“When I want women they are not hard to find ... and then I am free to go my way. Why complicate my life by taking into it a companion I don’t need?”
As the three friends were leaving the theatre one evening, Elena expressed a desire to go to a certain Montmartre cabaret that was causing a stir in Paris by the magnificence of its new decorations, in the Persian style of the Thousand and One Nights, adapted of course to the architectural necessities of a faubourg cabaret.
Green lights gave the effect of a sea cave to the high-ceilinged room in which the crowd looked as livid as so many corpses, recent victims of the hangman’s art. Two orchestras working in shifts filled the air with jerking and broken rythms. Violins and banjos vied with indefinable instruments in the production of disharmonies, while automobile horns, drums and cymbals, contributed to a pandemonium in which heavy objects crashed on the ground, rails squeaked, and the barnyard squawked.
In an open space between tables groups of dancers came and went. The women’s dresses and hats, like rainbow-hued foam flecked with gold, floated in and out among the black coats of the men and the white squares of the tablecloths. The orchestras shrieked, and the guests tried hard to be as noisy as the patrons of a country fair. Those who did not dance lassooed everything in sight with paper trailers, threw cotton snowballs about, blew whistles and played with other childish toys. Multicolored balloons floated on the smoke-laden air, while men and women, as they ate and drank, wore paper caps of ridiculous cut, baby bonnets tied on with strings, clown’s hats and fantastic bird-crests.
A forced merriment prevailed, a desire to revert to the stammerings of babyhood, as though this would give new incentive to the monotonous sinnings of middle age.
Elena seemed delighted with the scene.
“There’s nothing like Paris, after all, is there Robledo?” she cried.
But Robledo, the savage, smiled with an indifference magnificently insolent. The three ate and drank, though they were neither hungry nor thirsty. At every table the champagne bottles appeared, nestling in their silver pails. One might have thought them the gods of the place, in whose honor the feast was held. And always, before one bottle was empty, another took its place as though it had grown out of the frosty depths of the bucket.
Elena, who was looking about with a certain impatience, suddenly smiled and waved to a man who had just come in. It was Fontenoy, who joined them at their table.
Robledo suddenly remembered that Elena had mentioned the banker several times while they were at the theatre. Perhaps she and the banker had arranged this “chance” meeting at Montmartre?