Reginald Wright Kauffman

“ Then, as quickly, the anger passed and was succeeded by a look reminiscent, almost tender.
“You know that no alien can marry one of our people,” he said. “You know that now.”
Cartaret thought again of Vitoria’s parting word to him.
“I know it now,” he said.
“You are my guest,” Eskurola pursued. “I shall tell you something. You have seen me only as what must seem to you a strange and hard man—perhaps a fierce and cruel man. I am the head of my ancient house; on me there depends not only its honor, but also its continuance. ”

“ She freed herself. That newer perfume filled the purple twilight: the pure perfume of the Azure Rose that the wandering Basque carries with him abroad to bring him safely home. She drew the rose from beneath her blouse and held it out to him. Cartaret kissed it. She took it back, kissed it too, went to the nearest window and, tearing the flower petal from petal, dropped it into the Paris street.
“No,” she said softly when she had turned to him again, “do not kiss me yet. I want you first to understand me. I do love my own country, but I cannot stay in it forever. ”

“ Nor that alone—the thought burned in his brain: she had told this wild brother of hers that he, Cartaret, had insulted her; she had incited Eskurola to battle—perhaps to save herself, perhaps to salve some strange Basque conception of honor or pride. So be it; Cartaret could render her one more service—the last: if he allowed himself to be killed by this half-savage who so serenely thought that he was better than all the rest of the world, Don Ricardo’s wounded honor would be healed, and Vitoria—now evidently herself in danger or revengeful—would be either safe or pacified. ”

“ There was Chitta, groveling on the stone floor of the circular room, her face hidden in her hands; there was Vitoria, her arms outstretched, struck rigid in the act of repulsing Cartaret; and there were the two men—the American white, but determined and unafraid; the Basque with a dull red spreading on his tanned cheeks—facing each other as pugilists, entering the ring, face each other at pause during the fleeting instant before they begin to circle for an opening. ”

“ With some difficulty, Cartaret got rid of the composer. On a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, he took account of his resources. They were shockingly slender and, if they were to last him any time at all, he must exercise the most stringent economy. He must buy no more brandy for musical geniuses. Indeed, he must buy no more café dinners for himself....
It struck him, as a happy thought, that he might save a little if he lived on such cold solids as he could buy at the fruit-stand and pâtisseries and such liquids as he might warm in a tin-cup over his lamp. ”

“ Evening, which comes so suddenly in the Cantabrians, was falling before the luxuriant verdure lessened and he came to a break in the forest. Below him, billow upon billow, the foothills fell away in rolling waves of green. Above, the jagged circle of the horizon was a line of salient summits and tapering spires of every tint of blue—turquoise, indigo, mauve—mounting up and up like the seats in a Titanic amphitheater, to the royal purple of the sky.
Cartaret had turned in his saddle to look at the [Pg 244] magnificent panorama. ”

“ The smoke was still circling about the American’s head when he saw Eskurola striding toward him. The Basque’s face was a study of humiliation and dismay.
“What is this?” he demanded. “After I have tried to kill you, you do not kill me? You refuse to kill me? You inflict the greatest insult and the only one that I cannot resent?”
Cartaret threw down his pistol: it frightened him now. “I don’t know whether it’s an insult to let you live or not,” he said, “and I don’t care a damn. Where’s my mare?” ”

“ Cartaret worked gladly now, because he was, however little she might guess it, working for Vitoria. He had left for himself precisely enough to keep him alive, but every third or fourth day he would have the happiness of slipping a little silver into Chitta’s horny palm: Chitta came readily to the habit of waiting for him on the stair. He grew happier day by day, and looked—as who does not?—the better for it. He sought out Seraphin and Varachon; he bought brandy for Houdon; went to hear Devignes sing, and once he had Armand Garnier to luncheon. ”

“ The city that has in her tender keeping the dust of many lovers, cradled him and drew him forward. Her soft breath fanned his cheek, her sweet voice whispered in his ears:
“Trust me and obey me! Did I not know and shelter Gabrielle d’Estrées and her royal suitor? Have I not had a care for De Musset and for Heine? In that walled garden over there, Balzac dreamed of Mme. Hanska. Along this street Chopin wandered with George Sand.”
That whisper followed him to his room, still thrilling with Vitoria’s visit. ”

“ All the possibilities of [Pg 105] life—aye, and what is better, all life’s impossibilities—are behind you, and all life’s fears and hopes before. All our young dreams, our mature ambitions, our old regrets, curl in incense from our brains and struggle to pass that keyhole. Unhappy he for whom the door never opens; more unhappy, often, he for whom it does open; but most unhappy he who never sees that it is there: the Door across the Landing.
Cartaret knocked as if he were knocking at the gate of Paradise, and, perhaps again as if he were knocking at the gate of Paradise, he got no answer. ”

“ The last of the rain, unnoticed during Cartaret’s fevered play, had passed, and a red February sun was setting across the Seine, behind the higher ground that lies between L’Etoile and the Place du Trocadero. The river was hidden by the point of land that ends in the Quai D’Orsay, but, as Cartaret crossed the broad rue de Vaugirard, he could see the golden afterglow and, silhouetted against it, the high filaments of the Eiffel Tower. ”

“ Our legends are still Grecian, our customs are what the English call ‘iron-clad.’ Basque blood is Basque and so remains. It never mixes. It could mix in only one contingency.”
Cartaret was glad that the darkness hid his flushed cheek as he answered:
“I have recently heard of that contingency.”
“It never occurs,” said Eskurola quickly, “because the Basque always chooses not to permit himself to be saved. It is a traditional law among us as strong as that against the disgrace of suicide.”
Their feet were sounding over a bridge: the bridge, as Cartaret reflected, to the castle’s moat. ”

“ The Basque had been too punctilious in all his arrangements: from the first Cartaret had been sure that Don Ricardo and the French-speaking servant had played this tragic farce before, and that the master so arranged matters as easily to choose the one pistol that held death in its mouth. To convict him was impossible, and, were it possible, would be but to strike a fatal blow at the honor of that family which Vitoria held so dear. How false his vanity had played him! What was he that a goddess should not cease to love him when she chose? Enough and more that she had loved him once ”

“ Paris was always full of revolutionary exiles. He wondered if she were a rightful heiress, dispossessed of a foreign title. Perhaps she was the lovely pretender to a throne. In that mysterious home of hers, she must have possessed some exalted position, or the right to it, for Chitta had kneeled to her on the dusty floor of this studio, and the Lady’s manner, he now recalled, was the manner of one accustomed to command. ”

“ She was very ambitious; she worked hard, but she made, she said, little progress.
“The people that have no feeling for any art I pity,” she said; “but, oh, I pity more those who want to be some sort of artist and cannot be! The desire without the talent, that kills.”
Chitta was coming back, bearing aloft a fresh dish. She bore it with an air more haughty than any she had yet assumed. Directing at Cartaret a glance of pride and scorn, she set before her mistress—Cartaret’s strawberries. ”

“ But lovers, if they only want it enough, can have everything, and, somehow, the hurdy-gurdy did, just at that moment, begin to play “Annie Laurie” as it used to do, out in the rue du Val-de-Grâce.
Cartaret led her toward the darkened window, but stopped half-way across the room.
“I will try to deserve you,” he said. “I will make myself what you want me to be.” ”

“ Eskurola went on as if Cartaret had not spoken:
“It is not our custom to present to our ladies [Pg 277] such casual strangers as happen to ask shelter of us; nor is it the custom of our ladies to permit such presentations, still less to seek them. Of that last fact, I say but one word more: the Doña Dolorez has been lately from home, and I fear that her contact with the outer world has temporarily dulled the edge of her native sensitiveness.”
“Look here,” said Cartaret, his hands clenched, “if you mean to imply——”
“Sir!” The Basque’s eyes snapped. “I speak of my sister.” ”

“ In his poor room, a princess that he had never seen before—that, surely, he was not seeing now!—some royal figure out of a lost Hellenic tragedy; her breast visibly cumbered by the heavy air of [Pg 25] modern Paris, her wonderful eyes burning with the cold fire of resolution, she told him that she would kill him if he approached her. And she would do it; she would kill him with less compunction than she would feel in crushing an offending moth!
Cartaret had instinctively jumped at the first flash of the weapon. Now his laughter returned. A vision could not be impeded by a sprung lock. ”

“ Houdon is a good boy, but, Name of a Name, he has the conscience of a pig!”
“All right,” said Cartaret suddenly, for Seraphin was appealing to a sense of economy still fresh enough to be sensitive, “since he’s ordered the dinner, we’ll let him pay for it.”
“Alas,” declared Dieudonné, sadly shaking his long hair, “poor Maurice has not the money.”
“Oh!”—A gleam of gratitude lighted Cartaret’s blue eyes—“Then you are proposing that you do it?”
“My friend,” inquired Seraphin, flinging out his arms as a man flings out his arms to invite a search of his pockets, “you know me: how can I?” ”

“ Cartaret himself was thinking rapidly and by no means clearly. To say that dueling was not an American custom would avail him nothing—would be interpreted as cowardice; to fight with a man bred as Don Ricardo was evidently bred would be to walk out to death. Cartaret [Pg 284] looked at the panorama of the mountains. Well, why not death? Less than an hour ago his whole life had been mined, had been sent crashing about his head. The only thing that he cared for in life was taken from him: Vitoria had herself declared that she hated him. ”

“ During all his boyhood, art had been his single passion; during all his residence in Paris he had flung the best that was in him upon the altar of his artistic ambition; but now, without a single pang of regret, he resolved to give up art forever. He would see Vitoria on the morrow and come to a practical understanding with her: was he not always a practical man? Then he would reopen negotiation with his uncle and ask for a place in the elder Cartaret’s business. ”

“ The rain had lessened, but the fog held on, and the thoroughfares were wet and dismal. Cartaret cut down the rue du Val-de-Grâce to the Avenue de Luxembourg and through the gardens with their dripping statues and around the museum, whence he crossed to the sheltered way between those bookstalls that cling like ivy to the walls of the Odéon, and so, by the steep descent of the rue de Tournon and the rue de Seine, came to the rue Jacob and the Café Des Deux Colombes. ”

“ 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 passed. Cartaret was underfed and discouraged. He was too discouraged now to attempt to renew his acquaintance with the Lady of the Rose. ”

“ A new necktie was, nevertheless, imperative: he had been absent-mindedly wiping his brushes on the old, and it would not do to smell more of turpentine than the exigencies of his suit made necessary; the scent of turpentine is not appetizing.
If you have never been in love, you may suppose that the selection of so small a thing as a necktie is trivial; otherwise, you will know that there are occasions when it is no light matter, and you will then understand why Cartaret found it positively portentous. ”

“ He would never tell her that he loved her.
And then, very early on an evening in May, Destiny, who had been somnolent under the soft influence of Spring, awoke and once more took a hand in Cartaret’s affairs and those of the Lady of the Rose.
Cartaret had just returned from a mission to Lepoittevin’s shop and, having there disposed of a particularly bad picture, had put money in his purse: Chitta was waiting on the stairs and accepted the bulk of his earnings with her usual bad grace. He went into his studio, leaving the door ajar. The cool breeze of the Spring twilight fluttered the curtains ”

“ L’idée de génie, c’est de prendre dans la poche des gens l’argent qui n’y est pas encore.—Zola: L’Argent.
Until just before the appearance of Charlie Cartaret’s rosy vision, this had been a day of darkness and wet. Rain—a dull, hopeless, February rain—fell with implacable monotony. It descended in fine spray, as if too lazy to hurry, yet too spiteful to stop. It made all Paris miserable; but, as is the way with Parisian rains, it was a great deal wetter on the Left Bank of the Seine than on the Right. ”

“ 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 passing foible of a young man temporarily wearied by the pleasures of wealth. ”

“ Alegria is a little town in the high Cantabrian Mountains, far from any train.”
“Then come along downtown and help me buy a horse,” said Cartaret. “I saw a lot of likely-looking ones this morning.”
“But, monsieur,” expostulated the hotel proprietor, “nobody between here and Alegria speaks French. Nobody in Alegria speaks French—and you do not speak Eskura.”
“What’s that?”
“It is how we Basques name our own tongue.”
“Well, I don’t care. Get me a guide.”
“I fear I cannot, monsieur. The country people do not want Alava to become the prey of tourists, and they will be slow to allow a stranger.” ”

“ He measured off the ground and marked the stand for each, always asking Cartaret’s opinion. He stood while Cartaret again tossed a glittering gold-piece in the air.
“Tails!” cried Don Ricardo. “I always prefer,” he explained, “to see this king with his face in the dust. Let us look at him together, so that there will be no mistake.”
The piece lay with its face to the terrace.
“I win,” said Eskurola. “I shoot first. It is bad to begin well.”
Cartaret smiled. With such a marksman as this Basque to shoot at one, the speech became the merest pleasantry. ”

“ A book without problems and without horrors, its sole purpose is to give to the reader some of that pleasure which went to its making. Wars come and go; but for every man the Door Opposite stands open beside the Seine, the hurdy-gurdy plays “Annie Laurie” in the Street of the Valley of Grace and—a Lady of the Rose is waiting. ”

“ He stormed Dieudonné, leaned over the intervening table and embraced him.
“My dear friend!” he cried, his arms outflung, his fingers rattling rapid arpeggios upon invisible pianos. “You are indeed well found. I have news—such news!” He thrust back his head and warbled a laugh worthy of the mad-scene in Lucia. “Listen well.” Again he embraced the unresisting Seraphin. “This night we dine here; we make a collation—a symposium: we feed both our bodies and our souls. ”

“ The birds had ceased their song, but the scent of the lilacs still rose from the garden.
“Don’t you understand now?” she asked, her cheeks crimson in the fading light. “I guessed you did not understand then; but don’t you understand now?”
He stood bewildered. She had to go through with it.
“My brother had to live—you made him live. To kill himself is the worst disgrace that a Basque can put upon his family. ”

“ Cartaret obeyed.
Eskurola again held the door for his guest to pass.
“After you, sir,” he said.
They crossed the court-yard leisurely and shoulder to shoulder, for all the world as if they were two friends going out to enjoy the view. Any one observing them from the windows, had there been any one, would have said that Don Ricardo was pointing out to Cartaret the beauties of the scene. In reality he was saying:
“With your agreement, we shall fix the distance at ten paces, and I shall step it. There is no choice for light, and the wind is at rest. ”