Chapter III: Book II: The Lone Wolf’s Daughter (1)

I THE GIRL SOFIA

She sat all day long—from noon, that is, till late at night—on a high stool behind the tall, pulpit-like desk of the caisse; flanked on one hand by the swing door of green baize which communicated with the kitchen, on the other by a hideous black walnut buffet on which fruits of the season were displayed, more or less temptingly, to the taste of Mama Thérèse.

But for these articles of furniture, the buffet, the desk, and the door to the kitchen quarters, uninterrupted rows of tables, square, with composition-marble tops, lined three walls of the room. The fourth was mainly plate-glass window, one on either side of the main entrance.

Back of the tables were wall-seats upholstered in red plush, dusty and threadbare; and, above, a frieze of mirrors. The floor of the restaurant was a patternless mosaic of small hexagonal tiles, bare in warm weather, in the winter covered by a thick but well-worn Brussels carpet of peculiarly repulsive design. The windows wore half-curtains of net which, after nightfall, were reinforced by ruffled draperies of rep silk. Through the net curtains, by day, the name of the restaurant was shadowed in reverse by plain white-enamel letters glued to the glass:

The girl stared so constantly at these letters, during the off hours of the day, that she sometimes wondered if they were not indelibly stamped upon her brain, like this:

She gazed in the direction of the windows as a matter of habit, because Mama Thérèse objected to her reading at the desk (all the same, sometimes she did it on the sly) because the glimpses she caught, above the half-curtains, of heads of passersby gave her idle imagination something to play with, but mostly because it was difficult otherwise to seem unconscious of the stares that converged toward her from every table occupied by a masculine patron, whether regular or casual—unless the patron happened to be accompanied by a lady, in which unhappy event he had to content himself with furtive, sidelong glances, not always furtive enough by half.

The feminine patrons stared, too, but from quite another angle of view.

Sofia knew why. If she hadn’t, the mirror across the room would have enlightened even a woman without vanity; which paradox this thoroughly human young person was not.

She was, indeed, healthily vain; and when she wasn’t focussing dream-dark eyes upon the windows, or verifying additions and making change, she was as likely as not to be stealing consultations with the mirror opposite, making sure she hadn’t, in the last few minutes, gone off in her looks. Not that her comeliness bade fair ever to prove the cause of any real excitement. Mama Thérèse made a first-rate dragon: she was very much on the job of discouraging enterprising young men, and this without respect for union hours or overtime. And when she wasn’t functioning as the ubiquitous wet-blanket, Papa Dupont understudied for her, and did it most efficiently, too. If anything he was more vigilant and enthusiastic when it came to administering the snub sufficient than even Mama Thérèse; in Sofia’s sight, indeed, he betrayed some personal feeling in the business; he seemed to consider alien admiration of his charge an encroachment upon his private prerogatives, to be resented accordingly.

Sofia understood. At eighteen—thanks to the comprehensive visual education in the business of life which she could hardly have failed to assimilate from a coign of vantage overlooking every table of a Soho restaurant—there were precious few things she didn’t understand. But her insight into Papa Dupont’s mind in respect of herself was wholly devoid of sympathy. She was just a little bit afraid of him, and she despised him without measure. And this contempt was founded on something more than his weakness for taking numerous and surreptitious nips (surreptitious, at least, until they became numerous) while presiding over the zinc in the pantry between the restaurant proper and the kitchen; and on something more than his reluctance to let Mama Thérèse make an honest man of him, although these two had squabbled openly for so many years that most of the house staff believed them to be married hard and fast enough.

For the matter of that, Sofia herself might have been the dupe of this popular delusion—which Mama Thérèse did her best to encourage by never referring to Dupont save as “mon mari”—had they been less imprudent in recriminations which had passed between them in private when Sofia was of an age so tender that she was presumed to be safely immature of mind. Whereas she had always been precocious, if rather a self-contained child. Almost from infancy she had been conversant with many things which she knew it wouldn’t do to talk about.

Such sympathy as Sofia wasted on the couple was all for Mama Thérèse. What with keeping an eye on Papa Dupont that prevented his drinking himself to death seven times per calendar week, and an eye on Sofia that was fondly credited with being largely responsible for her failure to run away with each and every presentable man who ogled her, and browbeating the waiters and frustrating their attempts to cheat the house out of its fair dues, and supervising the marketing and the cuisine: believe it or not, Mama Thérèse led a tolerably busy life and deserved whatever gratification she got out of it, to say nothing of highest commendation for industry, fidelity, and frugality. But that did nothing to prevent Sofia from not liking her.

Her inability to play up to the relationship in which she stood to Mama Thérèse in the manner prescribed by sentimentalists worried Sofia more than a little. She was as hungry to give affection as to receive it; and surely she ought to be fond of Mama Thérèse, who (Sofia was forever being reminded) had in the goodness of her great heart adopted her as the orphaned offspring of a cousin far-removed, and had brought her up at her own expense, expecting no return (excepting humility, gratitude, unquestioning affection, and uncomplaining acceptance of a life of incessant toil at tasks uncongenial when not downright unsavoury, without spending money or hours of untrammelled liberty in which to spend it).

Surely such nobility ought to be requited with nothing less than love!

Nevertheless, the plain, and to Sofia disquieting, truth was: it wasn’t.

She was fond of Mama Thérèse after a fashion. No one was ever more ready to acknowledge the woman’s good qualities. But her faults, which included avarice, bad temper, gluttony, native cruelty of inclination, and simple inability to give a damn for anybody but herself, forbade satisfaction of Sofia’s yearnings to give her affections freely through bestowing them upon the abundant and florid person of Mama Thérèse.

Still, she made no murmur. There was more than a trace of fatalism in the composition of her spirit. As she conceived it, in this life either things were or they were not; and as a rule they uncompromisingly were not: one couldn’t have everything.

She was not happy, it would be stretching the truth to say she was content, but she was resigned, she was patient, she waited not altogether without confidence....

All the same, sometimes, as she sat, day in day out, on her high stool, looking down on familiar aspects of life’s fermentation as it manifests in public restaurants, or peering out of the windows to catch tantalizing glimpses of its freer, ampler, and—alas!—more recondite phases—sometimes Sofia wondered whether there were not grimly cynic innuendo in those three words which the mystery of choice had affixed to the window-panes and graven so deep into her soul.

For surely she was in exile there, an exile from all the fun and frolic and, fury of life, marooned in weary isolation, on a high stool, in a frowsty table d’hôte, in the living heart of London.

II MASKS AND FACES

Quite naturally she became acquainted with Faces....

She grew adept at a game which consisted mostly in keeping close watch upon those who for this reason or that engaged her attention, without giving them the slightest reason to suspect she was doing anything of the sort.

One could not always be staring in abstraction at nothing in particular as it passed to and fro on the sidewalk in front of the Café des Exiles; one could not often or for long at a time succeed in reading a book held open in one’s lap, below the level of the cashier’s desk, Mama Thérèse was too brisk for that; one had to do something with one’s mind; and it was sometimes diverting to watch and speculate about people who looked interesting.

There were so many Faces, they came and went so constantly, like bubbles in a tideway, that to Sofia most of them seemed indistinguishable one from another, mere blurs of flesh colour studded with staring eyes and slitted by apertures which automatically and alternately gaped to receive gobbets of food and goblets of drink and closed to gulp them down. A man needed to be remarkable for something in his looks, not necessarily pulchritude, or for uncommon individuality, for Sofia to favour him with more than one of her seemingly casual glances or to remember him if he visited the café a second time.

But those there were who stood out from the rank and file, for whom she watched, whom she missed if they failed to put in appearance at their accustomed hours, about whom her idle but able imagination wove wonderful fantasies, enduing them with histories and environments as far removed from fact as the drab dreams of the realists are from the picturesque commonplaces of everyday.

And there were others who came once and never again, but whom she never forgot. But for some of these last, indeed, she would never have remembered some of the former. The brown-eyed youngster with the sentimental expression and the funny little moustache, for example, lurked in the ruck a long time before the one and only visit of a bird of passage dignified him in the sight of the girl on the high stool.

On the occasion of his first appearance (but that was long ago, Sofia couldn’t remember how long) the slender young man with the soulful eyes and the insignificant moustache had commended himself to her somewhat derisive attention by seeming uncommonly exquisite for that atmosphere.

The Café des Exiles was little haunted by the world of fashion; its diner á prix fixe (2/6), although excellent, surprisingly well done for the money, did not much seduce the clientèle of the Carlton and the Ritz. Now and again its remoteness, promising freedom from embarrassing encounters save through unlikely mischance, would bring it the custom of a clandestine couple from the West End, who would for a time make it an almost daily rendezvous, meeting nervously, sitting if possible in the most shadowy corner, the farthest from the door, and holding hands when they mistakenly assumed that nobody was looking—until the affair languished or some contretemps frightened them away.

Aside from such visitations, however, the great world coldly passed the café by; although it couldn’t complain for lack of patronage, and in fact prospered exceedingly if without ostentation on the half-crowns of loyal Soho and more fickle suburbia.

The Sohobohemian on its native heath and the City clerk on the loose, however, were not prone to such vestments as young Mr. Karslake affected. It wasn’t that he overdressed; even the ribald would have hesitated to libel him with the name of a “nut”—which is Cockney for what the United States knows as a “fancy (or swell) dresser”; it was simply that he was always irreproachably turned out, whatever the form of dress he thought appropriate to the time of day; and that his wardrobe was so complete and varied that he seldom appeared twice in the same suit of clothes—except, of course, after nightfall; though his visits to the Café des Exiles for dinner or afterward were so infrequent that each attained (after Sofia began to notice him at all) the importance of an occasion. Luncheon was his time, and those empty hours at the end of the afternoon which London fills in with tea and Soho with drinks.

He seemed to have a very wide and catholic acquaintance among people of all ranks and stations in life; one could hardly call them friendships, for he lunched or sipped an aperti not often with the same person twice in a blue moon. And whether his companion were a curate or some ragged wastrel of the quarter; painted young person from the chorus of the newest revue or proper matron from Bayswater; keen adventurer from Fleet Street or solid merchant from the City, his attitude was much the same: easy, impersonal, unaffected, courteous, detached. He was as apt as not (going on his facial expression) to be mooning about Sofia when his guest was gesticulating wildly and uttering three hundred words a minute. When he spoke it was modestly, in a voice of agreeable cadences but pitched so low that Sofia never but twice heard anything he said; and his manner was not characterized by brisk decision. All the same, one noticed that he had, as a rule, the last word, that what he said left his hearer either satisfied or pensive.

He was unmistakably silly about Sofia; though that didn’t impress her, too many of the regulars were just as hard hit, one more or less didn’t count. But he never stared to the point of rudeness, and it always seemed to make him hugely uncomfortable if she appeared in the least aware of his adoration; and Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont never even noticed him, so circumspect was he. Still, Sofia saw, and sometimes wondered, just as she wondered now and then about most of the possible men who seemed disposed to be sentimental about her.

For there were times when she felt she could do with a little more first-hand experience and a little less second-hand knowledge.

Love (she supposed) must be a very agreeable frame of mind to be in, it was so generally vogue....

What first led her to think that Mr. Karslake might be an interesting person to know, entirely aside from his admiration, happened on an afternoon in June, a warm day for England, when a temperature of some 81 degrees was responsible for “heat-wave” broadsides issued by the evening papers.

At about tea time, Mr. Karslake, faultlessly arrayed, ambled in, selected a table diagonally across the room from the caisse, exchanged pleasantries with the waiter who served him a picon, and used a copy of The Evening Standard & St. James’s Gazette as a cover for his wistful admiration of Sofia.

Presently he was joined by a gentleman twice his age, if not older, whose conservative smartness was such that one wondered if he hadn’t strayed out of bounds through inadvertence. One would have thought his place was in the clubs of Piccadilly if not (at that particular hour) at a tea table on the river terrace of the Houses of Parliament. On the other hand, there wasn’t a trace of self-importance in his habit, it achieved distinction solely through the unpretending dignity of a decent self-esteem.

Sofia tried to fix what it was that made her think him the handsomest man she had ever seen. She failed. He wasn’t at all handsome in the smug fashion associated with the popular interpretation of that term; his features were engagingly irregular of conformation, but the impression they conveyed was of a singular strength together with as rare a fineness of spirit. A mobile and expressive face, stamped with a history of strange ordeals; but this must not be interpreted as meaning that it was haggard or prematurely aged; on the contrary, it had youthful colour and was but lightly scored with wrinkles, its sole confession of advancing years was in the gray at either temple. The eyes, perhaps, told more than anything else of trials endured and memories that would never rest.

Once they had looked into hers (but that came later) Sofia was sure she would never forget those eyes. And as she saw them then, she never did forget them. But the next time she saw them she did not know them at all.

The newcomer hailed Mr. Karslake by his name (which was the first time Sofia had heard it), sat down on the wall-seat beside him and, when the waiter came, desired an absinthe.

He had used two languages already, English to Karslake, French to the waiter; Sofia understood both and spoke them to perfection. So it was rather exasperating when, his absinthe having been served and the customary platitudes passed on the weather and their respective states of health, the conversation was continued in a tongue with which Sofia was not only unacquainted but which sounded like none she had ever heard spoken. This seemed the more annoying because there were few people in the restaurant to drown with chatter the sound of those two voices and because, in spite of their guarded tones, their table was one so situated that some freak of acoustics carried every syllable uttered at it, even though whispered, to the quick ears at the cashier’s desk. A circumstance which had treated Sofia to many a moment of covert entertainment and not a few that threatened to shatter what slender illusions had survived eighteen years of Mama Thérèse. But nobody else (with the possible exception of the last) was acquainted with this secret of the restaurant, and Sofia was careful never to mention it.

Now it so happened that Mr. Karslake had never before sat at that particular table.

The language spoken at it to-day intrigued Sofia extravagantly. It was rich in labials, gutturals, and odd sibilances. She was positive it was not a European tongue, though she thought it might possibly be Russian, because it sounded rather like Russian print looks; it might just as well have been Arabic or Choctaw, for all Sofia could say to the contrary. But his fluent ease in it impressed her with the notion that young Mr. Karslake might not, after all, be as negligible a person as he looked and as she indifferently had assumed.

She determined to study him more attentively.

It was rather a long confabulation, too, and one that both men seemed to take very seriously—though its upshot was apparently quite acceptable to both—and terminated abruptly with Mr. Karslake announcing, in English, with every evidence of satisfaction:

“Good! Then that’s settled.”

To this the older man dissented tolerantly.

“Pardon: nothing is settled; it is proposed, merely.”

“Well,” said Karslake with a little laugh that to Sofia sounded empty, “at all events it ought to be amusing.”

The other lifted one eyebrow and smiled remotely.

“You think so?”

“To be ordering you about, sir? I should say so!” But his companion wasn’t listening or chose purposely to ignore that accent of respect.

“You are right, my friend,” he said, abstractedly: “it will be amusing. But what in life is not? I fancy that is why most of us go on, because we find the play entertaining in spite of ourselves. And even when we think of Death ... there’s the possibility that on the other side of the curtain, where the unseen audience sits, whose hisses and applause we never hear ... over there it may be more entertaining still!”

Karslake was inquisitively watching his face.

“You would say that,” he commented, deference and admiration in his voice. “By all accounts you’ve had a most amusing life.”

“I have found it so.” The other nodded with glimmering eyes. “Not always at the time, of course. But when I look back, especially at my beginnings, at the times that seemed hardest and most intolerable ...”

He was thoughtful for a moment, glancing interestedly round the room.

“It takes one back.”

“What does?”

“This café, my friend.”

“To your beginnings, you mean?”

“Yes. It is very like the café at Troyon’s, at this hour especially, when there are so few English about.”

“Troyon’s?”

“A restaurant in Paris. Famous in its day. Several years ago—before the war—it burned down one night, cremating many memories. While it stood I hated it, now I miss it; Paris without it is no more the Paris that I knew.”

“Why did you hate it, sir?”

“Because I suffered there.”

He indicated a weedy young Alsatian across the room, a depressed and pimply creature in a waiter’s jacket and apron, who was shambling from table to table and collecting used glasses and saucers.

“You see that omnibus yonder? What he is to-day, that was I in mine—omnibus, scullion, valet-de-chambre, butt and scapegoat-in-general to the establishment, scavenger of food that no one else would eat.... I suffered there, at Troyon’s.”

“You, sir?” Karslake exclaimed in astonishment. “Whoever would have thought that you ... How did you escape?”

“It occurred to me, one day, I was less than half alive and never would be better while I stayed on in that servitude. So I walked out—into life.”

“I wish you’d tell me, sir,” Karslake ventured, eagerly.

“Some day, perhaps, when I get back. But now”—he looked at his watch—“I’ve got just time enough to taxi to my hotel, pack, and catch the boat train.”

“Don’t wait for me,” Karslake suggested, signalling the waiter.

“Perhaps it would be as well if I didn’t.”

They shook hands, and the older man got up, secured his hat and stick, and started out toward the door, moving leisurely, still looking about him with the narrowed eyes and smile of reminiscence.

Of a sudden that look was abolished utterly. He had caught sight of Sofia.

Her interest had been so excited by the singular confidences she had overheard that the girl had quite forgotten herself and her professional pose of blank neutrality. She was bending forward a little, forearms resting on the desk, frankly staring.

The man’s stride checked, his smile faded, his eyes grew wide and cloudy with bewilderment. For a moment Sofia thought him on the point of bowing, as one might on unexpectedly encountering an acquaintance after many years: there was that hint of impulse hindered by uncertainty. And in that moment the girl was conscious of a singular sensation of breathlessness, as if something impended whose issue might change all the courses of her life. A feeling quite insane and unaccountable, to be sure; and nothing came of it whatever. With a readiness so instant that the break in his walk must have been imperceptible to anybody but Sofia, the man recollected himself, composed his face, and proceeded to the door.

Confounded with inexplicable disappointment, Sofia sat unstirring.

In the open doorway the man turned and looked back, not at her, but at Karslake, as if of half a mind to return and say something more to the younger man. But he didn’t.

He never came back.

III THE AGONY COLUMN

Sofia dated from that afternoon the first stirrings of a discontent which grew in her throughout the summer till everything related to her lot seemed abominable in her sight.

Even without this subjective inquietude it would have been an unpleasant summer. All the world was at sixes and sevens, the social unrest stirred up by the war showed no signs of subsiding, but indeed, quite the contrary, there was trouble in the very air—ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard only too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their ears, grin fatuous complacence, and bleat like brainless sheep: “All’s well!”

High-spirited youth and witless wealth a-lust for strange new pleasures turned from the long strain of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies of extravagance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long since surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses: daily that wild dance of death attained wilder stages of saturnalia, the bands blaring ever louder to drown the mutter of savage elemental forces working underneath the crust.

And ever and anon a lull would fall and the world would shudder to the iteration of a word that spelled calamity to all things fair and sweet and lovable in life, the word _Bolshevism_....

In the Café des Exiles there was endless discord and strife.

For several reasons trade was not what it had been, even for the slack season of summer it was poor. The cost of everything had gone up, waiters were insubordinate and unreasonable in their demands, Mama Thérèse had been constrained to increase the fixed price of the dinner, old customers took umbrage at this and their patronage elsewhere.

Mama Thérèse cultivated a temper that grew day by day more vile, Papa Dupont displayed new artfulness in the matter of sneaking his daily toll of drink and showed it; the two squabbled incessantly.

One of the chefs, surmising the irregularity of their relations and foreseeing an imminent break, sought to turn it to his own profit by making amorous overtures to Mama Thérèse, who for reasons of her own, probably hoping to make Papa Dupont jealous, encouraged the idiot. And, as if this were not sickening enough, Papa Dupont, far from resenting this menace to the pseudo-peace of the ménage, ignored if he did not welcome it, and daily displayed new tenderness for Sofia. He kept near her as constantly as he could, he would even interrupt a wrangle with Mama Thérèse to favour the girl with a languishing glance or a term of endearment; he was forever caressing her disgustingly with his eyes.

The swing door between the café and the pantry had warped on its hinges and would not stay quite shut. Normally it stuck in a position which permitted whoever was at the zinc an uninterrupted view of the desk of la dame du comptoir. Instead of having it fixed, Papa Dupont put off that duty from day to day and developed a fond attachment for the place at the zinc. For hours on end Sofia, on her high stool, would be conscious of his gloating regard, his glances that lingered on the sweet lines of her throat, the roundness of her pretty arms.

She dared make no sign to show that she knew and resented, to do so would be merely to draw upon herself the spite of Mama Thérèse.

But she simmered with indignation, and contemplated futile plans—especially in the long, empty hours of the afternoon, between luncheon and the hour of the apertifs—countless vain plans for abolishing these intolerable conditions.

She thought a great deal of the strange man who had talked with young Mr. Karslake, and wondered about him. Somehow she seemed unable to forget him; never before had any one she didn’t know made such a lasting impression upon her imagination.

Sometimes she wasted time trying to explain to herself why the man had seemed, for that brief instant, to think he knew her, only to dismiss such speculations eventually with the assurance that she probably resembled in moderate degree somebody whom he had once known.

But mostly she was preoccupied with pondering the strangeness of it, that he who seemed so brilliant and brave a figure of the great world should, according to his own confession, have risen from beginnings as lowly as her own. All that he had suffered in the days of his youth, in that place in Paris which he called Troyon’s, Sofia had suffered here and in large part continued to suffer without prospect of alleviation or hope of escape. And remembering what he had said, that his own trials had come to an end only when he awakened to the fact that he was, as he had put it, “less than half alive” there at Troyon’s, and had simply “walked out into life,” she was persuaded that the cure for her own discomfort and discontent would never be found in any other way. But she lacked courage to adventure it.

To say “walk out and make an end of it” was all very well; but assuming that she ever should muster up spirit enough to do it—what then? Which way should she turn, once she had passed out through the doors? What could she do? She had neither means nor friends, and she was much too thoroughly conversant with the common way of the world with a woman alone to imagine that, by taking her life in her own hands, she would accomplish much more than exchange the irk of the frying pan for the fury of the fire.

All the same, she knew that she must one day do it and chance the consequences. Things couldn’t go on as they were.

And even granting that the outcome of any effort at self-assertion must be unhappy, she grew impatient.

Meanwhile, she did nothing, she sat quietly on her perch, looked with stony composure over the heads of the multitude, indifferent alike to admiration and the uncharitable esteem of her own sex, and waited with a burning heart.

Mr. Karslake ran true to form. He drifted in and out casually, always idle and dégagé and elegant, he continued his irregular conferences with ill-assorted companions, he worshipped discreetly and evidently without the faintest hope, he seemed more than ever a trifling and immaterial creature. Chance did not again lead him to the table where he had sat with the man whom Sofia could not forget, and only the memory of that conversation held any place for Karslake in the consideration of the girl.

Even at that she didn’t consider him seriously, she looked for him and missed him when he didn’t appear solely because of a secret hope that some day that other one would come back to meet him in the café.

Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have said.

Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake absented himself for several weeks, and when he showed up again his visits were fewer and more widely spaced.

On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary day, he sauntered in with his habitual air of having in particular nothing to do and all the time there was to do it in, and found a man waiting for him.

This was a person whom Sofia had quite overlooked after one glance had classified and pigeon-holed him. A single glance had been enough. They do some things better in England; a man cast for any particular rôle in life, for example, is apt to conform himself, mentally, physically, and even as to his outer habiliments, so nicely to the mould that he is forever unmistakably what he is even to the most casual observer. So this man was a butler, he had been born and bred a butler, he lived by buttling, a butler he would die; not a pompous, turkeycock butler, such as the American stage will offer you when it takes up English fashionable life in a serious way, but a mild-mannered, decent body, with plain side-whiskers, chopped short on a line with the lobes of his ears, otherwise clean-shaven, his hair pathetically dyed, a colourless cast of countenance, eyes meek and mild.

He was soberly dressed in black coat and waistcoat, the latter showing a white triangle of hard-polished shirt and a black bow tie, with indefinite gray trousers and square-toed boots by no means new. His middle was crossed by a thick silver watch-chain, and curious, old-fashioned buttons of agate set in square frames of gold fastened his round stiff cuffs of yesterday. He carried a well-brushed bowler as unfashionable as unseasonable.

When Mr. Karslake entered, the polished pattern of a young gentleman of means, slenderly well set-up in an exquisitely tailored brown lounge suit, wearing a boater and carrying a slender malacca stick in one chamois-gloved hand, the butler stood up at his table, quietly acknowledged his greeting—“Ah, Nogam! you here already?”—and waited for the younger man to be seated before resuming his own chair: a stoop-shouldered symbol of self-respecting respectability, not too intelligent, subdued by definite and unresentful acceptance of “his place.”

Their table was the one immediately beyond the buffet; and the café was very quiet, with only three other patrons, two of whom were playing chess while the third was reading an old issue of the Echo de Paris. So Sofia could, if she had cared to eavesdrop, have overheard everything that passed between Mr. Karslake and the man Nogam. But she didn’t; their first few speeches failed to excite her curiosity in the least.

She heard Mr. Karslake, who was becomingly affable to one of inferior station, express the perfunctory hope that he hadn’t kept Nogam waiting long, and Nogam reply to the simple effect of “Oh, not at all, sir.” To this he added that he ’oped there had been no ’itch, he was most heager to be installed in his new situation, and would do his best to give satisfaction. Karslake replied airily that he was sure Nogam would do famously, and Nogam said “Thank you, sir.” Then Karslake announced they must bustle along, because they were expected by some person unnamed, but just the same he meant to have a drink before he budged a foot. And he called a waiter and requested a whiskey and soda for himself and some beer for Nogam.... And Sofia turned her attention to other things.

The murmur of their talk meant nothing to her after that, and she forgot them entirely till they got up to leave, and then wasted only a moment in wondering why Mr. Karslake, if he were, as he seemed to be, engaging a butler for some friend or employer, should have arranged to meet the man in a café of Soho. But it didn’t matter, and she dismissed the incident from her mind.

What did matter was that she was to-day more than ever galled by the deadly circumstances of her existence. If they were to continue to obtain, she felt, life would grow simply unendurable, and she would to do something reckless to get a little relief from the tedium and the ugliness of it all.

She was fed up with everything, the shrewishness of Mama Thérèse, the drunkenness of Papa Dupont, the hideous dullness of the café, the smell of food, the fumes of tobacco, the reek of wines.

She was fed up with the leers of Papa Dupont, the scowls of Mama Thérèse, the grimaces of waiters, the stares of customers, the very sight of herself in the mirror across the room.

She was fed up with being fed up, she wanted to do something lunatic, she wanted to kick and scream and drum on the floor with her heels.

And all the while, beyond the threshold, life in the street was flowing by, a restless stream, and the voice of it was a siren call to her hungry heart, whispering of freedom, laughing low of love, roaring robustly of brave adventures.

And she sat there with folded hands, mutinous yet impotent, afraid, a useless thing with sullen eyes ... wasted ...

As was her custom, between six and seven, before the busy hours of the evening, she had her dinner fetched to a table near by.

Somebody had left a copy of a morning paper on the wall-seat. Sofia glanced through it without much interest. None the less, when she had finished, she took the sheet back to the caisse with her and intermittently, as occasion offered, read snatches of it quite openly, so bored that she didn’t care if Mama Thérèse did catch her at this forbidden practice; a good row would be almost welcome ... anything to break the monotony....

When she had digested without edification every item of news, she devoured the advertisements of the shops, then turned to the Agony Column, which she had saved up for a savoury.

She read the appeal of the widow of the English army officer who wanted some kind-hearted and soft-headed person to finance her in setting up an establishment for “paying guests.”

She read the card of the young gentleman of good family but impoverished means who admitted that he had every grace and talent heart could desire and who, in frantic effort to escape going to work for his living, threw himself bodily upon the generosity of an unknown, and as yet non-existent, benefactor, hinting darkly at suicide if nothing came of this last attempt to get himself luxuriously maintained in indolence.

She read the advertisements of money-lenders who yearned to advance fabulous sums to the nobility and gentry on their simple notes of hand.

She read the thinly disguised professional cards of lonely ladies whose unhappy lot could be mitigated only by congenial male companionship.

She read the ingenuous matrimonial bids.

She read the announcement of the lady of (deleted) title who was willing, for a substantial consideration, to introduce gentlefolk of means and their daughters to the most exclusive social circles.

She read the naïve solicitation of the alleged ex-officer of the B.E.F., who had won through the war with every known decoration except the Double Cross of the Order of St. Gall and with nothing of his anatomy left whole except his cheek, begging some great-hearted soul to buy him a barrel organ to play in the streets.

And then her eye was arrested by the appearance of her own name in the text of a brief advertisement, which she read naturally, with heightened interest:

IF MICHAEL LANYARD will communicate privately he will hear news of Sofia his daughter. Address Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, W.C. 3

IV MUTINY

Sofia had never heard the name of Michael Lanyard. Neither did the firm style of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, mean anything to her. Notwithstanding, she wasted more time than she knew trying to picture to herself a man who looked like Michael Lanyard sounded, and wishing (no matter what his looks might be) that she were his long-lost daughter Sofia, and that he would see the advertisement, and communicate privately as requested, and hear news of her, and come speeding in a Rolls-Royce to the Café des Exiles, and walk in and humble Papa Dupont with a look of hauteur and confound Mama Thérèse with a peremptory word, and take Sofia by the hand and lead her out and induct her into such an environment as suited her rightful station: said environment necessarily comprising a town house if not on Park Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country house sitting, in the mellowed beauty of its Seventeenth Century architecture, amid lordly acres of velvet lawn and private park.

She hoped the country house would be within sight of the sea, and that the family garage would run to a comfortable little town-car for her personal use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to pay calls or leave cards, or to concerts and matinees....

At about this stage her châteaux en Espagne began to rock upon their foundations; a seismic phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they habitually consumed in the café when the evening rush was over, the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the dull hours till closing time.

Thus reminded that it was nine o’clock or thereabouts of a stuffy evening in a stodgy world where nothing ever happened that hadn’t wearily happened the day before and the day before that and so back to the beginning of Time, and wasn’t scheduled tediously to continue happening to-morrow and the day after and so on to the end of Eternity, Sofia sighed and shook herself and put away the vanity of dreams.

But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry as the night.

In the rear of the room Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont wrangled sourly over their food; not with impassioned rancour but in the natural order of things—as others might discuss the book of the moment or the play of the year or scandal or Charlie Chaplin or the thundering fiasco of Versailles—these two discussed each other’s failings with utmost candour and freedom of expression: handling their subjects without gloves; never hesitating to touch upon topics not commonly mentioned in civil intercourse or to use the apt, unprintable word; never dreaming of politely terming a damned old hoe a spade; tossing the ball of recrimination to and fro with masterly ease.

Their preoccupation with this pastime was so thoroughgoing that Mama Thérèse even failed to notice the passage of the postman on his last round of the day. Ordinarily, for reasons best known to herself and which Sofia had never thought to question, Mama Thérèse preferred personally to receive all letters and contrived to be on hand at the postman’s customary hours of call. But to-night she only realized that he had come and gone when, happening to glance toward the caisse, she saw Sofia shuffling the half-dozen envelopes which had been left with her.

Immediately Mama Thérèse pushed back the table and got up, wiping chin and moustache with her napkin as she rolled toward the desk.

But she was too late. Already Sofia had sorted out and was staring in blank wonder at an envelope addressed to Mama Thérèse and bearing in its upper left-hand corner the imprint of its origin:

_Secretan & Sypher Solicitors Lincoln’s Inn Fields London, W.C. 3._

As yet she was simply startled by the coincidence, her brain had not had time to absorb its full significance—that Mama Thérèse should receive a communication from these distinctively named solicitors on the evening of the very day on which they advertised concerning a young woman named Sofia!—when the letter was snatched out of her hand, a torrent of objurgation was loosed upon her devoted head, and she looked into the black scowl of the Frenchwoman.

“Sneak! Spying little cat! How dare you pry into my letters?”

“But, Mama Thérèse—!”

“Be still, you! Has one asked you to speak? Give me those others”—Mama Thérèse with a vast show of violence appropriated them from Sofia’s unresisting grasp—“and after this keep your nose of a mouchard out of what doesn’t concern you!”

“But, Mama Thérèse!—”

“Hold your tongue. I wish to hear nothing from you, I hear too much—yes, and see too much, too! Oh, don’t flatter yourself I am like that fat dolt of a Dupont, to be taken in by a pair of round eyes and innocent ways. I know your sort, I know _you_, mam’selle, too well! Me, I am nobody’s fool, least of all yours, young woman. What goes on under my nose, I see; and if you imagine otherwise you are a bigger simpleton that you take me for.”

She snapped her fingers viciously in Sofia’s crimsoned face, uttered a contemptuous “_Zut!_” and waddled off, shaking her head and growling to herself.

Sofia felt stunned. The offensive had been launched so swiftly, she was conscious of having done so little to invite it, she had been taken unprepared, thrown into confusion, her feeble objections silenced and overwhelmed by that deluge of abuse, publicly disgraced....

Her face was burning, and tears started in her eyes; but she winked them back, she would not let them fall. Conscious of the grins of the handful of patrons, and the leers of the waiters, she steeled herself to suppress every betrayal of the mortification in which her soul was writhing, she made no sign but stared on stonily at the blackness of the night that peered in at the open doors.

Then indignation came to her rescue, the flaming colour ebbed from her face and left it unnaturally white, the mists before her eyes dissipated and their look grew fixed and hard, even her lips took on a grim, unyielding set. Beneath the desk her hands clenched into small fists. But she did not move.

The sensation stirred up by the outbreak of Mama Thérèse subsided, the domino players resumed their game, the old gentleman reading Le Rire turned a page and read on with a knowing smile, lovers returned to their low-voiced love-making, waiters yawned behind their hands, all was as it had been save that, at their table (Sofia could see by the mirror, without looking directly) Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont seemed to have declared an armistice and were gobbling down the rest of their meal in silence and indecorous haste.

Presently they got up and sought their living quarters. To do this they had to pass the caisse and through the green baize door. Mama Thérèse marched ahead with forbidding frown and quivering chins, with the militant carriage of misprized and affronted rectitude. To her, it was obvious, Sofia for the time being did not exist. At her heels Papa Dupont shambled uneasily, hanging the head of deep thoughtfulness, avoiding Sofia’s gaze. It was his part to pretend that all was well and always would be; only he lacked the effrontery, just then, for his usual smirk.

When they had disappeared Sofia began to think.

There was something more in this affair than mere coincidence, there was mystery, a sinister question.

Her countenance grew as dark as the complexion of her reverie. Athwart the field of her abstracted vision drifted the figure of young Mr. Karslake. She was barely conscious of it.

He seated himself with plain premeditation directly opposite the caisse, staring openly. But Sofia did not heed him at all. An odd smile shadowed his lips, an expression half eager, half apprehensive; there was a hint of puzzlement in his scrutiny. It was rather as if he had unexpectedly found some new reason for thinking the girl an exceptionally interesting personality. But she continued all unaware.

Shortly after being served with a drink which he ordered but made no offer to taste, he moved as if minded to rise and cross to Sofia, sat up and edged forward on the wall-seat with a singular air of timidity and embarrassment. But whatever his intention, he reconsidered and sat back, glancing round the room to see if anybody were watching him. He could not see that anybody was. Not even Sofia. Relieved, he settled back, found a handsome gold case in the waistcoat of his dinner jacket, extracted a cigarette, nipped it between his lips—and forgot to light it.

Of a sudden Sofia had arrived at a decision; and with every expression of it in her manner she slipped down from the high stool and left the caisse to take care of itself. Turning to the swing door she barged through with a high head and fire of determination illuminating her face. She had had enough of riddles.

Behind the zinc an elderly and trusted waiter was nodding. The kitchen was cold and dark for the night. Papa Dupont, then, would be upstairs, closeted with the genius of the establishment.

From the pantry a narrow staircase led up to the apartment above the restaurant. Sofia mounted rapidly, with a firm tread that was nevertheless practically noiseless, thanks to the paper-thin soles of well-worn slippers. She could hear voices bickering above.

At the top there was a short, dark corridor, with three doors. Two of these were closed on sleeping-rooms; the third door, to a sort of combination office and living-room, stood open, letting out a stream of light.

Sofia approached on tiptoe, though the altercation going on within had reached a stage so acute that it was doubtful whether either of the disputants would have heard had she stumped like a navvy.

The point of dissension was not at first apparent, because Mama Thérèse was speaking, and what she said had exclusively to do with her estimate of Dupont’s character, the mettle of his spirit, the stuff of his mentality, the authenticity of his pedigree (with especial reference to the virtue of his maternal ancestry) and the circumstances of his upbringing; which estimate in sum was low but by no means so low as the terms in which Mama Thérèse was inspired to couch it.

Papa Dupont did not seem to be greatly interested. He had heard all this before, many a time, with insignificant phraseological variations. Sofia, pausing unseen and unsuspected in the darkness just outside the doorway, could see him slouching deep in his chair, to one side of the table, his soft fat hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, his chin sunken on his chest, something dogged in the louring frown which he was bending upon nothing, something of genuine indifference in his passive attitude toward the blowsy virago who was leaning across the table the better to spit vituperation at him.

And he waited with singular patience until she had to stop for want of breath. Then he shrugged and said heavily:

“Still, I don’t see what else you propose to do, my old one.”

Apparently his old one was as poor in expedient as he. “It is for nothing,” she said, acidly, “that one looks to you!”

“I have said my say. If you have anything better to suggest....” He made a rhetorical pause for reply, but Mama Thérèse was well blown and sulky for the moment. “I am not old, not so old as you, and I have reason to believe the girl is not indifferent to my person.”

“Drooling old pig,” Mama Thérèse observed with reason: “if you dream she would trouble to look twice at you—!”

“That remains to be seen. And I, for one, fail to see how else we are to hold her. All this money that has been coming in, paid on the dot every quarter—that means there is more, much more to come to her. Are you ready to give it up?”

“Never!” Mama Thérèse thumped the table vehemently. “It is mine by rights, I have earned it. Look at the way I have slaved for her, the tender care I have lavished upon her, ever since she was a little one in my arms.”

“By all means,” Papa Dupont agreed, “look at it, but don’t talk about it to her. She might not understand you. Also, do not depend upon her to endorse any claim you might set up based upon such assertions.”

“She is an ungrateful baggage!”

“Possibly; but she is human, she has a memory—”

“Are you going to be sentimental about her again?” Mama Thérèse demanded. “Pitiful old goat!”

“But I am not in the least sentimental,” Papa Dupont disclaimed. “It is rather I who am practical, you who are sentimental. I ask you: Is there any way we can hold on to that money unless I marry Sofia? You do not answer. Why? Because there _is_ no other way. Then I am practical. But you will not admit that. And why? Because we have lived together for a number of years through force of habit, because once, very long ago, we were lovers, you and I—so long ago that you have forgotten you ever had a softer name for me than pig or goat. Who is the sentimentalist now—eh?”

“Shut your face!” Mama Thérèse growled. “You annoy me. I have a presentiment I shall one day murder you.”

“You would have done that long ago,” Papa Dupont pointed out, “if you had had the courage. Enough! I am silent. But when you are tired trying to think out another way, reflect on my solution. Meantime, let me have another look at that accursed letter.”

Mama Thérèse did not respond, she offered no objection when Dupont took up the sheet of paper that lay between them, but ground the heels of her hands into her fat cheeks and sat glowering vindictively while he read aloud, slowly, with the labour of one to whom reading is unaccustomed dissipation:

DEAR MADAM:

Herewith we beg to enclose our cheque to your order in the sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, being the quarterly payment in advance due you from the estate of our deceased client, the Princess Sofia Vassilyevski, for your care of her daughter. We further beg to advise that, pursuant to the provisions of her will, we begin to-day, on the eighteenth birthday of the young Princess Sofia, a search for her father with the object of apprising him of his daughter’s existence. Therefore we would request you to make arrangements to have the young Princess Sofia brought to England forthwith from the convent in France where we understand she is finishing her education. We take leave, however, to advise that, pending the outcome of our enquiries, the question of her father’s existence be not discussed with the young princess. In event of his death being established or of failure to find him within six months, the Princess Sofia is to enter without more delay or formality into possession of her mother’s estate.

Papa Dupont put down the letter. “It is plain enough,” he expounded: “if this father is found, we can whistle for our money; whereas if I were married to Sofia, as her husband I would control—”

He broke off sharply, and added in consternation: “One million thunders!”

Sofia stood between them.

And yet she wasn’t the Sofia they knew, but another person altogether, a transfigured and exalted Sofia, aflame with righteous wrath and contemptuous with the pride of birth which had leaped into full being a moment since.

A princess, born the daughter of a princess, now she knew and looked it.