The Azure Rose Part 13

Cartaret leaned from a window. The air was still keen, but the night was clear. The rue du Val de Grace was deserted, its houses dark and silent. Overhead, in the narrow ribbon of indigo sky, hung a pallid moon: a disk of yellow gla.s.s.

What indeed was she, this Lady of the Rose? He pictured as hers a distant country of deep valleys full of clamoring streams and high mountains where white roses grew. He pictured her as that country's sovereign. Yet the rose which she treasured had not yet faded on the day of her arrival: she could not come from anywhere so far away.

He was cold. He closed the window, shivering. He was ridiculous: why, he had been in danger of falling in love with a woman of whom he knew nothing! He did not even know her name....

The pa.s.sage of slow-footed time helped him, however, not at all. He would sit for hours, idle before his easel, listening for her light step on the stair and afraid to go to meet her when at last he heard it, for he was desperately poor now, and poverty was making him the coward that it will sooner or later make any man.

He had antagonized the concierge by preparing his own coffee in the morning instead of continuing to pay Mme. Refrogne for it. When he had something to cook, he cooked badly; but there were days when he had nothing, and lived on pastry and bricks of chocolate, and others when it seemed to him that such supplies as he could buy and store on that shelf outside the window were oddly short-lived.

For a while he called daily at the shop of M. Lepoittevin, but that absurd picture of a boy tearing a rose would not sell, and Cartaret soon grew ashamed of calling there; Fourget he would not face. He managed at first to dispose of one or two sketches and so kept barely alive, yet, as the days went by, his luck dwindled and his greatest energy was expended in keeping up a proud pretense of comfort to his friends of the Quarter.

Pear-shaped Devignes was easy to deceive: the opera-singer lived too well to want to believe that anybody in the world could starve.

Garnier, the cadaverous poet, saved trouble, indulging his dislike of other people's poverty by remaining away from it; but Seraphin, who came often and sat about the studio in a silence wholly uncharacteristic, was difficult. Houdon, finally, was frequent and expensive: he always foraged about what he called Cartaret's "tempting window-buffet," but he regarded the condition of affairs as the pa.s.sing foible of a young man temporarily wearied by the pleasures of wealth.

"Ah," he snorted one day when he had come in with Varachon, "you fail wholly to deceive me, Cartarette. You say you are not well-to-do so that we shall think that you are not, but I know, I! Had you not your own income, you would try to sell more pictures, and your pictures are superb. They would fetch a pretty sum. Believe not that because I have a great musical genius I have no eye for painting. I know good painting. All Arts are one, my brother."

He jabbed Cartaret's empty stomach and, whistling a theme and twisting his little mustache, went to the window and took a huge bite of the last apple there.

Cartaret watched the composer toss half the apple into the concierge's garden.

Varachon, the sculptor, grunted through his broken nose.

"Your work is bad," he whispered to Cartaret--"very bad. You require a long rest. Go to Nice for a month."

The weeks pa.s.sed. Cartaret was underfed and discouraged. He was too discouraged now to attempt to renew his acquaintance with the Lady of the Rose. He was pale and thin, and this from reasons wholly physical.

Meanwhile, through the scented dawns, April was coming up to that city in which April is most beautiful and most seductive. From the spicy Mediterranean coasts, along the Valley of the Rhone, Love was dancing upon Paris with laughing Spring for his partner. Already the trees had blossomed between the Place de La Concorde and the Rond Point, and out in the Bois the birds were singing to their mates.

One morning, when Cartaret, with unsteady hand, drew back his curtain, _rouge-gorges_ were calling from the concierge's garden, and seemed to be calling to him.

"Seize hold of love!" they chorused in that garden. "Life is short; time flies, and love flies with it. Love will pa.s.s you by. Take it, take it, take it, while there still is time! Like us, it is a bird that flies, but, unlike us, it never more returns. It is a rose that withers--a white rose: take it while it blooms. Take it, though it leave you soon; take it, though it scratch your fingers. Take it, take it, take it now!"

On that day the annual siege of Paris ended, the city fell before her invaders, and by the time that Cartaret went into the streets, the army of occupation was in possession. The Luxembourg Gardens, the very benches along the Boul' Miche' were full of lovers: he could not stir from the house without encountering them.

From it, however, he had to go: the Spring called him with a sad seductiveness that he could no longer resist. He wandered aimlessly, trying the impossible: trying to keep his eyes from the couples that also wandered, but wandered hand in hand, and trying to keep his thoughts from roses and the Lady of the Rose.

He found himself before one of the riverside bookstalls, fingering an old book, leather-bound. The text, he realized, was English, or what once was so: it was a volume of Maundeville, and Cartaret was reading:

"Betwene the cytee and the chirche of Bethlehem is the felde Floridus; that is to seyne, the field florsched. For als moche as a fayre mayden was blamed with wrong ... for whiche cause sche was demed to the dethe, and to be brent in that place, to the which she was ladd. And, as the fyre began to brenne about hire, she made her preyeres to oure Lord, that als wissely as sche was not gylty ... that he would help hire, and make it to be knowen to alle men of his mercyfulle grace.

And, whanne sche had thus seyd, sche entered into the fuyer; and anon was the fuyer quenched and oute, and the brondes that weren brennynge becomen white roseres, full of roses; and theise werein the first roseres and roses, both white and rede, that ever ony man saughe. And thus was this mayden saved by the grace of G.o.d." ...

All that week--while the contents of his window-sideboard dwindled, he was sure, faster than he ate from it--he had tried to forget everything by painting heavily at pot-boilers. He had begun with the aim of earning enough to resume his studies; he had continued with the hope of getting together enough to keep alive--in Paris. And yet, fleeing from that bookstall, he was fool enough to walk all the way to Les Halles, to walk into Les Halles, and to stop, fascinated by a counter laden with boxes of strawberries, odorous and red, the smallest box of which was beyond the limits of his economy.

That was bad enough--it was absurd that his will should voluntarily play the Barmecide for the torture of his unrewarded Shacabac of a stomach--but worse, without fault of his own, was yet to follow this mere aggravation of his baser appet.i.tes. Spring and Paris are an irresistible combination on the side of folly, and that evening another sign of them presented itself: there was a burst of music; a hurdy-gurdy was playing in the rue du Val de Grace, and Cartaret, from his window, listened eagerly. It has been intimated from the best of sources that all love lives on music, and it is the common experience that when any love cannot get the best music, it takes what it can get:

"Her brow is like the snaw-drift; Her throat is like the swan; Her face it is the fairest That e'er the sun shone on-- That e'er the sun shone on-- And dark blue is her e'e----"

That French hurdy-gurdy was playing "Annie Laurie," and, since the lonely artist's heart ached to hear the old, familiar melody, when the bearded grinder looked aloft, Cartaret drew a coin from his pocket.

Anxious to pay for his pain, as the human kind always is, he tossed his last franc to that vendor of emotions in the twilit street.

He was drunk at last with the wine that his own misery distilled. He abandoned himself to the admission that he was in love: he abandoned himself to his dream of the Lady of the Rose.

Seraphin, in a wonderful new suit of clothes, found him thus the next morning--it was a Friday--and found him accordingly resentful of intrusion. Cartaret was sitting before an empty easel, his hands clasped in his lap, his eyes looking vacantly through the posts of the easel.

"Good-day," said Seraphin.

Cartaret said "Good-day" as if it were a form of insult.

Seraphin's hands tugged at his two wisps of whisker.

"You are not well, _hein_?"

"I was never better in my life," snapped Cartaret, turning upon his friend a face that was peaked and drawn.

The Frenchman came timidly nearer.

"My friend," he said, "I have completed my _magnum opus_. It has not sold quite so well as I hoped, not of course one thousandth of its value. That is this Spanish cow of a world. But I have three hundred francs. If you need----"

"Go away," said Cartaret, looking at his empty easel. "Can't you see I'm trying to begin work?"

Seraphin himself had suffered. His dignity was not offended: he kept it for only his creditors and other foes. He guessed that Cartaret was at last penniless, and he guessed rightly.

"Come, my friend," he began; "none shall know. Will you not be so kind as to let me----"

Cartaret got up and, for all his weakness, gripped the Frenchman's hand until Dieudonne nearly screamed.

"I'm a beast, Seraphin!" said Cartaret. "I'm a beast to treat a friendly offer this way. Forgive me. It's just that I feel a bit rocky this morning. I drank too much champagne last night. I do thank you, Seraphin. You're a good fellow, the best of the lot, and a sight better than I am. But I'm not hard up; really I'm not. I'm poor, but I'm not a sou poorer than I was this time last year."

It was a magnificent lie. Seraphin could only shrug, pretend to believe it, and go away.

Cartaret scarcely heeded the departure. He had relapsed into his day-dream. He took from against the wall the two portraits that he had painted of the Lady of the Rose and hung them, now here, now there, trying them in various lights. There were at least ten more sketches of her by this time, and these, too, he hung in first one light and then another. He studied them and tried to be critical, and forgot to be.

His thoughts of her never took the shape of conscious words--he loved her too much to attempt to praise her--but, as he looked at his endeavors to portray her, his mind was busy with his memories of all that loveliness--and pa.s.sed from memories to day-dreams. He saw her as something that might fade before his touch. He saw her as a Princess, incognito, learning his plight, buying his pictures secretly, and, when she came to her throne, letting him serve her and worship from afar. And then he saw her even as a Galatea possible of miraculous awakening. Why not? Her eyes were the clear eyes of a woman that has never yet loved, but they were also, he felt, the eyes of one of those rare women who, when they love once, love forever. Cartaret dared, in his thoughts, to lift the heavy plaits of her blue-black hair and, with trembling fingers, again to touch that hand at the recollection of touching which his own hand tingled.

Why not, indeed? Already a stranger thing had happened in his meeting her. Until that year he had not guessed at her existence; oceans divided them; the barriers of alien race and alien speech were raised high between them, and all of these things had been in vain. The existence was revealed, the ocean was crossed, the bar of sundering speech was down. He was here, close beside her, as if every event of his life had been intended to bring him. Through blind ways and up ascents misunderstood, unattracted by the many and lonely among the crowd, he had, somehow, always been making his way toward--Her.

Thus Cartaret dreamed while Seraphin made a hurried journey to the rue St. Andre des Arts and the shop of M. Fourget.

"But no, but no, but no!" Fourget's bushy brows met in a frown. "It is out of the question. Something has happened to the boy. He can no longer paint."

Oh, well, at least monsieur could go to the boy's rooms and see what he had there.

"No. Am I then a silly philanthropist?"

Seraphin tried to produce his false dignity. What he brought out was something genuine.