CHAPTER XXIV
A WONDERFUL thing had happened to Jean. Gabrielle had smiled at him. Her eyes, serene and secret, had for one swift moment met his with sudden tenderness.
It made Jean, on his way home to Rue Lalo, almost too happy to breathe.
The May night swept his blood with hurrying magic, and in his heart a tiny thread of golden melody was born.
It was the hour when Paris awoke; rich, expensive, passionate Paris, and launched itself into swift, tireless motors, racing to and fro through the transient pleasure of the night. The Champs Élysées stretched before him like a coil of swiftly flashing jewels. Fire and speed, and the gay faculty of easy living, flamed its message home to the world. It was to this great stream that Madame Torialli belonged—belonged, that is, by birth, by position, by success; but Jean no longer believed that she shared its life; the gay world was such a small affair. The music in his brain sang a different story to him. Gabrielle was a child at heart, she was like the soft unfolding of the spring.
It was easy to think of her on a night full of stars. He knew that Paris could not count for her any more than for him. It was a mere glittering screen between them and their joy.
Jean flew up his steep, dark stairs in the Rue Lalo, and found Margot tidying up his things. The most fatal mistake a woman can make, in the eyes of a young man, is to be present when he is thinking of somebody else. Margot had made it and she saw by Jean’s eyes that she had made it, and she did not feel as if she could ever see anything else.
Jean recognized that Margot was unhappy, and this angered him—he was by nature sympathetic—but there are moments in life when even to the sympathetic the sorrows of others bear a grotesque insignificance. Jean hoped that Margot would not tell him why she was unhappy. It seemed to him frankly incredible that anyone need be unhappy who lived in the same world as Gabrielle’s smile.
And Margot had come there to tell him—still she, too, for the moment saw the wisdom of putting it off.
They fell back on her music. Jean threw himself on the music-stool and suggested that Margot should sing first this and then that. Never had Jean given her such a comprehensive and variable singing lesson or paid less attention to what she sang. At last the music came to an abrupt end; there was no more music Margot could sing, and it appeared that there was nothing more for either of them to say. Jean lit a cigarette and sat there, shaking his foot to and fro in an agony of suppressed impatience. He could not very well turn Margot out of his room, and yet her very presence made the music that was within him less—the melody seemed dwindling like a tiny stream choked by a fall of sand.