won’t answer?…. he continued. “No matter, I have delivered my message, and you can settle things as you please…. But, honestly, I think you are unkind. I felt sorry for the poor fellow. If I were you, I would at least send him a kind word.”
Then Renée, who had not ceased to keep her eyes, filled with a glittering light, fixed upon Maxime, said:
“Go and tell M. de Mussy that he’s a nuisance.”
And she resumed her slow walk amidst the groups of guests, smiling, bowing, shaking hands with people. Maxime stood where he was, lost in surprise; then he laughed silently to himself.
In no way eager to deliver his message to M. de Mussy, he strolled round the large drawingroom. The reception was dragging itself to its end, marvellous and commonplace, like all receptions. It was close upon midnight; the guests were dropping off one by one. Not caring to go to sleep upon an unpleasant impression, he decided to look for Louise. He was passing before the hall-door, when he saw standing in the vestibule the pretty Madame Michelin, whom her husband was wrapping up daintily in a blue-and-pink opera-cloak.
“He was charming, quite charming,” she was saying. “We talked of you all through dinner. He will speak to the minister; only it is not in his province ….”
And as a footman, close by them, was helping the Baron Gouraud on with a great fur coat:
“That’s the old boy who could carry the thing through!” she added in her husband’s ear, while he was tying the ribbon of her hood under her chin. “He can do anything he likes with the minister. Tomorrow, at the Mareuil’s, I must see what ….”
M. Michelin smiled. He carried his wife off gingerly, as though he had something valuable and fragile under his arm. Maxime, after glancing round to assure himself that Louise was not in the hall, went straight to the small drawingroom. And he found her still there, almost alone, waiting for her father who had spent the evening in the smoking-room with the politicians. Most of the ladies, the marquise, Madame Haffner, had left. Only Madame Sidonie remained behind, explaining to some wives of officials how fond she was of animals.
“Ah! here is my little husband,” cried Louise. “Sit down here and tell me where my father has fallen asleep. He must have fancied that he was already in the Chamber.”
Maxime replied in a similar strain, and the two young people began laughing again as loudly as at dinner. Sitting on a very low stool at her feet, he ended by taking her hands, by playing with her as with a schoolfellow. And, in fact, in her frock of white foulard with red spots, with her high-cut bodice, her flat breast, and her ugly, cunning little street-boy’s head, she might have passed for a boy dressed up as a girl. Yet at times her shrivelled arms, her distorted form, would assume a pose of abandonment, and a light would flash from the depths of her eyes, still full of callowness; but not the least blush in the world was brought to her cheeks by Maxime’s romping. And they both laughed on, thinking themselves alone, without perceiving Renée, who stood half-hidden in the middle of the conservatory, watching them from a distance.
A moment before, as she was crossing a walk, the sight of Maxime and Louise had suddenly caused Renée to stand still behind a shrub. Around her the hothouse, resembling the nave of a church, with an arched glass roof supported by straight, slender iron columns, displayed its fat vegetation, its masses of lusty verdure, its spreading rockets of foliage.
In the middle, in an oval tank level with the flooring, lived, with the mysterious sea-green life of water-plants, all the aquatic flora of the tropics. Cyclanthus-plants, displaying their streaks of variegated green, raised a monumental girdle around the fountain, which resembled the truncated capital of some cyclopean column. At either end, two tall tornelias reared their quaint brushwood above the water, their dry, bare stems contorted like agonizing serpents, and let fall aerial roots, that seemed like a fisherman’s nets hung up in the open air. Near the edge, a Javanese pandanus spread its cluster of green leaves streaked with white, thin as swords, prickly and fretted as Malay creeses. And on the surface, in the warmth of the tepid sheet of slumbering water, great water-lilies opened out their pink petals, and euryales trailed their round leaves, their leprous leaves, floating like the backs of monstrous blistered toads.
By way of turf, a broad edging of selaginella encircled the tank. This dwarf fern formed a thick mossy carpet of a light green shade. And beyond the great circular path, four enormous clusters of plants shot vigorously right up to the roof: palms, drooping gently in their elegance, spreading their fans, displayed their rounded crowns, hung down their leaves like oars wearied by their perpetual voyage through the blue; tall Indian bamboos rose straight, hard, slender, dropping from on high their light shower of leaves; a ravenala, the traveller’s tree, reared its bouquet of huge Chinese hand-screens; and in a corner a plantain-tree, loaded with fruit, stretched out on all sides its long horizontal leaves, on which two lovers might easily recline clasped in each other’s embrace. In the corners were Abyssinian euphorbias, deformed prickly cactuses, covered with loathly excrescences, oozing with poison. And beneath the trees the ground was carpeted with creeping ferns, adianta and pterides, their fronds outlined daintily like fine lace. Alsophilas of a taller species tapered upwards with their rows of symmetrical foliage, hexagonal, so regular as to have the appearance of large pieces of porcelain destined to hold the fruit of some titanic desert. The shrubberies were surrounded with a border of begonias and caladiums; begonias, with twisted leaves, gorgeously streaked with red and green; caladiums whose spear-headed leaves, white, with veins of green, looked like large butterfly-wings; bizarre plants, whose foliage lives strangely with the sombre or wan splendour of noisome flowers.
Behind the shrubberies, a second and narrower pathway ran round the greenhouse. There, on stages, half concealing the hot-water pipes, bloomed marantas, soft as velvet to the touch, gloxinias, purple-belled, dracœnas, resembling blades of old lacquer.
But one of the charms of this winter-garden was the four alcoves of verdure at the corners, roomy arbours closed in by thick curtains of creepers. Scraps of virgin forest had here erected their leafy walls, their impenetrable confusion of stems, of supple shoots that clung to the branches, shot through space in reckless flight, and fell from the arched roof like tassels of ornate drapery. A stalk of vanilla, whose ripe pods emitted a pungent perfume, trailed about a moss-grown portico; Indian berries draped the thin pillars with their round leaves; bauhinias with their red clusters, quisqualias with flowers pendant like bead necklaces glided, twined and intertwined like slim adders, endlessly playing and creeping amid the darkness of the growths.
And beneath arches, placed here and there between the beds of shrubs, hung baskets suspended from wire chains, and filled with orchids, fantastic plants of the air, which pushed in every direction their crooked tendrils, bent and twisted like the limbs of cripples. There were cypripediums, whose flowers resemble a wonderful slipper with a heel adorned with a dragon-fly’s wings; ærides, so delicately scented; stanhopeas, with pale tiger flowers, which exhale from afar a strong and acrid breath, as from the putrid throats of the convalescent sick.
But what most struck the eye from every point of the walks was a great Chinese hibiscus, whose immense expanse of foliage and flowers covered the whole wall of the house on to which the conservatory was built. The huge purple flowers of this giant mallow, unceasingly renewed, live but a few hours. They resembled as who should say the eager, sensual mouths of women, the red lips, soft and moist, of some colossal Messalina, bruised by kisses, and ever reviving with their hungry, bleeding smiles.
Renée, standing by the tank, shivered in the midst of this verdant magnificence. Behind her, a great sphinx in black marble, squatting upon a block of granite, turned its head towards the fountain with a cat’s cruel and wary smile; and, with its polished thighs, it looked like the dark idol of this tropical clime. From globes of ground glass came a light that covered the leaves with milky stains. Statues, heads of women with necks thrown back, swelling with laughter, stood out white against the background of the shrubberies, with patches of shadow which distorted the mad gaiety upon their faces. Strange rays of light played about the dull, still water of the tank, throwing up vague shapes, glaucous masses with monstrous outlines. A flood of white light streamed over the ravenala’s glossy leaves, over the lacquered fans of the latanias; while from the lacework of the ferns