Of Time and the River (133 page)

“Oui! Oui! Bon! C’est ça! QUALMS?

“Mais ça veut dire?” the other said inquiringly in a puzzled tone.

“Ça veut dire, chérie—you need have no qualms, madame—” the little wren-like woman considered carefully before she spoke—“Vous n’avez pas besoin de perturbation—n’est-ce pas?” she cried, with an eager look of triumph.

“Ah-h!” the other cried, with an air of great enlightenment. “Oui! Je comprends. . . . I assure you, madame, that you need have no qualms about the plumbing arrangements.”

“Bon! Bon!” the little woman nodded her head approvingly. “PLUMBING, chérie. PLUMBING,” she added gently as an afterthought.

“You will find everyt’ing t’oroughly modairne—”

“THOROUGHLY—” the other said, slowly and carefully. “THOROUGHLY— you pronounce it this way, my dear—TH—TH—” She leaned forward, inserting her tongue illustratively between her false teeth.

“Thoroughly,” the other said, with evident difficulty, and repeated—“thoroughly modairne—”

“MODERN, dear! MODERN!” the little wren-like woman said slowly and carefully again, but then, nodding her head with a movement of swift decision, she went on sharply: “Mais non! Ça va! Ça va bien!” She nodded her head vigorously. “Laissez comme ça! Les Américains aiment mieux comme ça—un peu d’accent, n’est-ce pas?” she said craftily. “Pour les Américains.”

“Ah, oui!” the other woman responded at once, nodding seriously. “Vous avez raison. Ce n’est pas bon de parler trop correctement. Un peu d’accent est mieux. Ils aiment ça—les Américains.”

They nodded wisely at each other, their faces comically eloquent with that strange union of avarice, hard worldliness, and provincial naďveté which qualifies a Frenchman’s picture of the earth. Then, looking up at the young man, who was standing awkwardly before the bureau, the younger of the two women said coldly:

“Monsieur?—”

The young woman was perhaps twenty-eight years old, but her cold, dark face, which was lean and sallow and cleft powerfully by a large strong nose, had the maturity of cold mistrustfulness and unyielding avarice which was incalculable. It was as if from birth her spirit had been steeped in the hard and bitter dyes of man’s iniquity, as if she had sucked the acid nutriment of mistrust and worldly wisdom out of her mother’s breast—as if her hard heart and her cold, dark eyes had never known youth, remembered innocence, or been blinded by romantic fantasies—as if, in short, she had sprung full-armoured from her cradle, versed in all grim arts of seeking for one’s self, clutching her first sous in a sweating palm, learning to add by numbers before she could prattle a child’s prayer.

Seen so, the woman’s face had a cold and stern authority of mistrust that was impregnable. The face, indeed, might have been the very image of a hotel-keeper’s soul, impeccable in its perfection of bought courtesy, but hard, cold, lifeless, cruel as hell, obdurate as a block of granite, to any warming ray of mercy, pardon, or concession where another’s loss and its own gain might be concerned.

And yet, for all its cold and worldly inhumanity, the face was a passionate one as well. Her strong, black brows grew straight and thick in an unbroken line above her eyes, her upper lip was dark with a sparse but unmistakable moustache of a few black hairs, her face, at once cold and hard in its mistrust, and smouldering with a dark and sinister desire, was stamped with that strange fellowship of avarice and passion he had seen in the faces of women such as this all over France.

He had seen these women everywhere—behind the cashier’s desk in restaurants, shops, and stores, behind the desks in cafés, theatres, and brothels, or in the bureau of a hotel such as this. Sometimes they were alone, sometimes they were seated together behind one of those enormous tall twin desks, enthroned there like the very magistrates of gain, totting up the interminable figures in their ledgers with the slow care and minute painfulness of greed. They sat there, singly or two abreast, behind their tall desks near the door, casting their hard eyes in a glance of cold mistrust upon the customers and at each other, conspiring broodingly together as they checked and compared each other’s ledgers—seeming to be set there, in fact, not only as a watch upon the cheats and treasons of the world, but as a watch upon their own as well.

And yet, haired darkly on their upper lips, cold, hard, mistrustful in their grasping avarice as they might be, he had always felt in them the complement of a sinister passion. He felt that when all the day’s countings were over, the last entry made in the enormous ledger, the last figure added up, and the last drops of sweat wrung from the leaden visage of the final sous—then, THEN, he felt, they would pull down the shutters, bare their teeth in smiles of savage joy, and go to their appointed meeting with their lover, Jack the Ripper. Upon faces such as these, even during their daylight impassivity of cold mistrust, the ardour of their nocturnal secrecies was almost obscenely articulate; it required little effort of the imagination to see these women quilted in a vile, close darkness, a union of evil chemistries, locked in the grip of a criminal love, with teeth bared in the bite and shine of a profane and lawless ecstasy, and making savage moan.

Such, in fact, was the face of the young woman in the bureau of the hotel, who now looked up at him with the cold inquiry of mistrust and said:

“Monsieur?—”

“I—I’d like to get a room,” he stammered awkwardly, faltering before her hard, impassive stare, and speaking to her in her own language.

“Comment?” she said sharply, a little startled at being addressed so immediately in the language wherein she had just been holding— studious practice. “Vous désirez?—”

“Une chambre,” he mumbled—“pas trop chčre.”

“Ah-h—a room! He says he wants a room, my dear,” the little woman now put in, quickly and eagerly. She hopped up briskly and came towards him with an eager gleam in her sharp old eyes, an anticipating hope in her meagre face.

“You are a stranger?” she inquired, peering sharply at him. “An American?”—with a look of eager hope.

“Yes,” he said.

“Ah-h!” her breath went in with a little intake of greedy satisfaction. “I thought so! . . . Yvonne! Yvonne!” she cried sharply, turning to the other woman in a state of great excitement. “He’s an American—he wants a room—he must have something good—an American,” she babbled, “the best you’ve got—”

“But yes!” cried Yvonne rising. “To be sure. At vunce!” she cried, and struck a bell, calling: “Jean! Jean!”

“But not—not,” the youth stuttered, “not the best—it’s just for me—I’m all alone,” he appealed to the smaller woman—“something not very expensive,” he said desperately.

“Ah—hah—hah!” she said, emitting a little chuckling laugh of gloating satisfaction and continuing to peer craftily up at him. “An American! And young, too.—How old are you, my boy?”

“T-t-twenty-four,” he stuttered, staring at her helplessly.

“Ah—hah—hah!” Again the little gloating laugh. “I thought so— and why are you here? . . . What are you doing here in Orléans, eh?” she said imperatively, yet coaxingly. “What brings you here, my boy?”

“Why—why—” he stammered confusedly, and then finding no adequate reason (since there was none) for being there, he blurted out— “I’m—a writer—a--a—journalist,” he stammered, feeling this made his lie the less.

“Ah—hah—hah,” she chuckled softly again with a kind of abstracted gluttony of satisfaction—“a journalist, eh, my boy?” In her ravenous eagerness she had begun to pat and stroke his arm with a claw-like hand, as a cook might stroke a fat turkey before killing it. “A journalist, eh? . . . Yvonne! Yvonne!” suddenly she turned to the other woman again, speaking rapidly in a burst of high excitement. “The young man is a journalist . . . an American journalist . . . he writes for The New York Times, Yvonne . . . the greatest newspaper in America.”

“Well, not exactly that,” he blundered, red in the face from confusion and embarrassment. “I never said—”

“Ah—hah—hah,” the little old woman said again with her little gloating laugh, peering up at him with a crafty gleam in her sharp old eyes, and stroking his arm in her unconscious eagerness. “. . . And you’ve come to write about us, eh? . . . Joan of Arc, eh?” she said seducingly, with a little crafty laugh of triumph. “—The Cathedral . . . the Maid of Orléans . . . ah, my boy, you have come to the right place. . . . I will show you everything. . . . I will take care of you. . . . You are in good hands now. . . . Ah-h, we love the Americans here. . . . Yvonne! Yvonne!” she cried again, her excitement growing all the time. “He says he is here to write about Orléans for The New York Times . . . he will put it all in . . . the Cathedral . . . Joan of Arc . . . the hotel here . . . the greatest paper in America . . . millions of people will come here when they read it—”

“Well, now, I never said—” he began again.

“Ah—hah—hah,” again she was peering up at him craftily, with old eyes of eager greed, chortling her little laugh of gloating triumph, as she stroked his arm. “Twenty-four, eh? . . . And where are you from, my boy? . . . Where is your home?”

“Why—New York, I suppose,” he said hesitantly.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she said impatiently—“but before that? Where were you born? . . . What State are you from?”

He stared at her for a moment with bewildered face.

“Why, I don’t think you’d know where it is,” he said at length. “I’m from Catawba.”

“Catawba—yes!” the old woman pressed on eagerly. “And what part of Catawba? What town?”

“Why,”—he stared at her, gape-jawed with amazement—“a place called Altamont.”

“Altamont!” she crowed jubilantly. “Altamont—yes! Altamont—of course!”

“You KNOW it?” he said incredulously. “You’ve HEARD of it?”

“HEARD of it! Why, my boy, I’ve been there seven times!” She chuckled with triumph, then went on with a wild and incoherent eagerness. “Little Mother, they call me . . . I am known everywhere. . . . Letters . . . cablegrams . . . the Governor of Arkansas . . .” she babbled. “I gave up everything . . . spent my fortune. . . . Ah, my boy, I love the Americans. . . . They call me Little Mother. . . . Altamont! . . . A beautiful town! . . . Do you know Doctor Bradford and his family? . . . And how is Harold? . . . What’s Alice doing now—has she married? . . . a lovely girl. . . . And how is George Watson? . . . What’s he doing, eh? . . . Is he still secretary of the Chamber of Commerce? . . . And Mrs. Morgan Hamilton. . . . And Charles McKee—ah, how I should like to see all my dear old friends in Altamont again.”

“You—you know them—all those people?” he gasped, hearing as in a dream the great cathedral bells throng out upon the air of night.

“KNOW them! . . . I know everyone in the town. . . . I always stay with Doctor Bradford and his family. . . . Ah, what lovely people, my boy. . . . How good they have been to me. . . . I love Americans! . . . Little Mother, they call me,” she went on in a strange, tranced tone, her eyes burning feverishly as she spoke— “‘As the brave little woman who is known to thousands of Our Boys as the Little Mother of the Stars and Stripes stood before the great audience that packed the City Auditorium last night as it had never been packed before in its whole history, it is safe to say there was not a dry eye in the great’—Yvonne!” She broke sharply away from her mysterious recitation, and again addressed herself excitedly to the hotel woman—“I know his town . . . I know his family . . . I know his father and mother . . . I have stayed at their house! . . . They are all dear friends of mine! . . . Quick! Tell Madame Vatel that an American friend of mine is here. . . . Tell her it is going to be a great thing for her . . . for Orléans . . . for all of us. . . . Tell her he is going to write about the hotel in The New York Times . . . you will give him a good room . . . a good price, eh?” she said cunningly. “He will bring hundreds of people here to the hotel—”

“But yes, Countess,” said Yvonne. “Perfectly.”

“The best! The best!” the old woman cried. “He comes from one of the most prominent families in America—ah—hah—hah! You will see!” She chuckled with mysterious cunning. “I shall make you all rich and famous before I’m through . . . I know all the rich Americans. . . . Hah—hah. . . . They will all come here now when he has written about us. . . . The New York Times, Yvonne,” she whispered gloatingly, “the paper all the rich Americans read. . . . Tell Madame Vatel what has happened. . . . Ah, a great thing, Yvonne. . . . a great thing for us all—see!” she whispered mysteriously, pointing towards the bewildered youth—“the head, Yvonne! The head! You can tell by the head, Yvonne,” she whispered. “WHAT a clever head, Yvonne. . . . The New York Times, eh? . . .” she chuckled craftily, “that all the clever writers write for! . . . Tell Vatel!” she whispered gloatingly, rubbing her little claw-like hands together. “Tell Madame. . . . Tell everyone. . . . He must have the best,” she muttered with conspiratorial secrecy. “The best.”

“But yes, Countess,” Yvonne said smoothly. “Monsieur shall have nothing but the best. Number Seven, I think,” she said reflectively. “Oui! Number Seven!” She nodded her head decisively with satisfaction. “I am sure Monsieur will like the room. . . . Jean! Jean!” She clapped her hands sharply to the attentive porter, who now sprang forward nimbly. “Apportez les baggages de Monsieur au Numéro Sept.”

“But—but—the price?” the youth said awkwardly.

“The price,” said Yvonne, “to Monsieur is—twelve francs. To others—that is deeferent, eh?” she said with a significant smile and an expressive shrug. “But since Monsieur is a friend of the Countess, the price will be twelve francs.”

“Cheap! Cheap!” the Countess muttered. “And now, my boy,” she said coaxingly, taking him by the arm, “you must take your meals here, too. . . . The cuisine! . . . Ah-h! Merveilleuse!” she whispered, making a small rhapsodic gesture with one hand. “You will eat here, too, my boy—eh?”

He nodded dumbly, and the old woman turned immediately to Yvonne with a look of cunning triumph, saying: “Did you hear, Yvonne? . . . Do you see? . . . He will take his meals here, too. . . . Tell Vatel. . . . Tell Madame. . . . I know all the rich Americans. . . . They will all come now, Yvonne,” she whispered. “You will see. . . . And now, my boy,” she said with an air of decision, turning to him again, “have you had dinner yet? . . . No? . . . Good!” she said with satisfaction. “I shall eat with you,” she took him by the arm possessively. “We shall eat together here in the hotel. . . . I shall have Pierre set a table for us . . . we shall always eat together there—just you and I. . . . Ah, you have come to the right place . . . I shall look after you and watch you like your own mother, my boy. . . . There are so many bad places here in Orléans . . . so many low resorts. I shall tell you where they are so that you can keep out of them . . . it is so easy for a young man to go astray. . . . So many young Americans who come over here get into trouble, meet with bad companions, because they have no one to guide them. . . . But have no fear, my boy . . . I will watch over you while you are here like your own mother. . . . They call me Little Mother.”