Part 4 (1/2)
”Louis!” I exclaimed protestingly.
”I mean what I say, monsieur,” Louis declared, leaning toward me, and speaking in a low, earnest whisper. ”The cafe below, the streets throughout this region, are peopled by his creatures. In an hour he could lead an army which would defy the whole of the gendarmes in Paris. This quarter of the city is his absolutely to do with what he wills. Do you believe that you would have a chance if he thought that she had looked twice at you,--she--Susette--the only woman who has ever led him? I tell you that he is mad with love and jealousy for her. The whole world knows of it.”
”My dear Louis,” I said, ”you know me only in London, where I come and sit in your restaurant and eat and drink there. To you I am simply like all those others who come to you day by day,--idlers and pleasure seekers. Let me a.s.sure you, Louis, that there are other things in my life. Just now I should welcome anything in the world which meant adventure, which could teach me to forget.”
”But monsieur need not seek the suicide,” Louis said. ”There are hundreds of adventures to be had without that.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
”If mademoiselle should send me the note,” I said, ”surely it would not be gallant of me to refuse to accept it.”
”There are other ways of seeking adventures,” Louis said, ”than by ending one's days in the Seine.”
The girl by this time had finished her note and rolled it up. She looked behind her to the other end of the room, where only Bartot's broad back was visible. Then she raised her eyes to mine,--turquoise blue as the color of her gown,--and very faintly but very deliberately she smiled. I was not in the least in love with her. The affair to me was simply interesting because it promised a moment's distraction.
But, nevertheless, as she smiled I felt my heart beat faster, and I reached a little eagerly forward as though for the note. She called a waiter to her side. I watched her whisper to him; I watched his expression--anxious and perturbed at first, doubtful, even, after her rea.s.suring words. He looked down the room to where Bartot was standing. It seemed to me, even then, that he ventured to protest, but mademoiselle frowned and spoke to him sharply. He caught up a wine list and came to our table. Once more, before he spoke, he looked behind to where Bartot's back was still turned.
”For monsieur,” he whispered, setting the wine list upon the table, and under it the note.
I nodded, and he hastened away. At that moment Bartot turned and came down the room. As he approached he looked at me once more, as though, for some reason or other, he was more than ordinarily interested in my presence. It may have been my fancy, but I thought, also, that he looked at the wine card stretched out before me.
”Be careful!” Louis whispered. ”Be careful! And, for G.o.d's sake, destroy that note!”
I laughed, and as Bartot was compelled to turn his back to me to regain his seat, this time at the table with his companion, I raised my gla.s.s, looking her full in the face, and drank. Then I slipped the note from underneath the wine card into my pocket. She made the slightest of signs, but I understood. I was not to read it until I was alone.
”Go outside,” Louis whispered to me. ”Read your letter and get rid of it.”
I obeyed him. A watchful waiter pulled the table away, and I walked out into the anteroom. Here, with a freshly lit cigarette in my mouth, I unclenched my fingers, and looked at the few words written very faintly, in long, delicate characters, across the torn sheet of paper:
Monsieur is in bad company. It would be well for him to lunch to-morrow at the Cafe de Paris, and to ask for Leon.
That was all. I tore it into small pieces and returned to my seat, altogether puzzled. It seemed to me that Louis watched me with an incomprehensible anxiety as I resumed my place by his side.
”If monsieur is ready,” he suggested, ”perhaps we had better go.”
I rose to my feet reluctantly.
”As you will, Louis,” I said.
But the time for our departure had not yet come!
CHAPTER V
SATISFACTION
During the whole of the time people had been coming and going from the restaurant, not, perhaps, in a continual stream, but still at fairly regular intervals. It seemed to me, who had watched them all with interest, that scarcely a person had entered who was not worthy of observation. I saw faces, it is true, which I had seen before at the fas.h.i.+onable haunts of Paris, upon the polo ground, at Longchamps, or in the Bois, yet somehow it seemed to me that they came to this place as different beings. There was a tense look in their faces, a look almost of apprehension, as they entered and pa.s.sed out,--as of people who have found their way a little further into life than their a.s.sociates. Louis was right. There was something different about the place, something at which I could only dimly guess, which at that time I did not understand. Only I realized that I watched always with a little thrill of interest whenever the hurrying forward of Monsieur Carvin indicated the arrival of a new visitor.
We had already risen to go, and the _vestiaire_ was on his way towards us, bearing my hat and coat, when Monsieur Carvin, who had hurried out a moment before, reappeared, ushering in a new arrival. The events that followed have always seemed a little confused to me. My first thought was that this was indeed a nightmare into which I had wandered. The slight unreality which had hung like a cloud over the whole of the evening, the strangeness of my being there with such a companion, the curious atmosphere of the place, which so far had completely puzzled me,--these things may all have served to heighten the illusion. Yet it seemed to me then that, dreaming or waking, this thing with which I was confronted was the last impossibility. I suppose that I must have stared at him like some wild creature, for the conversation around us suddenly stopped.