[CHAPTER XIV]
Lest he should feel unduly elated, The Eye of the Beholder came back on Wednesday afternoon, but this time he did not post it to another firm instanter. He could not very well ask for it to be returned to Paris, and he left it with Turquand when he bade him good-bye. "Send it where you like," he begged; "perhaps you might try Farqueharsen next. Yes, I've rather a fancy for Farqueharsen! But let it make the round, old chap, and drop me a line when there aren't any more publishers for it to go to."
The nurse's "endeavour" was crowned by success. The Walfords had congratulated him so warmly that he almost began to think they were nice people again. And the departure was made on Thursday morning as arranged.
They travelled, of course, by the Newhaven route, and reached the gare St. Lazare after dark on a rainy evening. The amount of luggage that they possessed among them made Kent stare, as he watched half a dozen porters hoisting trunks, and a perambulator, and a bassinet on to the bus, and it seemed as if they would never get out of the station. At last they rattled away, through the wet streets, the baby whimpering, and the nurse flustered, and he and Cynthia very tired. They drove to a little hotel near the Madeleine, where they intended to stay until they found a suitable pension de famille, and where dinner and the warmth of beaune was very grateful. Nurse also "picked up" after the waiter's appearance with her tray and a half-bottle of vin ordinaire, and, as their fatigue passed, exhilaration was in the ascendant once more. Cynthia's recovery was so marked that, finding the rain had ceased and the moon was shining, she wanted to go out and look at the Grand Boulevard. So Humphrey and she took a stroll for an hour, and said how strange it was to think that they had come to live in Paris, and how funnily things happened. And they had a curaçoa each at a café, and went back to their fusty red room on the third-floor, with the inevitable gilt clock and a festooned bedstead, quite gaily.
The chambermaid brought in their chocolate at eight o'clock next morning, and her brisk "Bonjour, m'sieur et madame!" sounded much more cheerful to them both than Ann's knock at the door, with "The 'ot water, mum!" to which they were accustomed. The sun streamed in brilliantly as she parted the window-curtains. After the chocolate and rolls were finished, Kent proceeded to dress, and leaving Cynthia in bed, betook himself to the office of the paper in the rue du Quatre Septembre.
Beaufort had not come yet, and, pending his chief's arrival, he occupied himself by examining a copy. The tone of the notes struck him as decidedly poor, and a lengthy interview with one of the prominent French actresses abounded in all the well-worn cliches of the amateur. The "dainty and artistic" room into which the interviewer was ushered, the lady's "mock" despair, which gave place to "graceful" resignation and "fragrant" cigarettes, made him sick. Beaufort was very cordial when he entered, though, and it was vastly reassuring to discover how lightly he took things. The work, Mr. Kent would find, was as easy as A, B, C. "Turf Topics" was contributed by a fellow called Jordan, and, really, Mr. Kent would find a few hours daily more than enough to prepare an issue! They went into the private room, where a bottle of vermouth and a pile of French and English journals, marked and mutilated, were the most conspicuous features of the writing-table; and Kent came to the conclusion that his Editor was an extremely pleasant man, as the vermouth was sipped and they chatted over two excellent cigars.
At first the duties did not prove quite so simple as had been promised to one who had never had anything to do with producing a paper before, and the printer worried him a good deal. But Beaufort was highly satisfied. The novice was swift to grasp details, and took such an infinity of pains in seasoning and amplifying the réchauffés, that really his stuff read almost like original matter. As he began to feel his feet, too, he put forth ideas, and, finding that the other was quite ready to listen to them, gained confidence, and was not without a mistaken belief that in so quickly mastering the mysteries of a weekly and painfully exiguous little print, of which four-fifths were eclectic, he had displayed ability of a brilliant order.
Primarily the labour that he devoted to the task was ludicrously disproportionate to the result, but by degrees he got through it with more rapidity. When a month had passed since the morning that he first sat down in the assistant-editorial chair of The World and his Wife, he discovered that he was doing in an afternoon what it had formerly taken two days to accomplish, and he marvelled how he could have been so stupid. The work had devolved upon him almost entirely now, for Beaufort, having shown him the way in which he should go, dropped in late, and withdrew early, and did little but drink vermouth and say, "Yes, certainly, capital!" while he was there. It was Kent who proposed the subject for the week's interview, wrote—or re-wrote—the causerie, and who even secured the majority of the few advertisements that they obtained. Also, when the semi-celebrity to be interviewed was not a good-looking woman, it was he who was the interviewer. When the lady was attractive, Billy Beaufort attended to that department himself.
Cynthia had found a pension de famille in the Madeleine quarter, highly recommended for a permanency, and here they had removed. They had two fairly large bedrooms, communicating, on the fourth floor, and paid a hundred and fifty francs a week. It did not leave much over from the salary for their incidental expenses, after reckoning the nurse's wages; but it was supposed to be very cheap, and madame Garin and her vivacious daughter, who skipped a good deal for thirty years of age, and was voluble in bad English, begged them on no account to let any of the other boarders hear that they were received at such terms, for that would certainly be the commencement of madame Garin and her daughter's ruin. Some of the boarders were French people, but the meals, with which twenty-five persons down the long table appeared to be fairly content, were very bad. They would have been thought bad even in a boarding-house in Bloomsbury. The twenty-five persons were waited on by a leisurely and abstracted Italian, and the intervals between the meagre courses were of such duration that Kent swore that he had generally forgotten what the soup had been called by the time that the cold entree reached him.