Roi Megrue - Under Cover

PARIS wears her greenest livery and puts on her most gracious airs in early summer. When the National Fete commemorative of the Bastille’s fall has gone, there are few Parisians of wealth or leisure who remain in their city. Trouville, Deauville, Etretat and other pleasure cities claim them and even the bourgeoisie hie them to their summer villas.

The city is given up to those tourists from America and England whom Paris still persists in calling Les Cooks in memory of that enterprising blazer of cheap trails for the masses. Your true Parisian and the stranger who has stayed within the city’s gates to know her well, find themselves wholly out of sympathy with the eager crowds who follow beaten tracks and absorb topographical knowledge from guide-books.

Monty Vaughan was an American who knew his Paris in all months but those two which are sacred to foreign travelers, and it irritated him one blazing afternoon in late July to be persistently mistaken for a tourist and offered silly useless toys and plans of the Louvre. The camelots , those shrewd itinerant merchants of the Boulevards, pestered him continually. These excellent judges of human nature saw in him one who lacked the necessary harshness to drive them away and made capital of his good nature.

He was a slim, pleasant-looking man of five and twenty, to whom the good things of this world had been vouchsafed, with no effort on his part to obtain them; and in spite of this he preserved a certain frank and boyish charm which had made him popular all his life.

Presently on his somewhat aimless wanderings he came down the Avenue de l’Opéra and took a seat under the awning and ordered an innocuous drink. He was in a city where he had innumerable friends, but they had all left for the seashore and this loneliness was unpleasant to his friendly spirit. But even in the Café de Paris he was not to be left alone and he was regarded as fair game by alert hawkers. One would steal up to his table and deposit a little measure of olives and plead for two sous in exchange. Another would place some nuts by his side and demand a like amount. And when they had been driven forth and he had lighted a cigarette, he observed watching him with professional eagerness a ramasseur de megot , one of those men who make a livelihood of picking up the butts of cigars and cigarettes and selling them.

When Monty flung down the half-smoked cigarette in hope that the man would go away he was annoyed to find that the fellow was congratulating himself that here was a tourist worth following, who smoked not the wispy attenuated cigarettes of the native but one worth harvesting. He probed for it with his long stick under the table and stood waiting for another.

The heat, the absence of his friends and the knowledge that he must presently dine alone had brought the usually placid Monty into a wholly foreign frame of mind and he rose abruptly and stalked down the Avenue.

A depressed-looking sandwich-man, bearing a device which read, “One can laugh uproariously at the Champs Elysées every night during the summer months,” blocked his way, and permitted a woman selling fans of the kind known to the camelots as les petits vents du nord to thrust one upon him. “Monsieur does not comprehend our heat in Paris,” she said. “Buy a little north wind. Two sous for a little north wind.”

Monty thrust a franc in her hand and turned quickly from her to carom against a tall well-dressed man who was passing. As Monty began to utter his apology the look of gloom dropped from his face and he seized the stranger’s hand and shook it heartily.

“Steve, old man!” he cried, “what luck to find you amid this mob! I’ve been feeling like a poor shipwrecked orphan, and here you come to my rescue again.”

The man he addressed as Steve seemed just as pleased to behold Monty Vaughan. The two were old comrades from the days at their preparatory school and had met little during the past five years. Monty’s ecstatic welcome was a pleasant reminder of happy days that were gone.

“I might ask what you are doing here,” Steven Denby returned. “I imagined you to be sunning yourself in Newport or Bar Harbor, not doing Paris in July.”

“I’ve been living here for two years,” Monty explained, when they were sheltered from interruption at the café Monty had just left.

“Doing what?”

Monty looked at him with a diffident smile. “I suppose you’ll grin just like everybody else. I’m here to learn foreign banking systems. My father says it will do me good.”

Denby laughed. “I’ll bet you know less about it than I do.” The idea of Monty Vaughan, heir to the Vaughan millions, working like a clerk in the Crédit Lyonnais was amusing.

“Does your father make you work all summer?” he demanded.

“I’m not working now,” Monty explained. “I never do unless I feel like it. I’m waiting for a friend who is sailing with me on the Mauretania next week and I’ve just had a wire to say she’ll be here to-morrow.”

“She!” echoed Denby. “Have you married without my knowledge or consent? Or is this a honey-moon trip you are taking?”

A look of sadness came into the younger man’s face.

“I shall never marry,” he returned.

But Steven Denby knew him too well to take such expressions of gloom as final. “Nonsense,” he cried. “You are just the sort they like. You’re inclined to believe in people too much if you like them, and a husband who believes in his wife as you will in yours is a treasure. They’ll fight for you, Monty, when you get home again. For all you know the trap is already baited.”

“Trap!” Monty cried reproachfully. “I’ve been trying to make a girl catch me for three years now and she won’t.”

“Do you mean you’ve been finally turned down?” Steven Denby asked curiously. It was difficult to suppose that a man of his friend’s wealth and standing would experience much trouble in offering heart and fortune.

“I haven’t asked yet,” Monty admitted. “I’ve been on the verge of it hundreds of times, but she always laughs as I’m coming around to it, and someone comes in or something happens and I’ve never done it.” He sighed with the deprecating manner of the devout lover. “If you’d only seen her, Steve, you’d see what mighty little chance I stood. I feel it’s a bit of impertinence to ask a girl like that to marry me.”

Steven patted him on the arm. “You’re just the same,” he said, “exactly the silly old Monty I used to know. Next time you see your charmer, risk being impertinent and ask her to marry you. Women hate modesty nowadays. It’s just a confession of failure and we’re all hitched up to success. I don’t know the girl you are speaking of but when you get home again instead of declaring your great unworthiness, tell her you’ve left Paris and its pleasures simply to marry her. Say that the Bourse begged you to remain and guide the nation through a financial panic, but you left them weeping and flew back on a fast Cunarder.”

“I believe you are right,” Monty said. “I’ll do it. I ought to have done it years ago. Alice is frightfully disappointed with me.”

“Who is Alice?” the other demanded. “The lady you’re crossing with on the Mauretania?”

“Yes,” said Monty. “A good pal of mine; one of those up-to-date women of the world who know what to do and say at the right moment. She’s a sort of elder sister to me. You’ll like her, Steve.”

Denby doubted it but pursued the subject no further. He conceived Alice to be one of those capable managing women who do so much good in the world and give so little pleasure.