"This cafe, my friend."
"To your beginnings, you mean?"
"Yes. It is very like the cafe at Troyon"s, at this hour especially, when there are so few English about."
"Troyon"s?"
"A restaurant in Paris. Famous in its day. Several years ago--before the war--it burned down one night, cremating many memories. While it stood I hated it, now I miss it; Paris without it is no more the Paris that I knew."
"Why did you hate it, sir?"
"Because I suffered there."
He indicated a weedy young Alsatian across the room, a depressed and pimply creature in a waiter"s jacket and ap.r.o.n, who was shambling from table to table and collecting used gla.s.ses and saucers.
"You see that omnibus yonder? What he is to-day, that was I in mine--omnibus, scullion, valet-de-chambre, b.u.t.t and scapegoat-in-general to the establishment, scavenger of food that no one else would eat.... I suffered there, at Troyon"s."
"You, sir?" Karslake exclaimed in astonishment. "Whoever would have thought that you ... How did you escape?"
"It occurred to me, one day, I was less than half alive and never would be better while I stayed on in that servitude. So I walked out--into life."
"I wish you"d tell me, sir," Karslake ventured, eagerly.
"Some day, perhaps, when I get back. But now"--he looked at his watch--"I"ve got just time enough to taxi to my hotel, pack, and catch the boat train."
"Don"t wait for me," Karslake suggested, signalling the waiter.
"Perhaps it would be as well if I didn"t."
They shook hands, and the older man got up, secured his hat and stick, and started out toward the door, moving leisurely, still looking about him with the narrowed eyes and smile of reminiscence.
Of a sudden that look was abolished utterly. He had caught sight of Sofia.
Her interest had been so excited by the singular confidences she had overheard that the girl had quite forgotten herself and her professional pose of blank neutrality. She was bending forward a little, forearms resting on the desk, frankly staring.
The man"s stride checked, his smile faded, his eyes grew wide and cloudy with bewilderment. For a moment Sofia thought him on the point of bowing, as one might on unexpectedly encountering an acquaintance after many years: there was that hint of impulse hindered by uncertainty. And in that moment the girl was conscious of a singular sensation of breathlessness, as if something impended whose issue might change all the courses of her life. A feeling quite insane and unaccountable, to be sure; and nothing came of it whatever. With a readiness so instant that the break in his walk must have been imperceptible to anybody but Sofia, the man recollected himself, composed his face, and proceeded to the door.
Confounded with inexplicable disappointment, Sofia sat unstirring.
In the open doorway the man turned and looked back, not at her, but at Karslake, as if of half a mind to return and say something more to the younger man. But he didn"t.
He never came back.
III
THE AGONY COLUMN
Sofia dated from that afternoon the first stirrings of a discontent which grew in her throughout the summer till everything related to her lot seemed abominable in her sight.
Even without this subjective inquietude it would have been an unpleasant summer. All the world was at sixes and sevens, the social unrest stirred up by the war showed no signs of subsiding, but indeed, quite the contrary, there was trouble in the very air--ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard only too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their ears, grin fatuous complacence, and bleat like brainless sheep: "All"s well!"
High-spirited youth and witless wealth a-l.u.s.t for strange new pleasures turned from the long strain of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies of extravagance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long since surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses: daily that wild dance of death attained wilder stages of saturnalia, the bands blaring ever louder to drown the mutter of savage elemental forces working underneath the crust.
And ever and anon a lull would fall and the world would shudder to the iteration of a word that spelled calamity to all things fair and sweet and lovable in life, the word _Bolshevism_....
In the Cafe des Exiles there was endless discord and strife.
For several reasons trade was not what it had been, even for the slack season of summer it was poor. The cost of everything had gone up, waiters were insubordinate and unreasonable in their demands, Mama Therese had been constrained to increase the fixed price of the dinner, old customers took umbrage at this and their patronage elsewhere.
Mama Therese cultivated a temper that grew day by day more vile, Papa Dupont displayed new artfulness in the matter of sneaking his daily toll of drink and showed it; the two squabbled incessantly.
One of the chefs, surmising the irregularity of their relations and foreseeing an imminent break, sought to turn it to his own profit by making amorous overtures to Mama Therese, who for reasons of her own, probably hoping to make Papa Dupont jealous, encouraged the idiot. And, as if this were not sickening enough, Papa Dupont, far from resenting this menace to the pseudo-peace of the menage, ignored if he did not welcome it, and daily displayed new tenderness for Sofia. He kept near her as constantly as he could, he would even interrupt a wrangle with Mama Therese to favour the girl with a languishing glance or a term of endearment; he was forever caressing her disgustingly with his eyes.
The swing door between the cafe and the pantry had warped on its hinges and would not stay quite shut. Normally it stuck in a position which permitted whoever was at the zinc an uninterrupted view of the desk of la dame du comptoir. Instead of having it fixed, Papa Dupont put off that duty from day to day and developed a fond attachment for the place at the zinc. For hours on end Sofia, on her high stool, would be conscious of his gloating regard, his glances that lingered on the sweet lines of her throat, the roundness of her pretty arms.
She dared make no sign to show that she knew and resented, to do so would be merely to draw upon herself the spite of Mama Therese.
But she simmered with indignation, and contemplated futile plans--especially in the long, empty hours of the afternoon, between luncheon and the hour of the apertifs--countless vain plans for abolishing these intolerable conditions.
She thought a great deal of the strange man who had talked with young Mr.
Karslake, and wondered about him. Somehow she seemed unable to forget him; never before had any one she didn"t know made such a lasting impression upon her imagination.
Sometimes she wasted time trying to explain to herself why the man had seemed, for that brief instant, to think he knew her, only to dismiss such speculations eventually with the a.s.surance that she probably resembled in moderate degree somebody whom he had once known.
But mostly she was preoccupied with pondering the strangeness of it, that he who seemed so brilliant and brave a figure of the great world should, according to his own confession, have risen from beginnings as lowly as her own. All that he had suffered in the days of his youth, in that place in Paris which he called Troyon"s, Sofia had suffered here and in large part continued to suffer without prospect of alleviation or hope of escape. And remembering what he had said, that his own trials had come to an end only when he awakened to the fact that he was, as he had put it, "less than half alive" there at Troyon"s, and had simply "walked out into life," she was persuaded that the cure for her own discomfort and discontent would never be found in any other way. But she lacked courage to adventure it.
To say "walk out and make an end of it" was all very well; but a.s.suming that she ever should muster up spirit enough to do it--what then? Which way should she turn, once she had pa.s.sed out through the doors? What could she do? She had neither means nor friends, and she was much too thoroughly conversant with the common way of the world with a woman alone to imagine that, by taking her life in her own hands, she would accomplish much more than exchange the irk of the frying pan for the fury of the fire.
All the same, she knew that she must one day do it and chance the consequences. Things couldn"t go on as they were.
And even granting that the outcome of any effort at self-a.s.sertion must be unhappy, she grew impatient.
Meanwhile, she did nothing, she sat quietly on her perch, looked with stony composure over the heads of the mult.i.tude, indifferent alike to admiration and the uncharitable esteem of her own s.e.x, and waited with a burning heart.
Mr. Karslake ran true to form. He drifted in and out casually, always idle and degage and elegant, he continued his irregular conferences with ill-a.s.sorted companions, he worshipped discreetly and evidently without the faintest hope, he seemed more than ever a trifling and immaterial creature.
Chance did not again lead him to the table where he had sat with the man whom Sofia could not forget, and only the memory of that conversation held any place for Karslake in the consideration of the girl.
Even at that she didn"t consider him seriously, she looked for him and missed him when he didn"t appear solely because of a secret hope that some day that other one would come back to meet him in the cafe.
Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have said.
Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake absented himself for several weeks, and when he showed up again his visits were fewer and more widely s.p.a.ced.
On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary day, he sauntered in with his habitual air of having in particular nothing to do and all the time there was to do it in, and found a man waiting for him.