As he sat there, there seemed to come again into the silent room the perfume he had noticed when he returned. It seemed to float in on the twilight, still dimly pink behind the roofs of the gray houses along the Boul’ Miche’: subtle, haunting, an odor more delicate and tender than any he had ever known before.
He raised his head. He saw something white lying on the floor—lying where, a few moments since, he had stood. He went forward and picked it up.
It was a flower like a rose—a white rose—but unlike any rose of which Cartaret had any knowledge. It was small, but perfect, its pure petals gathered tight against its heart, and from its heart came the perfume that had seemed to him like a musical poem in an unknown tongue.
For a second time Cartaret had that quick vision of the sunlight upon snow-crests and the virgin sheen of unattainable mountain tops....
CHAPTER II
PROVIDING THE GENTLE READER WITH A CARD OF ADMISSION TO THE NEST OF THE TWO DOVES
Dans ces questions de crédit, il faut toujours frapper l’imagination. L’idée de génie, c’est de prendre dans la poche des gens l’argent qui n’y est pas encore.—Zola: L’Argent.
Until just before the appearance of Charlie Cartaret’s rosy vision, this had been a day of darkness and wet. Rain—a dull, hopeless, February rain—fell with implacable monotony. It descended in fine spray, as if too lazy to hurry, yet too spiteful to stop. It made all Paris miserable; but, as is the way with Parisian rains, it was a great deal wetter on the Left Bank of the Seine than on the Right.
No rain—not even in those happy times before the great war—ever washed the Left Bank clean, and this one only made it a marsh. A curtain of fog fell sheer between the Isle de la Cité and the Quai des Augustins; the twin towers of St. Sulpice staggered up into a pall of fog and were lost in it. The gray houses hunched their shoulders, lowered their heads, drew their mansard hats and gabled caps over their noses and stood like rows of patient horses at a cabstand under the gray downpour. Now and again a real cab scuttled along the streets, its skinny beast clop-clopping over the wooden paving, or slipping among the cobbled ways, its driver hidden under a mountainous pile of woolen great-coat and rubber cape. Even the taxis lacked the proud air with which they habitually splash pedestrians, and such pedestrians as business forced upon the early afternoon thoroughfares went with heads bowed like the houses’ and umbrellas leveled like flying-jibs.
In front of the little Café Des Deux Colombes, the two marble-topped tables which occupied its scant frontage on the rue Jacob were deserted by all save their four iron-backed chairs with wet seats and their twin water-bottles into which, with mathematical precision, water dropped from a pair of holes in the sagging canvas overhead. Inside, however, there were lighted gas-jets, the proprietor and the proprietor’s wife—presumably the pair of doves for whom the Café was named—and a man that was trying to look like a customer.