Grey Roses | Page 9

at his
sobriquet. We would have rewarded liberally, at that time, any one who
could have told us what the K. stood for. We yearned to unite the
cryptic word to his surname by a hyphen; the mere abstract notion of
doing so filled us with fearful joy. Chalks was right, I dare say; we
were easily amused. And Nina, at these moments of literary frenzy--I

can see her now: her head bent over the manuscript, her hair in some
disarray, a spiral of cigarette-smoke winding ceilingward from between
the fingers of her idle hand, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming with
mischievous inspirations, her face pale with the intensity of her glee. I
can see her as she would look up, eagerly, to listen to somebody's
suggestion, or as she would motion to us to be silent, crying,
'Attendez--I've got an idea.' Then her pen would dash swiftly, noisily,
over her paper for a little, whilst we all waited expectantly; and at last
she would lean back, drawing a long breath, and tossing the pen aside,
to read her paragraph out to us.
In a word, she managed very well, and by no means died of hunger.
She could scarcely afford Madame Chanve's three-franc table d'hôte, it
is true; but we could dine modestly at Léon's, over the way, and return
to the Bleu for coffee,--though, it must be added, that establishment no
longer enjoyed a monopoly of our custom. We patronised it and the
Vachette, the Source, the Ecoles, the Souris, indifferently. Or we would
sometimes spend our evenings in Nina's rooms. She lived in a
tremendously swagger house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire,--on the
sixth floor, to be sure, but 'there was a carpet all the way up.' She had a
charming little salon, with her own furniture and piano (the same that
had formerly embellished our café), and no end of books, pictures,
draperies, and pretty things, inherited from her father or presented by
her friends.
By this time the inevitable had happened, and we were all in love with
her,--hopelessly, resignedly so, and without internecine rancour, for she
treated us, indiscriminately, with a serene, impartial, tolerant, derision;
but we were savagely, luridly, jealous and suspicious of all new-comers
and of all outsiders. If we could not win her, no one else should; and we
formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire. Oh, the maddening,
mock-sentimental, mock-sympathetic face she would pull, when one of
us ventured to sigh to her of his passion! The way she would lift her
eyebrows, and gaze at you with a travesty of pity, shaking her head
pensively, and murmuring, 'Mon pauvre ami! Only fancy!' And then
how the imp, lurking in the corners of her eyes, with only the barest
pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly leap forth in a

peal of laughter! She had lately read Mr. Howells's 'Undiscovered
Country,' and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for love: 'Feeling
foolish.'--'Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye, gentlemen?' she inquired,
mimicking the dialect of Chalks. 'Well, I guess you just ain't feeling
any more foolish than you look.'--If she would but have taken us
seriously! And the worst of it was that we knew she was anything but
temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the potentialities we divined
in her, when he remarked, regretfully, wistfully, as he often did, 'She
could love like Hell.' Once, in a reckless moment, he even went so far
as to tell her this pointblank. 'Oh, naughty Chalks!' she remonstrated,
shaking her finger at him. 'Do you think that's a pretty word? But--I
dare say I could.'
'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued
gloomily.
'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't approve of
matrimony as an institution. And then--as you say--Lord help my
husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So capricious, and
flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and disobedient, and exacting,
and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No, I shall never marry.
Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't marry; but, if I ever meet a
man and love him--ah!' She placed two fingers upon her lips, and
kissed them, and waved the kiss to the skies.
This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and
the three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared
threateningly at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom
she might some day meet and love. We were sure, of course, that he
would be a beast; we hated him not merely because he would have cut
us out with her, but because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so
hopelessly unworthy of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her.
I think we conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and