The Laughing Girl

Smith, although now made mean by hunger, was decent enough to notice and salute my flag. The flag of Chili is a pretty one; it carries a single white star on a blue field, and a white and a red stripe.

One has only to add a galaxy of stars and a lot more stripes to have the flag I had lived under so many years.

And now that this flag was flying over millions of embattled Americans – well, it looked very beautiful to me. And was looking more beautiful every time I inspected it. But the Chilean O'Ryans had no business with the Star Spangled Banner as long as Chili remained neutral. I said this, at times to Smith, to which he invariably remarked: "Flap-doodle! No Irishman can keep out of this shindy long. Watch your step, O'Ryan."

Now, as I walked toward Smith, carrying my suitcase, he observed my advent with hopeful hunger-stricken eyes.

"If yonder maid with yonder mop can cook, and has the makings of a civilized meal in this joint of yours, for heaven's sake tell her to get on the job," he said. "What do you usually call her – if not Katie?"

"How do I know? I've never before laid eyes on her."

"You don't know the name of your own cook?"

"How should I? Did you think she was part of the estate? That boche attorney, Schmitz, at Berne, promised to send up somebody to look after the place until I made up my mind what I was going to do. That's the lady, I suppose. And Smith – did you ever see such very red hair on any human woman?"

I may have spoken louder than I meant to; evidently my voice carried, for the girl looked over her shabby shoulder and greeted us with a clear, fresh, unfeigned, untroubled peal of laughter. I felt myself growing red. However, I approached her. She wore a very dirty dress – but her face and hands were dirtier.

"Did Schmitz engage you and are you to look out for us?" I inquired in German.

"If you please," she replied in French, leaning on her mop and surveying us out of two large gray eyes set symmetrically under the burnished tangle of her very remarkable hair.

"My child," I said in French, "why are you so dirty? Have you by chance been exploring the chimney?"

"I have been cleaning fireplaces and pots and pans, Monsieur. But I will make my toilet and put on a fresh apron for luncheon."

"That's a good girl," I said kindly. "And hasten, please; my friend, Mr. Smith, is hungry; and he is not very amiable at such times."

We went into the empty house; she showed us our rooms.

"Luncheon will be served in half an hour, Messieurs," she said in her cheerful and surprisingly agreeable voice, through which a hidden vein of laughter seemed to run.

After she had gone Smith came through the connecting door into my room, drying his sunburned countenance on a towel.

"I didn't suppose she was so young," he said. "She's very young, isn't she?"

"Do you mean she's too young to cook decently?"

"No. I mean – I mean that she just seems rather young. I merely noticed it."

"Oh," said I without interest. But he lingered about, buttoning his collar.

"You know," he remarked, "she wouldn't be so bad looking if you'd take her and scrub her."

"I've no intention of doing it," I retorted.

"Of course," he explained, peevishly, "I didn't mean that you, personally, should perform ablutions upon her. I merely meant – "

"Sure," said I frivolously; "take this cake of soap and chase her into the fountain out there."

"All the same," he added, "if she'd wash her face and fix her hair and stand up straight she'd have – er – elements."

"Elements of what?" I asked, continuing to unpack my suitcase and arrange the contents upon my dresser. Comb and brushes I laid on the left; other toilet articles upon the right; in the drawers I placed my underwear and linen and private papers.

Then I took the photograph which I had purchased in Berne and stood it up against the mirror over my dresser. Smith came over and looked at it with more interest than he had usually displayed.

It was the first photograph of any woman I had ever purchased. Copies were sold all over Europe. It seemed to be very popular and cost two francs fifty unframed. I had resisted it in every shop window between London and Paris. I nearly fell for it in Geneva. I did fall in Berne. It was called "The Laughing Girl," and I saw it in a shop window the day of my arrival in Berne. And I could no more get it out of my mind than I could forget an unknown charming face in a crowded street that met my gaze with a shy, faint smile of provocation. I went back to that shop and bought the photograph labeled "The Laughing Girl." It traveled with me. It had become as necessary to me as my razor or toothbrush.

As I placed it on the center of my dresser tilted back against the looking-glass, for the first time since it had been in my possession an odd and totally new sense of having seen the original of the picture somewhere – or having seen somebody who resembled it – came into my mind.

"As a matter of fact," remarked Smith, tying his tie before my mirror, "that red-haired girl of yours downstairs bears a curious resemblance to your lady-love's photograph."

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed, intensely annoyed. Because the same distasteful idea had also occurred to me.

II

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.