CHAPTER XXXVII
MAX swung down the Escalier de Sainte-Marie in as reckless a mood as ever possessed being of either sex. Nothing of the sweet Maxine was discernible in face or carriage; the boy predominated, but a boy possessed of a callousness that was pathetic seen hand-in-hand with youth.
For the first time he was viewing Paris bereft of the glamour of romance; for the first time the Masque of Folly passed before him, licentious and unashamed. Many an hour, in days gone by, he had discussed with Blake this lighter side of many-sided Paris, and with Blake's wise and penetrating gaze he had seen it in true perspective; but to-night there was no sane interpreter to temper vision, to-night he was bitterly alone, and his mind, from long austerity, long concentration upon work, had swung with grievous suddenness to the opposing pole of thought. He had no purpose in his descent from the rue Müller, he had no desire of vice as an antidote to pain, but his loathing of Paris was drawing him to her with that morbid craving to hurt and rehurt his bruised soul that assails the artist in times of misery.
The streets were quiet, for it was scarcely nine o'clock, and as yet the lethargy of the day lay heavy on the air. The heat and the accompanying laxity breathed an atmosphere of its own; every window of every house gaped, and behind the casements one caught visions of men and women negligent of attire and heedless of observation.
Romance was dead! Of that supreme fact Max was very sure. A hard smile touched his lips, and hugging his cynicism, he went forward—crossing the Boulevard de Clichy, plunging downward into the darker regions of the rue des Martyrs and the rue Montmartre, where the lights of the boulevards are left behind, and the sight-seer is apt to look askance at the crude facts that the street lamps divulge to his curious eyes. To the boy, these corners had no terrors, for in his untarnished friendship with Blake all sides of life had been viewed in turn, as all topics had been discussed as component parts of a fascinatingly interesting world. To-night he went forward, mingling with the inhabitants of the district, revelling with morbid realism in the forbidding dinginess of their appearance. He was not of that quarter—that was patent to every rough who lounged outside a café door, as it was patent to every slovenly woman who gave him a glance in passing. He was not of the quarter, but he was an artist—and a shabby one at that—so the men accorded him an indifferent shrug and the women a second glance.
Forward he went, possessed by his morbidity—forward into the growing murkiness of environment until, association of ideas suddenly curbing impulse, he stopped before the door of a shabby café bearing the fanciful appellation of the Café des Cerises-jumelles. Once, when bound upon a night exploration in this same region, he and Blake had stopped to smile at this odd name and wonder at its origin, and finally they had passed through the portal to find that the twin cherries smiled upon doubtful patrons. The vivid memory of that night smote him now as, drawn by some unquestioned influence, he again entered the café, passing through a species of bar to a long, low-ceiled eating-room set with small tables. How Blake had talked that night! How thoughtfully, how humanely and tolerantly he had judged their fellow-guests, as they sat at one of these tables, rubbing shoulders with the worst—or, as he had laughingly insisted, the best—of an odd fraternity!
The recollection was keen as a knife when Max entered the eating-room, sat down and ordered a drink with the supreme indifference of disillusion. Six months ago he would have trembled to find himself alone in such a place; to-night he was beyond such a commonplace as fear.
He smiled again cynically, emptied his glass and looked about him. His first experience of the place had been in the hours succeeding midnight, when the quarter hummed with its unsavory life; but now it was early, the lights were not yet at their fullest, the waiters had not as yet taken on their nocturnal air of briskness. In one corner three men were engrossed in a game of cards, in another a thin girl of fifteen sat with her arm round the neck of a boy scarce older than herself, whispering jests into his ear, at which they both laughed in coarse low murmurs, while in the middle of the room, with her back turned to him, a woman in a tight black dress and feathered hat was eating a meal of poached eggs.
In a vague way, absorbed in his own thoughts, Max fell to studying this solitary woman, until something in her impassivity, something in the sphinx-like calm with which she went through the business of her meal, blent with his imaginings, and he suddenly found her placed beside Blake in the possession of his thoughts—an integral part of their joint lives. In a flash of memory the large black hat, the opulent figure took place within his consciousness and, answering to a new instinct, he rose and took an involuntary step in the woman's direction.
She changed her position at sound of his approach, her large hat described new angles, and she looked back over her shoulder.
"What!" she said aloud. "The little friend of Blake! But how droll!"
She showed no surprise, she merely waved her hand to a chair facing her own.
Max sat down; a hot and dirty waiter came forward languidly, and wine was ordered.
Lize pushed aside the glass of green-tinted liquid that she had been consuming through a straw, and waited for what was to come. Max, looking at her in the crude light of a gas-jet, saw that her face was whiter, her eyes more hollow than when her wrath had fallen on him at the Bal Tabarin; also, he noted that a little dew of heat showed through the mask of powder on her face.
Silence was maintained until the wine was brought; then she drank thirstily, laid down her empty glass and turned her eyes upon him.
"You have parted with your friend, eh?"
The surprise of the question was so sharp that it killed speculation. He did not ask how she had probed his secret—whether by mere intuition or through some feminine confidence of Jacqueline's. The fact of her knowledge swept him beyond the region of lucid thought; he accepted the situation as it was offered.
"Yes," he said. "I have parted with my friend."
"And why? He is a good boy—Blake!" She looked at him with her inscrutable eyes, and after many days he was conscious of the touch of human compassion. He did not analyze the woman's feelings—he did not even conjecture whether she knew him for boy or girl. All he comprehended was that out of this sordid atmosphere—out of the lethargy of the sultry night—some force had touched him, some force was drawing him back into the circle of human things. Strange indeed are the workings of the mind. He, who had shrunk with an agonized sensitiveness from the sympathy of M. Cartel—from the tender comprehension of the little Jacqueline—suddenly felt his reserve melt and break in presence of this woman of the boulevards with her air of impassive ennui. Theoretically, he knew life in all its harder aspects, and it called for no vivid imagination to trace the descent of the fresh grisette of the Quartier Latin to the creature who sought her meals in the Café des Cerises-jumelles, yet hers was the accepted compassion.
"Madame!" he said, suddenly. "Madame, tell me! You knew him once?"
Lize wiped the dew of heat from her forehead; emptied a second glass of wine. "A thousand years ago, mon petit, when the world was as young as you!"
"In the Quartier?"
"In the Quartier—on the Boul' Mich'—at Bulliers—" She stopped, falling into a dream; then, suddenly, from the farthest corner of the room, came the sound of a loud kiss, and the boy and girl at the distant table began to sing in unison—a ribald song, but instinct with the zest of life. Lize started, as though she had been struck.
"They have it—youth!" she cried, with a jerk of her head toward the distant corner. "The world is for them!" Then her voice and her expression altered. She leaned across the table, until her face was close to Max.
"What a little fool you are!" she said. "It is written in those eyes of yours—that see too little and see too much. Go home! Think of what I have said! He is a good boy—this Blake!"
Max mechanically replenished her glass, and mechanically she drank; then she produced a little mirror and made good the ravages of the heat upon her face with the nonchalance of her kind; finally, she looked at the clock.
"Come!" she said. "We go the same way."
He rose obediently. He made no question as to her destination. He had come to drown himself in the sordidness of Paris and, behold, his heart was beating with a human quickness it had not known since the moment he held Blake's first letter unopened in his hand; his throat was dry, his eyes were smarting with the old, half-forgotten smart of unshed tears.
He followed her with a strange docility as she passed out of the unsavory Cerises-jumelles into the close, ill-smelling street. In complete silence they walked through what seemed a nightmare world of unpleasant sights, unpleasant sounds, until across his dazed thoughts the familiar sense of Paris—the sense of the pleasure-chase—swept from the Boulevard de Clichy.
Lize paused; he saw her fully in the brave illumination—the large black hat, the close-clad figure, the pallid face—and as he looked, she smiled unexpectedly and, putting out her hand, patted him on the shoulder.
"Good-bye, mon enfant! Go home! Youth comes but once; and this Blake—he is a good boy!"
Before he could answer, before he could return smile or touch, she was gone—absorbed into the maze of lights, and he was alone, to turn which way he would.