Running Sands Part 39

"I love you!--I love you!" she cried.

The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen.

XIII

WORMWOOD

When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed, often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply, bidding her sleep and not bother.

Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the turned door k.n.o.b had roused her, was the glance that might be expected of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed.

Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes and gladly let him go.

On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that he might pa.s.s and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their surmise and the truth.

He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round tables on the sidewalk outside a corner cafe. Only one of them was in use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a closely b.u.t.toned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other customer.

A dirty waiter appeared from the cafe and shuffled forward, adjusting his ap.r.o.n.

"_B'jour, monsieur_," the waiter mumbled.

Stainton did not return this salutation.

"_Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau_," he ordered.

He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago.

He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning.

The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink, put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the gla.s.s dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew.

The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys shrilly crying the t.i.tles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles; the girls annoyed him most because they would call one another's attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their own hearts; but Jim hated them all.

He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage, went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but, when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he found himself the first patient in the waiting-room.

Was _M. le medecin_ in? Yes, the grave manservant a.s.sured, but he doubted if _M. le medecin_ could as yet receive monsieur. It was early, and _M. le medecin_ rarely saw any patients before--

Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily bade him enter.

"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, _hein_? Did the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend?

Sit."

The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiene Sociale,"

Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier, Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits, there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.

Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample mouth were contracted.

"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something else. I dare say it's not--not much. I know that these things may be the merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical weariness, or--or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does like to have a physician's a.s.surance."

Boussingault peered through his bar-bound _pince-nez_. He began to understand.

"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe before the _dejeuner_."

Stainton tried to smile.

"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life,"

he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I took it on an empty stomach."

The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.

"M. Stainton," he asked, "you come here to-day as a patient, is it not?"

"Well, I hope that I won't need any treatment, but----"

"But you do not come here to pa.s.s the time, _hein_?"

"No, doctor."

"Then," said Boussingault, spreading out his hands and shrugging his shoulders, "tell me why in the so early morning, not sick, you take absinthe for the second time in your life."

He was looking at Stainton in a manner that distinctly added to Jim's nervousness. The American was not a man to quail before most, and he had come here to get this expert's opinion on a vital matter; yet he feared to furnish the only data on which an opinion could, to have use, be founded.

"Well, doctor," he said, trying hard for the easiest words, "you--you met my wife last evening."

Boussingault's bullet head bobbed.

"What then?" he inquired.

"What do you think of her?"

"I think that she is very charming--and, M. Stainton, very young."

It struck Jim that the concluding phrase had been weighted with significance.

"I don't know just how to tell you," he resumed. "I don't like to talk even to my physician of--of certain intimate matters; but"--he glanced at the most conspicuous volumes on the nearest shelf--"from the t.i.tles of these books, I think that what I want to see you about falls within the limits of your specialty."

He stopped, gnawing his lower lip, his mind seeking phrases. Before he could find a suitable one, his vis-a-vis, looking him straight in the eyes, had settled the matter:

"My friend, there are but two reasons why one that is no fool should drink absinthe at an hour so greatly early: or he has been guilty of excess and regrets, or he has been unable to be guilty and regrets." He paused, his face thrust half across the desk. "Madame," he demanded, "she is how old?"

Stainton met him bravely now, but in a manner clearly showing his anxiety to protect himself.

"She is nearly nineteen."

"Eighteen, _bien_. And you?"