Chiefly Concerning Strawberries

 
Reginald Wright Kauffman

Theft in its simplicity—however sharp and rude, yet if frankly done, and bravely—does not corrupt men’s souls; and they can, in a foolish, but quite vital and faithful way, keep the feast of the Virgin Mary in the midst of it.—Ruskin: Fors Clavigera.
 
It was quite true that he had resolved to be careful of the money that old Fourget had paid him for the pot-boiler. He still meant to be careful of it. But he was to be a guest at déjeuner next morning, and a man must not breakfast with a Princess and wear a costume that is really shockingly shabby. Cartaret therefore set about devising some means of bettering his wardrobe.

His impulse was to buy a new suit of clothes, as Seraphin had done when he sold his picture. Seraphin, however, had received a good deal more money than Cartaret, and Cartaret was [145] really in earnest about his economies: when he had spent half the afternoon in the shops, and found that most of the ready-made suits there exposed for sale would cost him the bulk of his new capital, he decided to sponge his present suit, sew on a few buttons and then sleep with it under his mattress by way of pressing it. A new necktie was, nevertheless, imperative: he had been absent-mindedly wiping his brushes on the old, and it would not do to smell more of turpentine than the exigencies of his suit made necessary; the scent of turpentine is not appetizing.

If you have never been in love, you may suppose that the selection of so small a thing as a necktie is trivial; otherwise, you will know that there are occasions when it is no light matter, and you will then understand why Cartaret found it positively portentous. The first score of neckties that he looked at were impossible; so were the second. In the third he found one that would perhaps just do, and this he had laid aside for him while he went on to another shop. He went [146] to several other shops. Whereas he had at first found too few possibilities, he was now embarrassed by too many. There was a flowing marine-blue affair with white fleur-de-lys that he thought would do well for Seraphin and that he considered for a moment on his own account. He went back to the first shop and so through the lot again. In the end, his American fear of anything bright conquered, and he bought a gray “four-in-hand” that might have been made in Philadelphia.

On his return he went to the window to see how his strawberries were doing. He remembered the anecdote about the good cleric, who said that doubtless God could have made a better berry, but that doubtless God never did. Cartaret wondered if it would be an impertinence to offer his strawberries to the Lady of the Rose.

They were gone.

He went down the stairs in two jumps. He thrust his head into the concierge’s cavern.

“Who’s been to my room?” he shouted. He was still weak, but anger lent him strength.

[147] Refrogné growled.

“Tell me!” insisted Cartaret.

“How should I know?” the concierge countered.

“It’s your business to know. You’re responsible. Who’s come in and gone out since I went out?”

“Nobody.”

“There must have been somebody! Somebody has been to my room and stolen something.”

Thefts are not so far removed from the sphere of a concierge’s natural activities as unduly to excite him.

“To rob it is not necessary that one come in from without,” said he.

“You charge a tenant?”

“I charge nobody. It is you that charge, monsieur. I did not know that you possessed to be stolen. A thief of a tenant? But certainly. One cannot inquire the business of one’s tenants. What house is without a little thief?”

“I believe you did it!” said Cartaret.

Refrogné whistled, in the darkness, a bar of “Margarita.”

[148] Houdon was passing by. He made suave enquiries.

“But not Refrogné,” he assured Cartaret. “You do an injustice to a worthy man, my dear friend. Besides, what is a box of strawberries to you?”

Cartaret felt that he was in danger of making a mountain of a molehill; he had the morbid fear, common to his countrymen, of appearing ridiculous. It occurred to him that it would not have been beyond Houdon to appropriate the berries, if he had happened into the room and found its master absent; but to bother further was to be once more absurd.

“I don’t suppose it does matter,” he said; “but my supplies have been going pretty fast lately, and if I was to catch the thief, I’d hammer the life out of him.”

“Magnificent!” gurgled Houdon as he passed gesturing into the street.

Cartaret returned toward his room. The dusk had fallen and, if he had not known the way so well, he would have had trouble in finding it. He was tired, too, and so he went slowly. That he [149] also went softly he did not realize until he gently pushed open the door to his quarters.

A shadowy figure was silhouetted against the window out of which Cartaret kept his supplies, and the figure seemed to have some of them in its hands.

Cartaret’s anger was still hot. Now it flamed to a sudden fury. He did not pause to consider the personality, or even the garb, of the thief. He saw nothing, thought nothing, save that he was being robbed. He charged the dim figure; tackled it as he once tackled runners on the football-field; fell with it much as he had fallen with those runners in the days of old—except that he fell among a hail of food-stuffs—and then found himself tragically holding to the floor the duenna Chitta.

It was a terrible thing, this battle with a frightened woman. Cartaret tried to rise, but she gripped him fast. His amazement first, and next his mortification, would have left him nerveless, but Chitta was fighting like a tigress. His face was scratched and one finger bitten, before he [150] could hold her quiet enough to say, in slow French:

“I did not know that it was you. You are welcome to what you want. I am going to let you go. Don’t struggle. I shan’t hurt you. Get up.”

He thanked Heaven that she understood at least a little of the language. Shaken, he got to his own feet; but Chitta, instead of rising, surprisingly knelt at his.

She spouted a long speech of infinite emotion. She wept. She clasped and unclasped her hands. She pointed to the room of her mistress; then to her mouth, and then rubbed that portion of her figure over the spot where the appetite is appeased.

“Do you mean,” gasped Cartaret—“do you mean that you and your mistress”—this was terrible!—“have been poor?”

Chitta had come to the room without her head-dress, and the subsequent battle had sent her hair in dank coils about her shoulders. She nodded; the shaken coils were like so many serpents.

“And that she has been hungry?—Hungry?”

A violent negative. Chitta bobbed toward [151] Cartaret’s rifled stores and then toward the street, as if to include other stores in the same circle of depredation. She was also plainly indignant at the idea that she would permit her mistress to be hungry.

“Oh,” said Cartaret, “I see! You are a consistent thief.”

This time Chitta’s nod was a proud one; but she pointed again to the other room and shook her head violently; then to herself and nodded once more. Words could not more plainly have said that, although she had been supplementing her provisions by petty thefts, her employer knew nothing about them.

And she must not be told. Again Chitta began to bob and moan and weep. She pointed across the hallway, put a finger to her lips, shook her old head and finally held out her clasped hands in supplication.

Cartaret emptied his pockets. He wished he had not been so extravagant as to buy that necktie. He handed to Chitta all the money left from the [152] price that Fourget had paid him, to the last five-centime piece.

“Take this,” he said, “and be sure you don’t ever let your mistress know where it came from. I shan’t tell anybody about you. When you want more, come direct to me.” He knew that he could paint marketable pot-boilers now.

She wanted to kiss his hand, but he hurried from the woman and left her groveling behind him....

“M. Refrogné,” he said to the concierge, “I owe you an apology. I am sorry for the way I spoke to you a while ago. I have found those strawberries.”

“Bah!” said Refrogné. He added, when Cartaret had passed: “In his stomach, most likely.”

Slowly the horror of having had to use physical force against a woman left Cartaret. He started for a long walk and thought many things. He thought, as he trudged at last across L’Etoile, how the April starshine was turning the Arc de Triomphe to silver, and how the lovers on the benches at the junction of the rue Lauriston and the avenue [153] Kléber made Napoleon’s arch in praise of war a monument to softer passions. He thought, as he strolled from the avenue d’Eylan and across the Place Victor Hugo, how the heart of that poet, whose statue here represented him as so much the politician, must grow warm when, as now, boys and girls passed arm in arm about the pediment. The night bore jonquils in her hands and wore a spray of wisteria in her hair. Brocaded ghosts of the old régime must be pacing a stately measure at Ranelagh, and all the elves of Spring were dancing in the Bois.

The Princess was poor. That brought her nearer to him: it gave him a chance to help her. Cartaret found it hard to be sorry that she was poor.

(The Azure Rose)