Saratoga Trunk (7 page)

Clio stopped now and pointed to the pot of bubbling jambalaya. “Some of that!” she said. “A plateful ofthat. Mm, what a heavenly smell!”

“No. It will ruin your breakfast at Begué’s.”

“Nothing will ruin my breakfast. I have the appetite of a dock laborer. You know that. Here, Cupide. Set down that basket and fetch me a plateful ofthat lovely stuff. What’s that it’s called, Kaka?”

“Jambalaya. Heavy stuff. You’ll be—”

“Quick, Cupide. Tell the man a heaping plateful for me—for Madame la Comtesse.”

Cupide, in the act of setting down his basket, straightened again with a jerk “For who!”

“You heard!” barked Kakaracou. “A platefi.il of jambalaya for Madame la Comtesse. Who else,
stupide!”

The dwarf shook his bullet head as though to rid it of cobwebs, grinned impishly and trotted off. “Heh, you! A dish of that stuff for Madame la Comtesse.”

“Who?”

“Madame la Comtesse there. And be quick about it.”

The man looked up from stirring the pot, his eyes fell on the girl’s eager face, he became all smiles, his eyes, his teeth flashed, he spooned up a great bowlful and placed it on a tray and himself would have carried it to her but Cupide reached up and took it from him and brought it to her miraculously without spilling a drop, brimming though it was. Then, because he was just table-high with arms strong as steel rods, he stood before her holding up the tray with its savory dish and she stood and ate it thus, daintily and eagerly, with quite a little circle of admiring but anxious New Orleans faces, black, olive, cream,
café au lait,
white, awaiting her verdict.

“Oh,” Clio cried between hot heaping spoonfuls, “it’s delicious, it’s better than anything I’ve ever eaten in France.”

Cupide, the living table, could just be seen from the eyes up, staring over the rim of the tray. He now turned his head to right to left while his stocky little body remained immovable. “Madame la Comtesse,” he announced in his shrill boyish voice, “says that the dish is delicious, it is more delicious than anything she has eaten in France.” He then lowered the tray an inch or two to peer into the half-empty dish.
“Relevé,”
he said under his breath. “Hash! Pfui!”

Clio took a final spoonful, her strong white teeth crunching the spicy mess; she broke a crust of fresh French bread, neatly mopped up the sauce in the bowl and popped this last rich morsel into her mouth. The onlookers breathed a satisfied sigh, and at that moment Clio encountered the bold and enveloping stare of one onlooker whose admiration quite evidently was not for her gustatory feats but for her face and figure. It was more than that. The look in the eyes of this man who stood regarding her was amused, was tender, was possessive. He was leaning indolently against one of the pillars forming the arcade, his hands thrust into the front pockets of his tight fawn trousers, one booted foot crossed the other. Under the broad, rolling brim of his white felt hat his stare of open and flashing admiration was as personal as an embrace. Clio Dulaine was accustomed to stares, she even liked them. In France, especially at the races, the Parisians had followed the fantastic little group made up of the lovely Rita Dulaine, the full-blown Belle, the great-eyed girl, the attendant dwarf and Negress. They had stared and commented with the Gallic love of the bizarre. But this man’s gaze was an actual intrusion. He was speaking to her, wordlessly. In another moment she thought he actually would approach her, address her. She felt the blood tingling in her cheeks that normally were so pale. Abruptly she set down her plate and spoon, she shoved the tray a little away from her.

“Bravo Madame la Comtesse!” cried the jambalaya man behind his brazier of charcoal. “Eaten like a true Creole!” The onlookers laughed a little, but it was an indulgent laugh; they liked to see a pretty woman who could polish off her plate with gusto. It flattered them. They, too, knew good food when they saw it. They knew a good-looking woman, as well, though she did have a fast look about her—or maybe it was merely foreign.

Kakaracou nudged her with one sharp elbow. “Come, I don’t like the look of this. It’s common. You, Cupide, take that miserable stuff away.” Her sharp eyes had not missed the tall stranger lolling there against the pillar with his bold intent gaze. She was still muttering as they moved on, and the words were not pretty, made up as they were of various epithets and obscenities culled from the French, from the Congo, from the Cajun, from the Negro French.

“Stop nudging me, you wicked old woman! I’m not a child. I’ll go when I please.” But Clio moved on, nevertheless, with a flick of her eye to see if the tall figure lounging against the pillar took note of their going. Here and there they stopped at this stall or that, though the basket by now squeaked its protest and Cupide was almost ambushed behind its foliage. Clio was like a greedy child, she wanted everything that went to make up the dishes of which she had heard in her Paris exile. Kaka, too, was throwing caution to the winds. All through the Paris years she had complained because she could not obtain this or that ingredient for a proper Creole dish. And now here it all was, spread lavishly before her. Native dainties, local tidbits. Her eyes glittered, the artist in her was aroused.

“Quail!” she could cry like a desert wanderer who stumbles upon water. “Pompano! Red beans! Soft-shell crabs! Creole lettuce! Oh, the wonderful things that I could never find in that place over there.”

A turbaned Negress came by calling the wares from her napkin-covered basket.
“Calas tout chaud! Calas tout chaud!”
Undone, Kaka bought a hot rice cake and gulped it down greedily, poked another into Cupide’s great mouth. Down it went with a single snap of his jaws.

So it happened that when they reached the end of the arcade there leaning against a pillar exactly as before was the sombreroed stranger of the burning gaze. He was refreshing himself with a cup of coffee bought at the near-by stall, and as he stirred this lazily and sipped its creamy contents he did not once take his eyes off Clio over the cup’s rim.

New Orleans knew a Texan when it saw one. New Orleans regarded its Texas neighbors as little better than savages. Certainly this great handsome product of the plains made the New Orleans male, by contrast, seem a rather anemic not to say effeminate fellow. He was, perhaps, an inch or so over six feet but so well proportioned that he did not seem noticeably tall. His eyes were not so blue as his bronzed face made them appear. His ears stood out a little too far, he walked with the gait of the horseman whose feet are more at home in the stirrup than on the ground. Any of these points would have marked him for an outlander in the eyes of New Orleans. But even if these had failed, his clothes were unmistakable. The great white sombrero was ornamented with a beautifully marked snakeskin band, his belt was heavy with silver nailheads, his fawn trousers were tucked into high-heeled boots that came halfway up his shin. But as final contrast to the quietly dandified or somber garments of the sophisticated Louisiana gentry he wore a blue broadcloth coat of brightish hue strained across his broad shoulders and reaching almost to the knees; and his necktie was a great stiff four-in-hand of white satin on which blue forget-me-nots had been lavishly embroidered by some fair though misguided hand. He was magnificent, he was vast, he was beautiful, he was crude, he was rough, he was untamed, he was Texas.

“There he is!” hissed Kaka, rearing her lean black head like a snake ready to strike. “There he is, that great
badaud,
leaning there.”

Clio was intently examining a head of cauliflower. She hated cauliflower and never ate it. “Who, Kaka dear?” she now asked absent-mindedly. “H’m?” with an air of dreamy preoccupation which would have deceived no one, least of all the astute Kakaracou. “What a lovely
choufleur.’“

“Who, Kaka dear, who, Kaka dear!” Wickedly the Negress mimicked her in a kind of poisonous baby-talk. “You and your cauliflower head there, you’re two of a kind.”

Clio decided that the time had now come for dignity. In her role of Madame la Comtesse she now drew herself up and looked down her nose at Kaka. The effect of this was somewhat spoiled by the fact that Kaka glared balefully back, completely uncowed. “We will now go to the Cathedral. Kaka, you will accompany me. Cupide, you will go home with your basket, quickly, then return and wait outside the church.
Vite!”

At the Market curb stood an open victoria for hire, its shabby cushions a faded green, its two sorry nags hanging listless heads. The black charioteer was as decrepit as his equipage. “We’ll ride,” Clio announced, grandly. “I’m tired. It’s hot. I’m hungry.”

The black man bowed, his smile a brilliant gash that made sunshine in the sable face. His gesture of invitation toward the sagging carriage made of it a state coach, of its occupants royalty. “Yas’m, yas’m. Jes’ the evening for ride out to the lake, yas’m.”

“Evening! Why, it’s hardly noon!”

“Yas’m, yas’m. Puffic evening for ride out to the lake.”

She set one foot in its gray kid shoe on the carriage step.

“Ma’am,” said a soft, rather drawling voice behind her, “Ma’am, I hate to see anybody as plumb beautiful as you ride in a moth-eaten old basket like this, let alone those two nags to pull it. If you’ll honor me, Ma’am, by using my carriage, I’m driving a pair of long-tailed bays to a clarence, I brought them all the way from Texas, and they’re beauties and thoroughbreds, just like—well, that sounds terrible, I didn’t mean to compare you, Ma’am, with—I meant if you’d just allow me—”

Standing there on the carriage step she had turned in amazement to find her face almost on a level with his as he stood at the curb. The blue eyes were blazing down upon her. He had taken off the great white sombrero. The Texas wind and sun that had bronzed the cheeks to startlingly near her own had burned the chestnut hair to a lively red-gold. For one terrible moment the two swayed together as though drawn by some magnetic force; then she drew back, and as she did so she realized with great definiteness that she wanted to feel his ruddy sun-warmed cheek against hers. She said, “Sir!” like any milk-and-water miss, turned away from him in majestic disapproval and seated herself in the carriage, whose cushion springs, playing her false, let her down in a rather undignified heap. His left hand still held the coffee cup. Unrebuffed, he strode toward the stall to set this down, and at that moment the outraged Kakaracou gave the signal to Cupide. That imp set down his laden basket. The Texan’s back was toward him, a broad target. With the force and precision of a goat Cupide ran straight at him, head lowered, and butted him from behind. The coffee cup went flying, spattering the
café au lait
trousers with a deeper tone. Another man would have fallen, but the Texan’s muscles were steel, his balance perfect. He pitched forward, stumbled, bent almost double, but he did not fall, he miraculously recovered himself. The white hat had fallen from his hand, it rolled like a hoop into a little pile of decayed vegetables at the curb. Across the open square, skipping along toward the
Vieux Carré,
you saw the figure of the dwarf almost obscured by the heavy basket.

A gasp had gone up from the market, and a snicker—but a small and smothered snicker. The flying blue coattails had revealed the silver-studded belt as being not purely ornamental. A businesslike holster hung suspended on either hip.

Kaka had whisked into the carriage, the coachman had whipped up the listiess nags, they were off to the accompaniment of squeaking springs and clattering hoofs and the high shrill cackle of Kaka’s rare laughter.

Clio Dulaine’s eyes were blazing; her fists were clenched; she craned to stare back at the tall blue-coated figure that had recovered the hat and now, standing at the Market curb, was brushing its sullied whiteness with one coat sleeve even while he gazed at the swaying vehicle bouncing over the cobblestones toward the Cathedral.

“I’ll whip him! I’ll take his uniform away from him. I’ll send him up North among the savages in New York State. I’ll never allow him to walk out with me again. I’ll lock him in the
garçonnière
on bread and water. I’ll—”

“Oh, so Madame la Comtesse enjoys to have loutish cowboys from Texas speak to her on the street. What next! Even your aunt Belle—”

“Shut up! Do you want to be slapped here in front of the Cathedral!”

Kaka took another tack. She began to whimper, her monkeyish face screwed into a wrinkled knot of woe. “I wish I had died when my Rita
bébé
died. I wish I could die now. I promised her I’d take care of you. It’s no use. Common. Common as dirt.” The carriage came to a halt before the church, Clio stepped out, her head held much too high for a Sunday penitent. “Wait here,” Kaka instructed the driver, her air of injured innocence exchanged for a brisk and businesslike manner, “and if that lout in the market asks you if we are inside say no, we left on foot. There’ll be
pourboire
for you if you do as I say.”

Within the cool dim cathedral Clio’s head was meekly bowed, her lips moved silently, she wiped away a tear as she prayed for the souls of the dead, for her lovely unfortunate mother, for her father, for her lusty aunt, but her eyes swam this way and that to see if, in the twilight gray of the aisles and pillars, she could discern a tall waiting figure. Out again into the blinding white sunshine of the Place d’Armes, the carriage was there, awaiting her; Cupide was there perched on the coachman’s box, the reins in his own tiny hands; the Sunday throngs were there, but no graceful lounging Texan, no clarence drawn by long-tailed bays.

“Oh!” The girl’s exclamation of disappointment was as involuntary as the sound of protest under pain. Kaka was jubilant. They had thrown him off. He had overheard the driver speaking of the lake. Plainly Clio was pouting.

“It’s too late for Begué’s, don’t you think, Kaka? And too hot. Let’s drive out to the lake, h’m? I’m not hungry. All that jambalaya.”

Cupide had wrought a startling change in the broken-down chariot. Evidently he had brought back with him from the house sundry oddments and elegancies with which to refurbish his lady’s carriage. A whisk broom had been vigorously plied, for the ancient cushions were dustless now and the floor cloth as well. Over the carriage seat he had thrown a wine-red silk shawl so that the gray faille should not be sullied further. He had rubbed the metal buckles of the rusty harness, he had foraged in the basement of th
c garçonnière
for his cherished equipment of Paris days and had brought out the check reins, which now held the nags’ heads high in a position of astonished protest. He himself, in his maroon livery, was perched on the driver’s seat, his little feet barely reaching the dashboard against which he braced himself. It was the Negro, dispossessed but admiring, who clambered down to assist the two into the transformed coach.