CHAPTER VI
CARTARET SETS UP HOUSEKEEPING
Que de femmes il y a dans une femme! Et c’est bien heureux.—Dumas, Fils: La Dame Aux Perles.
Cartaret did not see the Lady of the Rose next day, though his work suffered sadly through the worker’s jumping from before his easel at the slightest sound on the landing, running to his door, and sometimes himself going to the hall and standing there for many minutes, trying, and not succeeding, to look as if he had just come in, or were just going out, on business of the first importance. He concluded, for the hundredth time, that he was a fool; but he persevered in his folly. He asked himself why he should feel such an odd interest in an unknown girl practically alone in Paris; but he found no satisfactory answer. He declared that it was madness in him to suppose that she could want ever to see him again, and madness to suppose that a penniless failure had anything to gain by seeing her; but he continued to try.
On the night following the first day of his watch, Cartaret went to bed disappointed and slept heavily. On the second night he went to bed worried, and dreamed of scaling a terrible mountain in quest of a flower, and of falling into a hideous chasm just as the flower turned into a beautiful woman and smiled at him. On the third night, he surrendered to acute alarm and believed that he did not sleep at all.
The morning of the fourth day found him knocking on the panel of that magic door opposite. Chitta opened the door a crack, growled, and shut it in his face.
“I wonder,” reflected Cartaret, “what would be the best means of killing this old woman. I wonder if the hyena would eat candy sent her by mail.”
He had been watching, all the previous day, for the Lady of the Rose to go out, and she did not leave her room. Now it occurred to him to watch for Chitta’s exit on a forage foray and to renew his attack during her absence. This he accomplished. From a front window, he had no sooner seen the duenna swing into the rue du Val de Grâce, with her head-dress bobbing and a shopping-net on her arm, than he was again knocking at the door across the landing.
He knew now, did Cartaret, that, on whatever landing of life he had lived, there was always that door opposite, the handle of which he had never dared to turn, the key to which he had never yet found. He knew, on this morning—a clear, windy morning, for March had come in like a lion—that, for the door of every heart in the world, or high or low, or cruel or tender, there is a heart opposite with a door not inaccessible.
The pale yellow sun sang of it: Marvelous Door Opposite!—it seemed to sing—how, when they pass that portal, the commonplace becomes the unusual and reality is turned into romance. Lead becomes silver then, and copper—gold. Magical Door Opposite! All the possibilities of life—aye, and what is better, all life’s impossibilities—are behind you, and all life’s fears and hopes before. All our young dreams, our mature ambitions, our old regrets, curl in incense from our brains and struggle to pass that keyhole. Unhappy he for whom the door never opens; more unhappy, often, he for whom it does open; but most unhappy he who never sees that it is there: the Door across the Landing.
Cartaret knocked as if he were knocking at the gate of Paradise, and, perhaps again as if he were knocking at the gate of Paradise, he got no answer. He knocked a second time and heard the rustle of a woman’s skirt.