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The Mysterious Mickey Finn

Dover Publications, Inc.

The Rosy-Whiskered Morn in Montparnasse

Eleven a.m. is a dull hour on the terrasse of the Café du Dôme. The early risers of Montparnasse have already had coffee and rolls, the larger group who are in Paris frankly for loafing and inviting their thirsts, stay in bed until afternoon. The French of the neighbourhood, small shop keepers, butcher boys, dairy girls, bill collectors, and the like, are scurrying to and fro with their minds on their retail business.

On the spring morning in question, Homer Evans, one of the few who were sitting in front of that famous café, was there because he had not yet been in bed. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired young man who looked sturdy without being athletic, and responsive although indolent. He did not lounge awkwardly over table and chair like a character from Mark Twain, and decidedly he did not sit erect and perform moral gymnastics like an American business man. He looked as if he had lived easily and well, neither rich nor poor, but nobody in Montparnasse knew how he did it, where his funds came from or what his antecedents were. His friends, and he had scores of them, secretly wondered why a man of such brilliance and poise was content to let his talents lie fallow. For while there was considerable doubt as to the artistic merits and abilities of many of the residents of the quarter, Evans could write and paint with the best of them. His output, however, was small. He had written one short monograph entitled 'Democracies, Ancient and Modern' and had painted only one picture, a portrait of his friend and drinking companion, a Norwegian-American artist named Hjalmar Jansen. He had sat for Hjalmar, as he had sat for many other painters, and when the big Norwegian had got through, Evans had borrowed the paints, rags, and brushes and had turned out a work of art that caused other hard-working artists to wince with envy. One of them, plump Rosa Stier, had almost flown into a rage.

'You've no right to do that, damn you, Homer,' she had said. And even Hjalmar Jansen had grunted uncomfortably. 'When I think of the work I put in to train my hand and my eyes, when you consider these poor bastards all over the quarter who'd give their right eye to paint like that ...'

'I swear by all that's holy that I'll never do it again,' Evans said, and he kept his word.

Music, of all the arts, meant the most to Evans, so much that he seldom talked about it. Each year he would spend January and February in Spanish Morocco, usually at Melilla where he knew an Arab café in which the musicians played all night long, with their throbbing, insistent rhythm and unending simple melodies. Then he would return to Paris for the best part of the concert season.

He liked particularly to hear finger exercises played, over and over again. He loved to lie in bed and listen to those musical Arabesques repeat themselves and run idly through slight variations. For two years, until the previous December, he had hired a music student to play finger exercises on his grand piano each day between eleven and one, and when the pretty and earnest young girl from Montana had gone back home to teach he had been vaguely uneasy for weeks, although it occurred to him afterwards that he had never known her name.

On the Tuesday morning on which this story opens Evans had not been to bed, not because alcoholic excesses had driven him to carry on beyond the natural ending of a party. He had been showing his publisher and some visiting Americans the night life of the city. They had tasted the right food, and a staggering number of the right kind of drinks, had seen busy people at work in the most commendable of all labours, the continuance of the food supply. Just to remind his guests that beneath the frosting of society are strata with no margins for defending their humanity, he had taken them to the huge square in front of the city hospital, just after two o'clock, at the hour when all the tramps and derelicts are chased out of the squalid bars and from beneath the bridges. Standing in the shelter of the great cathedral, the Americans had watched the furtive army of the disinherited slink across the square on the way to the market where some of them might earn a few sous and the others scrape up discarded carrots and cabbage leaves from the slippery sidewalks. It was one of Evans' few acts of self-discipline, mingling now and then with that unholy and wretched crowd, and usually he performed it alone. But his publisher had wanted to see everything, so after a dinner at the Café de Paris, an hour at the Folies Bergère, a drink or two chez Weber, and the stimulating popular quarter around the place Clichy, instead of treating his guests to a session of living pictures in the notorious rue Blondel, Homer had confronted them unexpectedly with the lowest of the low, in one of their moments of greatest discomfort. It was his sense of the dramatic, perhaps, and more likely something more. At any rate, it had given his publisher such a shock that, later, he had viewed the miraculous pyramids of carrots and cauliflower, the entire place St Eustache covered with baskets of strawberries, the Bourse flanked with fifty thousand mushrooms, in a daze and had harangued Evans in every market café on the subject of his idleness, on the number of books he might have been turning out, on the injustice of burying his thirty talents, in contradiction with Biblical precedent and the practice of right-thinking people everywhere. After the dawn, involving green and gold behind the spires of Notre Dame, after the last bat had zigzagged between the buildings of the rue de la Huchette, Evans had retired to his own quarter, Montparnasse, again to think it over. He had thought it over and once more decided he was on the right track. No books, no paintings, no fame. If he wrote as he could write, no one would publish it, least of all the dapper young president of the Acorn Press, and if the stuff were published, no one would read it. And if someone read it, he would probably not understand it. And if he did by chance understand it, it would make him feel badly.

A negative resolve is not conducive to sleep, so Evans had sat calmly on the terrasse of the Select watching the blue deepen behind the Coupole. Then; at the appropriate hour, he had shifted over to the Dôme and had just about decided that after lunch he would take some rest when Hjalmar Jansen appeared.

No doubt 'appeared' is too light a verb to use in connexion with the hulking Norwegian painter. He lumbered across the street, letting the traffic dodge him as best it could, and before he had approached nearer than fifty yards, Evans could see that his friend had something on his mind.

'What the hell?' Evans asked, startling the Norwegian into recognizing him. 'One would think, by the looks of your face, that the English girl had made you marry her.'

'Worse than that,' said Jansen, making the straw chair creak with his weight as he sat at Evans' table.

'There's nothing worse than that,' Evans said. 'Her feet....'

'This is serious,' Jansen said. 'Hugo Weiss is in town.'

The End of a Fiscal Year

Hugo Weiss was known in every capital of the western world as a multimillionaire, a philanthropist and a patron of the arts. His home was New York and his refuge, Paris. He financed two symphony orchestras, kept a number of lesser opera companies circulating in America, was the moving director of at least half a dozen important museums. The aura of dollar signs and astronomical figures, of glittering diamond horseshoes, 'la' in altissimo and miles of narrow galleries filled with dim paintings evoked by the mention of Hugo Weiss was so different from that of the Café du Dôme on a spring morning that Homer Evans, did not at first receive the import of his friend's remark. It was as if Hjalmar had said, 'They are scrubbing off the dome of St Paul's this morning,' or 'Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.' Then Homer suddenly remembered that it was because of one thousand dollars advanced by Hugo Weiss that Hjalmar Jansen had been able to stay in Paris and paint during the past year, the fiscal year, from Hjalmar's viewpoint, that was drawing to a dismal close.

'So he's here?' said Evans.

'He got in yesterday,' Jansen said, and sank into a deeper gloom, which was agitated by fitful flashes of awareness that something drastic must be done.

Now Hjalmar Jansen was what might be termed a serious artist. That is to say, when he produced a painting that was distinctly below par he threw it away, sometimes stretcher and all. He had impressed Hugo Weiss at a New York cocktail party, where his hearty voice, rugged physique and capacity for bathtub gin had made him stand out from the city folks present. They had ducked out of the party together and spent the evening at Luchow's where the magic of Weiss's presence had produced real Würzburger.

It would not be fair to say that Hjalmar had done no work since coming to Montparnasse, but his artistic conscience had developed much faster than his skill, so most of the canvases had been chucked out of the window, not a few before the window had been opened. After a failure he would usually get roaring drunk, and get into a fight if he could find a man big enough. Then, if he still felt rebellious, he would hop a Belgian canal barge on which he would ride to the border, through the marvellous canals of northern France, insisting on doing most of the work and on buying all the wine. This would take about two weeks, after which he would settle down to work again. His best painting, a portrait of the proprietor of the Dôme, was hanging inside the café and was the proprietor's prize possession. He had accepted it for a bar bill that would, if represented by stacked saucers, reach approximately to the level of the Eiffel Tower. By such expedients, Hjalmar had lived abundantly and made his thousand dollars go far, but it was nearly gone. In fact, there were seven francs fifty of it left, and lunch for himself and the English girl with the tenacious temperament and enormous feet had to come out of that.

The two friends sat silently at the Dôme while Evans reviewed the facts in his mind and Hjalmar Jansen shifted in his seat, twisted his béret in his huge hands and tried to decide what to do. By borrowing the portrait hanging in the café (and which the proprietor prized almost as much as his licence to do business) Hjalmar would have three paintings to show his benefactor, – three paintings to answer for a year's hard work: the portrait of Chalgrin, otherwise known as M. Dôme, in a severe black frock coat and funereal tie, somewhat after the manner of Fantin-Latour; a nude of the English girl with red hair (and consistent at that) and those expressive British feet in the foreground; and a still life of some old boots that had taken his fancy. Could he explain to Hugo Weiss that he had covered about an acre of canvas, each foot of which had taught him something? What to do? What to do? His wits were not responding that morning, partly on account of his benefactor's unexpected arrival, partly because Maggie Dickinson, the English girl, had been particularly tearful and troublesome at breakfast and had made it clear that she intended, for his own good, to make him settle down.

'Listen, old boy,' Evans said, at last. 'I've been up all night, and involved in a number of things. My publisher has been badgering me, I've beheld starvation in the midst of plenty. I have seen the sun rise behind the spires of Our Lady while the predatory bat was a-wing. It's certain: (1) that Hugo Weiss did not come to Paris expressly to view your masterpieces; (2) that he will still be here to-morrow, since I noticed in this morning's Herald that he is to be a guest of honour at the banquet of the Société des Artistes Français three evenings hence; (3) that I can give you better counsel after I have had two hours' peaceful sleep. Meet me here at five this evening, when, if the sun holds strong, a long cool drink will be in order.'

'Thanks. Much obliged. I will,' said Jansen, rising quickly and upsetting two chairs in his progress across the terrasse. 'So long. Sleep well. At five,' he roared, from the sidewalk, and of the dozen heads behind spread newspapers, only one turned toward the speaker and then back to where Homer Evans was sitting. That one belonged to Ambrose Gring.

No one knew where Ambrose Gring had been born or what sort of passport he carried. He frequented art galleries, the kind that deal in fabulously priced old masters, and seemed to be familiar with the dealers and attendants all up and down the rue la Boétie and in the place Vendôme. He had been at Yale and won a poetry prize, was familiar with Constantinople and spoke Turkish, had followed Kolchak in northern Russia, although no one could imagine him as a fighting man, and had been involved in a notorious affair which ended by having an American widow taken forcibly from his apartment by her male relatives and sequestrated in a private and expensive Maison de Santé until she had cooled off sufficiently to give up Ambrose. Gring listened to the voice of Hjalmar because it was his habit to listen to everything. Whatever he saw or heard he made a mental note of, for future reference, and oftener than might be expected, he found odd scraps of information could be made profitable to him, either to ingratiate himself with someone, or to take vengeance for a personal slight, for he was very vain.

'This afternoon at five,' Gring repeated to himself, and resolved to be on hand, at a nearby table. He knew that Hjalmar was agitated and that he was perfectly sober, two unusual circumstances which by coinciding made it certain that something important was in the wind. And it was a small wind in Montparnasse that did not blow Ambrose at least a cup of coffee or an introduction to some naïve American girl who was seeing Paris for the first time, and needed guidance.

Homer Evans was aware of Ambrose, sitting two tables in front of him, but that did not spoil the morning for him. He was tolerant of Ambrose Gring as he was tolerant of everyone. In fact he had often admired the eel-like way in which Ambrose got along, without work or visible achievement, without disclosing his past, explaining his present or speculating upon his future. Most pan-handlers worked hard at their trade, so hard in fact that in any other line of work they would have been successful. Not so with Ambrose. The lilies of the field were sweatshop slaves compared with him, and Solomon in all his glory never had a better fitting suit or a niftier tie. It was true that a few years previously some articles bearing Gring's signature had appeared in Art for Art's Sake, a commercial review which listed all the important auctions and sales, but no one had seen Gring write them.

As Homer Evans turned to call the waiter, he saw with dismay that Maggie Dickinson, the English girl, looking sterner and more haggard than, ever, was heading across the terrasse, unmistakably bound for his table.

'I know you don't like to be interrupted, but I must talk to you,' she said, running her skinny fingers through her shock of red hair.

He had risen courteously, and with all his impatience concealed, asked her to sit down.

'You're the only one of Hjalmar's friends who has any sense, or decency,' she burst out, and the ears of Ambrose Gring, two tables in advance, spread themselves a fraction of a millimetre and expressed the utmost satisfaction.

'What's wrong?' Evans asked.

'He's wasting himself, he's throwing himself away.... Oh, don't think I'm jealous. He can run around with other girls if he wants to, but he needs a steadying influence, someone to take care of him, his clothes, his filthy studio, to wake him at the proper hour, to give him breakfast, get his models there on time, take care of his money and see that he eats his regular meals. I don't mind if he drinks. It's natural, perhaps, for him to drink. But he ought to work and he needs a little order.'

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Excerpted from The Mysterious Mickey Finn by Elliot Paul. Copyright © 2014 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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