Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/507

Chapter 41

DEDICATION

Through the wide flung open shutters of her room in the Grand Hotel Terminus, Vida Bertrand looked down at the milling throngs at the entrance of the Gare St. Lazare.

Railroad stations, she thought, were the beginning as well as the end of journeys. What made this room well chosen was not its chintz walls, marble fireplace, brass bed with lace-edged pillowcases and pink silk down covers, but its location near where the rues d'Amsterdam, Rome, Madrid, Londres, Lisbonne, Constantinople, Milan, Athènes, Moscou, webbed the trains coming and going. Sounds of music came up through toots and venders' street cries, and people were dancing in the streets.

The sultry day purpled in apoplectic festivity and a relief femme de chambre, sighing and muttering self-commiseratingly, hurriedly turned down the bed and changed towels because it was July 14th. The streetlights came up one by one and the effluvium of the sweating streets wafted up mingled with the erotic scent that was Paris.

She took off her dress and, disdaining the mosquitoes, turned on the lamp at the window desk and to the cacophony of mingled café music, wrote:

Paris, July 14, 1927

Figente ailed all summer of 1926, deflating slowly like a pricked balloon. His conversion which he hoped would ease his fear of dying had the opposite effect. He became impossible with cantankerous demands and cruel jibes. He could not abide his Father Confessor and finally refused to see him. He thought nothing of calling me to come at any hour of the night to sit with him and read to him from the Marquis de Sade or Dante or Abelard.