One day I visit the room where an English Lord of Letters died more deaths than one. A gloomy, gruesome hotel, with an electric night-sign that goes in and out like some semaphore of sin. A cadaverous, miserable-looking man tells me that the room is at present occupied. I return. A cadaverous, miserable-looking woman whines to a dejected looking valet-de-chambre that I may go up.
It is on the first floor and overlooks a court. There is the bed of varnished pine in which he died; the usual French hotel wardrobe, the usual plush armchair, but not, I note, the usual clock of chocolate marble. Everything so commonplace, so sordid; yet for a moment I could see that fallen demi-god, as with eyes despairful as death in their tear-corroded sockets, he stared and stared into that drab, rain-sodden court.
For who can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.
And so in sweet, haphazard wanderings amid the Paris of the Past time sped ever so swiftly. I forgot my manuscripts, my position, everything in my sheer delight of freedom; and how long my dream would have continued I know not if I had not had a sudden awakening. It was on my return from one of my rambles when I drew up with a start in front of a shop that showed all kinds of woman’s work for sale.
“Heavens! Surely that isn’t Anastasia’s cushion?”
I was staring at a piece of exquisite silk embroidery, an imitation of ancient tapestry. No, I could not be mistaken. Too well I remembered every detail of it; how I had watched it take on beauty under her patient fingers; how hour after hour I could hear the crisp snap as the needle broke through the taut silk. Over a week had she toiled on it, rising with the first dawn, so that she might have more daylight in which to blend her colours. And there it was, imbedded in that mass of cheap stuff, and marked with a smudgy paper, “Forty-five francs.” Yes, I felt sick.
How careless I had been! I had never given the financial situation another thought, yet we had wanted for nothing. There was that excellent dinner we had had the night before; why, she must have sold this to buy it! Even now I was living on the proceeds of her work.
“What a silly girl! She wouldn’t say a word, in case I should be worried. Just like women; they take a fiendish delight in humiliating a man by sacrificing themselves for him. But I can’t let her support me. Let’s see.... There’s my watch and chain. What’s a chain but a useless gaud, a handhold for a pick-pocket. Maybe this very afternoon I’ll have the whole thing snatched. I’ll take no chances; it’s a fine, heavy chain, and cost over a hundred dollars; maybe the Mont de Pietists will give me fifty for it.”
They wouldn’t. Twenty-five was their limit, so I took it meekly. Then, returning hastily to the embroidery shop, I bought the cushion cover, carried it home under my coat, and locked it safely away in the alligator-skin suitcase.