Henry Always Says So!

by Achmed Abdullah

HENRI ALWAYS SAYS SO!

By Achmed Abdullah

I

AMONG his friends it had always been a moot point if the character of Count Gérard de Pontmartin—fantastic, quixotic, and, in a way, tenebrific, with a pale charm which moved one’s appreciation of the pathetic and a mammoth melancholy which moved one’s appreciation of the comical—was an atavistic throwback to Undine, the water fairy, from whom his family claimed descent, or the rather more prosy result of his earlier training and milieu.

The Count himself held firm to the legendary theory which he regarded in the light of an esthetic bulwark against the coarse and clamorous cloutings of lusty young democracy.

He used to say that thanks to the newspapers, open plumbing, department stores, and the abolition of certain seignioral manor rights, all sorts of people, including free—and union—masons, socialists, Protestants, Jews, and South-Americans, were laying claim to what had formerly been a gentleman’s privileges, even to bend-sinisters and the gout; but Undine—a fairy ancestress with a shiny, silvery, scaly fish-tail!

“Why,” he would exclaim, “here is one thing which you cannot buy across the bargain counter of the Bon Marché!”

Mademoiselle Liane Desjazet, on the other hand, used to make slighting remarks about Undine and about the taste, the manners, and the ethics of the ancient de Pontmartin who had mated with her.

“My poor little Gérard,” she would say, with an impatient toss of her short, thick, russet mane, “the thought of that ancestor of yours embracing a specimen of a half-fish with a tail instead of legs is beastly. It is disgusting and infective! One does not do such things—not even in an aquarium of the Outer Boulevards!

“And,” here she would put a rapid little kiss on his aristocratic beak, “you are such a romantic old dear, not because of that animal of an Undine, but because of the life you have lived. It’s the milieu which counts—Henri always says so!”

“Who is Henri?”—this from the depth of the armchair where the Count was discussing his after-dinner perfecto and fine champagne, and then Liane’s ready reply that Henri was the stage electrician at the theater where she played.

“An elderly man,” she elaborated, “much, much older than you—with a long, curly white beard, and a wife who does scrubbing, and seven children”—a rapid complotting of statements without the slightest foundation of truth; and the Count realized it.

But he sighed and said nothing. For—here he smiled and kissed her narrow, pleasurable white hand—Liane was young, so young! And so, doubtless, was Henri!

She was indeed only nineteen, but already Paris was at her feet. Amaury Delande had written plays for her; Coty had called his newest and most exotic perfume after her; the Abbé Lapraze, over at the church of Paul de Saint-Victor, had anathematized her; and Arthur Meyer had said in the Gaulois that she looked like a Watteau painted by Forain—and the Count was sixty-five, gouty, addicted to flannel underwear, and arrived at that epoch in life where one breakfasts on a bromo-seltzer, a cigarette, and no food.

Yet it would be unjust to say his ancient name and splendid fortune were the only links which bound Liane to him; for there were also his great soul, his kindly heart, and the fact that his wrinkled old hands were as soft as silk and exhaled a fine, thin perfume which could not be matched the whole length of the Rue Royale.

And if once in a while, in a moment of forgetting, she quoted Henri—though at times his name seemed to be Jacques or Roland or Max—she knew that M. de Pontmartin would smile and understand and forgive; for there was his romantic, quixotic nature—the result, as she said, of his earlier milieu.

The Count had spent the greater part of his youth and his manhood in Tunis, in the diplomatic service of France, finally becoming the official resident at the Court of His Highness Si-Ali Hamouda Bey, Regent of Tunis, and the latter potentate’s intimate friend. The sojourn there and the friendship with the grave Arab had given to M. de Pontmartin’s character and viewpoint a fantastic, exotic note which he took with him into his private lifelong after he had left the pink-and-white office building among the dusty, straggling, sad palms of the Kasbah and had taken up his residence in Paris, in a squat old house across from the Place Royale, where it seemed to him that he could see, gliding among the foliage of the gardens, the shadow of Marion Delorme and the ensanguined spectre of one of his ancestors executed on the Place de Grève by orders of Cardinal Richelieu.

Thence, too, looking from the window of his salon, he could see the little apartment where the young genius of Victor Hugo had first taken wings and the tiny room where the sublime Rachel had slowly agonized: “the land of the dead who try to speak,” to quote the Count’s words; and then he would think of his own dead youth.

Perhaps he had made a mistake in choosing this ancient quarter of Paris as residence. It accentuated the grey burden and the pathetic impotence of his own age—and he loved Liane; he loved her nineteen years and her short, thick, russet mane... and she? Why—she babbled of Henri, who at times was called Roland or Max or Jacques.

Never for a moment did the Count think of making a scene with her, of mentioning to her the fact that it was his money which paid for her apartment, her jewels, her furs, her motor-cars, and her fluffy Persian kittens. For he was a gentleman of France and, too, he had lived in the Orient where in all matters, including the eternal feminine, he had absorbed the grave, calm lessons of the turbaned lands. Thus while, if all other methods failed, he would have gladly tied the little Liane into a sack, together with a live, biting, scratching cat, and thrown her into the sea—just as his old friend Si-Ali Hamouda Bey would have done—he was orientalized enough, on the other hand, to know that first he must use all the other methods—methods which say that a man must fight and struggle if he wants to keep the one he loves.

Fight and struggle! But how could he fight—he who was sixty-five, gouty, addicted to flannel underwear and, if the truth be told, to occasional hot-water bottles?

Only this morning he had seen her drive in the Bois by the side of a slim young man with ultra-British clothes and ultra-Gallic whiskers. Later in the day, when mildly confronted with the fact, she would doubtless tell him that the young man in question was some minor employee at the theater—“un jeune homme sérieux, my poor little Gérard—a scene-shifter, happily married to the daughter of a wholesale plumber of Passy—three children. Surely,” here a rapid kiss, “you would not be jealous of a plumber’s son-in-law ... with three children!”

And what could he say or do—though it seemed to him that the plumber’s son-in-law bore a strange resemblance to the young Marquis Gontrain de Rocqueplan!

II

M. de Pontmartin sighed as he walked along the Seine, leaning heavily on his cane. One of the ducks on the river bank untucked its head and awoke, resettling with a shivered rustle of brown-and-green feathers. Somehow the sight saddened the Count; somehow the shivered rustle of the little bird’s metallic plumage seemed to stand for everything which was cold and aged and dejected.

It had been different, years ago, in Tunis. There had been women then—many women who had loved him, Frenchwomen and Jewesses from Morocco and even native Arab women. It had been said of him that he had loved his way from the North of Tunis to the South and back again—from the Darel-Bey to Belvedere, from the Bou-Cornine to Sidi-bou-Said.

Sidi-bou-Said!—with its flaunting gardens, its entangled, exuberant mingling of leaves and spiky creepers and waxen, odorous flowers! M. de Pontmartin’s memory flashed backward—

He remembered an evening in spring—many, many years ago—when he and Si-Ali Hamouda Bey had driven out to Sidi-bou-Said, to a little exquisite Moorish building of fretted white marble and Andalusian majolica which, back in the Sixteenth Century, had been built by Spanish Moors for the harem of a Bey of Tunis. Now the place was used for native entertainments, and they had driven over to see a famous desert dancer come to Tunis for the first time to do the danse du ventre as it is danced among the black tents.

He remembered the scene: the Tunisan dancers, huge bundles of spangled silk stuffed with quivering rolls of fat, and at their feet the blind musicians—and he and Si-Ali Hamouda Bey, smoking their nargilehs, sipping their fig-water, and holding in their hands little bouquets of jessamine in token of joy and gallant intentions.

First there had been the usual stupid dances. Then the desert woman had made her appearance. She had danced well, of course; but it had not been her dancing which had caused him and the Bey to cover the ground in front of her feet with jewels and flowers. It had been the song she had sung—a throbbing, lilting song of the desert—of that mysterious Africa which squats to the South of Tunis in mad, amazing, unhuman stillness—

It had been the song of a jewel; a jewel which meant to its owner everlasting youth and everlasting love. Afterwards, Si-Ali Hamouda Bey had told him that the jewel—a flawless, ten-carat emerald—really existed—“and as to the promise of everlasting youth and love,” he had added, “even to that is there a foundation of fact. For only the man blessed with the greatest strength of youth can win it; only the greatest love in the world can conquer it”; and then he had told him where the emerald was. It was the usual tale of a priceless stone set in the head of a Galla idol—far, far South in the heart of the Central-African jungles; the sort of tale which is repeated, with innumerable variations and embroideries, from Morocco to the Cape. Only this tale had the advantage of being true.

“Many men have tried,” Si-Ali Hamouda Bey had wound up, “but they died—all—they died the slow death of Africa. Perhaps,” smiling into his short-cropped mustache, “their strength of youth was not great enough—perhaps their love was not deep enough!”

Youth and strength—and love!

Thus the Count’s thoughts as he sat by the open window, smoking countless cigarettes, looking out into the Place Royale—watching the night through, until he could see the distant buildings change from indefinite outlines into black, jagged silhouettes. Finally he rose, with a shiver. The lamps still burned in the streets, but the little wind that rises with dawn came blowing up from the Seine and rustled in the trees.

M. de Pontmartin entered the library to write some letters; and, two days later, the polite world of Paris saw in the Gaulois that the Count had gone on a lengthy journey, while Mademoiselle Liane Desjazet opened a letter which contained a handsome draft on the Crédit National, a world of tender old-fashioned messages, and a strange postscript which said that the Count would be gone for an indefinite length of time and that he would bring back his strength and all the love in the world—or die in the attempt.

Liane smiled.

“What a delightful, romantic, ridiculous old dear!” she said.

Then she sent her maid to deposit the draft and telephoned to Henri—that month his name was Henri.

III

Paris forgot the Count after a month or two, and Liane only remembered him when the stubs in her cheque book showed that her bank account was steadily decreasing and—that was early the following spring—when she strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens and smelled the scent of certain spring flowers. They reminded her of the fine, thin perfume of M. de Pontmartin’s wrinkled old hands; and then she sighed—and she telephoned to the Count’s valet, who informed her that Monsieur had not been heard from.

Spring had passed into autumn and autumn into fall. The new comedy which Amaury Delande was writing for Liane was nearing completion—and Liane herself was sitting in her little pink boudoir, dabbing at her cheeks with a powder-puff and thinking, with a melancholy shrug of her slim young shoulders, that after all she would have to accept the attentions, the limousine, and the bulbous wallet of a certain millionaire brewer who had recently come from Alsace to Paris. And his hands—his hands—they were coarse and red—and there was no perfume to them; only a heavy male scent of nicotine and alcohol—and—

Suddenly there were two rings at the bell—a short ring, then a long one.

Liane threw the powder-puff on the table.

Two rings!

She remembered—Gérard—Gérard de Pontmartin.

“Quick,” she cried to her maid, “quick—mais enfin—open, open!”

A moment later, M. de Pontmartin came into the boudoir, and when Liane saw him she screamed.

His corpulent old body had shrunk to a skeleton; his soft wrinkled old hands seemed like agonized, yellow claws; he dragged his left foot like a leaden, lifeless weight; straight across his face was a terrible, blood-red scar—the scar of a wound which had blotted out one eye; and he trembled, trembled—in every limb and nerve and muscle—

“What has happened to you?” cried Liane. “You are sick! You must sit down—you—”

The Count lifted one of his agonized yellow claws.

“Here, my little Liane,” he said with a strange, flat voice, “I have brought ...” and he tumbled into a chair, overcome with weakness, while from his hand a small package dropped on the carpet.

Liane picked it up.

She opened it; and inside, on a bed of dried tropical leaves, she saw a large, flawless emerald—like a drop of crystallized green fire.

She held it against her white throat and looked into the mirror.

“You—you like it?” came the Count’s strange, flat voice, and Liane turned around with a smile.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “of course I like it. But I do wish you had brought me a ruby. Red stones are much more becoming to me”; and then she added—“Henri always says so!”

Count Gérard de Pontmartin started at the name. Then a queer smile ran over his face, giving the blood-red scar a fantastic upward twist.

“Henri!” he whispered, with a quaint blending of self-pity and contentment, “ah—but it does one good to hear the old name again,” and, trembling painfully, he stooped and kissed Liane’s white hand.