"It's delicious enough just to KNOW she's there! I've never seen her, you know.When I was here with Mamie Hoke we never went anywhere but to the music halls, because she couldn't understand any French; and when I came back afterward to the Farlows' I was dead broke, and couldn't afford the play, and neither could they; so the only chance we had was when friends of theirs invited us--and once it was to see a tragedy by a Roumanian lady, and the other time it was for 'L'Ami Fritz' at the Francais."Darrow laughed."You must do better than that now.'Le Vertige' is a fine thing, and Cerdine gets some wonderful effects out of it.You must come with me tomorrow evening to see it--with your friends, of course.--That is," he added, "if there's any sort of chance of getting seats."The flash of a street lamp lit up her radiant face."Oh, will you really take us? What fun to think that it's tomorrow already!"It was wonderfully pleasant to be able to give such pleasure.Darrow was not rich, but it was almost impossible for him to picture the state of persons with tastes and perceptions like his own, to whom an evening at the theatre was an unattainable indulgence.There floated through his mind an answer of Mrs.Leath's to his enquiry whether she had seen the play in question."No.I meant to, of course, but one is so overwhelmed with things in Paris.And then I'm rather sick of Cerdine--one is always being dragged to see her."That, among the people he frequented, was the usual attitude toward such opportunities.There were too many, they were a nuisance, one had to defend one's self! He even remembered wondering, at the moment, whether to a really fine taste the exceptional thing could ever become indifferent through habit; whether the appetite for beauty was so soon dulled that it could be kept alive only by privation.Here, at any rate, was a fine chance to experiment with such a hunger: he almost wished he might stay on in Paris long enough to take the measure of Miss Viner's receptivity.
She was still dwelling on his promise, "It's too beautiful of you! Oh, don't you THINK you'll be able to get seats?" And then, after a pause of brimming appreciation: "Iwonder if you'll think me horrid?--but it may be my only chance; and if you can't get places for us all, wouldn't you perhaps just take ME? After all, the Farlows may have seen it!"He had not, of course, thought her horrid, but only the more engaging, for being so natural, and so unashamed of showing the frank greed of her famished youth."Oh, you shall go somehow!" he had gaily promised her; and she had dropped back with a sigh of pleasure as their cab passed into the dimly-lit streets of the Farlows' quarter beyond the Seine...
This little passage came back to him the next morning, as he opened his hotel window on the early roar of the Northern Terminus.
The girl was there, in the room next to him.That had been the first point in his waking consciousness.The second was a sense of relief at the obligation imposed on him by this unexpected turn of everts.To wake to the necessity of action, to postpone perforce the fruitless contemplation of his private grievance, was cause enough for gratitude, even if the small adventure in which he found himself involved had not, on its own merits, roused an instinctive curiosity to see it through.
When he and his companion, the night before, had reached the Farlows' door in the rue de la Chaise, it was only to find, after repeated assaults on its panels, that the Farlows were no longer there.They had moved away the week before, not only from their apartment but from Paris; and Miss Viner's breach with Mrs.Murrett had been too sudden to permit her letter and telegram to overtake them.Both communications, no doubt, still reposed in a pigeon-hole of the loge;but its custodian, when drawn from his lair, sulkily declined to let Miss Viner verify the fact, and only flung out, in return for Darrow's bribe, the statement that the Americans had gone to Joigny.
To pursue them there at that hour was manifestly impossible, and Miss Viner, disturbed but not disconcerted by this new obstacle, had quite simply acceded to Darrow's suggestion that she should return for what remained of the night to the hotel where he had sent his luggage.
The drive back through the dark hush before dawn, with the nocturnal blaze of the Boulevard fading around them like the false lights of a magician's palace, had so played on her impressionability that she seemed to give no farther thought to her own predicament.Darrow noticed that she did not feel the beauty and mystery of the spectacle as much as its pressure of human significance, all its hidden implications of emotion and adventure.As they passed the shadowy colonnade of the Francais, remote and temple-like in the paling lights, he felt a clutch on his arm, and heard the cry: "There are things THERE that I want so desperately to see!" and all the way back to the hotel she continued to question him, with shrewd precision and an artless thirst for detail, about the theatrical life of Paris.He was struck afresh, as he listened, by the way in which her naturalness eased the situation of constraint, leaving to it only a pleasant savour of good fellowship.It was the kind of episode that one might, in advance, have characterized as "awkward", yet that was proving, in the event, as much outside such definitions as a sunrise stroll with a dryad in a dew-drenched forest; and Darrow reflected that mankind would never have needed to invent tact if it had not first invented social complications.
