CHAPTER IV
I had Fifine’s figure in my mind’s eye as I made my purchases. The practice of mentally revisualising things once seen left me in no doubt as to its proportions. It was somewhat developed for a girl of nineteen, but I had reason to believe that a certain precosity was not suggested in her shape alone. There was a hint also of mental ripeness beyond her years, oddly irreconcilable with the passive front she maintained—a readiness of retort which I had found exhilarating, and hoped yet to provoke to my greater confusion and diversion.
The young ladies of the Magasin du Louvre made themselves very merry over my commission. I thought it best to confide one section of Fifine’s list to the expert judgment of the lingerie department, with directions only that the articles specified were to be of the best. The dresses, the stockings and the shoes, with some small fanciful accessories, I made it my own business to select. After all, a Frenchman would do these things unabashed, so why should I demur.
A sweet young sylph—libelled, as I have since learned, under the name of “mannequin”—offered, for my behoof, to exhibit on her own jimp and faultless figure the one or two frocks I preferred for consideration. Nothing loth, since I was agent for a Countess, I stood and thrilled to see this vision of grace pose in beauty before me, while I considered her points with all the fastidious brutality of an Oriental slave-buyer. She stood as undisturbed as Fifine herself, a little arch challenge on her lips, and I had to summon up all my resolution in order to resist, in the face of that pretty allurement, the conquest of my individual taste and judgment.
“But is it not perfect!” (this from the showwoman): “Monsieur is very certainly ravished by the divine cunning of a creation at once so simple and so elaborate in its simplicity.”
“Truly, Madame, if I am ravished I cannot help myself. But my transports, I find, do not amount to that. If I might suggest an improvement——”
“But surely, Monsieur, if Monsieur can find the heart.”
Monsieur found the heart, and also the deft fingers, while the warm palpitating little mannequin stood, smiling, to be manipulated. A touch here and there, a call for new and subtler materials in the grace-notes, so to speak, a more statuesque disposition of the lines, and Monsieur stood back satisfied. Madame was in ecstasies.
“It is incredible! Why did not Monsieur confess he was an artist?”
“Truly, Madame, it is the nature of the model which has inspired me. If one could always so light on the soul ready-made for one’s handling! How easy then would be one’s task.”
Madame answered somewhat at random to that; but the mannequin looked at me kindly, with just a little coquetry of the white shoulders, which said plainly, “Would you not like to have the handling of these!”
I decided finally for that costume, and another to be worn by day, the two to be delivered in the course of the afternoon. And then I withdrew in quest of the hosiery department. My task here was simple, if delicate, and I acquitted myself of it with aplomb, as also of my fancy commissions. And then came the question of the shoes.
Here my directions were explicit. Fifine would have none of your Grands Magasins: A la Merveilleuse in the Avenue de l’Opéra, and only à la Merveilleuse, would satisfy her. And so to that resort of fashion I went. I bought her two pairs; and the price was prodigious; but I had my orders, and there was an end of it.
All this had taken time, and it was past mid-day when I returned, laden with parcels, to the Rue de Fleurus. I entered the flat to find it delivered to silence and emptiness. There was no sign of my visitor in the eating- or the sitting-room—no, nor in the bedroom, the door of which stood ajar. My heart gave a somersault; but instantly righted itself with a laugh. If she was gone, for whatever reason, I had attended strictly to my directions, and could not be held to blame. Moreover it meant to me a problem very simply solved. And yet an odd little qualm of chagrin took me momentarily. I felt I should have liked to know Fifine’s opinion on my choice.
And at that instant the sound of a pot crashing in the kitchen made me jump.
So she was there! I bestowed my parcels in the bedroom, and thence hurried to ascertain the cause.
She was standing by the stove, a look between anger and dismay on her face. The fragments of a pipkin lay on the floor.
“I heard you come in,” she said, “and it flustered me. I am furious that it should have, but it did. I was trying to bake some eggs, and there they lie. Do you want me to starve, that you leave me like this?”
She was wrathful in her hunger; all the apathy was gone.
“I have brought some lunch with me,” I said. “You would have had it sooner if your list had been shorter. Go now to the table, and I will serve it with what despatch I may.”
There were oysters—which I knew how to open—little croquettes of chicken, honey-comb in a section, chocolate, and a good bottle of Sauterne. I had them all in a basket, at which Fifine looked wistfully. She went without a word, however; but at the door she hesitated, looking back. “I am sorry I broke the pipkin,” she said, and vanished.
When, in a little after, I brought in the meal and, placing it before her, stood aside like a waiter, she glanced at me doubtfully.
“Do you never eat, yourself, Monsieur?”
“Occasionally,” I answered, “when my betters are satisfied.”
Still she hesitated; but finally set to with an appetite. She had a single glass of wine, which brought a warmth to her cheek and a glow to her eyes. I think it made her generous to me in the matter of leavings, for I made quite a good meal after she had ended and withdrawn, and I finished the bottle of wine. After which I followed her into the sitting-room, where she sat luxuriously smoking one of my cigarettes.
“Now,” I said, “if it pleases you, and when, the bed is inviting for a siesta, the view from the window is benign, and my purchases to your order are all spread out on the counterpane—all, that is to say, save the two costumes, which are to arrive this afternoon.”
She opened her eyes. “Why do you want me gone?”
“I have some tidying-up to do,” I said. “I must dispose my effects more suitably to the entertaining of so distinguished a visitor.”
“I do not want anything touched,” she answered. “I like them best as they are.”
“But the litter, the disorder, the utter absence of method in the arrangement?”
“If that is all, do not alter them for me.”
“It is not all, nevertheless. I have my own bed to prepare.”
“Your own!—Ah, true! I forgot. Well, I will go, and ascertain to what horrors you have committed me.”
That was gracious; but I remained unruffled in my self-confidence. She did not appear again during the whole afternoon, and I amused myself over what makeshifts I could contrive for my personal comfort. There was a settee in the salle-à-manger, tattered but roomy, which, with plentiful rugs, would serve me sufficiently for a bed; and my washing could be done in the kitchen. The costumes were delivered in the course of the afternoon, and I left them at my guest’s door, with a knock, and an intimation that I was going out to buy the dinner. She did not answer, and I concluded that she was asleep.
Asleep, and without a thought of her incredible position, of the hovering danger! I could not believe it humanly possible that any woman, young or old, patrician or plebeian, living in perpetual apprehension of death by secret violence, could conduct herself with such persistent sangfroid. She did not so live in fact; of that I was finally convinced. For some purpose unconfessed Marion had foisted that story upon me, with the sole intention, likely enough, to ensure my closest trust and vigilance. Necessary precautions, no doubt, if one knew the whole truth, but hardly dictated by terror of the worst. By what lesser fear, or policy, it was useless for me to conjecture; nor did the question trouble me. Indeed, from that time, I think, I dismissed the whole puzzle from my mind, being satisfied on the main point, and quite assured that my comrade’s soul was darkened by no more mortal trepidations than my own.
For dinner I contrived quite a delectable little repast, and, when it was laid and ready, I announced the fact at the closed door. It opened, after a brief interval, and a shimmering vision appeared before my dazzled and wonder-stricken eyes.
In fact I had chosen very happily, and faultlessly, it seemed, as to fit. The girl’s face was quite flushed in the consciousness of the picture she presented. It was a picture, indeed—of tinted youth, sensuous and pure in one, in a silken setting. I was reminded somehow of sun-flushed Pomona in her flowering apple orchards, herself symbolic of the lovely half-visionary blossoms and the rosy fruit they promised. So content was I with this fruit of my own visualising.
“Truly, I am proud of myself,” I said.
The smile died on her lips.
“No more than that?” she said. “As if I were a dummy”—and she went past me, while I stood back, ostentatiously withdrawing her skirts. I had never seen a haughtier lady. She appeared so obsessed with her own sacrosanctity, that to look at her uninvited was an offence, to brush her in passing a sacrilege. But a little way on, and she relented, turning to me suddenly with a face between insolence and something strangely like suppressed merriment.
“Really, Cousin, it was very well done of you. Now I can believe what I never should have guessed from your pictures, that you are an artist.”
The audacity of it! It caught my breath like a splash of cold water. But it was just as refreshing.
I crowed: “Well, at least I am promoted, and inclined to presume upon that favour. It would never do for your acknowledged cousin to wait upon you like a garçon-de-salle; and so for the future I shall propose sitting down to table with you.”
She drew herself up, but relaxed almost at once.
“After all you provide the meals, and have a right to share in them.”
“I wonder,” I said, “that that did not occur to me before.”
She began something, broke off, then suddenly just lifted the hem of her skirt and projected a silvery foot.
“You have a right to see,” she said. “I thank you for your choice, Cousin.”
“It has come tripping to me through the moonlight,” I said, “and is all sparkling with dewy gossamer. A fairy’s slipper, and the fairy who wears it to be my guest. Why did you never tell me before that you came of the pretty people?”
“Because I thought you had eyes,” said Fifine, and, dropping her skirt, went on to dinner.
I think I had surpassed myself in that meal. Anyhow I enjoyed it. Fifine turned to me near the beginning with a question:—
“When you feel hungry you go to market? You just take your gun and hunt for a dinner, n’est ce pas? Do you always so live from hand to mouth?”
“Always, Cousin. It is the rare way to the unexpected, believe me. I have my camp-fire up here, and my cooking-pot, and all the intricacies of the neighbourhood to explore for its replenishing. That is the right way. I have dined with a written menu before me, and dined so without a thrill of the surprise which is the true sauce of gastronomy. We vagabonds are the real epicures—and more than that. The light of our festivity sometimes attracts to us strange comrades—creatures of the outer mysteries, bright or sullen, but always for their strangeness worth entertaining. Here, for instance, comes to me from the shadows a gauzy apparition, most welcome, it is true, yet shining very incongruity in this context of pot-luck and rough-and-ready.”
And so indeed it appeared to me; nor otherwise, save by fantasy, could I reconcile this vision of an elaborate evening toilette with its vagrant surroundings. But the fashionable convention, I supposed, when once acquired was ineradicable; and, no doubt, to have dined in undress would have seemed tantamount with Fifine to bathing in public.
But, to my surprise, she took my sarcasm, if sarcasm it was, in good part.
“This apparition is of your own invoking,” she said. “And I did not want to deny you that pride in yourself which you had a right to feel. The strange comrade who has come to you out of the shadows is, after all, only your own lay-figure, Cousin; and—and the dress is very pretty.”
I glanced at her in some astonishment. Her cheeks were flushed, and she trifled with the food on her plate.
“So spake the young rosebud of its sheath,” I said, with a laugh. “Now I am going to fill up your glass.”
She let me do it; she was fond, in moderation, of sweet wine, was Fifine; and somehow I liked to see her lips and the “blushful Hippocrene” meet in small kisses—there was a suggestion of pure Paganism in that contact, of nymphs that thought no sin of tasting the good earth’s love.
We made a passable meal of it, between smalltalk and persiflage, always in the abstract sense. I accepted things as they had come to me, and, save to ascertain that my guest’s privacy had not been interrupted in any way during my absence, asked no leading questions and invited no confidences. That would have been to spoil all the romantic glamour of the situation; and moreover I should not have expected the truth. Since we were reconciled in the matter of social equality, I was prepared, for my comfort, to drift, and suffer or enjoy the charge the gods had put upon me. I came to do both, in fact, but with ever a leaning towards the contented side. And so Fifine and I became comrades.