CHAPTER XIV

Lest he should feel unduly elated, _The Eye of the Beholder_ came back on Wednesday afternoon, but this time he did not post it to another firm instanter. He could not very well ask for it to be returned to Paris, and he left it with Turquand when he bade him good-bye. "Send it where you like," he begged; "perhaps you might try Farqueharsen next. Yes, I've rather a fancy for Farqueharsen! But let it make the round, old chap, and drop me a line when there aren't any more publishers for it to go to."

The nurse's "endeavour" was crowned by success. The Walfords had congratulated him so warmly that he almost began to think they were nice people again. And the departure was made on Thursday morning as arranged.

They travelled, of course, by the Newhaven route, and reached the gare St. Lazare after dark on a rainy evening. The amount of luggage that they possessed among them made Kent stare, as he watched half a dozen porters hoisting trunks, and a perambulator, and a bassinet on to the bus, and it seemed as if they would never get out of the station. At last they rattled away, through the wet streets, the baby whimpering, and the nurse flustered, and he and Cynthia very tired. They drove to a little hotel near the Madeleine, where they intended to stay until they found a suitable pension de famille, and where dinner and the warmth of beaune was very grateful. Nurse also "picked up" after the waiter's appearance with her tray and a half-bottle of vin ordinaire, and, as their fatigue passed, exhilaration was in the ascendant once more. Cynthia's recovery was so marked that, finding the rain had ceased and the moon was shining, she wanted to go out and look at the Grand Boulevard. So Humphrey and she took a stroll for an hour, and said how strange it was to think that they had come to live in Paris, and how funnily things happened. And they had a curaçoa each at a café, and went back to their fusty red room on the third-floor, with the inevitable gilt clock and a festooned bedstead, quite gaily.

The chambermaid brought in their chocolate at eight o'clock next morning, and her brisk "Bonjour, m'sieur et madame!" sounded much more cheerful to them both than Ann's knock at the door, with "The 'ot water, mum!" to which they were accustomed. The sun streamed in brilliantly as she parted the window-curtains. After the chocolate and rolls were finished, Kent proceeded to dress, and leaving Cynthia in bed, betook himself to the office of the paper in the rue du Quatre Septembre.

Beaufort had not come yet, and, pending his chief's arrival, he occupied himself by examining a copy. The tone of the notes struck him as decidedly poor, and a lengthy interview with one of the prominent French actresses abounded in all the well-worn cliches of the amateur. The "dainty and artistic" room into which the interviewer was ushered, the lady's "mock" despair, which gave place to "graceful" resignation and "fragrant" cigarettes, made him sick. Beaufort was very cordial when he entered, though, and it was vastly reassuring to discover how lightly he took things. The work, Mr. Kent would find, was as easy as A, B, C. "Turf Topics" was contributed by a fellow called Jordan, and, really, Mr. Kent would find a few hours daily more than enough to prepare an issue! They went into the private room, where a bottle of vermouth and a pile of French and English journals, marked and mutilated, were the most conspicuous features of the writing-table; and Kent came to the conclusion that his Editor was an extremely pleasant man, as the vermouth was sipped and they chatted over two excellent cigars.

At first the duties did not prove quite so simple as had been promised to one who had never had anything to do with producing a paper before, and the printer worried him a good deal. But Beaufort was highly satisfied. The novice was swift to grasp details, and took such an infinity of pains in seasoning and amplifying the réchauffés, that really his stuff read almost like original matter. As he began to feel his feet, too, he put forth ideas, and, finding that the other was quite ready to listen to them, gained confidence, and was not without a mistaken belief that in so quickly mastering the mysteries of a weekly and painfully exiguous little print, of which four-fifths were eclectic, he had displayed ability of a brilliant order.

Primarily the labour that he devoted to the task was ludicrously disproportionate to the result, but by degrees he got through it with more rapidity. When a month had passed since the morning that he first sat down in the assistant-editorial chair of _The World and his Wife_, he discovered that he was doing in an afternoon what it had formerly taken two days to accomplish, and he marvelled how he could have been so stupid. The work had devolved upon him almost entirely now, for Beaufort, having shown him the way in which he should go, dropped in late, and withdrew early, and did little but drink vermouth and say, "Yes, certainly, capital!" while he was there. It was Kent who proposed the subject for the week's interview, wrote--or re-wrote--the causerie, and who even secured the majority of the few advertisements that they obtained. Also, when the semi-celebrity to be interviewed was not a good-looking woman, it was he who was the interviewer. When the lady was attractive, Billy Beaufort attended to that department himself.

Cynthia had found a pension de famille in the Madeleine quarter, highly recommended for a permanency, and here they had removed. They had two fairly large bedrooms, communicating, on the fourth floor, and paid a hundred and fifty francs a week. It did not leave much over from the salary for their incidental expenses, after reckoning the nurse's wages; but it was supposed to be very cheap, and madame Garin and her vivacious daughter, who skipped a good deal for thirty years of age, and was voluble in bad English, begged them on no account to let any of the other boarders hear that they were received at such terms, for that would certainly be the commencement of madame Garin and her daughter's ruin. Some of the boarders were French people, but the meals, with which twenty-five persons down the long table appeared to be fairly content, were very bad. They would have been thought bad even in a boarding-house in Bloomsbury. The twenty-five persons were waited on by a leisurely and abstracted Italian, and the intervals between the meagre courses were of such duration that Kent swore that he had generally forgotten what the soup had been called by the time that the cold entree reached him.

Yet they were not uncomfortable. Their room was cosy in the lamplight when the winter had set in and Etienne had made a fire, and the curtains of the windows were drawn to hide the view of snowy roofs; and though the dinner often left them hungry, they could go out and have chocolate and cakes. And even as a foreign Pressman, Kent got some tickets for theatres and concerts. It was livelier than Leamington Road, to say the least of it--more lively for him than for Cynthia, perhaps; but an improvement for her as well, since one or two of the women were companionable. She took walks with them while he was at the office, and practised her French on them in the chilly salon.

One afternoon when he was sitting at the office table and Beaufort had gone, the clerk came in to him with a card that bore the name of "Mrs. Deane-Pitt." She was staying in Paris, and the Editor had accepted his suggestion that it might be a good idea to interview a novelist for a change. Kent had sent the proofs to her the day before, but he had never seen her. He told the clerk with some satisfaction to show her in, and he wished he had put on his other jacket, for the author of _Two and a Passion_ was a woman to meet.

He felt shabbier still when she entered; she looked to him like an animated fashion-plate reduced to human height. From the hues of her hat to the swirl of her skirt, it was evident that Mrs. Deane-Pitt made money and knew where to spend it. An osprey in the hat was the only touch of vulgarity. Everybody would not have termed her "pretty"; but her eyes and teeth were good, and both flashed when she talked. Her age might have been anything from thirty to thirty-five.

"I wanted to see Mr. Beaufort," she said, in a clear, crisp voice; "but I hear he's out."

"Yes; he is out," said Kent. "Is it anything _I_ can do?"

"Well, I don't like that interview. I dare say it was my own fault, but I object to suffering for my own faults--one has to suffer for so many other people's in this world. It's all about _Two and a Passion_. I wrote _Two and a Passion_ seven years ago--and I didn't get a royalty on it, either! Why not talk about the books I've done since, and say more about the one that's just out? You say, 'Mrs. Deane-Pitt confessed to having recently published another novel,' and then you drop it as if it were a failure. And 'confessed'--why 'confessed'? That's the tone I don't like in the thing. You write about me as if I were an amateur."

He felt that Beaufort would not be sorry to have missed her.

"May I see the proofs again?" he asked.

She gave them to him, and settled herself in her chair. He looked at them pen in hand, and she looked at him.

"It can easily be put right, can't it, Mr.----"

"'Kent.' Easily--oh yes! Will you tell me something about your new book? I'm ashamed to say I haven't read it yet."

"Don't apologise. It's called _Thy Neighbour's Husband_."

"Does she bolt with him, or do you end it virtuously?"

"Virtuously, monsieur," she said, smiling. "You travel fast!"

"And--please go on! Are there cakes and ale, or does she tend the sick and visit the poor?"

"You appal me!" said Mrs. Deane-Pitt. "Whatever my faults, I am modern; I end with a question-point."

"Not questioning the lady's----"

"Oh, her happiness, of course!"

"'This brilliant and absorbing study, which is already giving rise to considerable discussion,' would be the kind of thing?"

"Quite," she said. "I'm awfully sorry to give you so much trouble."

"The 'trouble' 's a pleasure. You don't want your 'favourite dog' mentioned, do you? Favourite dogs are rather at a discount. Er----"

"Three," she said. "Yes; a boy and two girls."

"Does the boy--'in a picturesque suit'--come into the room, and lead up to 'evident maternal pride'?"

"He's a dear little fellow!" she answered. "But do you think 'evident maternal pride' would be quite in the key? No; I'd stick to me and the work! Besides, domesticity is tedious to read about; the dullest topic in the world is other people's children."

Kent laughed.

"I'll explain to Mr. Beaufort," he declared; "you shall have a revise sent on to-morrow. I'm sure you'll find it all right when he understands the style of thing you want."

"Thank you," she said dryly. "I assure you I have no misgivings, Mr. Kent. 'Kent'! I've never had any correspondence with you, have I? The name's familiar to me, somehow."

"An alias is 'The garden of England,'" he said.

"No; you haven't written anything, have you?"

"Two novels. One is published, and the post is wearing out the other."

"I remember," she cried, uttering the title triumphantly; "I read it. What grand reviews you had! Of course, I know now. I liked your book extremely, Mr. Kent. 'Humphrey Kent,' isn't it?"

"Thank you," he said. "Yes, 'Humphrey Kent.'"

"And you go in for journalism, too, eh?"

"Oh, this is a departure. I was never on a paper till lately."

"Really!" she exclaimed. "You aren't giving fiction up?"

"I'm pot-boiling, Mrs. Deane-Pitt. Do you think it very inartistic of me?"

"Don't!" she said. "Inartistic! I hate that cant. There are papers that are always calling _me_ inartistic. One's got to live. Oh, I admire the people who can put up with West Kensington and take three years to write a novel, but their altitude is beyond me. I write to sell, _moi_ --though you needn't put that in the interview. But I shouldn't have thought you'd have any trouble in placing your books--you oughtn't to to-day! I expect you've been too 'literary'--you'll grow out of it."

"You don't believe in----"

"I'm a practical woman. The public read to be amused, and the publishers want what the public will read, good, bad, or rotten; that's my view. You mustn't make me say these things, though," she broke off, laughing, and getting up; "it's most indiscreet--to a Pressman.... I shall send you a copy of _Thy Neighbour's Husband_--to a colleague. Good-afternoon, Mr. Kent. I'll leave you to go on with your work now. Pray don't look so relieved."

"I should value the copy ever so much," he said. "It was anything but relief--I was struggling to conceal despair."

She put out her hand, and a faint perfume clung to his own after the door had closed. Though her standpoint was not his own, her personality had impressed him, and, as he watched her from the window re-entering her cab, Kent was sorry that she hadn't remained longer.

He hoped she would not forget her promise to send her novel to him, and when it reached him, a few days later, he opened it with considerable eagerness. The style disappointed him somewhat, and the story seemed to him unworthy of the pen that had written _Two and a Passion_. But he replied, as he was bound to do, with a letter of grateful appreciation, and endeavoured, moreover, to persuade himself that he liked it better than he did. The lady, on her side, wrote a cordial little note, thanking him for the amended proof-sheets--"I had no idea that I was so clever or so charming." She said she should be pleased to see him if he could ever spare the time to look in--she could give him a cup of "real English tea"; and she was "Very truly his--Eva Deane-Pitt."