Chapter 2: Al Fresco

Our luncheon was a delicious surprise. It was served to us on a rustic table and upon a fresh white cloth, out by the fountain. We had a fragrant omelette, a cool light wine, some seductive bread and butter, a big wooden bowlful of mountain strawberries, a pitcher of cream, and a bit of dreamy cheese with our coffee. The old gods feasted no more luxuriously.

Smith, fed to repletion, gazed sleepily but sentimentally at the vanishing skirts of my red-headed Hebe who had perpetrated this miracle in our behalf.

“Didn’t I tell you she’d prove to be pretty under all that soot?” he said. “I like that girl. She’s a peach.”

In point of fact her transfiguration had mildly amazed me. She had scrubbed herself and twisted up her hair, revealing an unsuspected whiteness of neck. She wore a spotless cotton dress and a white apron over it; the slouch of the slattern had disappeared and in its place was the rather indolent, unhurried, and supple grace of a lazy young thing who has never been obliged to hustle for a living.

“I wonder what her name is?” mused Smith. “She deserves a pretty name like Amaryllis——”

“Don’t try to get gay and call her that,” said I, setting fire to a cigarette. “Mind your business, anyway.”

“But we ought to know what she calls herself. Suppose we wanted her in a hurry? Suppose the house caught fire! Suppose she fell into the fountain! Shall I go to the pantry and ask her what her name is? It will save you the trouble,” he added, rising.

“I’ll attend to all the business details of this establishment,” said I, coldly. Which discouraged him; and he re-seated himself in silence.

To mitigate the snub, I offered him a cigar which he took without apparent gratitude. But Shandon Smith never nursed his wrath; and presently he affably reverted to the subject:

“O’Ryan,” he remarked, leaning back in his chair and expelling successive smoke rings at the Bec de l’Empereur across the valley, “that red-haired girl of yours is a mystery to me. I find no explanation for her. I can not reconcile her extreme youth with her miraculous virtuosity as a cook. I cannot coordinate the elements of perfect symmetry which characterize her person with the bench show points of a useful peasant. She’s not formed like a ‘grade’; she reveals pedigree. Now I dare say you look upon her as an ordinary every-day, wage-earning pot-wrestler. Don’t you?”

“I do.”

“You don’t consider her symmetrical?”

“I am,” said I, “scarcely likely to notice pulchritude below stairs.”

Smith laughed:

“For that matter she dwells upstairs in the garret, I believe. I saw her going up. I’m astonished that you don’t think her pretty because she looks like that photograph on your dresser.”

What he said again annoyed me, —the more so because, since her ablutions, the girl did somehow or other remind me even more than before of that lovely, beguiling creature in my photograph. And why on earth there should be any resemblance at all between that laughing young aristocrat in her jewels and silken negligée and my slatternly maid-of-all-work—why the one should even remotely suggest to us the other—was to me inexplicable and unpleasant.

“Smith,” I said, “you are a sentimental and romantic young man. You shyly fall in love several times a day when material is plenty. You have the valuable gift of creative imagination. Why not employ it commercially to augment your income?”

“You mean by writing best sellers?”

“I do. You are fitted for the job.”

“O’Ryan,” he said, “it would be wasted time. Newspapers are to-day the best sellers. Reality has knocked romance clean over the ropes. Look at this war? Look at the plain, unvarnished facts which history has been recording during the last four years. Has Romance ever dared appropriate such astounding material for any volume of fiction ever written?”

I admitted that fiction had become a back number in the glare of daily facts.

“It certainly has,” he said. “Every day that we live—every hour—yes, every minute that your watch ticks off—events are happening such as the wildest imagination of a genius could not create. You can prove it for yourself, O’Ryan. Try to read the most exciting work of fiction, or the cleverest, the most realistic, the most subtle romance ever written. And when you’ve yawned your bally head off over the mockery of things actual, just pick up the daily paper.”

He was quite right.

“I tell you,” he went on, “there’s more romance, more excitement, more mystery, more tragedy, more comedy, more humanity, more truth in any single edition of any French, English, Italian, or American daily paper published in these times than there is in all the fiction ever produced.”

“Very true,” I said. “Romance is dead to-day. Reality reigns alone.”

“Then why snub me when I say that your red-headed maid is a real enigma and an actual mystery? She might be anything in such times as these. She might be a great lady; she might be a scullion. Have you noticed how white and fine and slim her hands are?”

“I notice they’re clean,” said I cautiously.

He laughed at me in frank derision, obstinately interested and intent upon building up a real romance around my maid-of-all-work. His gayety and his youth amused me. I was a year his senior and I felt my age. The world was hollow; I had learned that much.

“Her whole make-up seems to me suspiciously like camouflage,” he said, “her flat-heeled slippers, for example! She has a distractingly pretty ankle, and have you happened to notice her eyes, O’Ryan?”