Part 17 (2/2)
In the middle of the red-tiled kitchen Madame Leroux still stormed as shrilly as though she alone of all excellent housewives possessed worthless servants.
”Is it not enough that I myself must arise at half-past four today, and it is that I must do _all_ myself, me, as well as to entertain the friends and the relations of Monsieur, they who are eating their blood with jealousy because he marries himself with an English lady of the high n.o.bility? And why are the boards not placed over the bowls of soup?
My faith, it is then that _I_ must work, _I_ must arrange, _I_ must plan, _I_ must have the eyes everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, while you let the fire die down, female idle ones who do nothing but regard with open mouths and talk in corners and try to eat me the _glaces_ fruits out of the dishes?” (Gasp for breath.) ”Take you these immediately, Marie Claire----” she waved towards a score of trussed chickens that looked like a frieze of poultry--”and set them in the pans. And pose you those lids so that the pottage may simmer as it must.” She pointed to the vast arched fireplace with the grid running from one end to the other. ”_Mon Dieu_, if this boy here had as many legs as an octopus he could not more expressly place them in my way.
That he does at each moment! Is it that I have sent my own children out to receive _les amis_ even at Arcachon, to be enc.u.mbered by thee? The children? They will feast out here in the yard with the children of the notary and the little cousins; I do not wish that they are the whole time with the grown ones when one talks----”
And she bustled out into the _cour_ to look to the long trestled table there which had been surrounded by a still further variety of chairs.
It was here that Miss Walsh in her halting French asked where was Gustave, where was Monsieur Leroux?
”The men?” Madame gabbled. ”Ah, for that, where would they be?
Invisibles, so long as there is work to be done,” with a half-indulgent laugh. ”You will see also, in good time, you English ladies, that which the _service militaire_ does for the men! They make their service. They return. They put themselves at their ease. Behold, they are required to do nothing further for the rest of their life. It is we, Mesdemoiselles, we who are accustomed to it; we other French wives. You also, you will see! Ah, hold, the oysters! Now, Etienne, you will dust me once again the seats of all these chairs, I say to you, and with a dry duster, I pray you, not a wet one; dry, dry, dry, dry, dry----”
In this exalting hubbub did Olwen pa.s.s the whole morning with her friend until the sallow little Italian waiter came down to announce that _dejeuner_ was served.
They went up. How cool and quiet, it struck them, were those upper reaches of the hotel....
But as they were seeking their places a quick ”Oh, come and look!” from Miss Walsh brought Olwen running to the side window. ”Oh, here are the people----”
The procession of the French _invites_ was coming down the road from the little tramway terminus. It was solemnly headed by the three little pigtailed Leroux girls, each holding by the hand another child, bare from mid-thigh to ankle, and wearing an adaptation of the sailor suit.
After them, in a broken line of twos and ones and threes, came the grown-up people.
First and most resplendent of them appeared the individual whom Olwen rightly guessed to be the _notaire_ from Bordeaux. He wore a white bowler hat, a white waistcoat, and he carried in his hands, which he held well out in front of him, a large bouquet tied with tricolour streamers and the Union Jacques which Madame Leroux had desired, and he overshadowed even his rotund _endimanchee_ wife in her purple costume and forward raking hat, who bobbed in his wake. She was escorted by Monsieur Leroux. Next came Monsieur Popinot, the clerk from the pa.s.sports office, all in black, but carrying Madame Popinot's pink parasol. She, a plump and pretty little woman, carried a year-old baby in a corolla of lace.
Then came a sister of Madame Leroux, as dark, as mercilessly intelligent as the manageress herself, talking eagerly to Pierre Tronchet, effective in his blue and red.
Another _artilleriste_ on leave, evidently a comrade from the regiment, walked a pace or so behind them, between two silent young girls; then a trio of stout, bearded old men gesticulating freely, then a lady in another forward raking hat, then a party wearing deepest mourning, but wreathed in smiles, then others ... then again others.... Tronchets, Leroux, ramifications of both families, relatives, friends, and those whom it was intended to dazzle....
Olwen, gazing upon this _cortege_, suppressed a wish to think aloud of a rhyme of her childhood:
”The animals went in four by four, Hurray, Hurray!
The animals went in four by four And the big hippopotamus stuck in the door.”
This last line, she considered, might almost have applied to several of the _invites_!
All of them, as they approached the hotel, stiffened, pulled themselves together as if they were going past the saluting point of a review, a.s.sumed photographically unnatural expressions, and walked delicately; then they seemed to deflate and hurry as they slipped past the corner to the back entrance to the premises.
”Oh, I'm not a bit hungry,” sighed the agitated Miss Walsh as she turned from the window and sat down next to Olwen at the long table. The _dejeuner_ was as perfectly cooked and served as if no subterranean banquet had been in preparation. ”Oh, fancy having to be 'shown' to a host of people! Oh, I can't help feeling almost glad that Gustave's father and mother aren't alive! If they had been, you know, he would have had to ask their consent to marry me, even though he is thirty-eight. Oh, it is such a mercy that Madame didn't want me to sit through the whole of lunch.”
”Much the best plan!” agreed Mrs. Cartwright from her side of the table.
”Oh, yes; I don't appear till they have to drink my health--oh, but I am so nervous! And do you think I look all right in this, Mrs.
Cartwright?... honestly?”
She wore an expensive new dress of prune-coloured _glace_ silk, ornamented with a kind of lace bib and with rows and rows of little crimson b.u.t.tons that fastened nothing. Both Mrs. Cartwright and Olwen fibbed valiantly, and had their reward. The loveliest frock in Paris could not have been more becoming to Agatha Walsh than her flush of pleasure.
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