Of Time and the River (134 page)

He cast a distressed and perplexed glance towards Yvonne, and that capable person came instantly and suavely to his rescue.

“Perhaps, Countess,” she said smoothly, “Monsieur would like to see his room and brosh up a beet after ze fatigue of his journey—eh?”

He looked at her gratefully, and the Countess, nodding her head vigorously, said instantly:

“Oui! Oui! C’est ça! . . . By all means, my boy, go up to your room and wash up a bit. . . . Ah, a lovely room! He will like it, eh, Yvonne? . . . New furnishings, hot and cold water, beautiful plumbing.”

“I can assure Monsieur,” said Yvonne dutifully, “that he need have no—kalms—”

“QUALMS, Yvonne, QUALMS,” the Countess corrected her gently—“a lovely room, my boy! And when you have finished come on down and we will dine together. . . . You will find me here. I will wait for you. And while you eat,” she said enticingly. “I shall let you read my clippings—ah-h, I have a great book full of them. . . . You shall read it all, everything—what it says about their Little Mother,” she said tenderly. “And I shall keep you company. I shall talk to you and tell you what to do in Orléans. . . . No, no, I shall eat nothing,” she said hastily, as if to allay some economic apprehension on his part. “It will cost you nothing. . . . A little of your coffee, perhaps. . . . Perhaps a glass of wine—no more. Ah, my dear,” the old woman went on sadly, “the food here is so lovely, and I cannot eat it . . . I can eat nothing—”

“Nothing?” he said, staring at her.

“Rien, rien, rien,” she cried, waving her hand sidewise.

“The Countess is on—what you say—a diet?” said Yvonne sympathetically. “Eet ees the doctor’s orders—she cannot eat.”

“Rien du tout,” the Countess said again. “Nothing but horse’s blood, my dear,” the Countess said in a sad voice. “That’s all I live on now.”

“HORSE’S blood!” he stared at her unbelievingly.

“Oui!” she nodded. “Sang de cheval! You see, my dear,” she went on in an explanatory tone, “I have anćmia—and by the doctor’s orders I take horse’s blood. . . . But the food here is so lovely. Lovely. I shall wait for you, my boy, and watch you eat.”

“Jean!” cried Yvonne sharply, giving the youth his freedom by one brisk act. “Les baggages de Monsieur. Numéro Sept.”

She handed the key to the porter.

“Oui, monsieur,” the porter said cheerfully, picking up the youth’s valise. “Par ici, s’il vous plaît.”

They went back and got into the little lift, just big enough for two. It mounted slowly, creakingly, with slatting rope. They got off at the first flight: he followed the porter down a thickly carpeted hall and then, while the man switched on lights, turned down the coverlet of the bed, and pulled the heavy curtains together in order to assure that atmosphere of stale nocturnal confinement without which sleep in France seems impossible, he examined the room.

The place easily lived up to all the rapturous prophesies which the Countess had made of it. It was astonishingly luxurious—with that almost indecent luxury that is characteristic of a French hotel room, and that is disquietingly similar to the luxury of a brothel. The bed was a lavish, canopied affair with crimson hangings; the floor was covered with a thick crimson carpet, completely noiseless to the tread; there was a sensually fat sofa and several fat chairs covered with fat, red plush and painted with gilt, a great gilt- rimmed mirror above the mantel, a washbowl of deep and heavy porcelain with glittering nickel fixtures, a lavish bidet, the inevitable provision of a French woman’s needs, and curtains of a fat, silk, quilted material whose sensual folds were now closely drawn together, completing the effect of bordello secrecy and luxury previously described.

And this oriental luxury was being provided to him for seventy cents a day on the recommendation of a mad old woman who drank horse’s blood and whom he had never seen until a half-hour ago. As he stood there bewildered by this new, strange turn of chance and destiny, he felt the stillness of the old town around him, and heard again the vast, sweet thronging of the cathedral bells through the dark and silent air, and felt again, as he had felt so many times, the strange and bitter miracle of life. And there was something in his heart he could not utter.

When he went downstairs again, he found the old woman waiting for him, with an eager and cunning gleam at once comical and pathetic in her sharp old eyes, and a great book of newspaper clippings in her arms.

With an air of complete possession, she took him by the arm, and thus linked, they entered the hotel restaurant together. As they went in, it was at once evident that the fame of the young journalist had preceded him. There was a great scraping of chairs around the family table and Madame Vatel, her husband, their comely married daughter, and the daughter’s little girl, rose from the family soup in unison, and received him with a chorus of smiles, bows, and enchanted murmurs of greeting that alarmed him by their profuse respectfulness, and that became almost fawningly obsequious as the Countess began to publish the merits of his power and influence in a torrential French of which he could only capture occasional glittering fragments, the chief of which was the proud name of The New York Times—“le grand journal américain.”

Then, having muttered out a few desperate words of thanks for the overwhelming and unexpected warmth of their reception, he and the Countess were escorted by a bowing waiter to the table which had been prepared for them at the other end of the restaurant, near the street entrance. The food—a savoury and wholesome country soup, broiled fish, succulent thick slices of roast beef, tender, red, and juicy as none he had ever tasted before, a crisp and tender salad of endive, and camembert and coffee—was as delicious as the Countess had predicted; the wine—a Beaujolais, of which the old woman drank half a glass—both cheap and good; the service of the old waiter, suave, benevolent, and almost unctuously attentive; and his own mixed feelings of alarm, astonishment, embarrassment at the position in which he had been placed, resentment at the imposture into which the old woman had compelled him, and wild, helpless, mounting, and astounded laughter—were explosive, indescribable.

He would look up uneasily from the delicious food to see the Vatel family, heads together around their table in a congress of whispering secrecy, and with the imprint of conspiratorial greed and cunning on their faces. Then they would catch his eye, nudge one another, and bow and smile at him with fawning graciousness, and he would return to his food savagely, not knowing whether to curse or howl with laughter.

During the whole course of the meal, the Countess sat opposite him, watching like a hawk every move he made, her old eyes gleaming cunningly and a strange, fixed smile, which he had come to recognize as being at once crafty and naďve, shrewd with guile and yet pathetically inquiring, hovering faintly upon her sharp and meagre face.

All the time while he was eating, the old woman kept up her strange, fragmentary monologue—a semi-coherent discourse which mirrored forth the very image of her soul and seemed to be addressed to herself as much as to any listener. With a ravenous attentiveness she watched him devour his food, exhorted him to waste none of it, and to sop up the sauce as well, demanded of the old waiter second helpings of the delicious roast beef, accompanying her command with a glittering account of the prosperity that would accrue to him and the hotel as a result of this solicitude; plied the boy with questions concerning his friends, his work, his future prospects, and his travels—in short, pried, probed, wormed and insinuated her way into every corner of his history, and appointed herself guide and censor of his life and conduct from this moment on.

“How long have you been over here, my boy?”—she said in her low but vibrant monotone, which had that curious, dead resonance, an almost bodiless energy that seems to come from indestructible vitality of mind or spirit when the vitality of flesh has been exhausted. It was an energy at once as bitterly tenacious as man’s clutch on life, yet marked all the time by the brooding fatality of people who have lived too long and seen all things go—“How long have you been in Europe? . . . And where were you first? . . . England, yes. . . . And after England. . . . Paris? Where did you stay there? . . . How much did they charge you for your room? . . . Twelve francs. . . . Yes, but you could do better, my boy. . . . You could do much better. . . . You should find a place for eight francs a day. . . . All the Americans spend too much money,” she said sadly. “They come over here and waste their money. . . . I have seen so many Americans get stranded here. . . . During the war I had to help so many out. . . . Tell me, my boy,” she leaned over and clutched his arm with her claw-like hand, “you are not going to get stranded here like other Americans, are you?” Her voice had a low, hoarse, and fatal note in it. “Promise me you won’t get stranded here.”

He promised her.

“How much money have you got, my boy—eh?” she said, her old eyes lighted with an avaricious gleam. A sudden apprehension shocked her; she started forward, saying quickly—“You’ve got enough to pay your bill? You’ve got enough to get you out of Orléans? . . . You won’t get stranded here at the hotel?”

He reassured her, and with a look of relief she continued:

“You must tell me every day how much you spend. . . . You must let me watch your money for you. . . . So few young men in America understand the value of money. . . . They throw it away as if it were dirt. . . . There are so many ways to waste your money here in France. . . . We have so many things to spend money on—it’s gone before you know it—restaurants, hotels, liquor, wine, cafés— Ah, cafés, cafés!” she sighed with dead fatality. “Cafés everywhere you go,” she said. “They are the curse of France. Cafés and women. . . . Have you met the women yet?” she demanded sharply.

He told her that he had.

“Yes, I know,” she said, her voice sad with its note of resigned fatality. “You meet them in cafés—bad women, waiting there to prey upon the young Americans. . . . Tell me—” the eager gleam awakened in her eyes again—” have you given them much of your money?”

He told her that he had.

“Ah, I know,” she answered sadly. “All the young Americans waste their money in that way. . . . Don’t do it, my boy,” her claw-like hand went out and grasped his arm. “Promise me you will not give any more money away to those women. . . . They are BAD, bad . . . the shame of France. . . . Get yourself a nice girl, my boy. . . . I know some nice girls here in Orléans. . . . I will introduce you—But don’t go to the cafés, my boy—Or, if you go, don’t talk to any of the women there. . . . No nice woman here in Orléans goes to the café . . . all the women that you meet there are bad, bad. . . . The best café,” she concluded irrelevantly, “is on the Place Martroi. You will find the women there. . . . If you go, tell me tomorrow about the music. . . . They have good music there. . . . I love good music. . . . One hears so little music here in Orléans. . . . There are so few amusements for a decent woman here. . . . Sometimes I want to go to the café to hear the music, but if I did I would no longer be a decent woman. . . . I suppose you’ll go to the café tonight?” she said sadly, fatally, but with an eager glint of inquiry in her old eyes. “All the Americans go to the café‘s. It’s the only place there is to go to here.”

Towards ten o’clock, which was the hour of retiring, he escaped from her and went to the café of which she had spoken. There was an orchestra of three pieces playing the kind of music that is played in French cafés; and many mirrors, and long seats of old worn leather around the walls; and several young prostitutes sitting singly at tables, patiently ogling the sporting males of Orléans, who stroked their moustaches and ogled back, but spent no money on them. And there was one extremely lovely, blond, seductive and experienced-looking prostitute from Paris who ogled no one, but sat by herself at a table, frowning reflectively with half-closed eyes and with a cigarette in her mouth, studiously involved in solitaire and completely indifferent to the gallantries of the ogling males of Orléans, although many a languishing look was cast in her direction. The men played cards or dominoes together, held their secret, sly, and whispered conversations, and then roared with laughter; the café orchestra played the music that a French café orchestra always plays; the waiters went back and forth with trays and glasses; the proprietor went from table to table talking to his regular patrons; the women sat patiently at tables, and smiled and ogled when they caught somebody’s eye; and somehow the whole scene was instantly, poignantly familiar, like something he had known all his life.

And he did not know why this was true. But something essential in the substance and the structure of the scene—the beautiful and sophisticated prostitute from Paris, the seducers and gallants of the town of Orléans, the feeling of silence, secrecy, and darkness all around him in the old sleeping town—in which this place was now the only spot of warmth and gaiety and lightness—even the occasional shrill fife and piping whistle at the railway station not far away—all these things and people had their counterpart, somehow, in the life of small towns everywhere and in the life he had known in a small town as a child, when he had lain in his bed in darkness and had heard the distant wail and thunder of a departing train, and had seen then in the central core and vision of his heart’s desire, his image of the distant, the shining, the fabulous, thousand-spired, magic city, and had thought then of a lovely and seductive red-haired woman named Norah Ryan, who had that year come from the great city to live there in his mother’s house, and whose coming and whose going would always be a thing of mystery and wonder to them all; and felt, then, as now, all around him the numb nocturnal stillness of the town, the impending prescience of wild joy, the heartbeats of ten thousand sleeping men.

And this feeling of unutterable loss and familiarity, of strangeness and reality, remained with him later when he left the closing café and walked home towards his hotel through a silent, cobbled street, between rows of old, still houses, the shuttered secrecy of the shops.