# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 29/Number 2/The Violets

Extracted from Red Book magazine, June 1917, pp. 225–237. Accompanying illustrations by Oscar Frederick Howard may be omitted.
The Violets
by C. N. and A. M. Williamson
Authors of “The Lightning Conductor,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY OSCAR FREDERICK HOWARD
SUZE DURAND was always S wishing that something would happen; she hardly knew what, and hardly cared what, if it were exciting. She dreamed all sorts of dreams—pagan dreams, some of them, for her mother's religion bored her a little. She thought it old-fashioned, and dreadfully dull if you had to live up to it.
Wonderful things happened to the mannequins at Calline Sœurs, where Suze worked! Purple rumors of their successes drifted like rich smoke of incense into the room where Suze sewed. She was as pretty as any of those mannequins, and she knew it—which justified the dreams. Only, she was not as tall as a maypole and thin as a rapier. She had the usual human shape of the usual human girl, and of course this would never do for a mannequin. There was no hope for her in that line. But the talk in the room went to her head. She wasn't sure what would become of her, or what she wished might become of her. Should she bleach her reddish brown hair a bright copper red? She easily could. That would make her eyebrows look almost black, and her thick, curled-up lashes darker than they already were. Everybody would notice her then, and only her mother would be shocked. What of that? It was her hair, not Mother's: and anything for a change from the dullness of being a good, good jeune fille, with her eyes on the ground between the flat and Calline Sæurs, Calline Sæurs and the flat, day after day, night after night, world without end!
This cannot go on forever, in Paris, when you are nineteen, with blue-green eyes tilting upward, and a red mouth meant for laughing—no, not forever, especially when you have to pass all those heavenly shop-windows with hats and dresses and lacy things which ought to have been made for you.
Naturally, there had been young men, young men of the two kinds: the kind who work at trades connected with dirty machines, or worse still, who serve, sleek and smart, behind counters—they were of the kind who want to marry you; and the other kind, who follow you in the street and pretend to be grand gentlemen. Suze wasn't interested in the first kind, so far as she had seen, and she had never been taken in by any of the second. Still, there were always the dreams. Then came the war. And then Suze met the American boy.
THAT meeting changed the world. After it she knew exactly what she wanted in life. And she was glad—oh, so glad, down-on-her-knees glad—that she hadn't bleached her hair red to make everybody notice. He wouldn't have looked at her if she had—not in the way she wanted him to look. She was even more glad that she had stayed good.
It was the most marvelous, unique thing, her meeting with Bob Deforest—or else it was as simple and banal as a third-rate, two-reel “movie” written for “heart-interest:” heroine, honest serving-girl, with prayerful mother in background; hero, pure-minded youth of the working class with low wages and high intentions; love at first sight on both sides. But after all, life is a sort of moving-picture play in as many reels as you're given time for; and it's banal or noble according to the point of view and the acting of the parts.
Suze did not seem to herself in the least like one of those silly girls on the screen; and as for Bob Deforest, he was different from any man she had ever met or expected to meet. Who would have dreamed that the One, when he came, would be an American? This was Romance—a man from the other side of the world breaking into her life, suddenly, as if by chance, although he must have been sent by a mysterious decree of fate. Suze did not put her thought of Bob into such words; yet that idea hovered in her head.
It was on a Sunday afternoon they met, a Sunday in October after the war began. Suze was walking with her sister, an angel child of ten who was everything her elder sister ought to have been and was not. In bad moods Suze was jealous of Rose Marie, for the little girl was the apple of their mother's eye; and of course the mother was a widow—the mother of a Suze always is. But Suze was not jealous that day. She was under the spell of the war, which made her feel very small, and almost religious. It was a golden, dreaming day of Indian summer, like a bittersweet memory of peace; and the first autumn violets were being sold in the Paris streets, huge, purple violets.
Suze loved violets. She loved them better than any other flower. They seemed vaguely to mean all she wished for in life, and hardly hoped to have: sweetness, perfume, beauty, romance with nothing sordid in it—nothing violent with dregs of regret, such as carnations or red roses suggest.
The girls were walking along the Champs Elysées. A woman carrying a basket heaped with violets offered Suze a big bunch. “Fifty centimes,” she said.
“But have you nothing smaller?” asked Suze. “Give me a little bunch for ten centimes instead of fifty.”
The woman shook her head. She was rather a haughty person. She was not selling small bouquets to-day. She did better with the large ones. These were not common violets. They were the first of the season.
That was just why she wanted them, argued Suze, and the two stood disputing the price. Finally the woman took a step to move away. She would have thought that so chic and jolie a demoiselle could afford fifty centimes for violets to one whose husband and son were mobilized! But if not— This was too much for Suze. She was ready to buy the flowers and walk home, even if she had to carry Rose Marie! Rose Marie grabbed her sister's gown. “Sister, you mustn't!” she pleaded. “I'm not strong enough to walk. Remember you have brought only two sous over our fare!”
Sister, pouting, let the violet-woman go. Of course the angel child was right, but that needn't prevent Suze from being cross! “You know I've a superstition about violets,” she said. “If I can't have some of the first I meet, there's no luck for me the whole year!”
She turned tempestuously, to put the violets out of sight, and almost stumbled against a young man who must have been close behind her—a tall, slim young man, who was dark of face and yet somehow did not look like a Frenchman. Suze had time to notice all this, though she marched straight on, and he too went his way, in the wake of the violet-woman. The girl knew that their eyes had met, only because after he had gone it was as if she could see them still—brown eyes, with a beautiful, surprised, admiring expression, not impudent as most admiring eyes were when they met yours in the street. Yes, beautiful was the word!
“Wasn't that a nice young man?” asked the angel child, anxious to divert her sister's attention.
“I don't know,” said Suze. It might not have been true that she didn't know; but oddly, it was true. It was queer that, remembering the eyes so distinctly, she could not remember more. Dark, not like a Frenchman, but she couldn't have told to save her life whether he was un vrai monsieur or not. Those eyes! She had lost them and lost the violets. This was life.
IN a few minutes the girls became conscious that some one was pattering in their wake. Suze wouldn't look round. She was afraid, and yet she hoped, that it was Eyes. But Rose Marie looked; and then a voice spoke, the breathless voice of the violet-woman. “Violets for each of you, mesdemoiselles,” she panted. “Nothing to pay.”
She thrust into the hand of Suze a double-sized bunch, and into the hand of the child a smaller one. Then she was off without waiting for questions.
“That young man must have heard what you said!” exclaimed Rose Marie. “He bought the flowers and told the woman not to tell.”
Suze thought so too; in fact she knew it, and thrilled, but she did not answer. She didn't much care to discuss the incident. She buried her face in the violets, sweet and cold as a pool of perfume. The two walked on slowly, until Rose Marie asked to sit down. She said she was tired. So they sat on one of the seats under the yellowing trees, and after a while—a long while, long enough to prove that he was not following them—the young man came strolling back.
Suze recognized him instantly, though she had thought she remembered only his eyes. He had a different sort of hat from any Frenchman; besides, there were no young Frenchmen wearing civilian clothes in the Paris streets: all were soldiers. His were nice enough clothes, but not chic. He was not what Suze would call un vrai monsieur, but instead of being disappointed, she was pleased. He seemed nearer to her, in life.
He had been so long gone that he could not have known he would find the girls on coming back, but he might have hoped. And ten or twenty paces off he must have seen them on the seat. He didn't even pause, however, much as he might have been tempted to do what most Frenchmen would have done. He gave Suze one glance, and he would have passed on if it hadn't been for Rose Marie. Rose Marie held up her violets and cried out: “Thank you, monsieur. You were very kind.”
Whether that was her angelic innocence or not, Suze wasn't sure. Sometimes when she took Rose Marie for a jaunt, it seemed that the darling of the family was more precocious and less angelic out of doors than in. Anyhow, there it was! The young man had to snatch off his hat. He could not help smiling at the child. And Suze couldn't help smiling at him. She did not struggle very hard against the smile. She was being chaperoned by Rose Marie.
“I—didn't mean to be rude. I wanted you to have them for luck,” the giver of the violets explained in fairly fluent French, with an accent Suze had heard when she, with a trotteur carrying a giant dress-box, went to pacify American clients kept waiting by Calline Sœurs. “American!” she said to herself; and that made the whole incident right. She couldn't let him go believing that she had thought him rude. She showed that she understood. And when he asked if he might sit down just a minute, because it was his last Sunday in Paris, instead of objecting she heard herself exclaim: “But—your last Sunday, monsieur?”
He sat by Rose Marie, the child between him and Suze. He explained that he'd come over before the war to introduce a new make of motor. But he was French by descent. His grandfather had been French. His name, Deforest, was only a little changed through rubbing about in America from what it used to be: De Forêt. He'd always wanted to see his grandfather's native land, and he'd taken more pains with his French at school than most boys. Now he found that the war had “got into his blood.” He couldn't bear to be swaggering around, having a good time, while the other fellows were fighting. He had no one belonging to him over on the other side, now his mother was dead, and as soon as his firm could get a man in his place,—he wouldn't leave them in the lurch—he intended to join the Foreign Legion. Just couldn't keep out of it, somehow!
The three talked for an hour. Marie asked most of the questions, and gave most of the information, but Suze and he looked at each other. She did not want him to join the Foreign Legion and perhaps be killed; yet—she didn't want him not to join. At last, when it seemed as if they had known each other for sixty days instead of sixty minutes, Bob Deforest asked if he might call at the flat and meet their mother. Would Mademoiselle mind—as he had no mother of his own, and he was going to fight side by side with the men of her people?
Suze knew then that he was in love with her, that he must have begun to fall in love with the back of her head, and the little curls in the nape of her neck, even before he saw her face. She knew that she had been in love with his eyes, after the first look. And oh, but it was heavenly, being in love! She had not realized that it could be so exquisite.
MOTHER fell in love with Bob too, and Rose Marie fell in love with Bob. It was nearly a week before he could find another American good enough to take his place, in fairness to the firm, and twice each day he and Suze met: in the morning when she was on her way to work, and in the evening, when he saw her home. On the second day he told her how he felt. He wouldn't ask her to marry him before he went; he didn't want her to be a war widow! But would she be engaged to him, and marry him if he came back? She would—she would. She thought she must have died if he had waited twenty-four hours more to speak, she adored him so desperately.
Each evening Suze had a little bunch of her loved violets; but on the last night—the night before Bob offered himself for service in the Legion—they had a feast together, they two. Suze was not a demoiselle of the high world; and by this time Mother trusted Bob as if he were her own son; so she approved the good-by supper. It was not a grand affair—only a little simple food in a quiet restaurant Bob knew, but it gave them their first chance of an hour alone together. The small table was almost covered with violets. With his own hands Bob had sprinkled flowers over the white cloth, and there was an immense, flat bunch, made according to Bob's orders, for Suze to pin at her breast—the “sort of bunch smart American girls wear,” he explained. There was a purple ribbon, and a purple-headed pin; that was the American way.
“How shall I live without you?” she asked with a choke in her voice. “There's nothing but you in life. There never was!”
“It's just wonderful and great to hear you say that,” Bob answered. “Such a beauty as you are, a fascinator that a prince might fall in love with. And you waited for me, without caring for anyone else! Gee! It will be grand to feel you're thinking of me when I'm away off somewhere. Will you promise, kiddie, to think of me when you see violets?”
That was an easy promise. Suze gave it with all her heart.
THEY parted that night, at the door of Madame Durand's flat; and they did not meet again, for Bob's offer of himself for the Foreign Legion was accepted. Any man can be enlisted for the Legion at any time and anywhere, in France: and in war-days they are not packed off to Algeria or Cochin China. Bob was a worthy offering. The Legion was pleased with him. He had been in the militia at home, and so that helped him, he wrote, and his training was short before he was sent to the front.
Months went on, and nearly every day a letter came to Suze. When twenty-four hours passed with no word from Bob, she had death in her heart. She could not believe that girls she knew whose lovers were fighting suffered as she suffered. It seemed that Bob was as necessary to her life as the blood that rushed through her veins at thought of him. It couldn't be so with other girls. Even when their lovers were killed, though they put on mourning with long, black veils which weighed pounds, often after a few weeks or months they were engaged again. Suze believed that her heart would stop and she would fall dead if Bob were killed.
But it couldn't happen, it couldn't! It was too bad to be true. God would not be so cruel as to take Bob away, when she had been good in spite of the dreams which used to tempt her. She deserved a reward. Bob was the reward. God couldn't be an Indian giver: but to remind Him of His duty she prayed almost every moment of the day. She prayed while she walked and while she worked, while she dressed and undressed. She prayed on her knees by her bed night and morning; she prayed in church whenever she had an hour or even a few minutes to spare. She prayed to God and to the Holy Virgin and to all the kindest saints.
Her mother was happy. She thought that Suze, the gay pagan child bored by religion, was finding in it her greatest joy. It did not occur to her that Suze was trying to bribe God—nothing else but that.
One Sunday, when Bob had been two months gone, and the war was a year old, no letter came. That had happened before, missing a letter on the best day of the week, but each time the anguish and fear were the same, or more sharp. What if the next day, and the next, should drag on, with no word? Suze had always that sick presentiment, and then the sensation of coming up against a high wall—at the end of the world.
“O dear Christ, O Sainted Mary, let me hear to-morrow!” the girl prayed. But to-morrow dawned, and darkened to night, and her prayer was not answered. In the middle of the week she was too ill to go to work. She didn't care whether she lost her place with Calline Sœurs or not. So the days passed—if you could call them days. Suze wondered that she was alive. Yet she must live—to know.
Then at last she did know. A comrade—a man named Le Brun, about whom Bob had spoken—wrote. Bob had asked him to write to Mademoiselle Durand if anything happened. He had been wounded himself, in the attack where Bob fell, but now he was better. Bob had been reported missing at first, as perhaps Mademoiselle Durand had somehow learned; but it would not be fair to let her go on believing that, and hoping. He—Le Brun—had seen Bob lying mortally wounded on the battlefield, bleeding to death, past speaking. Only such a little attack, hardly reported in the papers! It was hard that a brave fellow like Bob had to go in that way, without winning glory. But he had died doing his duty—more than his duty, since he, an American born, could honorably have kept out of the war.
SUZE was strangely stunned by the news. It seemed that she suffered less than in the days and nights when she had been tossed, bruised and broken, back and forth between hope and fear. She felt crushed, as if some immense weight had fallen upon her. But suddenly pain sprang up in her heart like a living flame. It was actually there, in her heart, a physical ache beyond bearing. Her impulse was to go and fling herself in the river which has cooled so many hearts on fire. But life and youth were too strong. She looked at the water and turned away, yet not to go home. For hours she walked the streets until hunger and exhaustion had drugged the torture of her mind. Only then did she creep back to the flat, at midnight, to find her mother waiting.
“My child, my poor Suze, thou hast come to me! The good God and I will comfort thee!” cried Madame Durand.
To her horror, the girl laughed. “Le bon Dieu et Cie.,' Suze sneered. This would have been blasphemy if sorrow hadn't stolen the child's wits. Madame Durand thought that her daughter's head had gone wrong. But next day she appeared sane enough, except that she forbade Mother to speak of Bob.
When Suze had gone out, saying in a queer, sulky voice that she wished to find new work, Madame Durand and Rose Marie talked her over together in an awestruck way. They agreed that she “looked different,” not sad or wild, as she had looked while she waited for letters, but as if she were in a silent rage, defying some one whom she hated. “She looks wicked,” the angel child ventured to say, but Madame Durand gently reproached her darling.
“Suze was never like us,” she explained. “She takes things in a way we don't understand. Yet all those prayers of hers while she had the dear Bob will not be wasted. She will have help.”
But that was exactly what Suze was thinking; that all those prayers of hers had been “wasted.” Madame Durand and Rose Marie were right about one thing. She was in a silent rage, and she was defying some one she hated. That One was God—if there were a God.
It was evident that, if she were to live, she must have something to keep her thoughts from the past. The one outlet was to find work, hard work. Nothing would have tempted her back to Calline Sœurs, where the girls knew about Bob and would talk of him. But Suze was an expert sewer of sleeves. She found a situation with Phrynette, Calline's newest and smartest rival. Suze had more responsibility and more money. Madame Durand was much pleased. “Now we can save,” Mother said. “With what I earn” (she was a dressmaker), “and this increase of yours, next spring we can buy a piano for la petite.”
“I don't mean to save,” Suze warned her openly. “If I'm to live, I must have something to live for. I shall give you what I gave before, not a sou over. The rest I shall spend on clothes, or anything I fancy, perhaps for you or Rose Marie, perhaps for myself.”
This was another phase of the changed Suze—Suze who, with all her faults, had ever been loyal to family needs.
Suze did not put on mourning for Bob. He had hated crape, and half in joke one day had made her promise not to wear it “if I don't come back.” It was the same day she had promised to think of him whenever she saw violets. She carried out her threat of not saving a sou, and bought herself pretty things. It was her one pleasure—a dangerous pleasure, Madame Durand feared: but it was worse than useless remonstrating with Suze in these days. One got one's head snapped off!
The girl was prettier than she had been, though not in a “good way,” her mother anxiously thought as the spring opened. She was slenderer, more chic of figure, and a touch of rouge under the green-gray eyes gave a pearly look to her skin. She had done something to her hair; its latent copper tint was brought out, and the loose waves had glints of red gold. Madame Durand was sure every man must turn to stare at the new Suze, and she watched the clock at night when the girl ought to come home.
Women seemed to care as much about clothes as before the war. Phrynette had great luck with her clients. She saw, as Calline Sœurs had seen, that Suze Durand had a “personality.” She too sent the girl sometimes to pacify vexed clients who had been kept waiting. Suze would go out looking pretty and smart, accompanied by a trotteur carrying a box with the delayed order; and she had an almost hypnotic way of soothing a customer's rage.
ONE morning, after an agitating scene at the telephone, Suze was rushed off to the Princess de Courlaine. The Princess lived in a charming house in a street off the Champs Elysées. Her husband was fighting, of course, but her brother-in-law Prince Paul was fighting, of course, but her brother-in-law Prince Paul was réformé, not quite an invalid, yet too delicate for the terrible strain of war. The doctors had sent him home after his first month at the front, and since then he had been at loose ends, trying to forget in one way or other that he was a man useless to his country. He had just come up from the Riviera and had dropped in for déjeuner with his belle-sœur, to hear the news of his brother and of Paris, when Suze and her companion arrived.
The middle-aged princess was reading a letter to her young brother-in-law when the emissaries of Phrynette were announced. “Would you like to see the newest of the new?” Paul de Courlaine was asked, and he said yes, for women's finery amused him. Suze and the trotteur were ushered in. The trotteur opened the huge wooden box. Suze, with daintiness and grace, lifted out three frocks, each more marvelous than its predecessor, explaining in a soft voice why Madame Phrynette had not been able to finish the work last week according to promise. De Courlaine did not look at the dresses.
Suze didn't glance at him, even from under her lashes. After the respectful little bow, by which on entering she saluted the occupants, she gave no sign of awareness that a young man was one of them. Yet she knew perfectly well that there was a young man, not handsome but distinguished, with the air of having everything in the world he wanted. She knew, as girls do know with their eyes down, that he was “struck” with her. That he should be noticing her with an interest which seemed to set magnetic currents vibrating through the room was a compliment from such a man.
“Mais elle est gentille, cette petite, n'est-ce pas?” said the Princess, who saw what her brother-in-law was “up to,” and was not shocked—only amused. She expected to make the girl blush, and to tease Paul.
The girl did blush, though not as Bob's Suze would have blushed. She smiled with that becoming modesty which best shows off eyelashes; and having finished her errand, bowed herself away with the trotteur in tow. Before she reached the door, Courlaine politely threw it open and contrived to slip something into her hand. Suze could not have dropped the thing if she had wished, without getting the man and herself into trouble, but she did not wish.
As the girls escaped, Suze examined the stiff little roll in her palm. It proved to be a visiting card, and scrawled upon it in pencil were the words, “Will call for you with an automobile and take you for a drive this evening when you finish work.” He had decided quickly that he wanted to meet her again! He must have written while Suze displayed the dresses to his sister-in-law.
“Clever!” the girl thought. He hadn't risked a refusal by asking her to meet him. She was obliged to leave work at six, and if he chose the right moment, it wouldn't be her fault if they met. But she would not cheapen herself by waiting a second.
It was not difficult for De Courlaine to choose the right moment. Anybody in the neighborhood could tell his chauffeur at what time Phrynette closed. Suze had no need to wait. The limousine had been on the watch with shining crystal eyes a quarter of an hour before Phrynette's girls began to come out.
Suze walked past as if the grand blue car were invisible; but De Courlaine was not the man for an error in tact. Suze guessed this, and had no fear of being accosted before her friends. It was only when she had tripped indifferently on for some distance with the auto slowly following that its inmate showed himself.
“Wont you let me take you for a drive, just to the Cascade and back?” he asked, joining the neat figure.
Suze turned and gave him a gray-green glance. “Monsieur, I am not a girl, if you please, whom any man can pick up.”
“Mademoiselle, I am not 'any man.'”
“No. You are a prince. But does that change anything?”
“It might change your whole life, if you would let it!”
“I thought,” Suze reminded him, “you were talking of half an hour's drive!”
“I was. I am. But during that drive we can talk of the future.”
Suze went for the drive. She had meant all along to go.
IT was seldom, she explained, that she had any pleasure; and it was by the car and not by its owner that she was tempted. Prince Paul de Courlaine took the cue and behaved himself charmingly. If Suze had been a vraie demoiselle of his own world, he could not have treated her with more respect. The next evening and the next the same program was repeated; but then, it seemed to De Courlaine, even the girl must feel that it was time for an end of the first act.
The third day was Sunday. Instead of taking Rose Marie for a walk, Suze went out alone early, met De Courlaine in his car and lunched with him at a country restaurant. He told her she was the sweetest and prettiest girl he had ever seen, different from any other, and that it was abominable she should waste her youth in hard work.
“I'd love to give you beautiful things such as you brought to my sister-in-law the day I saw you first,” he said. “I'd love to buy you pearls better than hers, and see you against a rose-and-silver background like her boudoir—all your own. Wouldn't that make you happy? And theaters and concerts, and the most beautiful places of the world to see—you the most beautiful woman there?”
Suze had expected this offer, but she shivered a little when it came, because in a faint undertone another voice echoed through her soul: “Such a beauty as you are, a fascinator that a prince might fall in love with. And you waited for me.” Yes, she had waited, but there was nothing and no one to wait for now. The only life was to forget. She said to De Courlaine that she could not make up her mind, that she must have a little time to think. De Courlaine gave her till next day. He asked that instead of going to work she should break with the treadmill there and then, that she should go shopping with him and that she should choose whatever she liked. “Everything you need to make you the most admired girl in Paris—or Monte Carlo, or wherever you go.”
SUZE would not promise to meet him. but she hinted that, if she were at the rendezvous he named for the morning, it would mean that she consented. She did not want the man to be too sure. She wanted him to have an uneasy night, and then to keep him waiting next day at the meeting-place; but—she would come to it. She had not a throb of love in her heart for the weary-looking, pale prince with the high-arched eyebrows and nose of distinguished shape; but she had told herself many times that love had died for her, with the sweetness of youth, like a bird in a shut cage in a dark room. She meant to get what was left in life, and it seemed that for a pretty girl without money or position there was just one way of getting it.
Prince Paul de Courlaine opened the way; but in Suze's plan he was only the means to an end. She wouldn't wait for him to tire of her and throw her aside. No! The moment he had made her known and given her a footing, she would leave him and start an independent life high up at the top of the demimonde. By that time she would have learned to be a woman of the world, and she would have a great success, one of the historic courtesans of Paris such as the girls at Calline Sœurs and Phrynette's talked of. As for Mother and Rose Marie, it would be for them to choose. She would make them rich if they liked. If they didn't like, if they threw her over, then it couldn't be helped. And at worst she would post them money anonymously which they would have to use, because they couldn't send it back.
The next day, Monday, Suze started out at the usual hour as if to go to work, without any good-by kisses. Kissing had ceased to be since “Suze had changed.” Instead of going to Phrynette's, or to the rendezvous, she sat in the little park until she thought De Courlaine had been kept on tenterhooks long enough. Then, looking very beautiful in her pure pallor (she had put on no rouge), she appeared at the meeting-place.
“Dieu merci,” cried the man, who had waited nearly an hour. “I thought—I was afraid—”
“Don't thank God, then,” said the girl. “I have found it very bad luck to thank God.”
It was a wonderful day. Suze was nearer to being happy than she had been since she—was young. De Courlaine took her to the smartest of the shops and bought for her many dresses and exquisite under-things, fine as frost-wreaths. He let her choose as many hats as she liked; he bought her a string of pearls which cost ten thousand francs, a big diamond solitaire, and a wedding-ring. In silence she listened when he instructed the shop people to send at once, by special messenger, everything to “Madame Courland, Trois bis Rue des Tourterelles.” Perhaps he expected her to ask questions, but when she asked none, he, said at last: “You'll find the lot waiting for you when I take you—home, in time to dress for dinner. I've engaged a furnished apartment for you, and servants. I think you will not be dissatisfied.”
IT was almost evening when, after tea at the Ritz—Suze's first tea there, except in the long-ago dreams—the automobile turned into the Rue des Tourterelles. The moment the door was opened by an elderly yet chic maid, Suze realized that the jewel had seemed to De Courlaine worth a very costly setting; and at the door he left her. “You invite me to dinner?” he asked. Suze said “Yes.” The maid announced that the chef was preparing dinner for seven-thirty. Madame would have two hours to look at the parcels which had arrived, to rest and to dress.
It was a small flat, but perfect after its fashion, and it had evidently been decorated as a frame for a beautiful blonde woman. The maid was an experienced hairdresser. When Suze had bathed and swathed herself in a silk wrapper, her hair was done in a wonderful way which, she could see, made her as alluring and mysterious as a mermaid. Then she was put into the gown which its giver liked best and had begged her to wear—a pale sea-green, sea-blue tulle. The pearls were fastened round her white throat, and made her delicately powdered neck look soft as swan's-down. De Courlaine arrived before she was ready, and when she came from her rose-colored bedroom into the mauve-and-silver boudoir adjoining, he dropped on his knees and kissed her hands.
Beyond was the startlingly modern dining-room in white and black lacquer, all color concentrated in the deep-red roses scattered over the table. The chef must have been a genius, for the dinner, Suze thought, was like a feast in a fairy-story. Yet she could eat little. Her hands were ice-cold, and she ceased shivering only when De Courlaine had made her drink some champagne.
Then the sluggish blood bounded through her veins, and she laughed, though she did not know whether she was happy or miserable. How could she know, when her head swam, and her thoughts were so confused that they were hardly thoughts at all? Besides, she didn't care—didn't care!
THE fairy-book dinner was not long. There were just enough courses: and when De Courlaine had teased Suze to eat a few hothouse strawberries, he asked her to give him coffee and liqueur in the boudoir. “I have another little surprise for you there,” he said.
He led her into the next room. Already a silver tray stood on a low table beside the great cushion-covered sofa of mauve brocade. The coffee was to be Turkish coffee, and De Courlaine made it himself. Suze had never tasted it before. She sipped the sirupy stuff eagerly, and then some green Chartreuse. De Courlaine gave her a cigarette but took it from her fingers before it was half smoked.
“At last you are mine!” he said. “Now for our wedding-ceremony. You haven't let me kiss you yet, but you are going to atone for that!”
He sprang up and took from a console in a corner a great box of mauve satin which Suze had not noticed. It was tied with broad purple ribbon. De Courlaine's fingers quivered as he tugged at the bowknot. “Did you wonder there were no flowers in your boudoir, flowers of the right color?” he asked. “Lie back among the cushions and shut your eyes!' And when Suze did not obey quickly, he pushed her back. She lay with her chin thrown up, the pearls he had given cool on the throat his hot hand touched. It was good, for a moment, to have her eyes closed. But suddenly, like a delicate, perfumed dew, something rained down upon her, rained on her face, her hair, her neck.
With a cry she opened her eyes. She was covered with violets. De Courlaine showered them in purple handfuls from the mauve box. She drank their breath with her breath. They fell through the low neck of her dress into her bosom and lay over her heart. Their perfume pierced her soul.
“Violets!” she heard herself cry. “Violets—now! My God!”
“Yes, violets, now. A bed of violets, a bower of violets for my fresh violet among the faded roses I have known!”
The box was empty, and he tossed it aside, opening his arms. But Suze was on her feet. She pushed him away so fiercely that he fell into a chair, his weak heart pounding at his throat. Staring, amazed, he let her dart from the room into the bedroom adjoining and slam the door between. When he staggered up, it was locked. Suze, on the other side, was tearing off the pearls and the green tulle dress and ringing for the maid. “Find me my clothes I came in,” she ordered, while De Courlaine listened, like one in a nightmare, to the high, wild voice of the girl who must, it seemed, have gone mad.
He was not a man to make scenes before a servant; yet when it was borne in upon him that Suze meant to go, he hurried to bar her exit in the hall.
But it would have been as easy to bar the way of a tigress. With a look of horror and hatred he will never forget or understand, Suze thrust him aside and went out into the night.
SUZE went straight home. She longed like a lost child to see her mother, not to tell anything, but just to fall on a heart that loved her, and lie there, resting quietly. She wanted to see little Rose Marie—see her asleep and press a hot cheek to a soft, child hand.
“They're mine, those two,” she thought. “I have still a right to them. I have still a right to Bob.”
The impression was strong upon Suze that somehow Bob must have known, and sent the violets to save her. The whole world was changed because of the wonderful meaning in that impression. It meant that if Bob's spirit could come to her rescue, he existed and she might find him again. Indeed it was almost as if she had found him now.
How thankful she was that she had not left a note at home, saying she had gone to make another life for herself! She unlocked the door and went in. No one was in the sitting-room, but she could hear a voice in the room beyond. Mother was with Rose Marie, talking to the child and putting her to bed.
“I have left it under her plate,” were the words Suze heard. “It is the only thing I can do, for I am too tired to sit up. She is often so late—who can tell when she may walk in? Yet I should have liked to give it to her myself. It will not be good for the girl to learn such news, all alone in the night.”
Suze tiptoed to the table where her supper had been laid. She lifted the thick white plate and looked underneath. A telegram blue as faded violets lay on the unbleached cloth. It was addressed to Mademoiselle Durand, but it had been opened and folded again.
First of all she looked at the signature, Le Brun. That was the name of Bob's comrade, the man who had written long ago that he had seen Bob dying on the battlefield. She read:
    I have escaped from a German prison. I found Bob there. He did not die, after all, and I beg your forgiveness for the sorrow I made you suffer, though I meant well. He is not strong yet, for he has been months in hospital, but he told me to let you know, if I got through, that he thinks of you always. You are to go on waiting for him, and he will come perhaps with the next violets.
There was a crash in the sitting-room, and Mother rushed in to find Suze on the floor in a dead faint, with the telegram in her hand.
So the prayers to God and all the kindest saints had not been wasted; for mothers know that joy does not kill.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1933, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 90 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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