Authors: Susan Barrie
Each day when she haunted the reception desk she
enquired anxiously for letters. There was nothing for
her
...
The dark-eyed, alert girl behind the reception
desk regarded her compassionately. Mademoiselle was undoubtedly exp
e
cting to hear from a lover, and so far he had disappointed her. But, as she was so pretty and charming, in a curiously diffident way, there was no doubt at all he would remember her some time. It was just a question of being patient!
Toni realised that that was what the receptionist’s eyes said to her each time she answered her enquiry with rather a sad shake of the head.
“Nothing today,
mademoiselle.
Try the afternoon post!”
But the afternoon post brought nothing, either. Toni rejoined her uncle—usually sipping something which he described as quite innocuous oh the broad terrace of the hotel, which overlooked the street—and he could tell at once from her expression that her enquiries had proved futile.
“That young man of yours not a very good correspondent? Well, never mind, I wouldn’t worry! Never was much of a correspondent myself when I was young
... Put off writing letters until the last moment, even when there was someone pretty like yourself to receive them. Now, stop worrying your head and have an aperitif
... nothing like a good martini for freeing the mind of its troubles. Waiter!”
Sometimes Toni accepted the aperitif, sometimes she did not. Towards the end of the week she was feeling so desperate that she considered putting through a telephone call to the Hotel
Rosenhorn
, but for some reason the General discouraged the idea.
“Not a good thing to appear to be chasing after a man
... especially a foreigner! Might get the wrong ideas!” It occurred to Toni that a man who was expecting to marry in a few weeks’ time could hardly get the wrong ideas when his
fiancée
telephoned him, but some queer insistence in her uncle’s voice decided her against doing anything precipitate. Marianne might answer the call, and it would look extremely odd if Toni, with a note of uncertainty and agitation in her voice, enquired whether Monsieur Antoine was there to be spoken to.
She decided to wait another day, at least, and by the end of that day her spirits were so depressed that instead of describing Paris as a gay capital she would have described it as the unhappiest place on earth. They had attended a performance of
La Dame Aux Camellias,
and what with being haunted by the melancholy of the unfortunate heroine, shaken by her unhappy demise, and rendered definitely sceptical of the intentions of all males, she could barely conjure up a smile when they got back to the hotel. Tragic melodrama obviously had no effect at all on the General, and he was all for drinking a nightcap together and discussing the show before she left him to go to bed, and because he plainly thought he was giving her a wonderful time after her years of hardship she consented to accompany him into one of the now emptying public rooms.
The first one they passed through didn’t seem to appeal to the General, and they went on to the next. Here there were one or two couples lingering beneath the subdued lights, and an elderly lady or two engaged
with knitting. A profound silence seemed to envelop the place, broken only by the noise of traffic without, and Toni’s feet seemed to sink into the thick carpet as she followed her uncle over the floor.
And then, abruptly, he was gripping her elbow and indicating a group of chairs in a
corner
. In one of them a man was seated, and he rose at once as soon as Toni lifted her eyes in a bemused fashion and met his.
“Kurt!” she exclaimed, and moved forward with an impulsiveness that slightly shocked one of the elderly ladies peering at a magazine through a gold-handled lorgnette. Even more impulsively she threw herself forward into his arms, and the General stood by s
miling
placidly while they exchanged an unsatisfying but definitely rather starved sort of a kiss.
Kurt, who seemed to have lost some of his tan under the rose-shaded lights, kept his arm firmly about Toni’s shoulders while an explanation was offered to her of the reason why he had appeared so unexpectedly.
“It was your uncle’s idea,” he said. “He thought it might cheer you up if I came.”
“Cheer her up considerably, was what I actually said,” the General corrected him, looking round for a waiter to whom he could issue an order. “I decided to telephone the other day when you were looking so miserable at lunch I thought you’d cry into your soup, and as I never enjoy the spectacle of an engaged young woman crying into her soup I strongly urged him to get here as quick as he could manage it. And he came! Without losing much time
,
I give you my word
!
”
“But why didn’t you write?” Toni demanded, sinking down into the luxurious lap of a settee and experiencing a kind of breathless delight as Kurt shared the settee with her. He was holding her hand so strongly that she could have winced with the pain of it if she hadn’t been so humbly grateful for his touch.
“I haven’t received a single letter from you, and I’ve written to you every day. Even Uncle knows that.”
Uncle nodded.
“Been amazed by her energy, and her determination to tell you all that was going on,” he confessed. “Can’t think how she managed it, with all those trips to the hairdressers, and so forth. The only thing I can
think
of was that
sh
e was obsessed with the determination to do you justice when you finally did arrive.”
Toni looked up into the deep, dark velvet that was her lover’s eyes, and she repeated with a slight break in her voice:
“
Why
didn’t you write?”
Kurt was silent for a moment, and then he answered quietly:
“Perhaps I wanted you to miss me! Perhaps I
didn’t know what to write
...
Perhaps I found letters
utterly
inadequate as a bond between us!”
“But you did receive mine
?
”
“Oh, yes.”
He opened his notecase and she saw the letters lying inside it.
“Very well read, I can assure you,” he added, a note in his voice that set all her pulses quivering at the
same
time. “So well read that the paper on which they’re written ought to have disintegrated by this time!”
Toni’s fingers tightened about his until they were clinging to him. The elderly lady with the lorgnette, deciding this was a genuine love affair, relaxed and put aside her magazine, and decided to enjoy the process of being merely an onlooker.
“I was beginning to feel quite desperate because you didn’t write,” Toni told him, and her
li
p quivered.
“I know. Your uncle said all that over the telephone, and so we arranged that I should be here tonight. Does it make up for all those letterless days that I’m here now?”
And not with Marianne, her heart sang. Oh, never, never again will I have any fear of Marianne!
The General finished his whisky and soda and ordered another, and then he announced that he knew when he was in the way and he was going up to bed. He didn’t suppose they wanted him around.
“I don’t suppose you two will be thinking of retiring for some time yet, but if you can get Toni to smile at the inside of one of these Paris night-clubs I’ll stand you something very special in the way of a lunch tomorrow morning,” he added to Kurt. “I’ll admit I’ve trodden on her toes trying to get her to teach me these
modern
dances, but no girl ought to look as unhappy as she looked while acting the part of an instructor. Made me feel my years,” he admitted, sighing. And then he smiled at them both. “Don’t be too late. I don’t think Toni’s slept very much lately, and she oughtn’t to be outside her room much later than cock-crow. That should give you a little time to reassure one another about how much each of you has been missed!”
Alone together on the settee Toni and Kurt looked at one another. The elderly lady with the lorgnette considerately averted her eyes.
“What shall we do?” Kurt asked, in a voice so soft that Toni barely heard it. “And where shall we go
?
”
“Anywhere,” Toni replied. “It doesn’t matter to
me..
.”
“So long as we’re together?”
“Yes.”
“That’s how I feel,” he said, and together they walked out of the hotel. Kurt hailed a taxi, and after he had put Toni into it he had a few words with the driver.
“Where are we going?” she asked, when he joined her in the gloom of the back of the cab.
“I told the driver it didn’t matter,” Kurt said simply, and opened his arms to her. As they sped beneath the lights of Paris and the taxi-driver decided there was nothing wrong with Versailles, Toni felt herself locked in those arms, and her
li
ps responded breathlessly to his kisses. It wasn’t until they were both a
li
ttle exhausted by the fierceness and de
li
ght of their own passion that Kurt said decisively:
“I’ve decided that we’re going to be married immediately.
Immediately,
do you hear,
Liebling
?”
THE END