Her indifferent grey eyes, sweeping the hall, presently rested on Warner; and remained on him with a sort of idle insolence until his own shifted.
Halkett was saying:
"You know that girl the cashier, I mean is extraordinarily pretty. Have you noticed her, Warner?"
Warner turned again:
"I've been looking at her. She's rather thickly tinted, isn't she?"
"Yes. But in spite of the paint. She has a charmingly shaped head. Some day she'll have a figure."
"Oh, yes; figures and maturity come late to that type If you'll notice, Halkett, those hands of hers are really exquisite. So are her features the nose is delicate, the eyes beautifully drawn she's all in good drawing even her mouth, which is a little too full. As an amateur, don't you agree with me?"
"Very much so. She's a distinct type."
"Yes there's a certain appeal about her It's odd, isn't it the inexplicable something about some women that attracts. It doesn't depend on beauty at all."
Halkett sipped his Moselle wine.
"No, it doesn't depend on beauty, on intelligence, on character, or on morals. It's in spite of them in defiance, sometimes. Now, take that thin girl over there; her lips and cheeks are painted; she has the indifferent, disenchanted, detached glance of the too early wise. The chances are that she isn't respectable. And in spite of all that, Warner well look at her."
"I see. A man could paint a troubling portrait of her a sermon on canvas."
"Just as she sits there," nodded Halkett.
"Just as she sits there, chin on palm, one lank leg crossed over the other, and her slim foot dangling And the average painter would make her seem all wrong, Halkett; and I might, too, except for those clear grey eyes and their childish indifference to the devil's world outside their ken." He inspected her for a moment more, then: "Yes, in spite of rouge and other obvious elementals, I should paint her as she really is, Halkett; and no man in his heart would dare doubt her after I'd finished."
"That's not realism," remarked Halkett, laughing.
"It's the vital essence of it. You know I'm something of a gambler. Well, if I painted that girl as she sits there now, in this noisy, messy, crowded cabaret, with the artificial tint on lip and cheek if I painted her just as she appears to us, and in all the insolently youthful relaxation of her attitude I'd be gambling all the while with myself that the soul inside her is as clean as a flame; and I'd paint that conviction into her portrait with every brush stroke! What do you think of that view of her?"
"As you Americans say, you're some poet," observed Halkett, laughingly.
"A poet is an advanced psychologist. He begins where scientific deduction ends."
"That's what makes your military pictures so convincing," said Halkett, with his quick smile. "It's not only the correctness of details and the spirited drawing and color, but you do see into the very souls of the men you paint, and their innermost characters are there, revealed in the supreme crisis of the moment." He smiled quietly. "I'll believe it if you say that young girl over there is quite all right."
"I'd paint her that way, anyhow."
The singing on the stage had ceased from troubling, and the stringed orchestra was playing one of the latest and most inane of dance steps. A clumsy piou-piou got up with his fresh-cheeked partner; other couples rose from the sloppy tables, and in another moment the dancing floor was uncomfortably crowded.
It was a noisy place; a group of summer touring students from Louvain, across the border, were singing "La Brabançonne" a very patriotic and commendable attempt, but it scarcely harmonized with the dance music. Perspiring waiters rushed hither and thither, their trays piled high; the dancers trotted and spun around and galloped about over the waxed floor; the young girl behind her wire wicket swung her narrow foot to and fro and gazed imperturbably out across the tumult.
"Philippa!" cried one of the Louvain students, hammering on the table with his beer glass. "Come out from behind your guichet and dance with me!"
The girl's grey eyes turned superciliously toward the speaker, but she neither answered nor moved her head.
The young man blew a kiss toward her and attempted to climb upon the zinc table, but old man Wildresse, who was prowling near, tapped him on the shoulder.
"Pas de bêtise!" he growled. "Soyez sage! Restez tranquille, nom de Dieu!"
"I merely desired the honor of dancing with your charming cashier "
"Allons! Assez! It's sufficient to ask her, isn't it? A woman dances with whom she chooses."
And, grumbling, he walked on with his heavy sidling step, hands clasped behind him, his big, hard, smoothly shaven face lowered and partly turned, as though eternally listening for somebody just at his heels. Always sidling nearer to the table where Warner and Halkett were seated, he paused, presently, and looked down at them, shot a glance across at the girl, Philippa, caught her eye, nodded significantly. Then, addressing Warner and his new friend:
"Well, gentlemen," he said in English, "are you amusing yourselves in the Café Biribi?"
"Sufficiently," nodded Warner.
Wildresse peeped stealthily over his shoulder, as though expecting to surprise a listener. Then his very small black eyes stole toward Halkett, and he furtively examined him.
"Jour de fête," he remarked in his harshly resonant voice. "Grand doings in town tonight. Do you gentlemen dine here this evening?"
"I think not," said Warner.
"I am sorry. It will be gay. There are dance partners to be had for a polite bow. You should see my little caissière yonder!" He made a grunting sound and kissed his blunt fingers to the ceiling. "M-m-m!" he growled. "She can dance! But I don't permit her to dance very often. Only a special client now and then "
"May we consider ourselves special clients?" inquired Warner, amused.
"Oh, I don't say yes and I don't say no." He jerked his round, shaven head. "It all depends on her. She dances with whom she pleases. And if the Emperor of China asked her, nevertheless she should be free to please herself."
"She's very pretty," said Halkett.
"Others have said so before you in the Cabaret de Biribi."
"Why do you call your cabaret the Café Biribi?" asked Warner.
"Eh? By God, I call it Biribi because I'm not ashamed of the name."
Halkett looked up into his wicked black eyes, and Wildresse wagged his finger at him.
"Supposition," he said, "that your son is a good boy a little lively, but a good boy and he comes of age and he goes with his class for two years three years now, and to hell with it!
"Bon! Supposition, also, that his sergeant is a tyrant, his captain an ass, his colonel an imbecile! Bon! Given a little natural ardor a trifle of animal spirits, and the lad is up before the council bang! and he gets his in the battalions of Biribi!"
His voice had become a sort of ominous growl.
"As for me," he said heavily, "I mock at their council and their blockhead colonel! I accept their challenge; I do not conceal that my son is serving in a disciplinary battalion; I salute all the battalions of Biribi where there are better men in the ranks than there are in many a regiment of the line, by God! And I honor those battalions by naming my cabaret 'Biribi.' The Government gets no change out of me!"
The man asserted too much, swaggered too obviously; and Halkett, not suspicious but always cautious, kept his inquiring eyes fixed on him.
The man asserted too much, swaggered too obviously; and Halkett, not suspicious but always cautious, kept his inquiring eyes fixed on him.
Warner said with a smile:
"You have the courage of your convictions, Monsieur Wildresse."
"As for that," growled Wildresse, casting another stealthy glance behind him, "I've got courage. Courage? Who hasn't? Everybody's got courage. It's brains the world lacks. Excuse me, gentlemen affairs of business and if you want to dance with my little cashier, there is no harm in asking her." And he shuffled away, his heavy head bent sideways, his hands tightly clasped behind him.
"There's an evil type," remarked Halkett. "What a brute it is!"
Warner said:
"With his cropped head and his smooth, pasty face, and those unpleasant black eyes of his, he looks like an ex-convict. It doesn't astonish me that he has a son serving in the disciplinary battalions of Africa."
"Does it astonish you that he is the employer of that girl behind the counter?" asked Halkett.
Warner turned to look at her again:
"It's interesting, isn't it? She seems to be another breed."
"Yes. Now, what do you make of her?"
Warner hesitated, then looked up with a laugh.
"Halkett," he said, "I'm going over to ask her to dance."
"All right; I'll hold the table," said the Englishman, amused. And Warner rose, skirted the dancers, and walked around to the cashier's desk, aware all the while that the girl's indifferent grey eyes were following his movements.
CHAPTER III
Warner tucked his walking stick and straw hat under one arm and, sauntering over to the cashier's desk, made a very nice and thoroughly Continental bow to the girl behind it.
Her impartial and uninterested gaze rested on him; after a moment she inclined her head, leisurely and in silence.
He said in French:
"Would Mademoiselle do me the honor of dancing this dance with me?"
She replied in a sweet but indifferent voice:
"Monsieur is too amiable. But he sees that I am caissière of the establishment."
"Yet even the fixed stars of heaven dance sometimes to the music of the spheres."
She smiled slightly:
"When one is merely a fixture de cabaret, one dances only to the music of the Sbires! You must ask Monsieur Wildresse if I may dance with you."
"He suggested that I ask you."
"Very well, if it's a matter of business "
Warner laughed.
"Don't you ever dance for pleasure?" he asked in English.
She replied in English:
"Is it your theory that it would give me pleasure to dance with you?"
"It is," he said, still laughing. "But by demonstration alone are theories proven."
The girl hesitated, her grey eyes resting on him. Then she turned her head, drew a pencil from her chestnut hair, rapped with it on the counter. A head waiter came speeding to her.
"Aristide, I'm going to dance," she said in the same sweetly indifferent voice. "Have the goodness to sit in my chair until I return or Mélanie arrives."
She slid to the floor from her high seat, came out, through the wire gate, and began to unpin her cambric apron.
The closer view revealed to him her thinness in her black gown. She was not so tall as he had thought her, and she was younger; but he had been right about her cheeks and lips. Both were outrageously painted.
She handed her daintily embroidered apron to the waiter, laid one hand lightly on Warner's arm; he led her to the edge of the dancing floor, clasped her waist and swung her with him out into the noisy whirl beyond.
Thin, almost immature in her angular slenderness, the girl in motion became enchantingly graceful. Supple as a sapling in the summer wind, her hand rested feather-light in his; her long, narrow feet seemed like shadows close above the floor, never touching it.
The orchestra ceased playing after a few minutes, but old man Wildresse, who had been watching them, growled, "Go on!" and the music recommenced amid plaudits and shouts of general approval.
Once, as they passed the students' table, Warner heard the voice of old Wildresse in menacing dispute with the student who had first shouted out an invitation to Philippa.
"She dances with whom she chooses!" roared Wildresse. "Do you understand, Monsieur? By God, if the Grand Turk himself asked her she should not dance with him unless she wished to!"
Warner said to her jestingly:
"Did the Grand Turk ever ask you, Philippa?"
The girl did not smile.
"Perhaps I am dancing with him now. One never knows in a cabaret."
When the music ceased she was breathing only a trifle faster, and her cheeks under the paint glowed softly pink.
"Could you join us?" he asked. "Is it permitted?"
"I'd like to Yes."
So he took her back to the table, where Halkett rose and paid his respects gracefully; and they seated themselves and ordered a grenadine for her.
Old Wildresse, sidling by, paused with a non-committal grunt:
"Eh bien? On s'amuse? Dis, petit galopin!"
"I'm thirsty," said the girl Philippa.
"And your caisse?"
"Tell them to find Mélanie," she retorted indifferently.
"Bon! A jour de fête, too! How long are you going to be?" But as she glanced up he winked at her.
She shrugged her shoulders, leaned forward, chose a straw, and plunged it into the crimson depths of her iced grenadine.
Old Wildresse looked at her a moment, then he also shrugged his shoulders and went shuffling away, always apparently distrustful of that invisible something just behind his back.
Halkett said:
"Mr. Warner and I have been discussing an imaginary portrait of you."
"What?" The clear, grey eyes turned questioningly to him, to Warner.
The latter nodded:
"I happen to be a painter. Mr. Halkett and I have agreed that it would be an interesting experiment to paint your portrait as you really are."
The girl seemed slightly puzzled.
"As I really am?" she repeated. "But, Messieurs, am I not what you see before you?"
The music began again; the Louvain student, a little tipsy but very decorous, arose, bowed to the girl Philippa, bowed to Halkett and to Warner, and asked for the honor of a dance with her.
"Merci, Monsieur another time, perhaps," she replied indifferently.
The boy seemed disposed to linger, but he was not quarrelsome, and finally Halkett got up and led him away.
From moment to moment Warner, glancing across during his tête-à-tête with the girl Philippa, could see the Louvain student continually shaking hands with Halkett who seemed horribly bored.
A little later still the entire Louvain delegation insisted on entertaining Halkett with beer and song; and the resigned but polite Englishman, now seated at their table, was being taught to sing "La Brabançonne," between draughts of Belgian beer.
The girl Philippa played with the stem of her glass and stirred the ice in it with her broken wheat straw. The healthy color in her face had now faded to an indoor pallor again under the rouge.
"So you are a painter," she said, her grey eyes fixed absently on her glass. "Are you a distinguished painter, Monsieur?"
He laughed:
"You'll have to ask others that question, Philippa."
"Why? Don't you know whether you are distinguished?"
"I've had some success," he admitted, amused.
She thought a moment, then leaned forward toward the Louvain table.
"Mr. Halkett," she called in English. "Is Mr. Warner a distinguished American painter?"
Halkett laughed.
"One of the most celebrated American painters of the day!"