“An’ you are pleas wiz Paris, Monsieur Astang?” Madame Marotte asked the next morning as Hastings entered the pension’s breakfast room, pink-cheeked after his quick bath upstairs.
“I’m sure I shall like it,” he said, though he wondered why he felt so miserable.
The maid brought him coffee and rolls.
Hastings returned the blank stare of the big-headed young man and awkwardly nodded to the old gentlemen with red noses and dirty handkerchiefs.
He could barely drink his coffee. He sat there breaking his roll into crumbs, unaware of the sympathetic looks Madame Marotte kept giving him. She was tactful enough to leave him alone.
A maid soon came in carrying a tray with two bowls of hot chocolate.
The old gentlemen stared hungrily at her ankles.
She placed the chocolate on a table by the window and smiled at Hastings.
Then a thin young American woman entered, followed closely by an older woman who looked almost exactly like her. They took the table by the window.
Hastings immediately recognized them as Americans.
He waited for some sign that they recognized him too.
None came.
Being ignored by his own countrymen only made him feel worse. He nervously moved his knife around his plate and stared down at his breakfast.
The younger woman, however, was perfectly willing to talk.
She knew Hastings was there. She was quite prepared to let him admire her if he chose to look her way. At the same time, she felt superior to him.
She had already been in Paris for three weeks.
It was obvious that he had only just arrived and probably had not even unpacked his trunk.
She spoke with the comfortable confidence of someone who believed she knew everything.
She was arguing with her mother about which was more interesting, the Louvre or the Bon Marché.
Her mother contributed little beyond saying,
“Why, Susie!”
The old gentlemen finally marched out together.
They were outwardly polite but inwardly furious.
They could not stand the Americans filling the breakfast room with their endless chatter.
The big-headed young man watched them leave and gave a knowing cough.
“Gay old birds!” he muttered.
“They look like bad old men, Mr. Bladen,” Susie said.
Mr. Bladen smiled.
“They’ve had their day.”
He said it in a way that suggested his own day had just begun.
“And that’s why they all have such baggy eyes!” Susie exclaimed. “I think it’s disgraceful for young gentlemen—”
“Why, Susie!” her mother interrupted.
The conversation died again.
After a while, Mr. Bladen dropped the Petit Journal he had been reading every morning at the pension’s expense.
He turned toward Hastings and decided to be friendly.
“I see you’re American.”
It was hardly an original opening, but Hastings, desperately homesick, was grateful to hear it.
The conversation continued, helped along by occasional remarks from Susie, who seemed to be speaking mainly to Mr. Bladen.
Before long, she forgot to direct every remark specifically at him.
Hastings answered one of her general questions.
That was enough.
The peace was made.
Susie and her mother promptly took Hastings under their protection, as though he were a small piece of neutral ground in the middle of a diplomatic dispute.
“Mr. Hastings, you mustn’t disappear from the pension every evening the way Mr. Bladen does.”
“Paris is a terrible place for young gentlemen.”
“And Mr. Bladen is a dreadful cynic.”
Mr. Bladen looked pleased with himself.
“I’ll be at the studio all day,” Hastings replied. “I expect I’ll be more than happy to come back here at night.”
Mr. Bladen, who earned fifteen dollars a week as an agent for the Pewly Manufacturing Company of Troy, New York, gave him a doubtful smile.
Then he left to meet a customer on Boulevard Magenta.
Hastings went into the garden with Mrs. Byng and Susie.
At their invitation, he sat with them in the shade near the iron gate.
The chestnut trees were still covered with fragrant pink and white blossoms.
Bees buzzed among the roses climbing the white walls of the house.
The air had a faint freshness to it.
Watering carts rolled slowly up and down the street, while a clear stream of water ran along the spotless gutters of the rue de la Grande Chaumière.
Sparrows hopped happily beside the curb.
They splashed themselves again and again in the water, then shook their feathers with obvious delight.
Across the street, in a walled garden, two blackbirds sang among the almond trees.
Hastings swallowed hard.
The birdsong and the sound of running water in the Paris gutter suddenly carried him back to the sunny meadows of Millbrook.
“That’s a blackbird,” Susie said. “Look at him on that bush with the pink flowers. He’s completely black except for his bill. Some Frenchman says it looks as though someone dipped it in an omelet—”
“Why, Susie!” Mrs. Byng exclaimed.
“That garden belongs to a studio occupied by two Americans,” Susie continued calmly. “I often see them coming and going.”
“They seem to need a great many models, mostly young women.”
“Why, Susie!”
“Perhaps they simply prefer painting that sort.”
She paused, then went on.
“But I don’t understand why they needed five of them, along with three young gentlemen, and why they all had to pile into two cabs and drive away singing.”
She glanced down the quiet street.
“This street is terribly dull. There’s nothing to see except that garden and a little glimpse of Boulevard Montparnasse through the rue de la Grande Chaumière.”
“No one ever comes along except a policeman.”
“There’s a convent on the corner.”
“I thought it was a Jesuit college,” Hastings began.
But before he could finish, Susie launched into a detailed description she had clearly memorized from her Baedeker.
“On one side are the grand hotels of Jean Paul Laurens and Guillaume Bouguereau, and across from them, in the little Passage Stanislas, Carolus Duran paints the masterpieces that delight the whole world.”
The blackbird suddenly broke into a stream of rich, golden notes.
From some distant green corner of the city, another wild bird answered with a wild rush of liquid song.
The sparrows stopped bathing and looked upward, chirping nervously.
Then a butterfly drifted over and settled on a cluster of heliotrope.
Its crimson-banded wings opened and closed in the hot sunlight.
Hastings knew that butterfly.
For a moment, Paris disappeared.
He saw tall mulleins and fragrant milkweed covered with butterflies.
He saw a white house with a piazza wrapped in climbing woodbine.
He saw a man sitting and reading.
He saw a woman bending over a bed of pansies.
The memories filled his heart until it ached.
Then Susie’s voice brought him back.
“I believe you’re homesick!”
Hastings blushed.
Susie gave him a sympathetic sigh.
“When I first felt homesick, I used to go walking in the Luxembourg Gardens with mamma.”
“I don’t know why, but those old-fashioned gardens seemed to make me feel closer to home than anything else in this artificial city.”
“But they’re full of marble statues,” Mrs. Byng said mildly. “I don’t see the resemblance myself.”
Hastings was silent for a moment.
“Where is the Luxembourg?” he finally asked.
“Come with me to the gate,” Susie said.
Hastings got up and followed her.
She pointed down the street.
“That’s the rue Vavin, at the bottom of the street.”
Then she smiled.
“Go past the convent and turn right.”
Hastings followed her directions and set off.