"And she had her way," Mrs. Tully sighed. "She--why, she dismissed me,
sent me home. She would accept no more than the meagerest allowance,
and went down into the Latin Quarter on her own, batching with two
other American girls. And she met Dick. Dick was a rare one. You
couldn't guess what he was doing then. Running a cabaret--oh, not these
modern cabarets, but a real students' cabaret of sorts. It was very
select. They were a lot of madmen. You see, he was just back from some
of his wild adventuring at the ends of the earth, and, as he stated it,
he wanted to stop living life for a while and to talk about life
instead.
"Paula took me there once. Oh, they were engaged--the day before, and
he had called on me and all that. I had known 'Lucky' Richard Forrest,
and I knew all about his son. From a worldly standpoint, Paula couldn't
have made a finer marriage. It was quite a romance. Paula had seen him
captain the University of California eleven to victory over Stanford.
And the next time she saw him was in the studio she shared with the two
girls. She didn't know whether Dick was worth millions or whether he
was running a cabaret because he was hard up, and she cared less. She
always followed her heart. Fancy the situation: Dick the uncatchable,
and Paula who never flirted. They must have sprung forthright into each
other's arms, for inside the week it was all arranged, and Dick made
his call on me, as if my decision meant anything one way or the other.
"But Dick's cabaret. It was the Cabaret of the Philosophers--a small
pokey place, down in a cellar, in the heart of the Quarter, and it had
only one table. Fancy that for a cabaret! But such a table! A big round
one, of plain boards, without even an oil-cloth, the wood stained with
the countless drinks spilled by the table-pounding of the philosophers,
and it could seat thirty. Women were not permitted. An exception was
made for Paula and me.
"You've met Aaron Hancock here. He was one of the philosophers, and to
this day he swaggers that he owed Dick a bigger bill that never was
paid than any of his customers. And there they used to meet, all those
wild young thinkers, and pound the table, and talk philosophy in all
the tongues of Europe. Dick always had a penchant for philosophers.
"But Paula spoiled that little adventure. No sooner were they married
than Dick fitted out his schooner, the All Away, and away the blessed
pair of them went, honeymooning from Bordeaux to Hongkong."
"And the cabaret was closed, and the philosophers left homeless and
discussionless," Graham remarked.
Mrs. Tully laughed heartily and shook her head.
"He endowed it for them," she gasped, her hand to her side. "Or
partially endowed it, or something. I don't know what the arrangement
was. And within the month it was raided by the police for an anarchist
club."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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