The Beautiful Lady
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Booth Tarkington >> The Beautiful Lady
The Beautiful Lady
Booth Tarkington
Chapter One
Nothing could have been more painful to my sensitiveness than to
occupy myself, confused with blushes, at the center of the whole
world as a living advertisement of the least amusing ballet in
Paris.
To be the day's sensation of the boulevards one must possess an
eccentricity of appearance conceived by nothing short of genius;
and my misfortunes had reduced me to present such to all eyes
seeking mirth. It was not that I was one of those people in
uniform who carry placards and strange figures upon their backs,
nor that my coat was of rags; on the contrary, my whole costume
was delicately rich and well chosen, of soft grey and fine linen
(such as you see worn by a marquis in the pe'sage at Auteuil)
according well with my usual air and countenance, sometimes
esteemed to resemble my father's, which were not wanting in
distinction.
To add to this my duties were not exhausting to the body. I was
required only to sit without a hat from ten of the morning to
midday, and from four until seven in the afternoon, at one of
the small tables under the awning of the Cafe' de la Paix at the
corner of the Place de l'Opera--that is to say, the centre of
the inhabited world. In the morning I drank my coffee, hot in
the cup; in the afternoon I sipped it cold in the glass. I spoke
to no one; not a glance or a gesture of mine passed to attract
notice.
Yet I was the centre of that centre of the world. All day the
crowds surrounded me, laughing loudly; all the voyous making
those jokes for which I found no repartee. The pavement was
sometimes blocked; the passing coachmen stood up in their boxes
to look over at me, small infants were elevated on shoulders to
behold me; not the gravest or most sorrowful came by without
stopping to gaze at me and go away with rejoicing faces. The
boulevards rang to their laughter--all Paris laughed!
For seven days I sat there at the appointed times, meeting the
eye of nobody, and lifting my coffee with fingers which trembled
with embarrassment at this too great conspicuosity! Those
mournful hours passed, one by the year, while the idling
bourgeois and the travellers made ridicule; and the rabble
exhausted all effort to draw plays of wit from me.
I have told you that I carried no placard, that my costume was
elegant, my demeanour modest in all degree.
"How, then, this excitement?" would be your disposition to
inquire. "Why this sensation?"
It is very simple. My hair had been shaved off, all over my
ears, leaving only a little above the back of the neck, to give
an appearance of far-reaching baldness, and on my head was
painted, in ah! so brilliant letters of distinctness:
Theatre
Folie-Rouge
Revue
de
Printemps
Tous les Soirs
Such was the necessity to which I was at that time reduced! One
has heard that the North Americans invent the most singular
advertising, but I will not believe they surpass the Parisian.
Myself, I say I cannot express my sufferings under the notation
of the crowds that moved about the Cafe' de la Paix! The French
are a terrible people when they laugh sincerely. It is not so
much the amusing things which cause them amusement; it is often
the strange, those contrasts which contain something horrible,
and when they laugh there is too frequently some person who is
uncomfortable or wicked. I am glad that I was born not a
Frenchman; I should regret to be native to a country where they
invent such things as I was doing in the Place de l'Opera; for,
as I tell you, the idea was not mine.
As I sat with my eyes drooping before the gaze of my terrible
and applauding audiences, how I mentally formed cursing words
against the day when my misfortunes led me to apply at the
Theatre Folie-Rouge for work! I had expected an audition and a
role of comedy in the Revue; for, perhaps lacking any experience
of the stage, I am a Neapolitan by birth, though a resident of
the Continent at large since the age of fifteen. All Neapolitans
can act; all are actors; comedians of the greatest, as every
traveller is cognizant. There is a thing in the air of our
beautiful slopes which makes the people of a great instinctive
musicalness and deceptiveness, with passions like those burning
in the old mountain we have there. They are ready to play, to
sing--or to explode, yet, imitating that amusing Vesuvio, they
never do this last when you are in expectancy, or, as a
spectator, hopeful of it.
How could any person wonder, then, that I, finding myself
suddenly destitute in Paris, should apply at the theatres? One
after another, I saw myself no farther than the director's door,
until (having had no more to eat the day preceding than three
green almonds, which I took from a cart while the good female
was not looking) I reached the Folie-Rouge. Here I was
astonished to find a polite reception from the director. It
eventuated that they wished for a person appearing like myself
a person whom they would outfit with clothes of quality in
all parts, whose external presented a gentleman of the great
world, not merely of one the galant-uomini, but who would impart
an air to a table at a cafe' where he might sit and partake. The
contrast of this with the emplacement of the establishment on
his bald head-top was to be the success of the idea. It was
plain that I had no baldness, my hair being very thick and I but
twenty-four years of age, when it was explained that my hair
could be shaved. They asked me to accept, alas! not a part in
the Revue, but a specialty as a sandwich-man. Knowing the
English tongue as I do, I may afford the venturesomeness to play
upon it a little: I asked for bread, and they offered me not a
role, but a sandwich!
It must be undoubted that I possessed not the disposition to
make any fun with my accomplishments during those days that I
spent under the awning of the Cafe' de la Paix. I had consented
to be the advertisement in greatest desperation, and not
considering what the reality would be. Having consented, honour
compelled that I fulfil to the ending. Also, the costume and
outfittings I wore were part of my emolument. They had been
constructed for me by the finest tailor; and though I had
impulses, often, to leap up and fight through the noisy ones
about me and run far to the open country, the very garments I
wore were fetters binding me to remain and suffer. It seemed to
me that the hours were spent not in the centre of a ring of
human persons, but of un-well-made pantaloons and ugly skirts.
Yet all of these pantaloons and skirts had such scrutinous eyes
and expressions of mirth to laugh like demons at my conscious,
burning, painted head; eyes which spread out, astonished at the
sight of me, and peered and winked and grinned from the big
wrinkles above the gaiters of Zouaves, from the red breeches of
the gendarmes, the knickerbockers of the cyclists, the white
ducks of sergents de ville, and the knees of the boulevardiers,
bagged with sitting cross-legged at the little tables. I could
not escape these eyes;--how scornfully they twinkled at me
from the spurred and glittering officers' boots! How with amaze
from the American and English trousers, both turned up and
creased like folded paper, both with some dislike for each other
but for all other trousers more.
It was only at such times when the mortifications to appear so
greatly embarrassed became stronger than the embarrassment
itself that I could by will power force my head to a straight
construction and look out upon my spectators firmly. On the
second day of my ordeal, so facing the laughers, I found myself
facing straight into the monocle of my half-brother and ill-
wisher, Prince Caravacioli.
At this, my agitation was sudden and very great, for there was
no one I wished to prevent perceiving my condition more than
that old Antonio Caravacioli! I had not known that he was in
Paris, but I could have no doubt it was himself: the monocle,
the handsome nose, the toupee', the yellow skin, the dyed-black
moustache, the splendid height--it was indeed Caravacioli! He
was costumed for the automobile, and threw but one glance at me
as he crossed the pavement to his car, which was in waiting.
There was no change, not of the faintest, in that frosted tragic
mask of a countenance, and I was glad to think that he had not
recognized me.
And yet, how strange that I should care, since all his life he
had declined to recognize me as what I was! Ah, I should have
been glad to shout his age, his dyes, his artificialities, to
all the crowd, so to touch him where it would most pain him! For
was he not the vainest man in the whole world? How well I knew
his vulnerable point: the monstrous depth of his vanity in that
pretense of youth which he preserved through superhuman pains
and a genius of a valet, most excellently! I had much to pay
Antonio for myself, more for my father, most for my mother. This
was why that last of all the world I would have wished that old
fortune-hunter to know how far I had been reduced!
Then I rejoiced about that change which my unreal baldness
produced in me, giving me a look of forty years instead of
twenty-four, so that my oldest friend must take at least three
stares to know me. Also, my costume would disguise me from the
few acquaintances I had in Paris (if they chanced to cross the
Seine), as they had only seen me in the shabbiest; while, at my
last meeting with Antonio, I had been as fine in the coat as
now.
Yet my encouragement was not so joyful that my gaze lifted
often. On the very last day, in the afternoon when my
observances were most and noisiest, I lifted my eyes but once
during the final half-hour--but such a one that was!
The edge of that beautiful grey pongee skirt came upon the lid
of my lowered eyelid like a cool shadow over hot sand. A sergent
had just made many of the people move away, so there remained
only a thin ring of the laughing pantaloons about me, when this
divine skirt presented its apparition to me. A pair of North-
American trousers accompanied it, turned up to show the ankle-
bones of a rich pair of stockings; neat, enthusiastic and
humorous, I judged them to be; for, as one may discover, my only
amusement during my martyrdom--if this misery can be said to
possess such alleviatings--had been the study of feet,
pantaloons, and skirts. The trousers in this case detained my
observation no time. They were but the darkest corner of the
chiaroscuro of a Rembrandt--the mellow glow of gold was all
across the grey skirt.
How shall I explain myself, how make myself understood? Shall I
be thought sentimentalistic or but mad when I declare that my
first sight of the grey pongee skirt caused me a thrill of
excitation, of tenderness, and--oh-i-me!--of self-
consciousness more acute than all my former mortifications. It
was so very different from all other skirts that had shown
themselves to me those sad days, and you may understand that,
though the pantaloons far outnumbered the skirts, many hundreds
of the latter had also been objects of my gloomy observation.
This skirt, so unlike those which had passed, presented at once
the qualifications of its superiority. It had been constructed
by an artist, and it was worn by a lady. It did not pine, it did
not droop; there was no more an atom of hanging too much than
there was a portion inflated by flamboyancy; it did not assert
itself; it bore notice without seeking it. Plain but exquisite,
it was that great rarity--goodness made charming.
The peregrination of the American trousers suddenly stopped as
they caught sight of me, and that precious skirt paused,
precisely in opposition to my little table. I heard a voice,
that to which the skirt pertained. It spoke the English, but not
in the manner of the inhabitants of London, who seem to sing
undistinguishably in their talking, although they are
comprehensible to each other. To an Italian it seems that many
North-Americans and English seek too often the assistance of the
nose in talking, though in different manners, each equally
unagreeable to our ears. The intelligent among our lazzaroni of
Naples, who beg from tourists, imitate this, with the purpose of
reminding the generous traveller of his home, in such a way to
soften his heart. But there is some difference: the Italian, the
Frenchman, or German who learns English sometimes misunderstands
the American: the Englishman he sometimes understands.
This voice that spoke was North-American. Ah, what a voice!
Sweet as the mandolins of Sorento! Clear as the bells of Capri!
To hear it, was like coming upon sight of the almond-blossoms of
Sicily for the first time, or the tulip-fields of Holland. Never
before was such a voice!
"Why did you stop, Rufus?" it said.
"Look!" replied the American trousers; so that I knew the pongee
lady had not observed me of herself.
Instantaneously there was an exclamation, and a pretty grey
parasol, closed, fell at my feet. It is not the pleasantest to
be an object which causes people to be startled when they behold
you; but I blessed the agitation of this lady, for what caused
her parasol to fall from her hand was a start of pity.
"Ah!" she cried. "The poor man!"
She had perceived that I was a gentleman.
I bent myself forward and lifted the parasol, though not my eyes
I could not have looked up into the face above me to be
Caesar! Two hands came down into the circle of my observation;
one of these was that belonging to the trousers, thin, long, and
white; the other was the grey-gloved hand of the lady, and never
had I seen such a hand--the hand of an angel in a suede glove,
as the grey skirt was the mantle of a saint made by Doucet. I
speak of saints and angels; and to the large world these may
sound like cold words.--It is only in Italy where some people
are found to adore them still.
I lifted the parasol toward that glove as I would have moved to
set a candle on an altar. Then, at a thought, I placed it not in
the glove, but in the thin hand of the gentleman. At the same
time the voice of the lady spoke to me--I was to have the joy
of remembering that this voice had spoken four words to me.
"Je vous remercie, monsieur," it said.
"Pas de quoi!" I murmured.
The American trousers in a loud tone made reference in the idiom
to my miserable head: "Did you ever see anything to beat it?"
The beautiful voice answered, and by the gentleness of her
sorrow for me I knew she had no thought that I might understand.
"Come away. It is too pitiful!"
Then the grey skirt and the little round-toed shoes beneath it
passed from my sight, quickly hidden from me by the increasing
crowd; yet I heard the voice a moment more, but fragmentarily:
"Don't you see how ashamed he is, how he must have been starving
before he did that, or that someone dependent on him needed--"
I caught no more, but the sweetness that this beautiful lady
understood and felt for the poor absurd wretch was so great that
I could have wept. I had not seen her face; I had not looked up
--even when she went.
"Who is she?" cried a scoundrel voyous, just as she turned.
"Madame of the parasol? A friend of monsieur of the ornamented
head?"
"No. It is the first lady in waiting to his wife, Madame la
Duchesse," answered a second. "She has been sent with an equerry
to demand of monseigneur if he does not wish a little sculpture
upon his dome as well as the colour decorations!"
"'Tis true, my ancient?" another asked of me.
I made no repartee, continuing to sit with my chin dependent
upon my cravat, but with things not the same in my heart as
formerly to the arrival of that grey pongee, the grey glove, and
the beautiful voice.
Since King Charles the Mad, in Paris no one has been completely
free from lunacy while the spring-time is happening. There is
something in the sun and the banks of the Seine. The Parisians
drink sweet and fruity champagne because the good wines are
already in their veins. These Parisians are born intoxicated and
remain so; it is not fair play to require them to be like other
human people. Their deepest feeling is for the arts; and, as
everyone had declared, they are farceurs in their tragedies,
tragic in their comedies. They prepare the last epigram in the
tumbril; they drown themselves with enthusiasm about the
alliance with Russia. In death they are witty; in war they have
poetic spasms; in love they are mad.
The strangest of all this is that it is not only the Parisians
who are the insane ones in Paris; the visitors are none of them
in behaviour as elsewhere. You have only to go there to become
as lunatic as the rest. Many travellers, when they have
departed, remember the events they have caused there as a person
remembers in the morning what he has said and thought in the
moonlight of the night.
In Paris it is moonlight even in the morning; and in Paris one
falls in love even more strangely than by moonlight.
It is a place of glimpses: a veil fluttering from a motor-car, a
little lace handkerchief fallen from a victoria, a figure
crossing a lighted window, a black hat vanishing in the distance
of the avenues of the Tuileries. A young man writes a ballade
and dreams over a bit of lace. Was I not, then, one of the least
extravagant of this mad people? Men have fallen in love with
photographs, those greatest of liars; was I so wild, then, to
adore this grey skirt, this small shoe, this divine glove, the
golden-honey voice--of all in Paris the only one to pity and
to understand? Even to love the mystery of that lady and to
build my dreams upon it?--to love all the more because of the
mystery? Mystery is the last word and the completing charm to a
young man's passion. Few sonnets have been written to wives
whose matrimony is more than five years of age--is it not so?
Chapter Two
When my hour was finished and I in liberty to leave that
horrible corner, I pushed out of the crowd and walked down the
boulevard, my hat covering my sin, and went quickly. To be in
love with my mystery, I thought, that was a strange happiness!
It was enough. It was romance! To hear a voice which speaks two
sentences of pity and silver is to have a chime of bells in the
heart. But to have a shaven head is to be a monk! And to have a
shaven head with a sign painted upon it is to be a pariah. Alas!
I was a person whom the Parisians laughed at, not with!
Now that at last my martyrdom was concluded, I had some
shuddering, as when one places in his mouth a morsel of
unexpected flavour. I wondered where I had found the courage to
bear it, and how I had resisted hurling myself into the river,
though, as is known, that is no longer safe, for most of those
who attempt it are at once rescued, arrested, fined, and
imprisoned for throwing bodies into the Seine, which is
forbidden.
At the theatre the frightful badge was removed from my head-top
and I was given three hundred francs, the price of my shame,
refusing an offer to repeat the performance during the following
week. To imagine such a thing made me a choking in my throat,
and I left the bureau in some sickness. This increased so much
(as I approached the Madeleine, where I wished to mount an
omnibus) that I entered a restaurant and drank a small glass of
cognac. Then I called for writing-papers and wrote to the good
Mother Superior and my dear little nieces at their convent. I
enclosed two hundred and fifty francs, which sum I had fallen
behind in my payments for their education and sustenance, and I
felt a moment's happiness that at least for a while I need not
fear that my poor brother's orphans might become objects of
charity--a fear which, accompanied by my own hunger, had led
me to become the joke of the boulevards.
Feeling rich with my remaining fifty francs, I ordered the
waiter to bring me a goulasch and a carafe of blond beer, after
the consummation of which I spent an hour in the reading of a
newspaper. Can it be credited that the journal of my perusement
was the one which may be called the North-American paper of the
aristocracies of Europe? Also, it contains some names of the
people of the United States at the hotels and elsewhere.
How eagerly I scanned those singular columns! Shall I confess to
what purpose? I read the long lists of uncontinental names over
and over, but I lingered not at all upon those like "Muriel,"
"Hermione," "Violet," and "Sibyl," nor over "Balthurst,"
"Skeffington-Sligo," and "Covering-Legge"; no, my search was for
the Sadies and Mamies, the Thompsons, Van Dusens, and Bradys. In
that lies my preposterous secret.
You will see to what infatuation those words of pity, that sense
of a beautiful presence, had led me. To fall in love must one
behold a face? Yes; at thirty. At twenty, when one is something
of a poet--No: it is sufficient to see a grey pongee skirt! At
fifty, when one is a philosopher--No: it is enough to perceive
a soul! I had done both; I had seen the skirt; I had perceived
the soul! Therefore, while hungry, I neglected my goulasch to
read these lists of names of the United States again and again,
only that I might have the thought that one of them--though I
knew not which--might be this lady's, and that in so
infinitesimal a degree I had been near her again. Will it be
estimated extreme imbecility in me when I ventured the
additional confession that I felt a great warmth and tenderness
toward the possessors of all these names, as being, if not
herself, at least her compatriots?
I am now brought to the admission that before to-day I had
experienced some prejudices against the inhabitants of the
North-American republic, though not on account of great
experience of my own. A year previously I had made a disastrous
excursion to Monte Carlo in the company of a young gentleman of
London who had been for several weeks in New York and Washington
and Boston, and appeared to know very much of the country. He
was never anything but tired in speaking of it, and told me a
great amount. He said many times that in the hotels there was
never a concierge or portier to give you information where to
discover the best vaudeville; there was no concierge at all! In
New York itself, my friend told me, a facchino, or species of
porter, or some such good-for-nothing, had said to him,
including a slap on the shoulder, "Well, brother, did you
receive your delayed luggage correctly?" (In this instance my
studies of the North-American idiom lead me to believe that my
friend was intentionally truthful in regard to the
principalities, but mistaken in his observation of detail.) He
declared the recent willingness of the English to take some
interest in the United-Statesians to be a mistake; for their
were noisy, without real confidence in themselves; they were
restless and merely imitative instead of inventive. He told me
that he was not exceptional; all Englishmen had thought
similarly for fifty or sixty years; therefore, naturally, his
opinion carried great weight with me. And myself, to my
astonishment, I had often seen parties of these republicans
become all ears and whispers when somebody called a prince or a
countess passed by. Their reverence for age itself, in anything
but a horse, had often surprised me by its artlessness, and of
all strange things in the world, I have heard them admire old
customs and old families. It was strange to me to listen, when I
had believed that their land was the only one where happily no
person need worry to remember who had been his great-
grandfather.
The greatest of my own had not saved me from the decoration of
the past week, yet he was as much mine as he was Antonio
Caravacioli's; and Antonio, though impoverished, had his motor-
car and dined well, since I happened to see, in my perusal of
the journal, that he had been to dinner the evening before at
the English Embassy with a great company. "Bravo, Antonio! Find
a rich foreign wife if you can, since you cannot do well for
yourself at home!" And I could say so honestly, without spite,
for all his hatred of me,--because, until I had paid my
addition, I was still the possessor of fifty francs!
Fifty francs will continue life in the body of a judicial person
a long time in Paris, and combining that knowledge and the good
goulasch, I sought diligently for "Mamies" and "Sadies" with a
revived spirit. I found neither of those adorable names--in
fact, only two such diminutives, which are more charming than
our Italian ones: A Miss Jeanie Archibald Zip and a Miss Fannie
Sooter. None of the names was harmonious with the grey pongee --
in truth, most of them were no prettier (however less
processional) than royal names. I could not please myself that I
had come closer to the rare lady; I must be contented that the
same sky covered us both, that the noise of the same city rang
in her ears as mine.
Yet that was a satisfaction, and to know that it was true gave
me mysterious breathlessness and made me hear fragments of old
songs during my walk that night. I walked very far, under the
trees of the Bois, where I stopped for a few moments to smoke a
cigarette at one of the tables outside, at Armenonville.