Hot Night in the City

then, suddenly realizing what she was wrapping around herself, she pushed the despised rag from her and let it slide onto the floor.

Snow melting from the top of the cab rippled over the panes, causing soft slabs of buttery gaslight from shop windows to alternate with harsh rectangles of cold, white, electric light from the newly installed street lamps. The young man took mental note of this lighting effect. He might use it in his directions to a set designer some day. He pulled out his watch, fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for a matchbox, struck a light, and groaned. 'I'll never make it!' he muttered miserably.

'Serves you right,' she said.

He despised the mean-minded sort of people who say, 'Serves you right'. By the light of the match, he saw her face for the first time, and her intelligent, somewhat haughty eyes returned his frank examination, but their color was a fascinating— Ouch! He dropped the match onto his coat, which he then snatched up and slapped until he was sure it was not burning.

'I see you take your frustration out on inanimate things as well,' she said.

He lit another match, and now he could see the terrible danger facing his brother. If the sister also had that creamy complexion and those violet-blue eyes... his poor brother!

The match went out, and they experienced a moment of blindness until their eyes dilated again to the darkness of the cab, which swayed and jolted around a corner onto the Pont Sully that crossed the river at the upstream tip of the Ile St. Louis. The harsh glare of the bridge's new electric street lamps played over them in rhythmic succession, then, with a lurching turn to the left, they were following the Left Bank quay towards the Gare d'Austerlitz.

As the driver was making a daring pass, the fiacre's wheel got caught in the track of the horse-drawn omnibus line, jouncing the passengers into one another's arms. They immediately recoiled into their corners, whence they regarded one another with ruffled indignation and no small amount of suspicion.

After a brooding silence, she spoke, her voice flat with icy determination. 'I've decided to go with you.'

'What?'

'I don't trust you to prevent this preposterous marriage. My sister is a child. Barely eighteen.'

'My brother's only two years older.'

'That's evidently old enough to lure an innocent girl into marriage in the hope of getting at her dowry.'

'If anyone's guilty of setting traps, it certainly isn't my brother. He doesn't need your sister's paltry dowry. He owns a flourishing establishment in Cambo.'

'I daren't think what kind of establishment.'

'A hotel, if you must know. One of Cambo's best. It was my father's and my grandfather's before him. But my father died, and it was obvious that my talents ran more to the literary than the commercial, so we agreed that the hotel should be my brother's. He runs it with my mother.'

'Your mother's in on this too, is she?'

'Now just a minute!'

'I'm going to Cambo, and that's final! I don't trust any of your wild clan of Basque brigands.'

'I take offence at your— How did you know we're Basque?'

'Everyone in Cambo is Basque—except for the poor patients who go to take the waters and end up being tricked into marriage. Then too, there's the matter of your eyes.'

'My eyes?'

'Yes, your eyes. Those notorious 'melting brown' Basque eyes that feature in so many cheap romantic novels.'

'I know nothing of romantic novels.'

'But my sister does. She devours them. And that's why I'm going to Cambo-les-Bains with you.'

'Oh, you are, are you?'

'Yes, I am.'

'How?'

'How?'

'Do you have a ticket?'

'Of course I have a— Well... no, actually. My brother has our tickets.'

'Ah! Then how do you propose to get on the train?'

'Well, I'll just have to— Wait a minute. You have a ticket! For your sister.'

'O-o-oh, no, you don't!'

'Oh, yes, I shall! And if you don't let me use her ticket, I'll follow you onto the platform, and I'll cry and sob and accuse you of... of running off with some tart and deserting me and our children! Our seven children.'

'You wouldn't dare.'

She lifted her chin and regarded him coolly.

And he had the sinking realization that his adversary was not inhibited by the slightest sense of fair play.

'I'd do anything to save my sister from the fate worse than death: a bad marriage.'

As though to punctuate this declaration, the carriage lurched to a stop, bringing them once again into a contact that had a brief physical—but only physical—resemblance to an embrace. The cab door was snatched open, and light from an ox-eye lantern flashed in their faces. 'Train for Hendaye?' the porter asked. 'You'd better hurry, m'sieur-'dame. They're closing the gates to the platform now.'

The young man sprang out onto the pavement beside the impressive mass of the Gare d'Austerlitz. She descended, pointedly ignoring his proffered hand, as the porter seized two valises (the young woman's and her brother's) from the box of the cab and hastened into the station. They followed him to the turnstile, where the young man fumbled for the tickets for an eternal ten seconds before he found them in the first pocket he had checked. They slipped through the gates as they were closing, and they ran for all they were worth. She soon fell behind with a little cry of dismay, and he swore under his breath but he grasped her hand and drew her along behind him at a speed that not only cost her the last semblance of grace but even endangered her balance as they sped down the platform to where their porter stood beside the portable steps at the door of their car, making frantic signs for them to hasten. As they passed the dining car, the young woman glimpsed faces looking out upon their hectic race with expressions of unfeigned amusement blended with... something else, something that she would not identify until later, when recognition would make a tingle of embarrassment and outrage rush up the back of her neck into her hair.

With all the flair of gesture and oiliness of manner that mark the veteran tip-seeker, the steward showed them to their chambrette, deposited their valises in the racks, and turned up the gaslamp that displayed the 'new art' Guimard impulse to create foliage out of glass and metal. After the coin had been pressed into his hand and he had glanced down upon it with a thoroughly Gallic blend of resignation and disdain, the steward said that service in the dining car would begin in fifteen minutes, and he would make up their beds while they were dining. As he put his hand on the door handle to leave, he winked at the young man and tipped his head towards the young woman with a lift of the eyebrows.

She caught this yeasty, man-to-man communication in the mirror as she was taking off her Trilby fedora, and she spun around. Raising one hand to stay the steward's departure, she asked the young man, 'Did you tip him?'

'Well... ah... yes, of course.'

'Give me that tip,' she ordered the steward.

The steward recoiled and stammered, 'But, mam'selle, but... but...'

'Give it to me!' She held out her hand, and with a grimace of genuinely heartfelt pain, the steward turned his hand over and let the coin drop into her palm.

'Now get out of here! And if we push one of those buttons for a steward, you'd better not be the one who comes tapping at the door. Do you understand me?'

'But, mam'selle, I...'

'And what makes you so sure I'm a mademoiselle?'

'I'm terribly sorry, madame. I thought—'

'That's a lie. You've never had a thought in your life—other than filthy ones! Out. Out!'