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Booth Tarkington >> The Guest of Quesnay
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14 Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE GUEST OF QUESNAY
BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
1915
TO
OVID BUTLER JAMESON
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Several pairs of brighter eyes followed my companion ...... Frontispiece
"I haven't had my life. It's gone!"
"You and Miss Ward are old and dear friends, aren't you?"
"Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!" she cried
CHAPTER I
There are old Parisians who will tell you pompously that the boulevards,
like the political cafes, have ceased to exist, but this means only that
the boulevards no longer gossip of Louis Napoleon, the Return of the
Bourbons, or of General Boulanger, for these highways are always too
busily stirring with present movements not to be forgetful of their
yesterdays. In the shade of the buildings and awnings, the loungers, the
lookers-on in Paris, the audience of the boulevard, sit at little
tables, sipping coffee from long glasses, drinking absinthe or bright-
coloured sirops, and gazing over the heads of throngs afoot at others
borne along through the sunshine of the street in carriages, in cabs, in
glittering automobiles, or high on the tops of omnibuses.
From all the continents the multitudes come to join in that procession:
Americans, tagged with race-cards and intending hilarious disturbances;
puzzled Americans, worn with guide-book plodding; Chinese princes in
silk; queer Antillean dandies of swarthy origin and fortune; ruddy
English, thinking of nothing; pallid English, with upper teeth bared and
eyes hungrily searching for sign-boards of tea-rooms; over-Europeanised
Japanese, unpleasantly immaculate; burnoosed sheiks from the desert, and
red-fezzed Semitic peddlers; Italian nobles in English tweeds; Soudanese
negroes swaggering in frock coats; slim Spaniards, squat Turks,
travellers, idlers, exiles, fugitives, sportsmen--all the tribes and
kinds of men are tributary here to the Parisian stream which, on a fair
day in spring, already overflows the banks with its own much-mingled
waters. Soberly clad burgesses, bearded, amiable, and in no fatal hurry;
well-kept men of the world swirling by in miraculous limousines; legless
cripples flopping on hands and leather pads; thin-whiskered students in
velveteen; walrus-moustached veterans in broadcloth; keen-faced old
prelates; shabby young priests; cavalrymen in casque and cuirass;
workingmen turned horse and harnessed to carts; sidewalk jesters,
itinerant vendors of questionable wares; shady loafers dressed to
resemble gold-showering America; motor-cyclists in leather; hairy
musicians, blue gendarmes, baggy red zouaves; purple-faced, glazed-
hatted, scarlet-waistcoated, cigarette-smoking cabmen, calling one
another "onions," "camels," and names even more terrible. Women
prevalent over all the concourse; fair women, dark women, pretty women,
gilded women, haughty women, indifferent women, friendly women, merry
women. Fine women in fine clothes; rich women in fine clothes; poor
women in fine clothes. Worldly old women, reclining befurred in electric
landaulettes; wordy old women hoydenishly trundling carts full of
flowers. Wonderful automobile women quick-glimpsed, in multiple veils of
white and brown and sea-green. Women in rags and tags, and women draped,
coifed, and befrilled in the delirium of maddened poet-milliners and the
hasheesh dreams of ladies' tailors.
About the procession, as it moves interminably along the boulevard, a
blue haze of fine dust and burnt gasoline rises into the sunshine like
the haze over the passages to an amphitheatre toward which a crowd is
trampling; and through this the multitudes seem to go as actors passing
to their cues. Your place at one of the little tables upon the sidewalk
is that of a wayside spectator: and as the performers go by, in some
measure acting or looking their parts already, as if in preparation, you
guess the roles they play, and name them comedians, tragedians,
buffoons, saints, beauties, sots, knaves, gladiators, acrobats, dancers;
for all of these are there, and you distinguish the principles from the
unnumbered supernumeraries pressing forward to the entrances. So, if you
sit at the little tables often enough--that is, if you become an amateur
boulevardier--you begin to recognise the transient stars of the pageant,
those to whom the boulevard allows a dubious and fugitive role of
celebrity, and whom it greets with a slight flutter: the turning of
heads, a murmur of comment, and the incredulous boulevard smile, which
seems to say: "You see? Madame and monsieur passing there--evidently
they think we still believe in them!"
This flutter heralded and followed the passing of a white touring-car
with the procession one afternoon, just before the Grand Prix, though it
needed no boulevard celebrity to make the man who lolled in the tonneau
conspicuous. Simply for THAT, notoriety was superfluous; so were the
remarkable size and power of his car; so was the elaborate touring-
costume of flannels and pongee he wore; so was even the enamelled
presence of the dancer who sat beside him. His face would have done it
without accessories.
My old friend, George Ward, and I had met for our aperitif at the
Terrace Larue, by the Madeleine, when the white automobile came snaking
its way craftily through the traffic. Turning in to pass a victoria on
the wrong side, it was forced down to a snail's pace near the curb and
not far from our table, where it paused, checked by a blockade at the
next corner. I heard Ward utter a half-suppressed guttural of what I
took to be amazement, and I did not wonder.
The face of the man in the tonneau detached him to the spectator's gaze
and singled him out of the concourse with an effect almost ludicrous in
its incongruity. The hair was dark, lustrous and thick, the forehead
broad and finely modelled, and certain other ruinous vestiges of youth
and good looks remained; but whatever the features might once have shown
of honour, worth, or kindly semblance had disappeared beyond all tracing
in a blurred distortion. The lids of one eye were discoloured and
swollen almost together; other traces of a recent battering were not
lacking, nor was cosmetic evidence of a heroic struggle, on the part of
some valet of infinite pains, to efface them. The nose lost outline in
the discolorations of the puffed cheeks; the chin, tufted with a small
imperial, trembled beneath a sagging, gray lip. And that this bruised
and dissipated mask should suffer the final grotesque touch, it was
decorated with the moustache of a coquettish marquis, the ends waxed and
exquisitely elevated.
The figure was fat, but loose and sprawling, seemingly without the will
to hold itself together; in truth the man appeared to be almost in a
semi-stupor, and, contrasted with this powdered Silenus, even the woman
beside him gained something of human dignity. At least, she was
thoroughly alive, bold, predatory, and in spite of the gross embon-point
that threatened her, still savagely graceful. A purple veil, dotted with
gold, floated about her hat, from which green-dyed ostrich plumes
cascaded down across a cheek enamelled dead white. Her hair was
plastered in blue-black waves, parted low on the forehead; her lips were
splashed a startling carmine, the eyelids painted blue; and, from
between lashes gummed into little spikes of blacking, she favoured her
companion with a glance of carelessly simulated tenderness,--a look all
too vividly suggesting the ghastly calculations of a cook wheedling a
chicken nearer the kitchen door. But I felt no great pity for the
victim.
"Who is it?" I asked, staring at the man in the automobile and not
turning toward Ward.
"That is Mariana--'la bella Mariana la Mursiana,'" George answered; "--
one of those women who come to Paris from the tropics to form themselves
on the legend of the one great famous and infamous Spanish dancer who
died a long while ago. Mariana did very well for a time. I've heard that
the revolutionary societies intend striking medals in her honour: she's
done worse things to royalty than all the anarchists in Europe! But her
great days are over: she's getting old; that type goes to pieces
quickly, once it begins to slump, and it won't be long before she'll be
horribly fat, though she's still a graceful dancer. She danced at the
Folie Rouge last week."
"Thank you, George," I said gratefully. "I hope you'll point out the
Louvre and the Eiffel Tower to me some day. I didn't mean Mariana."
"What did you mean?"
What I had meant was so obvious that I turned to my friend in surprise.
He was nervously tapping his chin with the handle of his cane and
staring at the white automobile with very grim interest.
"I meant the man with her," I said.
"Oh!" He laughed sourly. "That carrion?"
"You seem to be an acquaintance."
"Everybody on the boulevard knows who he is," said Ward curtly, paused,
and laughed again with very little mirth. "So do you," he continued;
"and as for my acquaintance with him--yes, I had once the distinction of
being his rival in a small way, a way so small, in fact, that it ended
in his becoming a connection of mine by marriage. He's Larrabee Harman."
That was a name somewhat familiar to readers of American newspapers even
before its bearer was fairly out of college. The publicity it then
attained (partly due to young Harman's conspicuous wealth) attached to
some youthful exploits not without a certain wild humour. But frolic
degenerated into brawl and debauch: what had been scrapes for the boy
became scandals for the man; and he gathered a more and more unsavoury
reputation until its like was not to be found outside a penitentiary.
The crux of his career in his own country was reached during a midnight
quarrel in Chicago when he shot a negro gambler. After that, the negro
having recovered and the matter being somehow arranged so that the
prosecution was dropped, Harman's wife left him, and the papers recorded
her application for a divorce. She was George Ward's second cousin, the
daughter of a Baltimore clergyman; a belle in a season and town of
belles, and a delightful, headstrong creature, from all accounts. She
had made a runaway match of it with Harman three years before, their
affair having been earnestly opposed by all her relatives--especially by
poor George, who came over to Paris just after the wedding in a
miserable frame of mind.
The Chicago exploit was by no means the end of Harman's notoriety.
Evading an effort (on the part of an aunt, I believe) to get him locked
up safely in a "sanitarium," he began a trip round the world with an
orgy which continued from San Francisco to Bangkok, where, in the
company of some congenial fellow travellers, he interfered in a native
ceremonial with the result that one of his companions was drowned.
Proceeding, he was reported to be in serious trouble at Constantinople,
the result of an inquisitiveness little appreciated by Orientals. The
State Department, bestirring itself, saved him from a very real peril,
and he continued his journey. In Rome he was rescued with difficulty
from a street mob that unreasonably refused to accept intoxication as an
excuse for his riding down a child on his way to the hunt. Later, during
the winter just past, we had been hearing from Monte Carlo of his
disastrous plunges at that most imbecile of all games, roulette.
Every event, no matter how trifling, in this man's pitiful career had
been recorded in the American newspapers with an elaboration which, for
my part, I found infuriatingly tiresome. I have lived in Paris so long
that I am afraid to go home: I have too little to show for my years of
pottering with paint and canvas, and I have grown timid about all the
changes that have crept in at home. I do not know the "new men," I do
not know how they would use me, and fear they might make no place for
me; and so I fit myself more closely into the little grooves I have worn
for myself, and resign myself to stay. But I am no "expatriate." I know
there is a feeling at home against us who remain over here to do our
work, but in most instances it is a prejudice which springs from a
misunderstanding. I think the quality of patriotism in those of us who
"didn't go home in time" is almost pathetically deep and real, and, like
many another oldish fellow in my position, I try to keep as close to
things at home as I can. All of my old friends gradually ceased to write
to me, but I still take three home newspapers, trying to follow the
people I knew and the things that happen; and the ubiquity of so
worthless a creature as Larrabee Harman in the columns I dredged for
real news had long been a point of irritation to this present exile. Not
only that: he had usurped space in the Continental papers, and of late
my favourite Parisian journal had served him to me with my morning
coffee, only hinting his name, but offering him with that gracious
satire characteristic of the Gallic journalist writing of anything
American. And so this grotesque wreck of a man was well known to the
boulevard--one of its sights. That was to be perceived by the flutter he
caused, by the turning of heads in his direction, and the low laughter
of the people at the little tables. Three or four in the rear ranks had
risen to their feet to get a better look at him and his companion.
Some one behind us chuckled aloud. "They say Mariana beats him."
"Evidently!"
The dancer was aware of the flutter, and called Harman's attention to it
with a touch upon his arm and a laugh and a nod of her violent plumage.
At that he seemed to rouse himself somewhat: his head rolled heavily
over upon his shoulder, the lids lifted a little from the red-shot eyes,
showing a strange pride when his gaze fell upon the many staring faces.
Then, as the procession moved again and the white automobile with it,
the sottish mouth widened in a smile of dull and cynical contempt: the
look of a half-poisoned Augustan borne down through the crowds from the
Palatine after supping with Caligula.
Ward pulled my sleeve.
"Come," he said, "let us go over to the Luxembourg gardens where the air
is cleaner."
CHAPTER II
Ward is a portrait-painter, and in the matter of vogue there seem to be
no pinnacles left for him to surmount. I think he has painted most of
the very rich women of fashion who have come to Paris of late years, and
he has become so prosperous, has such a polite celebrity, and his
opinions upon art are so conclusively quoted, that the friendship of
some of us who started with him has been dangerously strained.
He lives a well-ordered life; he has always led that kind of life. Even
in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion
upon which the principal of a New England high-school would have
criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig;
and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one. He
was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured into a
somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in
appearance and manner. He has always been well tended and cared for by
women; in his student days his mother lived with him; his sister, Miss
Elizabeth, looks after him now. She came with him when he returned to
Paris after his disappointment in the unfortunate Harman affair, and she
took charge of all his business--as well as his social--arrangements
(she has been accused of a theory that the two things may be happily
combined), making him lease a house in an expensively modish quarter
near the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Miss Elizabeth is an instinctively
fashionable woman, practical withal, and to her mind success should be
not only respectable but "smart." She does not speak of the "right bank"
and the "left bank" of the Seine; she calls them the "right bank" and
the "wrong bank." And yet, though she removed George (her word is
"rescued") from many of his old associations with Montparnasse, she
warmly encouraged my friendship with him--yea, in spite of my living so
deep in the wrong bank that the first time he brought her to my studio,
she declared she hadn't seen anything so like Bring-the-child-to-the-
old-hag's-cellar-at-midnight since her childhood. She is a handsome
woman, large, and of a fine, high colour; her manner is gaily
dictatorial, and she and I got along very well together.
Probably she appreciated my going to some pains with the clothes I wore
when I went to their house. My visits there were infrequent, not because
I had any fear of wearing out a welcome, but on account of Miss
Elizabeth's "day," when I could see nothing of George for the crowd of
lionising women and time-wasters about him. Her "day" was a dread of
mine; I could seldom remember which day it was, and when I did she had a
way of shifting it so that I was fatally sure to run into it--to my
misery, for, beginning with those primordial indignities suffered in
youth, when I was scrubbed with a handkerchief outside the parlour door
as a preliminary to polite usages, my childhood's, manhood's prayer has
been: From all such days, Good Lord, deliver me!
It was George's habit to come much oftener to see me. He always really
liked the sort of society his sister had brought about him; but now and
then there were intervals when it wore on him a little, I think.
Sometimes he came for me in his automobile and we would make a mild
excursion to breakfast in the country; and that is what happened one
morning about three weeks after the day when we had sought pure air in
the Luxembourg gardens.
We drove out through the Bois and by Suresnes, striking into a
roundabout road to Versailles beyond St. Cloud. It was June, a dustless
and balmy noon, the air thinly gilded by a faint haze, and I know few
things pleasanter than that road on a fair day of the early summer and
no sweeter way to course it than in an open car; though I must not be
giving myself out for a "motorist"--I have not even the right cap. I am
usually nervous in big machines, too; but Ward has never caught the
speed mania and holds a strange power over his chauffeur; so we rolled
along peacefully, not madly, and smoked (like the car) in hasteless
content.
"After all," said George, with a placid wave of the hand, "I sometimes
wish that the landscape had called me. You outdoor men have all the
health and pleasure of living in the open, and as for the work--oh! you
fellows think you work, but you don't know what it means."
"No?" I said, and smiled as I always meanly do when George "talks art."
He was silent for a few moments and then said irritably,
"Well, at least you can't deny that the academic crowd can DRAW!"
Never having denied it, though he had challenged me in the same way
perhaps a thousand times, I refused to deny it now; whereupon he
returned to his theme: "Landscape is about as simple as a stage fight;
two up, two down, cross and repeat. Take that ahead of us. Could
anything be simpler to paint?"
He indicated the white road running before us between open fields to a
curve, where it descended to pass beneath an old stone culvert. Beyond,
stood a thick grove with a clear sky flickering among the branches. An
old peasant woman was pushing a heavy cart round the curve, a scarlet
handkerchief knotted about her head.
"You think it's easy?" I asked.
"Easy! Two hours ought to do it as well as it could be done--at least,
the way you fellows do it!" He clenched his fingers as if upon the
handle of a house-painter's brush. "Slap, dash--there's your road." He
paddled the air with the imaginary brush as though painting the side of
a barn. "Swish, swash--there go your fields and your stone bridge. Fit!
Speck! And there's your old woman, her red handkerchief, and what your
dealer will probably call 'the human interest,' all complete. Squirt the
edges of your foliage in with a blow-pipe. Throw a cup of tea over the
whole, and there's your haze. Call it 'The Golden Road,' or 'The Bath of
Sunlight,' or 'Quiet Noon.' Then you'll probably get a criticism
beginning, 'Few indeed have more intangibly detained upon canvas so
poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist, who in
Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of evening
on an English moor. The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the homeward
ploughman--'"
He was interrupted by an outrageous uproar, the grisly scream of a siren
and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust, as a great white touring-car
swung round us from behind at a speed that sickened me to see, and,
snorting thunder, passed us "as if we had been standing still."
It hurtled like a comet down the curve and we were instantly choking in
its swirling tail of dust.
"Seventy miles an hour!" gasped George, swabbing at his eyes. "Those are
the fellows that get into the pa--Oh, Lord! THERE they go!"
Swinging out to pass us and then sweeping in upon the reverse curve to
clear the narrow arch of the culvert were too much for the white car;
and through the dust we saw it rock dangerously. In the middle of the
road, ten feet from the culvert, the old woman struggled frantically to
get her cart out of the way. The howl of the siren frightened her
perhaps, for she lost her head and went to the wrong side. Then the
shriek of the machine drowned the human scream as the automobile struck.
The shock of contact was muffled. But the mass of machinery hoisted
itself in the air as if it had a life of its own and had been stung into
sudden madness. It was horrible to see, and so grotesque that a long-
forgotten memory of my boyhood leaped instantaneously into my mind, a
recollection of the evolutions performed by a Newfoundland dog that
rooted under a board walk and found a hive of wild bees.
The great machine left the road for the fields on the right, reared,
fell, leaped against the stone side of the culvert, apparently trying to
climb it, stood straight on end, whirled backward in a half-somersault,
crashed over on its side, flashed with flame and explosion, and lay
hidden under a cloud of dust and smoke.
Ward's driver slammed down his accelerator, sent us spinning round the
curve, and the next moment, throwing on his brakes, halted sharply at
the culvert.
The fabric of the road was so torn and distorted one might have thought
a steam dredge had begun work there, but the fragments of wreckage were
oddly isolated and inconspicuous. The peasant's cart, tossed into a
clump of weeds, rested on its side, the spokes of a rimless wheel slowly
revolving on the hub uppermost. Some tools were strewn in a semi-
circular trail in the dust; a pair of smashed goggles crunched beneath
my foot as I sprang out of Ward's car, and a big brass lamp had fallen
in the middle of the road, crumpled like waste paper. Beside it lay a
gold rouge box.
The old woman had somehow saved herself--or perhaps her saint had helped
her--for she was sitting in the grass by the roadside, wailing
hysterically and quite unhurt. The body of a man lay in a heap beneath
the stone archway, and from his clothes I guessed that he had been the
driver of the white car. I say "had been" because there were reasons for
needing no second glance to comprehend that the man was dead.
Nevertheless, I knelt beside him and placed my hand upon his breast to
see if his heart still beat. Afterward I concluded that I did this
because I had seen it done upon the stage, or had read of it in stories;
and even at the time I realised that it was a silly thing for me to be
doing.
Ward, meanwhile, proved more practical. He was dragging a woman out of
the suffocating smoke and dust that shrouded the wreck, and after a
moment I went to help him carry her into the fresh air, where George put
his coat under her head. Her hat had been forced forward over her face
and held there by the twisting of a system of veils she wore; and we had
some difficulty in unravelling this; but she was very much alive, as a
series of muffled imprecations testified, leading us to conclude that
her sufferings were more profoundly of rage than of pain. Finally she
pushed our hands angrily aside and completed the untanglement herself,
revealing the scratched and smeared face of Mariana, the dancer.
"Cornichon! Chameau! Fond du bain!" she gasped, tears of anger starting
from her eyes. She tried to rise before we could help her, but dropped
back with a scream.
"Oh, the pain!" she cried. "That imbecile! If he has let me break my
leg! A pretty dancer I should be! I hope he is killed."
One of the singularities of motoring on the main-travelled roads near
Paris is the prevalence of cars containing physicians and surgeons.
Whether it be testimony to the opportunism, to the sporting
proclivities, or to the prosperity of gentlemen of those professions, I
do not know, but it is a fact that I have never heard of an accident
(and in the season there is an accident every day) on one of these roads
when a doctor in an automobile was not almost immediately a chance
arrival, and fortunately our case offered no exception to this rule.
Another automobile had already come up and the occupants were hastily
alighting. Ward shouted to the foremost to go for a doctor.
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