THE FEASTING OF THE CHARM
"There's that that would be thought upon,
I trow, beside the bride.
The business of the kitchen's great,
For it is fit that men should eat,
Nor was it there denied."
Sir John Suckling.
Crowded hours were to follow that quiet afternoon in the forest.
A morning or so afterwards Olwen darted out into the hall, where she had caught a glimpse of the bride-to-be going past in a great hurry.
"Miss Walsh——!"
"Oh, Olwen," said Miss Walsh, stopping breathlessly. "Oh, I do want to talk to you, but I haven't a moment. It's the lunch today, you know, the déjeuner intime for all his relations and friends. They've had the cards——"
Olwen nodded; she had sent her "faire part" card home to Wales as a curiosity.
"It's to be down in Madame Leroux's own sitting-room; she says better so than having the party in the salle after the hotel visitors have had lunch," explained Miss Walsh, always breathless. "Oh, I feel I must go down and see if I can help her, but it is so difficult to understand when she will talk French so dreadfully fast——"
"Let me come too," entreated Olwen, eyes suddenly alight. "Let me help, do! I can generally make out even her fast French."
"Very well—if you ask her!"
Madame Leroux was talking faster French that morning than they had ever heard from her before. They found her in the basement, a whole region of the hotel that was unknown ground to Olwen, peopled by a tribe of workers whose sallow faces she had never seen before, and who were flying hither and thither on errands undreamt of on the upper floors. Even so the stoke-hole of a liner is unthought about on its polished decks.
The manageress was in the appartement that adjoined the kitchen, a domain smaller but pleasanter of aspect than any of the big rooms above, and more comfortable, except for one narrow space that was neither kitchen nor appartement. This space between the walls seemed to be a sound magnifier of the rumbling service-lift, the whistles of speaking-tubes, and the hissing and running of every water-pipe in the place. The door into the huge French kitchen stood open, giving a glimpse of marmites, burnished copper pans, crocks, and five-decker cookers; of vegetables piled haystack high, of ramparts of yard-long rolls, of twenty other kinds of provisions.
Beyond the kitchen a second door opened out into the cour, where buckets clanked, a tap splashed, and the whistling of a knife-cleaning machine could be heard. By yet another door Marie and Rosalie were bringing in chairs collected from bedrooms, attics, landings, and any other corner.
"May we both come in?" Miss Walsh asked timidly.
Madame Leroux turned.
"Ah! Enter always, Mademoiselle. It is not to all the world that I permit it—but for the little demoiselle of M. the Professor, but yes, but yes——To help? But certainly, if that gives her pleasure. One would have said that she would have preferred to spend the fine morning with M. le Capitaine in the forest, he with the one arm who admires her already——" Madame's glance was as swift as the dart of a chameleon's tongue after a fly.
She was already dressed for the day, her dark hair dragged up to the top of her head in a fist-shaped knob, secured with combs, and her front locks frisés above her mercilessly intelligent face. Over her tightly-fitted gown of black broché and passementerie, showing a fat white V of neck, a velvet band and a pendant, she had passed an enormous apron of blue-and-white check.
She was looking over her well-covered shoulder with eyes that were everywhere at once, and giving orders in a voice that was as shrill as a whipsaw and as quick as a mill-race.
"Hold! Prop that door open, Rosalie, instead of bumping it each time with the good chair, little careless one; one would say a swing!" (She took breath in a gasp.)
"And those oysters from Monsieur Paul; are they not yet arrived? Do not open them immediately, as last time; and even so, see that you open me but half of them in order that they may keep. And thou, Marcel, take me that mat into the yard instead of brushing me the dust over the vegetables!" (Gasps.) "Bon dieu, one would need twenty eyes——As for these knives, Etienne, have you the intention to grind them to powder rather than find other work? It is then not necessary that they serve us for another day?" (Gasp.) "My faith!... Ah, Mees Ouall she—Agathe——but no, it is not necessary that you help. Go, go and make yourself beautiful for after the déjeuner, when you are presented to the friends. Make yourself beautiful for Pierre, who shall mount up afterwards to beg you to descend for a little half-hour, like a princess!" (Gasp.) "Eh bien, if you hold to assisting me now, but not in the kitchen, no, no; if you will have the goodness to dispose on the table within the serviettes that I have already placed in a heap. Also the glasses; they are in those cupboards there; no, not there, Mademoiselle, here, here, here. Arrange them all precisely as in England, at your château, yes? It is that! It is perfect!" (Gasp.) "And the little demoiselle of the Professor shall set out the cards with the names——But no, no, no, no, no; she does not know the names nor where they sit. Better to place these pots of cyclamen on the window-sill, Mademoiselle, if you please. One would say real flowers, would one not? But two francs." (Gasp.) "Fifty! It is true! Ah, pas ça——" seeing Agatha Walsh, entirely at a loss, picking up from the sofa-corner and unrolling a tricolor flag. "Not that. It should have been interlaced with the other. I was desolated, but one could not obtain in time, the Union Jacques. Flowers only, therefore. Tiens, I have not placed a cloth over the safe——"
She spread over the iron cash-safe a cloth edged and inserted with the lovely pillow-made lace of the neighbourhood, while her nimble French tongue ran ceaselessly on.
Her niece-by-marriage-to-be, helped by Olwen, set to work with all the good will in the world to lay the large round table. From the cupboard drawers indicated by Madame's plump hands they brought a tablecloth, an ornately embroidered table-centre, and napkins of the finest linen, all wedded to that beautiful lace; from the cupboards they took old and exquisite glass, and silver that could not have been bettered at the Grange of Miss Walsh's youth. Olwen noticed that the old-fashioned carved bread-cradle that swung from the ceiling had already been filled with blossomed and berried boughs of the arbutus, patron plant of the place. She thought as Mrs. Cartwright had thought, "I shall always think of arbutus—and here."
The chairs, some of them rush-bottomed, others of carved gilt, were ranged about the table; then Olwen and Agatha Walsh sped out into the yard and returned with the knives that Etienne, the boy in the green drugget apron, had at last polished to his satisfaction.
In the middle of the red-tiled kitchen Madame Leroux still stormed as shrilly as though she alone of all excellent housewives possessed worthless servants.
"Is it not enough that I myself must arise at half-past four today, and it is that I must do all myself, me, as well as to entertain the friends and the relations of Monsieur, they who are eating their blood with jealousy because he marries himself with an English lady of the high nobility? And why are the boards not placed over the bowls of soup? My faith, it is then that I must work, I must arrange, I must plan, I must have the eyes everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, while you let the fire die down, female idle ones who do nothing but regard with open mouths and talk in corners and try to eat me the glacés fruits out of the dishes?" (Gasp for breath.) "Take you these immediately, Marie Claire——" she waved towards a score of trussed chickens that looked like a frieze of poultry—"and set them in the pans. And pose you those lids so that the pottage may simmer as it must." She pointed to the vast arched fireplace with the grid running from one end to the other. "Mon Dieu, if this boy here had as many legs as an octopus he could not more expressly place them in my way. That he does at each moment! Is it that I have sent my own children out to receive les amis even at Arcachon, to be encumbered by thee? The children? They will feast out here in the yard with the children of the notary and the little cousins; I do not wish that they are the whole time with the grown ones when one talks——"
And she bustled out into the cour to look to the long trestled table there which had been surrounded by a still further variety of chairs.
It was here that Miss Walsh in her halting French asked where was Gustave, where was Monsieur Leroux?
"The men?" Madame gabbled. "Ah, for that, where would they be? Invisibles, so long as there is work to be done," with a half-indulgent laugh. "You will see also, in good time, you English ladies, that which the service militaire does for the men! They make their service. They return. They put themselves at their ease. Behold, they are required to do nothing further for the rest of their life. It is we, Mesdemoiselles, we who are accustomed to it; we other French wives. You also, you will see! Ah, hold, the oysters! Now, Etienne, you will dust me once again the seats of all these chairs, I say to you, and with a dry duster, I pray you, not a wet one; dry, dry, dry, dry, dry——"
In this exalting hubbub did Olwen pass the whole morning with her friend until the sallow little Italian waiter came down to announce that déjeuner was served.
They went up. How cool and quiet, it struck them, were those upper reaches of the hotel....
But as they were seeking their places a quick "Oh, come and look!" from Miss Walsh brought Olwen running to the side window. "Oh, here are the people——"
The procession of the French invités was coming down the road from the little tramway terminus. It was solemnly headed by the three little pigtailed Leroux girls, each holding by the hand another child, bare from mid-thigh to ankle, and wearing an adaptation of the sailor suit. After them, in a broken line of twos and ones and threes, came the grown-up people.
First and most resplendent of them appeared the individual whom Olwen rightly guessed to be the notaire from Bordeaux. He wore a white bowler hat, a white waistcoat, and he carried in his hands, which he held well out in front of him, a large bouquet tied with tricolour streamers and the Union Jacques which Madame Leroux had desired, and he overshadowed even his rotund endimanchée wife in her purple costume and forward raking hat, who bobbed in his wake. She was escorted by Monsieur Leroux. Next came Monsieur Popinot, the clerk from the passports office, all in black, but carrying Madame Popinot's pink parasol. She, a plump and pretty little woman, carried a year-old baby in a corolla of lace.
Then came a sister of Madame Leroux, as dark, as mercilessly intelligent as the manageress herself, talking eagerly to Pierre Tronchet, effective in his blue and red.
Another artilleriste on leave, evidently a comrade from the regiment, walked a pace or so behind them, between two silent young girls; then a trio of stout, bearded old men gesticulating freely, then a lady in another forward raking hat, then a party wearing deepest mourning, but wreathed in smiles, then others ... then again others.... Tronchets, Leroux, ramifications of both families, relatives, friends, and those whom it was intended to dazzle....
Olwen, gazing upon this cortège, suppressed a wish to think aloud of a rhyme of her childhood:
"The animals went in four by four,
Hurray, Hurray!
The animals went in four by four
And the big hippopotamus stuck in the door."
This last line, she considered, might almost have applied to several of the invités!
All of them, as they approached the hotel, stiffened, pulled themselves together as if they were going past the saluting point of a review, assumed photographically unnatural expressions, and walked delicately; then they seemed to deflate and hurry as they slipped past the corner to the back entrance to the premises.
"Oh, I'm not a bit hungry," sighed the agitated Miss Walsh as she turned from the window and sat down next to Olwen at the long table. The déjeuner was as perfectly cooked and served as if no subterranean banquet had been in preparation. "Oh, fancy having to be 'shown' to a host of people! Oh, I can't help feeling almost glad that Gustave's father and mother aren't alive! If they had been, you know, he would have had to ask their consent to marry me, even though he is thirty-eight. Oh, it is such a mercy that Madame didn't want me to sit through the whole of lunch."
"Much the best plan!" agreed Mrs. Cartwright from her side of the table.
"Oh, yes; I don't appear till they have to drink my health—oh, but I am so nervous! And do you think I look all right in this, Mrs. Cartwright?... honestly?"
She wore an expensive new dress of prune-coloured glacé silk, ornamented with a kind of lace bib and with rows and rows of little crimson buttons that fastened nothing. Both Mrs. Cartwright and Olwen fibbed valiantly, and had their reward. The loveliest frock in Paris could not have been more becoming to Agatha Walsh than her flush of pleasure.
That déjeuner downstairs was supposed to be intime and private; but the distant sounds of it were already becoming audible to the more public part of the hotel.
First a soft but thunderous drumming as of applause upon the table-top was heard.
Then a skirl of laughter, the piercingness of which, near to, could only be guessed at.
Then, booming fragments of a voice that rose above others just as an occasional column of foam spouted higher than those other Biscay rollers on the reef. Then an uninterrupted booming.... Apparently a speech was in progress.
An involuntary and smiling silence seemed to fall upon the luncheon parties in the salle above, almost as if they would have felt it impolite to talk through what was going on below. Truly, Miss Walsh was making the hotel one that day—the hotel to which she had only come because of that hat-pin stuck in a guide-book and pricking at random a name on a page!
Then suddenly, the door of the salle à manger opened. The blue-and-red apparition of Sergeant Tronchet stood to attention just inside it: darkly flushed, beaming, silent.
(It may here be said that none of the visitors ever had known this swarthy well-set-up French soldier anything but silent. All that most of them had ever heard of his voice had been the murmured "Madame ... Mademoiselle ... Messieurs ..." that accompanied his heel-clicking bows. Only Miss Walsh had ever had any conversation with him. But had not this been to some purpose?)
"Oh, he's come to fetch me," she exclaimed now in a voice that failed. "Good-bye, Olwen dear," she added, as if she never expected to come back alive. "I shall see you and Mrs. Cartwright and the Professor at tea-time——you are all coming to my tea, aren't you?" she finished appealingly.
Then she disappeared, with her peacock-proud fiancé.
"The day has only just begun, my dear child!" declared Mrs. Cartwright to Olwen, rising. "Come to my room and take a rest before we come on in the next act. Run up, will you? I'll follow."
Olwen ran up; glad of a breathing space.
That party, three floors and five or six rooms away, did still dominate the whole hotel! She was glad to lie back in Mrs. Cartwright's basket-chair and to draw a long breath. She had nothing to do that afternoon, she thanked goodness....
But Mrs. Cartwright, as soon as she came in, drew a chair up to her writing-table and began to make notes, chuckling from time to time.
"Tell me when the people begin to go," she begged Olwen. "I had to make an errand about the tea, and take a peep in just now, I couldn't miss it.... My dear! The heat! And the din down there! Poor Miss Walsh! How Madame crammed them all in I don't know.... And Monsieur Leroux with his black domino beard and his pouchy eyes, and all those women exactly the same height whether they sit down or stand up...."
She was scribbling sketches of them all to send to her boys....
The noise downstairs rose to sounds of confused singing—Le Chanson des Baisers, then fell at last.
"I think they're all going away now," said Olwen from the balconied window, and Mrs. Cartwright ran to join her and to watch the homeward-faring procession filing by.
First the notary, his white bowler hat a little dinted, appeared round the corner of the hotel. He was arm in arm with Monsieur Popinot, who still carried his wife's pink parasol, and who seemed to have an idea of putting it up over the pair of them as they went by the windows, but was restrained by a gesture, suppressed but fierce, from the notary. His purple-clad wife hustled the children ahead of her; the party in mourning were giggling joyously together, then assumed a gravity.
With the same effect of pompously pulling themselves together with which they had passed the front of the hotel, they all repassed it now.
Even as they turned their backs upon it, the strain was seen to relax again. Up went the pink parasol in the distance.
"Ah, there; there goes Gustave's comrade the artilleriste," commented Mrs. Cartwright. "First at the fight—and last at the feast; yes, he's the last."
The artilleriste swaggered delightfully, turning to wave a farewell, and obviously caring little whether it were to the front of the hotel or the back....
And then, about seventy yards behind the last of these revellers there went by two other figures.
They were those of Captain Ross and Mr. Awdas, who had been making themselves scarce for the day.
And perhaps it was because Olwen was busy with her own effort not to look at one of them that she did not notice Mrs. Cartwright's swift glance at the other; the flying boy.
As if he felt that glance upon him, Jack Awdas looked up and put a hand to his cap; a smile rippling all over his face.
Olwen would not have read the purpose behind the smile.