austrian would relax, and the image of Toni would begin a slow process of fading...
It hadn’t faded by the time they reached Paris, for a telegram awaited her there, and it urged her to ‘have a good time and enjoy her shopping spree.’ It also urged her not to forget the Rosenhorn.
Toni carried the telegram up to her room, and she put it safely away in a drawer of the dressing-table before issuing any instructions about the disposal of her cases.
Her room was even more luxurious than the one she had recently occupied at the Rosenhorn. It had an enormous double bed raised on a kind of dais, and the hangings and the carpet were all of pale gold. The bathroom was positively sumptuous, and so were the rest of the furnishings. The outlook from the windows was over the Bois and the leafy trees of Paris, and Toni spent a long time standing and gazing downwards at the glittering cars and the couples moving below her, and she pushed back the thought that if only Kurt was with her everything would have a golden glamour about it. In fact, everything would be rainbow-hued, as well as golden.
When she joined her uncle in the magnificent dining-room where he had reserved a table for their evening meal she was relieved to hear that Philip would not be dining with them. Possibly Toni’s silence on the journey had affected him, and in any case he was convinced that she had left her heart behind in the mountains of Austria.
But the General was in a festive mood, and determined to celebrate. They would have a bottle of champagne with their meal—it was already reposing in an ice-bucket near to them—and afterwards he would take her to a show, and then, if she felt like it, they might go on to a night-club. In the morning, he was sure, she would want to be off early looking at the shops, but tonight was his night for ensuring that she saw something of Paris and enjoyed herself.
“Forget that young man of yours for a few hours, and have fun,” he urged.
But Toni was appalled.
“I’m a bit tired,” she admitted. “I had thought we would be going early to bed.”
The General exploded in amazement.
“Early to bed in Paris? My dear girl, don’t you know this is still the gayest capital in Europe?—the whole world, if it comes to that! Anyone who goes early to bed in Paris is dull indeed, and I’m not going to accept it that my niece is dull. Now, drink up that glass of champagne, and afterwards you’ll feel distinctly more cheerful.” He summoned the waiter with the slightly arrogant gesture of the Englishman abroad, and demanded to know what was special on the menu. Something that the chef could really recommend.
In the morning Toni set off for the shops alone, aware that her head was aching a little after her dissipations of the night before. Not that they had been excessive ... apart from one glass of champagne at dinner, she had had another in some gaudily gleaming place that was dignified by the title of a night-club, and had her toes trodden upon badly when her uncle decided he couldn’t let the evening pass without attempting one or two of the modern dances.
Toni, who had danced very little in her life, was nevertheless a born dancer, but the General was not. After apologising several times he gave it up and decided that the rhythm was infectious. It didn’t much matter whether he acquitted himself well or not ... He was thoroughly enjoying himself, and he was thankful to Toni for giving him the opportunity ... or rather, providing him with the excuse!
Toni decided to risk the highly dangerous crossings and make her own discovery of the shops. Her uncle had given her a wad of notes. They seemed to her to fill her handbag when she looked inside it, and she experienced more than a few qualms because she had accepted them. She would much rather feel independent and use her own money, except that she hadn’t any ... or very little.
Kurt had broached the delicate subject of her trousseau, and wanted to pay for everything, but she had refused almost indignantly, and her uncle had supported her. Now, she supposed, if she was ever to have an adequate wardrobe that would enable her to marry someone like Kurt she would have to use the General’s money.
At first she merely window-gazed, and gradually the truly feminine side of her became excited by the things she saw. She ventured to find her way inside one or two shops, and when she emerged her parcels made it necessary for her to take a taxi. After that, she decided to use a taxi all the time, and her afternoon shopping expedition was conducted along somewhat more practical and time-saving lines.
A week of this sort of thing, with the evenings devoted to the General and his naive appreciation of all that Paris night life offered, and she was feeling nearly exhausted. Between excursions to Fontainebleau and Versailles, visits to the hairdresser and the beauty-parlour, snatched half-hours in museums and art galleries, fittings for suits and dresses, purchases of cosmetics, night taxi jaunts to see the lights of Paris and the outskirts, she was beginning to feel like something washed up by the tide. And she never neglected to write to Kurt. She had sent him three long letters, and two telegrams answering the first one he sent her, when it was gradually borne in on her that, so far, he hadn’t bothered to write her one letter.
Each day when she haunted the reception desk she enquired anxiously for letters. There was nothing for her ... The dark-eyed, alert girl behind the reception desk regarded her compassionately. Mademoiselle was undoubtedly expecting to hear from a lover, and so far he had disappointed her. But, as she was so pretty and charming, in a curiously diffident way, there was no doubt at all he would remember her some time. It was just a question of being patient!
Toni realised that that was what the receptionist’s eyes said to her each time she answered her enquiry with rather a sad shake of the head.
“Nothing today, mademoiselle. Try the afternoon post!”
But the afternoon post brought nothing, either. Toni rejoined her uncle—usually sipping something which he described as quite innocuous oh the broad terrace of the hotel, which overlooked the street—and he could tell at once from her expression that her enquiries had proved futile.
“That young man of yours not a very good correspondent? Well, never mind, I wouldn’t wo
rry! Never was much of a correspondent myself when I was young ... Put off writing letters until the last moment, even when there was someone pretty like yourself to receive them. Now, stop worrying your head and have an aperitif ... nothing like a good martini for freeing the mind of its troubles. Waiter!”
Sometimes Toni accepted the aperitif, sometimes she did not. Towards the end of the week she was feeling so desperate that she considered putting through a telephone call to the Hotel Rosenhorn, but for some reason the General discouraged the idea.
“Not a good thing to appear to be chasing after a man ... especially a foreigner! Might get the wrong ideas!” It occurred to Toni that a man who was expecting to marry in a few weeks’ time could hardly get the wrong ideas when his fiancée telephoned him, but some queer insistence in her uncle’s voice decided her against doing anything precipitate. Marianne might answer the call, and it would look extremely odd if Toni, with a note of uncertainty and agitation in her voice, enquired whether Monsieur Antoine was there to be spoken to.
She decided to wait another day, at least, and by the end of that day her spirits were so depressed that instead of describing Paris as a gay capital she would have described it as the unhappiest place on earth. They had attended a performance of La Dame Aux Camellias, and what with being haunted by the melancholy of the unfortunate heroine, shaken by her unhappy demise, and rendered definitely sceptical of the intentions of all males, she could barely conjure up a smile when they got back to the hotel. Tragic melodrama obviously had no effect at all on the General, and he was all for drinking a nightcap together and discussing the show before she left him to go to bed, and because he plainly thought he was giving her a wonderful time after her years of hardship she consented to accompany him into one of the now emptying public rooms.
The first one they passed through didn’t seem to appeal to the General, and they went on to the next. Here there were one or two couples lingering beneath the subdued lights, and an elderly lady or two engaged with knitting. A profound silence seemed to envelop the place, broken only by the noise of traffic without, and Toni’s feet seemed to sink into the thick carpet as she followed her uncle over the floor.
And then, abruptly, he was gripping her elbow and indicating a group of chairs in a corner. In one of them a man was seated, and he rose at once as soon as Toni lifted her eyes in a bemused fashion and met his.
“Kurt!” she exclaimed, and moved forward with an impulsiveness that slightly shocked one of the elderly ladies peering at a magazine through a gold-handled lorgnette. Even more impulsively she threw herself forward into his arms, and the General stood by smiling placidly while they exchanged an unsatisfying but definitely rather starved sort of a kiss.
Kurt, who seemed to have lost some of his tan under the rose-shaded lights, kept his arm firmly about Toni’s shoulders while an explanation was offered to her of the reason why he had appeared so unexpectedly.
“It was your uncle’s idea,” he said. “He thought it might cheer you up if I came.”
“Cheer her up considerably, was what I actually said,” the General corrected him, looking round for a waiter to whom he could issue an order. “I decided to telephone the other day when you were looking so miserable at lunch I thought you’d cry into your soup, and as I never enjoy the spectacle of an engaged young woman crying into her soup I strongly urged him to get here as quick as he could manage it. And he came! Without losing much time, I give you my word!”
“But why didn’t you write?” Toni demanded, sinking down into the luxurious lap of a settee and experiencing a kind of breathless delight as Kurt shared the settee with her. He was holding her hand so strongly that she could have winced with the pain of it if she hadn’t been so humbly grateful for his touch.
“I haven’t received a single letter from you, and I’ve written to you every day. Even Uncle knows that.”
Uncle nodded.
“Been amazed by her energy, and her determination to tell you all that was going on,” he confessed. “Can’t think how she managed it, with all those trips to the hairdressers, and so forth. The only thing I can think of was that she was obsessed with the determination to do you justice when you finally did arrive.”
Toni looked up into the deep, dark velvet that was her lover’s eyes, and she repeated with a slight break in her voice:
“Why didn’t you write?”
Kurt was silent for a moment, and then he answered quietly:
“Perhaps I wanted you to miss me! Perhaps I didn’t know what to write ... Perhaps I found letters utterly inadequate as a bond between us!”
“But you did receive mine?”
“Oh, yes.”
He opened his notecase and she saw the letters lying inside it.
“Very well read, I can assure you,” he added, a note in his voice that set all her pulses quivering at the same time. “So well read that the paper on which they’re written ought to have disintegrated by this time!”
Toni’s fingers tightened about his until they were clinging to him. The elderly lady with the lorgnette, deciding this was a genuine love affair, relaxed and put aside her magazine, and decided to enjoy the process of being merely an onlooker.
“I was beginning to feel quite desperate because you didn’t write,” Toni told him, and her lip quivered.
“I know. Your uncle said all that over the telephone, and so we arranged that I should be here tonight. Does it make up for all those letterless days that I’m here now?”
And not with Marianne, her heart sang. Oh, never, never again will I have any fear of Marianne!
The General finished his whisky and soda and ordered another, and then he announced that he knew when he was in the way and he was going up to bed. He didn’t suppose they wanted him around.
“I don’t suppose you two will be thinking of retiring for some time yet, but if you can get Toni to smile at the inside of one of these Paris night-clubs I’ll stand you something very special in the way of a lunch tomorrow morning,” he added to Kurt. “I’ll admit I’ve trodden on her toes trying to get her to teach me these modern dances, but no girl ought to look as unhappy as she looked while acting the part of an instructor. Made me feel my years,” he admitted, sighing. And then he smiled at them both. “Don’t be too late. I don’t think Toni’s slept very much lately, and she oughtn’t to be outside her room much later than cock-crow. That should give you a little time to reassure one another about how much each of you has been missed!”
Alone together on the settee Toni and Kurt looked at one another. The elderly lady with the lorgnette considerately averted her eyes.
“What shall we do?” Kurt asked, in a voice so soft that Toni barely heard it. “And where shall we go?”
“Anywhere,” Toni replied. “It doesn’t matter to me...”
“So long as we’re together?”
“Yes.”
“That’s how I feel,” he said, and together they walked out of the hotel. Kurt hailed a taxi, and after he had put Toni into it he had a few words with the driver.
“Where are we going?” she asked, when he joined her in the gloom of the back of the cab.
“I told the driver it didn’t matter,” Kurt said simply, and opened his arms to her. As they sped beneath the lights of Paris and the taxi-driver decided there was nothing wrong with Versailles, Toni felt herself locked in those arms, and her lips responded breathlessly to his kisses. It wasn’t until they were both a little exhausted by the fierceness and delight of their own passion that Kurt said decisively:
“I’ve decided that we’re going to be married immediately. Immediately, do you hear, Liebling?”
THE END
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