The next day was Sunday. It was warm and sunny as a day could be. The air was charged with a kind of gay expectation. Barfleur had discovered a neo-impressionist portraitist of merit, one Hans Bols, and had agreed to have his portrait done by him. This Sunday morning was the first day for a series of three sittings; so I left him and spent a delicious morning in the Bois. Paris in spring! The several days—from Saturday to Wednesday—were like a dream. A gay world—full of the subtleties of social ambition, of desire, fashion, love-making, and all the keenest, shrewdest aspects of life. It was interesting, at the Café Madrid and The Elysée, to sit out under trees and the open sky and see an uninterrupted stream of automobiles and taxis pouring up, depositing smart-looking people all glancing keenly about, nodding to friends, now cordially, now tentatively, in a careful, selective social way.
One evening after I returned from a late ramble alone, I found on my table a note from Barfleur. “For God’s sake, if you get this in time, come at once to the Abbaye Thélème. I am waiting for you with a Mrs. L., who wants to meet you.” So I had to change to evening clothes at one-thirty in the morning. And it was the same old thing when I reached there—waiters tumbling over one another with their burdens of champagne, fruit, ices, confitures; the air full of colored glucose balls, colored balloons floating aloft, endless mirrors reflecting a giddy panorama, white arms, white necks, animated faces, snowy shirt bosoms—the old story. Spanish dancers in glittering scales, American negroes in evening clothes singing coon songs, excited life-lovers, male and female, dancing erotically in each other’s arms. Can it be, I asked myself, that this thing goes on night after night and year after year? Yet it was obvious that it did.
The lady in question was rather remote—as an English-woman can be. I’m sure she said to herself, “This is a very dull author.” But I couldn’t help it. She froze my social sense into icy crystals of “yes” and “no.” We took her home presently and continued our rounds till the wee sma’ hours.
CHAPTER LIII
THE VOYAGE HOME
The following Wednesday Barfleur and I returned to London via Calais and Dover. We had been, between whiles, to the races at Longchamps, luncheons at Au Père Boivin, the Pré Catalan, and elsewhere. I had finally looked up Marcelle, but the concierge explained that she was out of town.
In spite of the utter fascination of Paris I was not at all sorry to leave, for I felt that to be happy here one would want a more definite social life and a more fixed habitation than this hotel and the small circle of people that we had met could provide. I took a last—almost a yearning—look at the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Gare du Nord and then we were off.
England was softly radiant in her spring dress. The leaves of the trees between Dover and London were just budding, that diaphanous tracery which resembles green lace. The endless red chimneys and sagging green roofs and eaves of English cottages peeping out from this vesture of spring were as romantic and poetic as an old English ballad. No doubt at all that England—the south of it, anyhow—is in a rut; sixty years behind the times,—but what a rut! Must all be new and polished and shiny? As the towers and spires of Canterbury sped past to the right, gray and crumbling in a wine-like air, something rose in my throat. I thought of that old English song that begins—
“When shepherds pipe on oaten straws—”
And then London once more and all the mystery of endless involute streets and simple, hidden, unexplored regions! I went once more to look at the grim, sad, two-story East End in spring. It was even more pathetic for being touched by the caressing hand of Nature. I went to look at Hyde Park and Chelsea and Seven Kings. I thought to visit Sir Scorp—to cringe once more before the inquiring severity of his ascetic eye; but I did not have time, as things turned out. Barfleur was insistent that I should spend a day or two at Bridgely Level. Owing to a great coal strike the boat I had planned to take was put out of commission and I was compelled to advance my sailing date two days on the boat of another line. And now I was to see Bridgely Level once more, in the spring.