I did once see her, and in Normandy, and by moonlight, and her name was
Ange’lique. She was graceful, she was even beautiful. I was but nineteen
years old. Yet even so I cannot say that she impressed me favourably.
I was seated at a table of a cafe’ on the terrace of a casino. I sat
facing the sea, with my back to the casino. I sat listening to the quiet
sea, which I had crossed that morning. The hour was late, there were few
people about. I heard the swing-door behind me flap open, and was
aware of a sharp snapping and crackling sound as a lady in white passed
quickly by me. I stared at her erect thin back and her agitated elbows.
A short fat man passed in pursuit of her--an elderly man in a black
alpaca jacket that billowed. I saw that she had left a trail of little
white things on the asphalt. I watched the efforts of the agonised short
fat man to overtake her as she swept wraith-like away to the distant end
of the terrace. What was the matter? What had made her so spectacularly
angry with him? The three or four waiters of the cafe’ were exchanging
cynical smiles and shrugs, as waiters will. I tried to feel cynical, but
was thrilled with excitement, with wonder and curiosity. The woman out
yonder had doubled on her tracks. She had not slackened her furious
speed, but the man waddlingly contrived to keep pace with her now. With
every moment they became more distinct, and the prospect that they
would presently pass by me, back into the casino, gave me that physical
tension which one feels on a wayside platform at the imminent passing of
an express. In the rushingly enlarged vision I had of them, the wrath
on the woman’s face was even more saliently the main thing than I had
supposed it would be. That very hard Parisian face must have been as
white as the powder that coated it. ‘Coute, Ange’lique,’ gasped
the perspiring bourgeois, ‘écoute, je te supplie--’ The swing-door
received them and was left swinging to and fro. I wanted to follow,
but had not paid for my bock. I beckoned my waiter. On his way to me he
stooped down and picked up something which, with a smile and a shrug,
he laid on my table: ‘Il semble que Mademoiselle ne s’en servira plus.’
This is the thing I now write of, and at sight of it I understood why
there had been that snapping and crackling, and what the white fragments
on the ground were.
I hurried through the rooms, hoping to see a continuation of that
drama--a scene of appeasement, perhaps, or of fury still implacable. But
the two oddly-assorted players were not performing there. My waiter
had told me he had not seen either of them before. I suppose they had
arrived that day. But I was not destined to see either of them again.
They went away, I suppose, next morning; jointly or singly; singly, I
imagine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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