But I noticed she ordered a double cognac that night.
Madame A rendered one very great service to our group, one which we could never repay. We had been but a short time in Paris before we realized that one of our duties was to be helping out American girls and women who had come to Europe to study a little, sight-see a little, travel a little, expecting easily to form congenial relations with the people of the country, and who for one reason or another had never been able to do this. They were disappointed and unhappy. The four of us standing together made a nucleus they envied. We made it a rule to do our best to help them out; but at least in one case it involved us in serious trouble.
Among those who had attached themselves to us was a woman of some forty or more years with a curiously repellent personality. I have never known a person to produce a more melancholy effect on strangers. I have seen our little salon empty itself if she dropped in on our evening at home. Even Madame Bonnet’s little black dog Riquet, who had adopted us, would slink around the edge of the room and beg to be let out if she came in. What was the matter? We could not imagine. More than once she threw herself into my arms and sobbed that she was unhappy, in great trouble, of which she could not speak.
Miss C had been some three months in the house when we came home from a week-end trip to be met by an outraged Madame Bonnet. Miss C, she told us, had been arrested, arrested for stealing at the Bon Marché and the Louvre. She was in Saint-Lazaire. There was a note for me. I must do something. Think of the disgrace to her establishment!
The note told me only where she was, that she had engaged a lawyer, asked me to see him. I did, and found him of the type which I suppose hangs around all prisons into which great cities dump women of the street and petty criminals. His only interest was in a possible retainer. How much would I pay him for taking the case? Nothing, I assured him, until I had talked to the American authorities. I went to the consulate, where an irate and worried official swore loudly at the faculty of American women for getting into trouble in France.
“Here I am,” he said, “saddled with a girl who is going to have a baby and who swears she’ll kill herself if I don’t arrange for her to have it so her family will never know.
“I was afraid she would do it too, and then there would be another nasty scandal to hush up, so I got the man here and told him he must put up the money to see her through.
“He laughed at me; but I pulled this revolver out of the drawer” (suiting the action to the word) “and told him I thought I ought to shoot him, but that if I didn’t I’d send for the girl’s brother and see that he did. Well, he settled for ten thousand francs. But that does not let me off. What am I going to do with the baby? And now here you are with one of the nastiest kind of cases for a French court. They can’t stand foreigners stealing from them.”
“But what am I to do?” I wailed.
“She’ll have to stand a public trial. You must impress the judges. Find out if she’s got friends. Get cablegrams. Show she has relatives willing to help her. Read her letters. See if they don’t show what is behind this, and when the trial comes have all the pretty girls and prosperous-looking men you know present. They’ll look at you, and they’ll think twice. Put on a campaign, woman.”