CHAPTER III

PHIL, CHAMPION OF MISS ROWRER

“I’ll send her some flowers to-morrow,” the duke said, once they were outside.

“Monseigneur,” replied Caracal, “allow me to tell you, you’ve been below the mark all through!”

“That’s so!” agreed monseigneur.

“For a reigning duke,” Caracal went on, “a grand seigneur, a Parisian in soul, to have such timidity! It was worth while dining at impossible hours and passing evenings with a rheumatic clown, to wind up in nothing!”

“I shall have my revenge!” the duke said. “This evening I did not—dare.”

“And the reason is this,” Caracal continued: “you’re in love with Helia!”

“I!”

“Yes, monseigneur.”

“What an idea!”

Just then Caracal passed into the two-colored light of an apothecary’s shop, red on one side and green on the other; his single eye-glass darted a fantastic reflection on the duke. He might have been twin brother to Mephistopheles.

“What a devil of a man!” thought the duke; “you can hide nothing from him. He might easily be right!”

Caracal had not astonished him. In love? Perhaps he was, since others were noticing it. It is true that Caracal was not exactly “others,” powerful psychologist and searcher of hearts and brains as he was. But even Caracal would have to confess himself beaten by a Duke of Morgania parading with a circus star—that would be Parisian enough! He would no longer accuse him of inheriting the prejudices of Morgania, nor of believing in the predictions of the mad old witch!

The duke blushed at his own scruples. He envied Caracal’s effrontery.

“It is true,” he said to himself, “I have been below the mark all through. For a grand seigneur like me to be as timid as a college-boy is absurd. Helia ought to be for me simply an episode—a pastime—and nothing more.”

All these ideas had come to him while he was lighting his cigarette, and Caracal, red and green, was darting on him the reflection of his monocle.

“In love with Helia?” the duke said aloud, flattered that Caracal had such an opinion of him, “_ma foi_, why not?”

“You are quite right,” answered Caracal. “It will increase your prestige. Besides, you’ll see her at supper. My valet will hand her the invitation. Helia would rather go off alone, but she will come with us. Phil will be of the party, too!”

“Well, come along! We have an hour to wait. Let’s go in somewhere,” said the duke.

They were just coming into the Place Blanche. A café, through its open doors, wrapped them round with the smell of alcohol. Before them a red-winged mill seemed grinding fire and flame. Beyond, streets went climbing up Montmartre, mountain of guano. Right and left, along the Boulevard, incredible dens held out their blazing signs in line, like the “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” of monstrous nights.

“Here is a cabaret artistique; let’s go in,” said Caracal; “it’s immense!”

“Come on!” assented the duke.

The atmosphere, as of a den of animals, caught them by the throat. The conversations were deafening, but the voice of the proprietor rose above the clamor. He welcomed visitors, even ladies, with a torrent of insults. It was the height of chic to receive his avalanche of insolence with a smiling face.

“What do these two carrion come for?” he cried, pointing to Caracal and the duke, who, in his surprise, was on the point of getting angry, to the great joy of the public.

“Let’s sit in this corner; we can talk better,” Caracal said to him, as much at his ease in this asphyxiating air as a fish in water. They sat down and the brutal voice and the clamors of the public found occupation elsewhere.

“Talk?” asked the duke. “What in the world should we talk about here?”

“About Helia,” answered Caracal; “here’s to your amours, monseigneur!” And he raised the glass which a waiter, dressed like an Academician, had brought him.

“Caracal!” said the duke, laughing, “we no longer live in the times when kings espoused shepherdesses.”

“But dukes, monseigneur, still pay their court to danseuses,” Caracal went on. “It’s a tendency of the aristocracy.”

“Why?” asked the duke.

“Because the common run of men, when they court a woman, make account of what others think of her; whereas a grand seigneur doesn’t care for the opinion of the public and chooses what pleases him.”

“That’s true!” said the duke.

“I can cite you a dozen examples,” Caracal continued. “There’s Clotilde Loisset, the circus-rider, who is an Hungarian princess to-day; Chelli, the danseuse, married to a Russian count who is Minister of State; Lord Billy, betrothed to an equilibrist; the Countess of Landsfeldt, Baroness Rosenthal—you know well who they were. And you see what they are now, thanks to the caprice of some Highness! Grandees, monseigneur, are like those kings who acknowledge no rank but that which they themselves create.”

“Well said, Caracal!”

The duke, when his first surprise had passed, found it amusing to talk confidentially in such a moral pig-pen. It was so amusing, even, that he forgot to ask himself what possible interest Caracal could have to see him in love with Helia.

“Will you come now, Caracal? Phil must be waiting for us.”

“Helia, too!” said Caracal.

They left the place.

“We are leaving just as it is becoming interesting,” Caracal sighed. “It’s over there we are to meet,” he added, pointing to the terrace of a café inundated with light.

They had not gone twenty steps before a voice called to them. It was Phil’s.

“Good evening, Monsieur le Duc! Good evening, M. Caracal!”

“Good evening, Phil!” answered Caracal. “_Eh bien?_ How’s your American Club exposition? Interesting? Painting in the grand style? American painting, eh! eh! done by machinery, of course? I don’t say that for you, _cher ami_!”

“And how is your novel, ‘The House of Glass’?” retorted Phil, leaving painting for literature. “You were just now in search of human documents. Don’t say no; I saw you! You’re always thinking about it?”

“Always, my dear friend, always! But what makes you think so?”

“Because you were looking in the gutter,” said Phil.

Caracal made a grimace; but when they got to the café his self-love had a satisfaction which brought back his smiles. Before the terrace, encumbered with people, his valet was awaiting him, telegrams in hand. This valet was a part of his pride of life; a good fellow employed in a shop all day long, and free in the evening. Caracal dressed him up in a tail coat with gilt buttons, and a high hat, and had him bring his correspondence to the café every night, as if he were a man overwhelmed with invitations and billets-doux.

“Mademoiselle Helia will not come this evening,” the valet announced.

“Why not?” Caracal asked, interrupting the reading of his despatches, which he had good reasons for knowing by heart.

“Mademoiselle Helia did not say why. Mademoiselle only said that she would not come. She has gone out with M. Socrate.”

“Very well!” said Caracal, dismissing his valet.

“With Socrate! Poor Helia!” thought Phil.

“Well, messieurs, it will be less gay without a lady,” Caracal observed; “but since we are here, let’s do Montmartre, will you?”

“Come with us,” said the duke.

So all three “did” Montmartre.

Caracal knew it all thoroughly. The cabaret was his home. He entered offhand; he had his own manner of opening the door and bidding a friendly good day to the proprietor amid the tables.

“There’s Caracal!” These words, pronounced in the smoke of these little cafés by some _décadent_ accompanied by a painted girl, swelled his heart with pride. Even the duke envied him this quasi-royalty which Paris confers on its elect.

Caracal loved the cabaret _rosses_, where some rickety little monsieur advances on the platform, opens his snarling mouth and, hammering his words that not a syllable may be lost, narrates his little nastiness to the public.

“It’s a new school,” Caracal explained. “Much more advanced than the _décadents_! It’s educating the public up to itself little by little. It has taken frankly for its flag the exact word in all its crudity.”

“Say, rather, the dirty word,” said Phil.

Wherever they went there was the same atmosphere of infection. You would have said that, camping in modern Paris, there was a _ville chaude_ of the Middle Ages, where “_vérolez très précieux_” made high festival with ribald companions. The look of the places was repulsive. In one they were served by mock galley-slaves dragging their chains behind them. In another there were grave-diggers, and they sat by coffins, and green flames burned inside of skulls.

“You, fever-patient, what do you take?” the waiter said to the customer; “and you, consumptive? What do you drink, moribund?”

And then the fever-patient or the moribund—some ruddy young man from Scotland—would answer timidly: “_Oune bock_.”

“That gives a high idea of Paris,” Phil said, as they went out. To him it all seemed stupid. What a contrast for him, after an evening passed with Ethel, were these pestiferous dives with their brute public, like pigs at the fattening! The pitiful sight recalled to him the weak-willed days of the past, the evenings at the Deux Magots, the masterpieces drawn in pencil on café tables and wiped off with a rag.

Caracal made a study of the different cabarets, preferring this one to that and drawing a dilettante’s distinctions between their poets and singers.

“Such an one enunciates well. Have you heard his ballad of ‘The Drunkard and the Rotting Dog’? That is art!”

And with an elegant gesture he fixed the monocle in his eye. Phil examined Caracal and tried to discern in his face the low instincts, the hatreds, the thumb-marks of degeneracy. He saw nothing but self-satisfaction.

They had arrived at The Pustule, the latest _cabaret artistique_.

“Let’s go in!” Caracal proposed. “It shall be the last.”

“I shall leave you afterward,” said Phil.

They entered. A blonde girl, with a thin, colorless voice and childish gestures and little smirks, was singing:

“Les bosquets du Bois d’Boulogne Ous’ qu’on fait Zizi pan pan!”

Her place was taken by a _chansonnier rosse_, fat and bald. This one began at once, in an aggressive tone, a political satire. What? there was a couplet against Americans—Richard the Lion-hearted again, and then a direct allusion to a certain American miss—in this sewer!

Phil rose up, pale with anger. He would have smashed things, and shut the mouth of the fat brute bellowing on the stage; but suddenly he thought that he might compromise Miss Rowrer. He sat down, clenching his fist.

“I’d like to know who writes such infamous songs!” he said to Caracal.

“Bah, never mind! Calm yourself!” Caracal answered, with sudden uneasiness. “Never mind; it’s not worth while. No one understands!”

“What a set of fools!” Phil went on. “I’m going away; I choke here!”

“We’ll go with you,” added the Duke of Morgania.

A moment later Phil took his leave of the duke and Caracal, to return home. From the other side of the street he saw Caracal gesticulating and explaining modern art to the duke. Fragmentary sentences reached his ear: “_Chansonniers rosses_—off with all masks—the future of poetry—poetry _voyez-vous_—just like the rose, sprouts from the dunghill.”