When he spoke again, his voice was weary with a quiet bitterness of scorn. “I was born,” he said, “in the great and noble town of Bloomington, but—” the note of savage irony deepened—“at a very tender age I was taken to Moline. And now, thank God, I am in Paris”; he was silent a moment longer, and then continued in a quiet and almost lifeless tone: “Paris, Dijon, Provence, Aries… Yancey, Brant’s Mill, Bloomington.” He turned his quiet eyes upon the other boy. “You see what I mean, don’t you? The whole thing’s there.”
“Yes,” the boy replied, “I guess you’re right.”
LXXVIII
They were sitting at a table in one of the night places of Montmartre. The place was close and hot, full of gilt and glitter, heavy with that unwholesome and seductive fragrance of the night that comes from perfumery, wine, brandy and the erotic intoxication of a night-time pleasure place. Over everything there was a bright yet golden blaze of light that wrought on all it touched—gilt, tinsel, table linen, the natural hue and colouring of the people, the faces of men, and the flesh of the women—an evil but strangely thrilling transformation.
The orchestra had just finished playing a piece that everyone in Paris was singing that year. It was a gay jigging little tune that Mistinguette had made famous; its name was “Ca, c’est Paris,” and one heard it everywhere. One heard lonely wayfarers whistling it as they walked home late at night through the silent narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, and one heard it hummed by taxi-drivers, waiters, and by women in cafés. It was played constantly to the tune of flutes and violins by dance orchestras in the night-clubs of Montmartre and Montparnasse. And, accompanied by the swelling rhythms of the accordion, one heard it at big dance-halls like the Bal Bullier, and in the little dives and stews and café-brothel-dancing places along noisome alleyways near the markets and the Boulevard de Sébastopol.
In spite of its gay jigging lilt, that tune had a kind of mournful fatality. It was one of those songs which seem to evoke perfectly—it is impossible to know why—the whole colour, life, and fragrance of a place and time as nothing else on earth can do. For the boy, that song would haunt him ever after with the image of Paris and of his life that year, with the memory of Starwick, Elinor, and Ann.
The song had for him the fatality of something priceless, irrecoverably lost,
