Chapter 4

The next day was for him a free one. He wandered up and down the Rue de la Paix staring moodily into the jewellers' windows. That night, though he could have stayed away from the café, he returned at ten o'clock, and luckily enough was needed. Joseph greeted him effusively. The "mast," the thin fellow from Marseilles, had gone home with a splitting headache. Would Ambroise stay and serve his usual table? To his immense astonishment and joy he saw her enter alone. He took her wraps and seated her on her favourite divan near an electric fan. Then he stared expectantly at the door. But her carriage had driven away. Was a part of his dream coming true? He closed his eyes, and straightway saw scarlet. Then he went for wine, without taking her order.

Aholibah was preoccupied. She played with the bracelet on her tawny left wrist. Occasionally she lifted her glass, or else tossed her hair from her eyes. If any stranger ventured near her, she began to hum insolently, or spoke earnestly with Ambroise. He was in the eleventh heaven of the Persians. Two Ambroises appeared to be in him: one served his lady, spoke with her; the other from afar contemplated with the ecstasy of a hasheesh eater his counterfeit brother. It was an exquisite sensation.

"The purse--has Mademoiselle--" He stammered.

"No," she crisply answered.

"Can it never be duplicated? Perhaps--"

"Never. It is impossible. It was made in Africa."

"But--but--" he persisted. His bearing was so peculiar that she bent upon him her dynamic gaze.

"What's the matter with you this evening, Ambroise? Have you come into a successful lottery ticket? Or--" She was suspiciously looking at him. "Or--you haven't found _it_?"

He nodded his head, his face beatific with joy. He resembled the youthful Saint George after slaying the dragon. She was startled. Her eyes positively lightened; he listened for the attendant peal of thunder.

"Speak out, you booby. Cornichon! Where did you find it? Let me see it--at once." All fire and imperiousness, she held out grasping fingers. He shook. And then carefully he drew from the inside pocket of his coat, the purse. She snatched it. Yes--it was her purse. And yet there was something strange about it. Had the stones been tampered with? She examined it searchingly. She boasted a jeweller's knowledge of diamonds and rubies. One of the stones had been transposed, that she could have sworn. And how different the expression of the serpent's eyes--small carbuncles. No--it was not her purse! She looked at Ambroise. He was paling and reddening in rapid succession.

"It is _not_ my purse! How did this come into your possession? It is very valuable, quite as valuable as mine. But the eyes of my serpent were not so large--I mean the carbuncles. Ambroise--look at me! I command you! Where did you find this treasure--cher ami!" Her seductive voice lingered on the last words as if they were a morsel of delicious fruit. He leaned heavily on the table and closed his eyes to shut out her face--but he only saw scarlet. He heard scarlet.

"I--I--bought the thing because--you missed the other--" He could get no further. She smiled, showing her celebrated teeth.

"You bought the thing--_hein_? You must be a prince in disguise--Ambroise! And I have just lost _my_ Prince! Perhaps--you thought--you audacious boy--"

He kept his eyes closed. She was in a corner of the room--quite empty--the other waiters were on the terrace. She weighed his appearance and smiled mysteriously; her smile, her glance, and her scarlet gowns were her dramatic assets. Then she spoke in a low voice--a contralto like the darker tones of an English horn:--

"I fancy I'll keep your thoughtful _gift_--Ambroise. And now, like a good boy, get a fiacre for me!" She went away, leaving him standing in the middle of the room, a pillar of burning ice. When Joseph spoke to him he did not answer. Then they took him by the arm, and he fell over in a seizure which, asserted the practical head waiter, was caused by indigestion.

II

ACROSS THE STYX

It was raining on the Left Bank. The chill of a November afternoon cut its way through the doors of the Café La Source in the Boul' Mich' and made shiver the groups of young medical students who were reading or playing dominos. Ambroise Nettier, older, thinner, paler, waited carefully on his patrons. He had been in the hospital with brain fever, and after he was cured, one of the students secured him a position at this café in the Quartier. He had been afraid to go back to the Café Riche; Joseph had harshly discharged him on that terrible night; alone, without a home, without a penny, his savings gone, his life insurance hypothecated,--it had been intended for the benefit of his parents,--his clothes, his very trunk gone, and plunged in debt to his fellow-waiters, his brain had succumbed to the shock. But Ambroise was young and strong; when he left the hospital he was relieved to find that he no longer saw scarlet. He was a healed man. He had intended to seek for a place at the Café Cardinal, but it was too near the Café Riche--he might meet old acquaintances, might be asked embarrassing questions. So he gladly accepted his present opportunity.

The dulness of the day waxed with its waning. It was nearly six o'clock when the door slowly opened and Aholibah entered. She was alone. Her scarlet plumage was wet, and she was painted like a Peruvian war-god. She did not appear so brilliant a bird of paradise--or elsewhere--as at the aviary across the water. Yet her gaze was as forthright as ever. She sat on a divan between two domino parties, and was hardly noticed by the fanatics of that bony diversion. Recognizing Ambroise, she made a sign to him. It was some minutes before he could reach her table; he had other orders. When he did, she said she wanted some absinthe. He stared at her. Yes, absinthe--she had discarded iced wines. The doctor told her that cold wine was dangerous. He still stared. Then she held up the purse. It was a mere shell; all the stones save the amethyst in the mouth of the serpent were gone. She laughed shrilly. He went for the drink. She lighted a cigarette....

Every night for six months she haunted the café. She was always unattended, always in excellent humour. She made few friends among the students. Her scarlet dress grew shabbier. Her gloves and boots were pitiful to Ambroise, who recalled her former splendours, her outrageous extravagances. Why had fortune flouted her! Why had she let it, like water, escape through her jewelled, indifferent fingers! He made no inquiries. She vouchsafed none. They were now on a different footing. Tantalizingly she dangled the purse under his nose as he brought her absinthe--always this opalescent absinthe. She drank it in the morning, in the afternoon, at night. She seldom spoke save to Ambroise. And he--he no longer saw scarlet, for the glorious tone of her hat and gown had vanished. They were rusty red, a carroty tint. Her face was like the mask of La Buveuse d'Absinthe, by Felicien Rops; her eyes, black wells of regard; her hair without lustre, and coarse as the mane of a horse. Aholibah no longer manifested interest in the life of Paris. She did not read or gossip. But she still had money to spend.

The night he quarrelled with his new patron, Ambroise was not well. All the day his head had pained him. When he reached La Source, the dame at the cashier's desk told him that he was in for a scolding. He shrugged his thin shoulders. He didn't care very much. Later the prophesied event occurred. He had been much too attentive to the solitary woman who drank absinthe day and night. The patron did not propose to see his establishment, patronized as it was by the shining lights of medicine--!

Ambroise changed his clothes and went away without a word. He was weary of his existence, and a friend who shared his wretched room in the Rue Mouffetard had apprised him of a vacant job at a livelier resort, the Café Vachette, commonly known as the Café Rasta. There he would earn more tips, though the work would be more fatiguing. And--the Morocco Woman might not follow him. He hurried away.

III

AVERNUS

She sat on a divan in the corner when he entered the Vachette for the first time. He said nothing, nor did he experience either a thrill of pleasure or disgust. The other waiters assured him that she was an old customer, sometimes better dressed, yet never without money. And she was liberal. He took her usual order, but did not speak to her, though she played with the purse as if to tempt him--it had become for him a symbol of their lives. A quick glance assured him that the amethyst had disappeared. She was literally drinking _his_ gift away in absinthe. The spring passed, and Ambroise did not regain his former health. His limbs were leaden, his head always heavy. The alert waiter was transformed. He took his orders soberly, executed them soberly,--he was still a good routinier; but his early enthusiasm was absent. Something had gone from him that night; as she went to her carriage with her scornful, snapping, petulant _Ça_!--he felt that his life was over. Aholibah watched like a cat every night; he was not on for day duty. She never came to the Rasta before dark. The story of her infatuation for the well-bred, melancholy garçon was noised about; but it did not endanger his position, as at La Source. He paid little attention to the jesting, and was scrupulously exact in his work. But the sense of his double personality began to worry him again. He did not see scarlet as of old; he noticed when his eyes were closed that the apparition of a second Ambroise swam into the field of his vision. And he was positively certain that this spectre of himself saw scarlet--the attitude of his double assured him of the fact. Simple-minded, ignorant of cerebral disorders, loyal, and laborious, Ambroise could not speak of these disquieting things--indeed, he only worked the more....

At last, one night in late summer, she did not appear. It was after a day when she had sung more insolently than ever, drunk more than her accustomed allowance, and had shown Ambroise the purse--the sockets of the serpent's eyes untenanted by the beautiful carbuncles. Apathetic as he had become, he was surprised at her absence. It was either caprice or serious illness. She had dwindled to a skeleton, with a maleficent smile. Her teeth were yellow, her hands become claws, the scarlet of her clothes a drab hue, the plumes on her hat gone. Ambroise wondered. About midnight a mean-looking fellow entered and asked for him. A lady, a very ill lady, was in a coupé at the door. He hurried out. It was Aholibah. Her eyes were glazed and her lips black and cracked. She tried to croon, in a hoarse voice:--

"I am the Woman of Morocco!" But her head fell on the window-sill of the carriage. Ambroise lifted the weary head on his shoulder. His eyes were so dry that they seemed thirsty. The old glamour gripped him. The cabman held the reins and waited; it was an every-night occurrence for him. The starlight could not penetrate to the Boulevard through the harsh electric glare; and the whirring of wheels and laughter of the café's guests entered the soul of Ambroise like steel nails. She opened her eyes.

"I am that Aholibah ... a witness through waste Asia ... that the strong men and the Captains knew ..." This line of Swinburne's was pronounced in the purest English. Ambroise did not understand. Then followed some rapidly uttered jargon that might have been Moorish. He soothed her, and softly passed his hand over her rough and dishevelled hair. His heart was bursting. She was after all his Aholibah, his first love. A crowd gathered. He asked for a doctor. A dozen students ran in a dozen different directions. The tired horse stamped its feet impatiently, and once it whinnied. The coachman lighted his pipe and watched his dying fare. Some wag sang a drunken lyric, and Ambroise repeated at intervals:--

"Please not so close, Messieurs. She needs air." Then she moved her head and murmured:

"Where's--my Prince? My--Prince Ambroise--I have something--" Her head fell back on his shoulder with a rigid jerk. In her clenched fingers he recognized his purse--smudged, torn, the serpent mouth gaping, the eyes empty.... And for the last time Ambroise saw scarlet--saw scarlet double. His two personalities had separated, never to merge again.

IV

REBELS OF THE MOON

"On my honour, friend," Zarathustra answered, "what thou speakest of doth not exist: there is no devil nor hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body: henceforth fear naught."

The moon, a spiritual gray wafer, fainted in the red wind of a summer morning as the two men leaped a ditch soft with mud. The wall was not high, the escape an easy one. Crouching, their clothes the colour of clay, they trod cautiously the trench, until opposite a wood whose trees blackened the slow dawn. Then, without a word, they ran across the road, and, in a few minutes, were lost in the thick underbrush of the little forest. It was past four o'clock and the dawn began to trill over the rim of night; the east burst into stinging sun rays, while the moving air awoke the birds and sent scurrying around the smooth green park a cloud of golden powdery dust....

Arved and Quell stood in a secret glade and looked at each other solemnly--but only for a moment. Laughter, unrestrained laughter, frightened the squirrels and warned them that they were still in danger.

"Well, we've escaped this time," said the poet.

"Yes; but how long?" was the sardonic rejoinder of the painter.

"See here, Quell, you're a pessimist. You are never satisfied; which, I take it, is a neat definition of pessimism."

"I don't propose to chop logic so early in the morning," was the surly reply. "I'm cold and nervous. Say, did you lift anything before we got away?" Arved smiled the significant smile of a drinking man.

"Yes, I did. I waited until Doc McKracken left his office, and then I sneaked _this_." The severe lines in Quell's face began to swim together. He reached out his hand, took the flask, and then threw back his head. Arved watched him with patient resignation.

"Hold on there! Leave a dozen drops for a poor maker of rhymes," he chuckled, and soon was himself gurgling the liquor.

They arose, and after despairing glances at their bespattered garments, trudged on. In an hour, the pair had reached the edge of the forest, and, as the sun sat high and warm, a rest was agreed upon. But this time they did not easily find a hiding-place. Fearing to venture nearer the turnpike, hearing human sounds, they finally retired from the clearing, and behind a moss-etched rock discovered a cool resting-place on the leafy floor.

At full length, hands under heads, brains mellowed by brandy, the men summed up the situation. Arved was the first to speak. He was tall, blond, heavy of figure, and his beard hung upon his chest. His dissatisfied eyes were cynical when he rallied his companion. A man of brains this, but careless as the grass.

"Quell, let us think this thing out carefully. It is nearly six o'clock. At six o'clock the cells will be unlocked, and then,--well, McKracken will damn our bones, for he gets a fat board fee from my people, and the table is not so cursed good at the Hermitage that he misses a margin of profit! What will he do? Set the dogs after us? No, he daren't; we're not convicts--we're only mad folk." He smiled good-humouredly, though his white brow was dented as if by harsh thoughts.

Quell's little bloodshot eyes stared up into a narrow channel of foliage, at the end of which was a splash of blue sky. He was mean-appearing, with a horselike head, his mustache twisted into a savage curl. His forehead was abnormal in breadth and the irritable flashes of fire in his eyes told the story of a restless soul. The nostrils expanded as he spoke:--

"We're only mad folk, as you say; nevertheless, the Lord High Keeper will send his police patrol wagon after us in a jiffy. He went to bed dead full last night, so his humour won't be any too sweet when he hears that several of his boarders have vanished. He'll miss you more than me; I'm not at the first table with you swells."

Quell ended his speech with so disagreeable an inflection that Arved was astonished. He looked around and spat at a beetle.

"What's wrong with you, my hearty? I believe you miss your soft iron couch. Or did you leave it this morning left foot foremost? Anyhow, Quell, don't get on your ear. We'll push to town as soon as it's twilight, and I know a little crib near the river where we can have all we want to eat and drink. Do you hear--drink!" Quell made no answer. The other continued:--

"Besides, I don't see why you've turned sulky simply because your family sent you up to the Hermitage. It's no disgrace. In fact, it steadies the nerves, and you can get plenty of booze."

"If you have the price," snapped his friend.

"Money or no money, McKracken's asylum--no, it's bad taste to call it that; his retreat, ah, there's the word!--is not so awful. I've a theory that our keepers are crazy as loons; though you can't blame them, watching us, as they must, from six o'clock in the morning until midnight. Say, why were you put away?"

"Crazy, like yourself, I suppose." Quell grinned.

"And now we're cured. We cured ourselves by flight. How can they call us crazy when we planned the job so neatly?"

Arved began to be interested in the sound of his own voice. He searched his pockets and after some vain fumbling found a half package of cigarettes.

"Take some and be happy, my boy. They are boon-sticks indeed." Quell suddenly arose.

"Arved, what were you sent up for, may I ask?"

The poet stretched his big legs, rolled over on his back again, and scratching his tangled beard, smoked the cigarette he had just lighted. In the hot hum of the woods there was heard the occasional dropping of pine cones as the wind fanned lazy music from the leaves. They could not see the sun; its power was felt. Perspiration beaded their shiny faces and presently they removed collars and coats, sitting at ease in shirt-sleeves.... Arved's tongue began to speed:--

"Though I've only known you twenty-four hours, my son, I feel impelled to tell you the history of my happy life--for happiness has its histories, no matter what the poets say. But the day is hot, our time limited. Wait until we are recaptured, then I'll spin you a yarn."

"You expect to get caught for sure?"

"I do. So do you. No need to argue--your face tells me that. But we'll have the time of our life before they gather us in. Anyhow, we'll want to go back. The whole world is crazy, but ashamed to acknowledge it. We are not. Pascal said men are so mad that he who would not be is a madman of a new kind. To escape ineffable dulness is the privilege of the lunatic; the lunatic, who is the true aristocrat of nature--the unique man in a tower of ivory, the elect, who, in samite robes, traverses moody gardens. Really, I shudder at the idea of ever living again in yonder stewpot of humanity, with all its bad smells. To struggle with the fools for their idiotic prizes is beyond me. The lunatic asylum--"

"Can't you find some other word?" asked Quell, dryly.

"--is the best modern equivalent for the tub of Diogenes--he who was the first Solitary, the first Individualist. To dream one's dreams, to be alone--"

"How about McKracken and the keepers?"

"From the volatile intellects of madmen are fashioned the truths of humanity. Mental repose is death. All our modern theocrats, politicians,--whose minds are sewers for the people,--and lawyers are corpses, their brains dead from feeding on dead ideas. Motion is life--mad minds are always in motion."

"Let up there! You talk like the doctor chaps over at the crazy crib," interrupted Quell.

"Ah, if we could only arrange our dreams in chapters--as in a novel. Sometimes Nature does it for us. There is really a beginning, a development, a dénouement. But, for the most of us, life is a crooked road with weeds so high that we can't see the turn of the path. Now, my case--I'm telling you my story after all--my case is a typical one of the artistic sort. I wrote prose, verse, and dissipated with true poetic regularity. It was after reading Nietzsche that I decided to quit my stupid, sinful ways. Yes, you may smile! It was Nietzsche who converted me. I left the old crowd, the old life in Paris, went to Brittany, studied new rhythms, new forms, studied the moon; and then people began to touch their foreheads knowingly. I was suspected simply because I did not want to turn out sweet sonnets about the pretty stars. Why, man, I have a star in my stomach! Every poet has. We are of the same stuff as the stars. It was Marlowe who said, 'A sound magician is a mighty god.' He was wrong. Only the mentally unsound are really wise. This the ancients knew. Even if Gerard de Nerval did walk the boulevards trolling a lobster by a blue ribbon--that is no reason for judging him crazy. As he truly said, 'Lobsters neither bark nor bite; and they know the secrets of the sea!' His dreams simply overflowed into his daily existence. He had the courage of his dreams. Do you remember his declaring that the sun never appears in dreams? How true! But the moon does, 'sexton of the planets,' as the crazy poet Lenau called it--the moon which is the patron sky-saint of men with brains. Ah, brains! What unhappiness they cause in this brainless world, a world rotten with hypocrisy. A poet polishes words until they glitter with beauty, charging them with fulminating meaning--straightway he is called mad by men who sweat and toil on the stock exchange. Have you ever, my dear Quell, watched those little, grotesque brokers on a busy day? No? Well, you will say that no lunatic grimacing beneath the horns of the moon ever made such ludicrous, such useless, gestures. And for what? Money! Money to spend as idiotically as it is garnered. The world is crazy, I tell you, crazy, to toil as it does. How much cleverer are the apes who won't talk, because, if they did, they would be forced to abandon their lovely free life, put on ugly garments, and work for a living. These animals, for which we have such contempt, are freer than men; they are the Supermen of Nietzsche--Nietzsche whose brain mirrored both a Prometheus and a Napoleon." Quell listened to this speech with indifference. Arved continued:--

"Nor was Nietzsche insane when he went to the asylum. His sanity was blinding in its brilliancy; he voluntarily renounced the world of foolish faces and had himself locked away where he would not hear its foolish clacking. O Silence! gift of the gods, deified by Carlyle in many volumes and praised by me in many silly words! My good fellow, society, which is always hypocritical, has to build lunatic asylums in self-defence. These polite jails keep the world in countenance; they give it a standard. If _you_ are behind the bars--"

"Speak for yourself," growled Quell.

"Then the world knows that you are crazy and that _it_ is not. There is no other way of telling the difference. So a conspiracy of fools, lawyers, and doctors is formed. If you do not live the life of the stupid: cheat, lie, steal, smirk, eat, dance, and drink--then you are crazy! That fact agreed upon, the hypocrites, who are quite mad, but cunning enough to dissemble, lock behind bolted doors those free souls, the poets, painters, musicians--artistic folk in general. They brand our gifts with fancy scientific names, such as Megalomania, Paranoia, _Folie des grandeurs_. Show me a genius and I'll show you a madman--according to the world's notion."

"There you go again," cried Quell, arising to his knees. "Genius, _I_ believe, is a disease of the nerves; and I don't mind telling you that I consider poets and musicians quite crazy."

Arved's eyes were blazing blue signals.