Part 3 (2/2)
CHAPTER II
PROVIDING THE GENTLE READER WITH A CARD OF ADMISSION TO THE NEST OF THE TWO DOVES
Dans ces questions de credit, il faut toujours frapper l'imagination. L'idee de genie, c'est de prendre dans la poche des gens l'argent qui n'y est pas encore.--Zola: _L'Argent_.
Until just before the appearance of Charlie Cartaret's rosy vision, this had been a day of darkness and wet. Rain--a dull, hopeless, February rain--fell with implacable monotony. It descended in fine spray, as if too lazy to hurry, yet too spiteful to stop. It made all Paris miserable; but, as is the way with Parisian rains, it was a great deal wetter on the Left Bank of the Seine than on the Right.
No rain--not even in those happy times before the great war--ever washed the Left Bank clean, and this one only made it a marsh. A curtain of fog fell sheer between the Isle de la Cite and the Quai des Augustins; the twin towers of St. Sulpice staggered up into a pall of fog and were lost in it. The gray houses hunched their shoulders, lowered their heads, drew their mansard hats and gabled caps over their noses and stood like rows of patient horses at a cabstand under the gray downpour. Now and again a real cab scuttled along the streets, its skinny beast clop-clopping over the wooden paving, or slipping among the cobbled ways, its driver hidden under a mountainous pile of woolen great-coat and rubber cape. Even the taxis lacked the proud air with which they habitually splash pedestrians, and such pedestrians as business forced upon the early afternoon thoroughfares went with heads bowed like the houses' and umbrellas leveled like flying-jibs.
In front of the little Cafe Des Deux Colombes, the two marble-topped tables which occupied its scant frontage on the rue Jacob were deserted by all save their four iron-backed chairs with wet seats and their twin water-bottles into which, with mathematical precision, water dropped from a pair of holes in the sagging canvas overhead.
Inside, however, there were lighted gas-jets, the proprietor and the proprietor's wife--presumably the pair of doves for whom the Cafe was named--and a man that was trying to look like a customer.
Gaston Francois Louis Pasbeaucoup had an ap.r.o.n tied about his middle, and, standing before the intended patron's table, leaned what weight he had--it was not much--upon his finger-tips. His mustache was fierce enough to grace the upper lip of a deputy from the Bouches-du-Rhone and generous enough to spare many a contribution to the _plat-du-jour_; but his mustache was the only large thing about him--always excepting Madame his wife, who was ever somewhere about him and who was just now, two hundred and twenty pounds of evidence to the good food of the Deux Colombes, stuffed into a wire cage at one end of the bar, and bulging out of it, her eyebrows meeting over her pug-nose and the heap of hair leaping from her head nearly to the ceiling, while her lips and fingers were busy adding the bills from _dejeuner_.
”It would greatly pleasure me to accommodate monsieur,” Pasbeaucoup was whispering, ”but monsieur must know that already----”
The sentence ended in a deprecating glance over the speaker's shoulder in the general direction of mighty Madame.
”Already? Already what then?” demanded the intending customer.
He was lounging on the wall-seat behind his table, and he had an aristocratic air surprisingly at variance with his garments. His black jacket shone too highly at the elbows, and its short sleeves betrayed an unnecessary length of red wrist. His black boots gasped for repair; a soft black hat, pushed to the back of his black hair, still dripped from an unprotected voyage along the rainy street, and his neckcloth, which was also long and soft and black, showed a spot or two not put there by its makers. These were patently matters beyond their owner's command and beneath the dignity of his attention. Against them one was compelled to set a manner truly lofty, which was enhanced by a pair of burning, deep-placed eyes, a thin white face and, sprouting from either side of his lower jaw, near the chin, two wisps of ebon whisker. He frowned majestically, and he smoked a caporal cigarette as if it were a Havana cigar.
”Already what?” he loudly repeated. ”If it is possible! I patronize your cabbage of a cafe for five years, and now you put me off with your alreadys!”
Pasbeaucoup, his fingers still resting on the table, danced in embarra.s.sment and rolled his eyes in a manner that plainly enough warned monsieur not to let his voice reach the caged lady.
”I was but about to say that monsieur already owes us the trifling sum of----”
”_Sixty francs, twenty-five!_”
The tone that announced these fateful numerals was so tremendous a contralto as to be really ba.s.s. It came from the wire cage and belonged to Madame.
Pasbeaucoup sank into the nearest chair. He spread out his hands in a gesture that eloquently said:
”Now you've done it! I can't s.h.i.+eld you any longer!”
The debtor, albeit he was still a young man, did not appear unduly impressed. The table was across his knees, but he rose as far as it would permit and removed his hat with a flourish that sent a spray of water directly over Madame's monument of hair. Disregarding the blatant fact that she was quite the most remarkable feature of the room, he vowed that he had not observed her upon entering, was desolated because of his oversight and ravished now to have the pleasure of once more beholding her in all her accustomed grace and charm.
Madame shrugged her shoulders higher than the walls of the cage.
”Sixty francs, twenty-five,” she said, without looking up from her task.
Ah, yes: his little account. Monsieur recalled that: there was a little account; but, so truly as his name was Seraphin and his pa.s.sion Art, what a marvelous head Madame had for figures. It was of an exact.i.tude magnificent!
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