Back STreet (56 page)

“What is his name?” she asked of an American whose elbow was piercing her rib, as he slowly edged his way in front of her. She had known it once from the newspaper columns at Nice. “What, please, is his name?” The American did not reply. Often she found that to be the case now. People did not reply. Not particularly because they wanted to be rude. It was just that her voice did not seem to matter.

One hundred and ninety—

“
Qu’est-il, monsieur? Allemagne, n’est-ce-pas?
”

This time the question came from a manikin whose back, bare to the waistline, was sunburned to henna and whose marcelled yellow head was precisely the perfection of a small egg on end.

“Oh, pardon me, mademoiselle. Baron von Hufstangel is his name. Biggest manufacturer of medical instruments in the world.
Permettez-moi, mademoiselle
. Stand in front of me. You can see better—outrageous luck—phenomenal—”

Two-hundred thousand—

Full flash, like a sword out of its scabbard, there leaped her
impulse—an impulse slightly impeded by the ridiculous necessity of having to stoop, in that pressure of crowd, for the franc-notes that were banked in her stocking.

“Permit me, please,” she said, on the baron’s picking-up of the card, reaching between the shoulders of the manikin and the American, to place twenty-five hundred francs on the table.

There on the green felt, in a neat pile between the croupier and the baron, was the contents of the wad of twenty-five hundred francs that one instant before had been resting in its neatly folded clean handkerchief against the calf of her leg.

The spinning silence was your head, it had a thin high sound—it became, the inside of your head, a bicycle race with the riders on a slant—it became Richard leaning off his pony for a polo stroke.

Oh, la-la! Ten-spot! Baccarat!

The baron had lost.

“Pouf,” said the manikin, whose bare back was suntanned to henna, “his luck has gone up in smoke.”

Pouf, just like that. Pouf! Edging her way out, every time Ray said that “Pouf,” a bubble formed like a bit of glassine paper over her mouth. Pouf!

The contents of the valise that had been swallowed into the limbo that contained Mrs. Cleveland, was on her mind.

No telling what was in that bag. She could not remember exactly; ends of laces, jabots; slightly worn petticoats from the days when she still wore them; a couple of sheer nightgowns, needing new yokes; fans, feathers, odds and ends; two books on Italian primitives; and, strange to remember, quite a pretty pincushion doll, half-finished, a bisque head and shoulders mounted into a yellow-silk sawdust ball.

Not much, each in itself, perhaps, but the persistent thought held her that the aggregate might be considerable. Oh, yes, there was the burnt-wood toilet set that she had cast aside years ago, with “R.S.” on each piece, and the poppy design brightly colored.

That burnt-wood set, the percolator, binoculars, especially such objects of metal, could doubtless have been disposed of to no mean advantage by the
valet-de-chambre
, husband of the
ex-femme-de-chambre
.

He had already begun the process of selling off for her various of the small objects she took to him from time to time. An alarm clock. She had two. An umbrella with a sterling-silver handle. The silver toilet set had gone, too. For one hundred and fifty francs. It had cost forty dollars the day of the opening of Stern’s new department store on Forty-second Street. One hundred and fifty francs!
That low-watermark price made her begin to suspect the
valet-de-chambre
. But what could one do? It was not New York, where you knew the ropes, so to speak. It was simpler, but doubtless vastly more expensive, to entrust these small enforced sales to Anatole, who charged commission.

Every time she wrapped an object in a bit of the Paris
Herald
and hurried through the streets with it to the shop of Anna and Anatole, she had the absurd feeling that under her arm, in the shape of an alarm clock, for instance, she was carrying part of herself, detached, and for sale. Here’s my heart, ticking. Sell it, Anatole. Here’s my arm. It is pure silk and has a sterling-silver handle. Sell it, Anatole. It should bring one hundred francs. It cost twelve dollars, American money, at Wanamaker’s. Translate that for him, Anna. Twelve dollars at Wanamaker’s. Not so long ago either.

Actually it brought eighteen francs.

Low. Disgusting. Degrading. Close personal things like a nice dimity nightgown scarcely worn, and laundered in all its pleats and underlaid in pink tissue, five francs. One franc for a little silver dachshund, with bristles on his back, which had been given her, back in the Cincinnati days, by a traveling salesman for a hat concern. There had been other such objects; a black-enamel thimble with white polka-dots, which had brought one franc; a blue-enamel bracelet bangle, two francs. It was somehow quite frightening to even let the mind dwell on that.…

A great deal might have been frightening if you let it be. Didn’t intend to let it be.

In a way, looking back, it was simply beyond credence. The margin swept away like a leaf on a fast current. It had happened so quickly. It had happened so terribly. And yet one dared not be frightened. The thing to do was to profit. That was it! Profit by the rigors of this experience. As old Jim Culbertson, a Cincinnati sheriff, used to say, many a good man was saved and made by having the daylights scared out of him. Well, the daylights were scared out of her, all right. But there was a way out. Didn’t exactly see it at the moment, but there was a way out. Probably have a good laugh over it some day. Those things take time.

Could have been worse, too. Fancy trying to live on a few francs a day in New York! But that was precisely what you could do in Aix. Thank God, Papatou, who was always in some sort of frightening arrears with his madame, had a way of egging room rent out of her three and four weeks in advance. He had been paid for the entire month just two days before the advent of the Heidelberger. Thank God for that.

All sorts of food substitutions that could even be made to seem amusing, were possible. Cabbage cutlets, browned to look like veal. Flour soups, with the bread sliced and toasted as if for
petite marmite
. Except that the Babe, rascal, silliest of precious darlings, would not have the wool pulled over his eyes. Meat once a day for him, and don’t you fool yourself! Try to deceive him, if you could, on bread and a brown-flour gravy which had been mixed over chicken feet.

Besides, never again would she permit herself to pick chicken feet out of refuse pails. It looked shocking. It was shocking. God, it made her shudder down into her hands. Never, never again would she succumb to so degrading an economy. Served her right, too, the Babe sniffing her concoction, had turned up his nose and walked off.…

It was easier and somehow more decent to practice abashing denials of one’s self. Chicken gizzards, necks, veal bones for the Babe could be purchased from the chef of a grimy little restaurant down the block that sold her about a candy-sackful for a sou. Refuse, but at least not from the bin. For herself, a
petit suisse
, lentil mash, or a surprisingly tasty soup of cabbage, a carrot, an onion, and a dash from a bottle containing kitchen-bouquet.

It kept her thin and a little underfed, precisely what her preachment to Walter had been for years. “Make it a rule, Walter, to get up from the table a little hungry,” and then the continuous paradox of her preparing him the rich bakings, broilings, and fryings, which, when they had her turn of the spoon, had been so palatable to him.

There was a way, all right, to get on her feet. She was a little shocked; oh, yes, no doubt of that. Shot to pieces, as the saying went. But Rome was not rebuilt in a day. Or was it rebuilt? Anyway, once you got your head clear …

It was really quite amazing, and yet it hurt her terribly the way in which the Babe simply would not remain out of her lap.

“Please, Babe. Muvver’s worried. Let her think.”

Scratch, scratch, his little old feet with their extremely long nails, since it was all he could do now, in the way of exercise, to waddle around the courtyard, clamored at her skirts.

“No, Baby. Ray must think, darling.” God, how Ray must think and think and think!

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes, here! Muvver has a mind to go down and make old mean wolfhound Marchand eat her baby up. Now are you satisfied?”

In a way, it was blessed to hear him breathe out with satisfaction and feel the warm sag of body through her skirts. Sometimes noonday waned into dusk as she sat with him thus, and in spite of a frenzied rhythm of the phrase, “I-must-think-I-must-think,” the brain remained a dead thing. “Lump,” she cried to it. Lump it remained, seeming to lodge against her brow as inert as the Babe in the bowl of her skirts.

Just the same, come evening, and like a slow-motion picture of a fire horse making beeline at the clang of the bell for his trappings, on went the brown net dress with the bolero of sequins, accompanied by the ritual of the powdered neck, the touching-up of the lips along the chilly teeth, the laying-on of the spots of rouge.

It gave something akin to vigor and hope to feel the old shoulder straps slide into place, to feel the chest bare and powdered and revealed, as if its breasts were not two drooping wrinkled sacs.

Daylights scared out of her, yes! But only that she might profit. Good lesson. Never again. One of these nights, a hundred francs, a louis, who could tell, handed back by a prodigal winning hand—and presto—pouf!—success.

It had to be. People simply did not get into predicaments like this without getting out of them. The high-divers, the spectacular gamblers whose brains, after they had been blown out, got into the headlines, were one matter. So were the drug-and-drink habitués of the tables. Monte Carlo, Deauville, Paris, had their Bluebeard
chambers of legends like that. But the ordinary run-of-the-mill people who were content to earn livelihoods around the tracks and tables of Europe and America, they dropped out, of course, and became difficult to account for, like pins, but so did people in other walks of life. No, the run-of-the-mill folks whom she knew, simply did not get into predicaments like this without getting out of them—head up, too.

Picking those chicken feet out of the refuse can had been unnerving. Disgusting to have stooped to that, for a matter of fifty centimes. Suppose Papatou had seen it. The Babe had set her right to such obscene economies, turning up his darling little black-rubber nose. No, the question really was how to get things moving.

With twenty-two francs, some centimes, and a few sous to your name, and what aiding and abetting you could do by way of the sale of a few objects, the dilemma amounted to this: Risk ten or twelve of those precious francs at
boule
. The thought of that was terribly frightening to one so recently burned. There was not sufficient of the indomitable in her for that. Better to wait. Bide one’s time.

The young American fellows, off on summer vacations, were beginning to throng in now. College seniors most of them, minors, who, gaining their entrance cards by jolly outrageous devices, played
boule
in the outer rooms and cast about their ten-franc pieces in magnificent imitation of roués.

She could, if she would, go up to one of those fellows, and all in the spirit of jest say, “Big Boy, stake me,” yet knowing she couldn’t, she couldn’t, any more than she could go up to one of the girls, the old girls to whom she had more than once tossed a franc or two, and ask. Nonsense, of course she could! One can do anything that is sufficiently necessary. Besides, she herself had given in response to no more than the look in an eye. The pinched look in one of the pinched faces of one of the grandmas of the evening. What was to prevent her going up to one of the youths …

Nothing. Everything. The everything was that, for the life of her, the words would not come. She had tried. Evening after evening she had put on the brown net, and skirted the edge of the
boule
tables, now that all these cocky American college boys with their
sure humorous faces and in such exaggeratedly well-fitting evening clothes, were everywhere in evidence.

Big Boy, little stake? Bring you luck. Stake a lady, there’s a Big Boy. They were so crammed with easy hilarity, these youths, and with easy pity, for that matter. That would be terrible.…

Really though, serious for the moment as matters seemed, the impudence of the Babe was cute. Just once again she tried a concoction of the meat-extract over bread stewed in some of her own vegetable soup. “I guess not,” said the Babe, turning up reproachful eyes and little rubber nose. “I guess not.” Pride. Out-and-out pride. He made her feel snide again and scamper to get him the sackful of giblets and odds and ends from the chef.

That evening, after hours of watching and hovering on the edge of
la boule
, she finally placed a franc piece on seven, and with the chance to win back thirty-five, lost.

“Walter!” What a sickening thing to have done. To have blurted out a name as if you were calling someone. Of course, no one heard, or hearing, listened.

But just the same, it was a lesson in the need of holding on to oneself.

The hateful Anatole. Even though she seldom saw him, and transactions were carried on through Anna, he came to have a most horrible and symbolic significance. He was the disappearing medium through which vanished the Honiton tablecloth, the turquoise beads, the pearl fleur-de-lis, the German-silver coin purse, the opal ring, the handful of tiny porcelain knickknacks, the embroidery scissors, the little gold wedding band which she had bought for herself almost thirty years before and used sometimes to wear for convenience.

And for what? For no more than the price to keep ahead of her rent, which she meticulously did, still three and four weeks ahead. It was the one out-and-out security, other expenditures susceptible to constant shaving-down here and there. Lentils and barley for boiling into soups.
Petits pains
. Cheeses (the
petits suisses
in their silver wrappings cost fifty centimes). They were nourishing. Occasionally, a bit of veal. Giblets, fresh necks, gizzards, and not infrequently a wing or liver thrown in, for the Babe. How the rascal could gobble them, as if they had cost nothing, and no matter how bountiful his meal, always licking his chops for more. It was lovely to see him eat. It gave one a vast sense of his confidence in you. Come what would, the little black rogue knew that there would be no such thing as jeopardy for him. It was lovely to feel the completeness of that confidence.