And he believed her.
This alley-kitten—or alley-tigress—read him as such geniuses as Elsa and Keipp and Gillespie and Short had never done. She knew by divination that he was an American, a business man, graduate of a university; she knew that he had lost at love; she knew that essentially he was kindly and solid and not to be diverted by the obscenities with which she had amused other traveling Americans.
“You are a nize man. Maybe you buy me a dinner. Or I don’t care a damn—you come to my little flat and I cook you a shop. I have not got no man, now. The last—oh, the dirty hound—I threw him out because he stole my fur coat and pawned it!”
And he believed her.
Her flushed vitality pleased him. Though she said nothing of importance, she uttered her little, profane, sage comments on the warfare between men and women with such vigor, she so assured him that he was large and powerful and real and that she preferred him to all of the limp poetasters about the place, that he was warmed by her companionship. And without mentioning Berlin or Kurt, without making it quite clear whether Fran had been sweetheart or wife, he forgot his “I’d rather not talk about it,” and told her rather frankly of his illness.
Then he returned to his hotel, packed a bag, and spent three nights and days in the flat of Nande Azeredo.
She astonished him by the casual, happy, utterly proud way in which she served her Man. He had not known that any women save spinster secretaries could be happy in serving. She darned his socks and made him drink less cognac, she cooked snails for him so that he actually liked them, she taught him new ways of love, and when she found that he did not know them, she laughed at him, but affectionately. For the first time in his life he began to learn that he need not be ashamed of the body which God had presumably given him but which Fran had considered rather an error. He found in himself a power of intense passion such as, all his life, he had guiltily believed himself to lack; and sometimes Nande’s flat seemed to him the Bower of Eden.
It was an insane little flat: three rooms, just under the roof, looking on a paved courtyard which smelled of slops and worse, and was all day clamorous with quarreling, children playing, delivery of charcoal, and the banging of garbage cans. Her dishes were cracked, her cups were chipped; the plaster walls were rain-streaked and Sam’s roses she set out in a tin can; but on a couch covered with gold brocade lolled horribly a number of powdery-faced dolls, very elongated and expensive. Her clothes were in heaps and there was no concealment of sanitary appliances. And everywhere were instruments for the making of noise: a phonograph which by preference she turned on at three in the morning, rattles and horns left over from the last carnival, a very cheap radio—fortunately out of order—and seven canaries.
He could not, for a time, believe that Nande, whatever her virtues, was not calculating on what she would get out of him. When they were ambling the Rue de la Paix together (that street which Fran had seemed to know so well, but which Nande made living by telling the most scandalous tales about the shopkeepers and their favorites among the women clerks) he buzzed, “What’d you like me to buy you, Nan? Some pearls or—”
She stopped before him, planted her arms akimbo, and spoke furiously. “I am not vot you call a gold-digger! I am not lady enough! If when you get tired of me, you vant to give me a hundred dollars—or fifty—fine. But you must, by God, understand, when Nande Azeredo takes a man, it iss because she likes him! Pearls? What would I do with pearls? Can I eat pearls?”
She worked daily—though not for very many hours daily—at her atrocious modeling, and somehow she managed to bring him in precisely the sorts of English books he wanted: Shelley, for the vanity of remembering that he had been a University Man before he became a beachcomber, and detective stories, which he really read.
“Lord!” he reflected, “what a wife she’d make for a pioneer! She’d chuck this Parisian show like a shot, if she loved somebody. She’d hoe the corn, she’d shoot the Indians, she’d nurse the babies—and if she couldn’t get Paris lingerie, she’d probably spin it.”
But it was just her admirable vigor which after three days wearied him.
It was amusing, the first time, to see Nande, arms akimbo, in a shawl or a chemise, denouncing the grocer’s boy for an overcharge of thirty centimes, denouncing him with so many applications of the epithet “Camel” that he blanched and fled. But it was much less amusing, the twentieth time she quarreled with tradesmen, waiters, taxi-drivers, and motorists—who, she believed, were in a conspiracy to run her down—and with Sam himself, for not eating more. She was so shrill: her conversations started with a shriek and ended with a howl. He longed for a decent quiet. And always he saw Fran watching Nande and himself in mockery.
Whenever he stoutly convinced himself that Nande was beautiful as a young tigress and a miracle of loyal kindness, the cool wraith of Fran appeared, and Nande seemed then a blowsy gutter-looper. To his angry defense of Nande, Fran answered with the look she gave rude servants. She watched while Nande scrubbed the floor, bawling indecent lyrics; she slipped through the room just as Nande cheered Sam by slapping his rear; and he was turned into a schoolboy caught with the kitchen maid.
So he told Nande that business called him to Italy. She pretended to believe him; she begged him to be careful of cognac and women; she casually accepted
