Part 1 (1/2)
The Azure Rose.
by Reginald Wright Kauffman.
PREFACE
A novel about Paris that is not about the war requires even now, I am told, some word of explanation. Mine is brief:
This story was conceived before the war began. I came to the task of putting it into its final shape after nine months pa.s.sed between the Western Front and a Paris war-torn and war-darkened, both physically and spiritually. Yet, though I had found the old familiar places, and the ever young and ever familiar people, wounded and sad, I did not long have to seek for the Parisian bravery in pain and the Parisian smile s.h.i.+ning, rainbowlike, through the tears. Nothing can conquer France and nothing can lastingly hurt Paris. They are, as a famous wit said of our own so different Boston, a state of mind. Had the German succeeded in the Autumn of 1914 or the Spring of 1918, France would have remained, and Paris. What used to happen in the Land of Love and the City of Lights will happen there again and be always happening, so that my story is at once a retrospect and a prophecy.
Realizing these things, I have found it a pleasure to make this book.
A book without problems and without horrors, its sole purpose is to give to the reader some of that pleasure which went to its making.
Wars come and go; but for every man the Door Opposite stands open beside the Seine, the hurdy-gurdy plays ”Annie Laurie” in the Street of the Valley of Grace and--a Lady of the Rose is waiting.
R. W. K.
_Columbia, Penna._, Christmas Day, 1918.
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH, IF NOT LOVE, AT LEAST ANGER, LAUGHS AT LOCKSMITHS
Je ne connais point la nature des anges, parce que je ne suis qu'homme; il n'y a que les theologiens qui la connaissent.--Voltaire: _Dictionnaire Philosophique_.
He did not know why he headed toward his own room--it could hold nothing that he guessed of to welcome him, except further tokens of the dejection and misery he carried in his heart--but thither he went, and, as he drew nearer, his step quickened. By the time that he entered the rue du Val de Grace, he was moving at something close upon a run.
He hurried up the rising stairs and into the dark hall, and, as he did so, was possessed by the sense that somebody had as hurriedly ascended just ahead of him. The door to his room was never locked, and now he flung it wide.
The last of the afterglow had all but faded from the sky, and only the faintest twilight, a rose-pink twilight, came into the studio.
Rose-pink: he thought of that at once and thought, too, that these sky-roses had a sweeter scent than the roses of earth, for there was about this once-familiar place an odor more delicate and tender than any he had ever known before. It was dim, illusive; it was like a musical poem in an unknown tongue, and yet, unlike French scents and hot-house flowers, it subtly suggested open s.p.a.ces and mountain-peaks.
Cartaret had a quick vision of sunlight upon snow-crests. He wondered how such a perfume could find its way through the narrow, dirty streets of the Latin Quarter and into his poor room.
And then, in the dim light, he saw a figure standing there.
Cartaret stopped short.
An hour ago he had left the place empty. Now, when he so wanted solitude, it had been invaded. There was an intruder. It was---- yes, the Lord have mercy on him, it was a girl!
”Who's there?” demanded Cartaret.
He was so startled that he asked the question in English and with his native American accent. The next moment, he was more startled when the strange girl answered him in English, though an English oddly precise.
”It is I,” she said.
”It is I,” was what she said first, and, as she said it, Cartaret noted that her voice was a wonderfully soft contralto. What she next said was uttered as he further discovered himself to her by an involuntary movement that brought him within the rear window's shaft of afterglow. It was:
”What are you doing here?”