A Chair on the Boulevard Part 24

And when she did rise at last, he murmured, "Well, well, see me again and we will talk about it. I have no wish to be hard, you understand."

Her name was Laure. She was in love with a conjurer, a common, flashy fellow, who gave his mediocre exhibitions of legerdemain at such places as Le Jardin Exterieur, and had recently come to lodge at her mother's.

She aspired to marry him, but did not dare to expect it. Her homage was very palpable, and monsieur Eugene Legrand, who had no matrimonial intentions, would often wish that the old woman did not keep such a sharp eye upon her.

Needless to say, Bourjac's semi-promise sent her home enraptured. She had gone to him on impulse, without giving her courage time to take flight; now, in looking back, she wondered at her audacity, and that she had gained so much as she had. "I have no wish to be hard," he had said. Oh, the old rascal admired her hugely! If she coaxed enough, he would end by giving in. What thumping luck! She determined to call upon him again on Sunday, and to look her best.

Bourjac, however, did not succ.u.mb on Sunday. Fascinating as he found her, he squirmed at the prospect of the task demanded of him. His workshop in the garden had been closed so long that rats had begun to regard it as their playroom; the more he contemplated resuming his profession, the less inclined he felt to do it.

She paid him many visits and he became deeply infatuated with her; yet he continued to maintain that he was past such an undertaking--that she had applied to him too late.

Then, one day, after she had flown into a pa.s.sion, and wept, and been mollified, he said hesitatingly:

"I confess that an idea for an Illusion has occurred to me, but I do not pledge myself to execute it. I should call it 'A Life.' An empty cabinet is examined; it is supported by four columns--there is no stage trap, no obscurity, no black velvet curtain concealed in the dark, to screen the operations; the cabinet is raised high above the ground, and the lights are full up. You understand?" Some of the inventor's enthusiasm had crept into his voice. "You understand?"

"Go on," she said, holding her breath.

"Listen. The door of the cabinet is slammed, and in letters of fire there appears on it, 'Scene I.' Instantly it flies open again and discloses a baby. The baby moves, it wails--in fine, it is alive. Slam!

Letters of fire, 'Scene II.' Instantly the baby has vanished; in its place is a beautiful girl--you! You smile triumphantly at your reflection in a mirror, your path is strewn with roses, the world is at your feet. Slam! 'Scene III.' In a moment twenty years have pa.s.sed; your hair is grey, you are matronly, stout, your face is no longer oval; yet unmistakably it is you yourself, the same woman. Slam! 'Scene IV.' You are enfeebled, a crone, toothless, tottering on a stick. Once more! It is the last effect--the door flies open and reveals a skeleton."

"You can make this?" she questioned.

"I could make it if I chose," he answered.

"Will you?"

"It depends."

"On what?"

"On you!"

"Take any share you want," she cried. "I will sign anything you like!

After all, would not the success be due to you?"

"So you begin to see that?" said the old man drily. "But, I repeat, it depends! In spite of everything, you may think my terms too high."

"What do you want me to do?" she stammered.

"Marry me!" said Bourjac.

He did not inquire if she had any affection for him; he knew that if she said "Yes" it would be a lie. But he adored this girl, who, of a truth, had nothing but her beauty to recommend her, and he persuaded himself that his devotion would evoke tenderness in her by degrees. She found the price high indeed. Not only was she young enough to be his granddaughter--she had given her fancy to another man. Immediately she could not consent. When she took leave of him, it was understood that she would think the offer over; and she went home and let Legrand hear that Bourjac had proposed for her hand. If, by any chance, the news piqued Legrand into doing likewise--?

But Legrand said nothing to the point. Though he was a little chagrined by the intelligence, it never even entered his mind to attempt to cut the inventor out. How should it? She was certainly an attractive girl, but as to marrying her--He thought Bourjac a fool. As for himself, if he married at all, it would be an artist who was drawing a big salary and who would be able to provide him with some of the good things of life. "I pray you will be very happy, mademoiselle," he said, putting on a sentimental air.

So, after she had cried with mortification, Laure promised to be old Bourjac's wife.

A few weeks later they were married; and in that lonely little cottage she would have been bored to death but for the tawdry future that she foresaw. The man's dream of awakening her tenderness was speedily dispelled; he had been accepted as the means to an end, and he was held fast to the compact. She grudged him every hour in which he idled by her side. Driven from her arms by her impatience, old Bourjac would toil patiently in the workroom: planning, failing--surmounting obstacles atom by atom, for the sake of a woman whose sole interest in his existence was his progress with the Illusion that was to gratify her vanity.

He worshipped her still. If he had not worshipped her, he would sooner or later have renounced the scheme as impracticable; only his love for her supported him in the teeth of the impediments that arose. Of these she heard nothing. For one reason, her interest was so purely selfish that she had not even wished to learn how the cabinet was to be constructed. "All those figures gave her a headache," she declared. For another, when early in the winter he had owned himself at a deadlock, she had sneered at him as a duffer who was unable to fulfil his boasts.

Old Bourjac never forgot that--his reputation was very dear to him--he did not speak to her of his difficulties again.

But they often talked of the success she was to achieve. She liked to go into a corner of the parlour and rehea.r.s.e the entrance that she would make to acknowledge the applause. "It will be the great moment,"

she would say, "when I reappear as myself and bow."

"No, it will be expected; that will not surprise anybody," Bourjac would insist. "The climax, the last effect, will be the skeleton!"

It was the skeleton that caused him the most anxious thought of all. In order to compa.s.s it, he almost feared that he would be compelled to sacrifice one of the preceding scenes. The babe, the girl, the matron, the crone, for all these his mechanism provided; but the skeleton, the "last effect," baffled his ingenuity. Laure began to think his task eternal.

Ever since the wedding, she had dilated proudly to her mother and Legrand on her approaching debut, and it angered her that she could never say when the debut was to be. Now that there need be no question of his marrying her, Legrand's manner towards her had become more marked. She went to the house often. One afternoon, when she rang, the door was opened by him; he explained that the old woman was out marketing.

Laure waited in the kitchen, and the conjurer sat on the table, talking to her.

"How goes the Illusion?" he asked.

"Oh, big!" she said. "It's going to knock them, I can tell you!" Her laugh was rather derisive. "It's a rum world; the shop-girl will become an artist, with a show that draws all Paris. We expect to open at the Folies-Bergere." She knew that Legrand could never aspire to an engagement at the Folies-Bergere as long as he lived.

"I hope you will make a hit," he said, understanding her resentment perfectly.

"You did not foresee me a star turn, hein?"

He gave a shrug. "How could I foresee? If you had not married Bourjac, of course it would not have happened?"

"I suppose not," she murmured. She was sorry he realised that; she would have liked him to feel that she might have had the Illusion anyhow, and been a woman worth his winning.

"Indeed," added Legrand pensively, rolling a cigarette, "you have done a great deal to obtain a success. It is not every girl who would go to such lengths."

"What?" She coloured indignantly.

"I mean it is not every girl who would break the heart of a man who loved her."

They looked in each other's eyes for a moment. Then she turned her head scornfully away.

"Why do you talk rot to me? Do you take me for a kid?"

He decided that a pained silence would be most effective.

"If you cared about me, why didn't you say so?" she flashed, putting the very question he had hoped for.

"Because my position prevented it," he sighed. "I could not propose, a poor devil like me! Do I lodge in an attic from choice? But you are the only woman I ever wanted for my wife."

After a pause, she said softly, "I never knew you cared."

"I shall never care for anybody else," he answered. And then her mother came in with the vegetables.

It is easy to believe what one wishes, and she wished to believe Legrand's protestations. She began to pity herself profoundly, feeling that she had thrown away the substance for the shadow. In the sentimentality to which she yielded, even the prospect of being a star turn failed to console her; and during the next few weeks she invented reasons for visiting at her mother's more frequently than ever.

After these visits, Legrand used to smirk to himself in his attic. He reflected that the turn would, probably, earn a substantial salary for a long time to come. If he persuaded her to run away with him when the show had been produced, it would be no bad stroke of business for him!

Accordingly, in their conversations, he advised her to insist on the Illusion being her absolute property.