Mistress Anne Part 41

"I am honest," was the calm response.

Pip bought them unlimited peanuts and pop-corn, and Marie-Louise piloted them to the tent of a fat Armenian who told fortunes.

In spite of his fatness, however, he was immaculate in European clothing; he charged exorbitantly and achieved extraordinary results.

"He said the last time that I should marry a poet," Marie-Louise informed them, "which isn't true. I am not going to be married at all. But it amuses me to hear him."

The black eyes of the fat Armenian twinkled. "There will be a time when you will not be amused. You will be married."

He pulled out a chair for her. "Will your friends stay while I tell you the rest?"

"No, they are children; they want to buy peanuts and pop-corn--they want to play."

The others laughed. But the fat Armenian did not laugh. "Your soul is old!"

"You see," she asked the others, "what I mean? He says things like that to me. He told me once that in a former incarnation I had walked beside the Nile and had loved a king."

"A king-poet," the man corrected.

"Will you tell mine?" Eve asked suddenly.

"Certainly, madam."

"I am mademoiselle. You go first, Marie-Louise."

But Marie-Louise insisted on yielding to her. "We will come back for you."

Coming back, they found Eve in an irritable temper. "He told me--nothing."

"I told you what you did not want to hear. But I told you the truth."

"I don't believe in such things." Eve was lofty. Her cold eyes challenged the Oriental. "I don't believe you know anything about it."

"If Mademoiselle will write it down----" He was fat and puffy, but he had a sort of large dignity which ignored her rudeness. "If Mademoiselle will write it down, she will not say--next year--'I do not believe.'"

She shivered. "I wish I hadn't come. d.i.c.ky boy, let's go and play. Pip and Marie-Louise can stay if they like it. I don't."

When Marie-Louise had had her imagination once more fed on poets, kings, and previous incarnations, she and Pip went forth to seek the others.

"I wonder what he told Eve?" Pip speculated.

Marie-Louise spoke with shrewdness. "He probably told her that she would marry you--only he wouldn't put it that way. He would say that in reaching for a star she would stumble on a diamond."

"And is Brooks the star?"

She nodded, grinning. "And you are the diamond. It is what she wants--diamonds."

"She wants more than that"--tenderness crept into his voice--"she wants love--and I can give it."

"She wants Dr. Brooks. 'Most any woman would," said Marie-Louise cruelly.

"We all know he is different. You know it, and I know it, and Eve knows it. He is bigger in some ways, and better!"

They found Eve and Richard in a pavilion dancing in strange company, to raucous music. Later the four of them rode on a merry-go-round, with Marie-Louise on a dolphin and Eve on a swan, with the two men mounted on twin dragons. They ate chowder and broiled lobster in a restaurant high in a fantastic tower. They swept up painted Alpine slopes in reckless cars, they drifted through dark tunnels in gorgeous gondolas. Eve took her pleasures with a sort of feverish enthusiasm, Marie-Louise with the air of a skeptic trying out a new thing.

"Mother would faint and fade away if she knew I was here," Marie-Louise told Richard as she sat next to him in a movie show, "and so would Dad.

He would object to the germs and she would object to the crowd. Mother is like a flower in a sunlighted garden. She can't imagine that a lily could grow with its feet in the mud. But they do. And Dad knows it. But he likes to have mother stay in the sunlighted garden. He would never have fallen in love with her if her roots had been in the mud."

She was murmuring this into Richard's ear. Eve was on the other side of him, with Pip beyond.

"I've never had a day like this," Marie-Louise further confided, "and I am not sure that I like it. It seems so far away from--Pan--and the trees--and the river."

Her voice dropped into silence, and Richard sat there beside her like a stone, seeing nothing of the pictures thrown on the screen. He saw a road which led between spired cedars, he saw an old house with a wide porch.

He saw a golden-lighted table, and his mother's face across the candles.

He saw a girl in a brown coat scattering food for the birds with a kind little hand--he heard the sound of a bell!

When they reached the yacht, Winifred was dressed for dinner, and Eve and Marie-Louise scurried below to change. They dined on the upper deck by moonlight, and sat late enjoying the still warmth of the night. There was no wind and they seemed to sail through silver waters.

Marie-Louise sang for them. Strange little songs for which she had composed both words and music. They had haunting cadences, and Pip told her "For Heaven's sake, kiddie, cheer up. You are making us cry."

She laughed, and gave them a group of old nursery rhymes. Most of them had to do with things to eat. There was the Dame who baked her pies "on Christmas day in the morning," and the Queen who made the tarts, and Jenny Wren and her currant wine.

"They are what I call appetizing," she said quaintly. "When I was a tiny tot Dad kept me on a diet. I was never allowed to eat pies or tarts or puddings. So I used to feast vicariously on my nursery rhymes."

They laughed, as she had meant they should, and Pip said, "Give us another," so she chanted with increasing dramatic effect the story of King Arthur.

"A bag pudding the king did make, And stuffed it well with plums, And in it put great hunks of fat, As big as my two thumbs----"

"Think of the effect of those hunks of fat," she explained amid their roars of laughter, "on my dieted mind."

"I hate to think of things to eat," Eve said. "And I can't imagine myself cooking--in a kitchen."

"Where else would you cook?" Marie-Louise demanded practically. "I'd like it. I went once with my nurse to her mother's house, and she was cooking ham and frying eggs and we sat down to a table with a red cloth and had the ham and eggs with great slices of bread and strong tea. My nurse let me eat all I wanted, because her mother said it wouldn't hurt me, and it didn't. But my mother never knew. And always after that I liked to think of Lucy's mother and that warm nice kitchen, and the plump, pleasant woman and the ham and eggs and tea."

She was very serious, but they roared again. She was so far away from anything that was homely and housewifely, with her red hair peaked up to a high knot, her thick white coat with its black animal skin enveloping her shoulders, the gleam of silver slippers.

"d.i.c.ky," Eve said, "I hope you are not expecting me to cook in Arcadia."

"I don't expect anything."

"Every man expects something," Winifred interposed; "subconsciously he wants a hearth-woman. That's the primitive."

"I don't want a hearth-woman," Pip announced.

Dutton Ames chuckled. "You're a stone-age man, Meade. You'd like to woo with a club, and carry the day's kill to the woman in your tent."

A quick fire lighted Pip's eyes. "Jove, it wouldn't be bad, would it?

What do you think, Eve?"

"I like your yacht better, and your chef and your alligator pears, and caviar."