The Murder in the Fishing Cat BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY WOODCUTS BY J. ALLEN LEWIS OBODY came any more to the comfortably at your table under a red NRestaurant du Chat qui Peche. and-white awning, choose your eel, It was difficult to say just why. The popularity of a restaurant does not depend on the excellence of its cuisine or the cobwebs on the bottles in its cellar. And you might have in the window ten glass tanks instead of one in which moved obscurely shadowy eels and shrimps, yet you could be no surer of success. Jean-Pierre knew this, and he did not reproach himself for his failure. It is something that may happen to the best of us. For fourteen years he had served as good lapin sauté as was to be found in Paris; and if the petits pois were rather big and hard, and the Vouvray rather like thin cider, and you got no more than a teaspoonful of sugar with your strawberries, well, what could you expect for seven francs, all told? Not the world, surely. As for the rest, where else might you, while sitting and see it captured for you deftly in a napkin, and borne off, writhing muscularly, to the kitchen, to be delivered to you five minutes later on a platter, fried? That was more than you could do at Ciro's. It might be, of course, because Margot had scolded him much too audibly. But where was the man among his clients whose wife had not at some time or other addressed him as "saligaud," or "espèce de soupe au lait"? Let him stand forth. And, anyway, she had gone now. After fourteen years at his side, stamping the butter, whacking the long loaves of bread, sitting down with a sigh to a bowl of onion soup after nine o'clock, she had gone. She had run off with a taxi-driver who had red mustaches that curled naturally. And the place was very still. Jean-Pierre stood in the doorway with a damp cloth in his hand, and watched the people go by. They all went by. Once he had been sure that all were coming in, but now he knew better. They were going to the Rendezvous des Cochers et Camionneurs next door. "J'ai pas la veine," said Jean-Pierre. He stepped out upon the pavement and busily passed the damp cloth over a table which was not yet dry. Two A man and a girl went by. Two men went by. A woman went past, selling papers: "L'Intran'! L'Intransigeant! La Liberté-troisième édition! L'Intran'! L'Intransigeant!" young men went by; one was wearing a smock, the other had a painted picture under his arm. A man and a girl went past with their arms about each other. The man was saying, "Si, si, c'est vrai." A very little girl came along, carrying a basket of small fringepetaled pinks and fading roses. She had a serious face. She held out the flowers earnestly to a woman, with a coat over her arm, pushing a babycarriage; to an old man reading a newspaper as he walked; to two young women, dressed precisely alike, who were hurrying somewhere, chattering. A priest went by, taking long steps, his black gown flapping about his large shoes, his stiff, shallow hat on the back of his head. He was trying to catch a bus. He began to run. The little girl watched him go by, seriously. Still watching him, she held out her flowers to a soldier in a uniform of horizon-blue. Then she went to the restaurant next door and moved among the tables. "Sentez, madame," she said without emotion, and impassively thrust a bunch of pinks under the nose of a young woman, with a very red mouth, whose fork dangled languidly from her hand as she conversed with the man across from her. "Merci, merci," said the woman, and motioned her away without looking at her. An American boy was dining alone, reading from a yellow book. He looked up from his book, and followed the little girl with his eyes as she moved about the terrace. As she approached him he spoke to her. "C'est combien, ça, ma petite?" he asked. She came up to him, and pressed her small stomach against the table. "Dix sous," she answered lispingly, staring at his forehead. He put an arm about her while he selected a nosegay from the basket, stood it up in his empty wine-glass, and poured Vichy for it. Then he gave her a franc and told her to keep the change. She stared at him, and went off up the street, holding out her basket to the passers-by. Jean-Pierre came to himself with a start: the proprietor of a flourishing café does not stand all the afternoon gaping at the goings-on in the café next door. No wonder people did not come to the Restaurant du Chat: it had an absent-minded patron. He hurriedly passed the damp cloth over two of the iron-legged tables, plucked a brown leaf from the laurel which hedged the terrace from the pavement proper, and went back into the restaurant. "Ça va, Philippe?" he questioned jovially of the large eel which was now the sole occupant of the tank. Not for the life of him could JeanPierre have told you why he had addressed the eel as Philippe; but having done so, he was glad. For from the moment he had given the creature a name; it possessed an identity, it was a person, it was something he could talk to. He went to the kitchen, and returned with a morsel of lobster from a salad of the night before and tossed it into the pool. Two men and two women, finding the Rendezvous des Cochers crowded, turned in at the Restaurant du Chat qui Peche and seated themselves. They heard Jean-Pierre singing: "Oh, madame, voilà du bon fromage! Oh, madame, voilà du bon fromage! Voilà du bon fromage au lait!" One of the men rapped on the table with his stick. Jean-Pierre stopped short in his song, caught up the carte du jour, smoothed down his black beard, and hurried out. "Very good, the rabbit," he suggested. And, "What will you have, sirs, in the way of wine?" FOR half a year there had been only three of them to do the work, he, his wife, and Maurice, the waiter. Maurice had come to them when he was sixteen; but very soon he was nineteen, and the War Department, which knows about everything, had found out about that also, and had taken him away to put him into the army. Then for two months there had been only two of them, but it was quite enough. Now Margot was gone, and he was alone. But business was worse and worse, and very rarely was he hurried with all the cooking and the serving and the cleaning-up. Jean-Pierre had made few friends in Paris in these fourteen years. He had dealt pleasantly with his clients, his neighbors, and the tradespeople with whom he had to do; but he had been content with his wife. She was a pretty woman from the frontier of Spain and more Spanish than French. He had met her for the first time right over there, in the Luxembourg Gardens. He could almost see from his doorway the very tree under which she had been sitting. She was wearing a hat of pink straw sloping down over her forehead, with many little roses piled high under the back of it; and she was very small about the waist. She was embroidering something white. which she was sitting, and every time Several times he passed the chair in she looked up, and then looked down again. When she arose to go, he fell into step beside her. "Mademoiselle, may I accompany you?" he asked. "No, please," she answered hurriedly, without looking at him, and quickened her step. He kept pace with her, however, and bent over her and spoke again more softly. "It is wrong for one so beautiful to be so cruel," he said. "Veux-tu me laisser!" she scolded, tossing her head, and hastened out of sight. But the next afternoon she was there again. "You remember my wife, Philippe?" said Jean-Pierre. "Margot of the naughty eyes and the pretty ankles?" Philippe said nothing. "You do, all the same," Jean-Pierre averred. "She used to stir the water to make you mad." After a moment he said again, "Philippe, you remember Margot, don't you?" Philippe said nothing. "Well, anyhow," said Jean-Pierre, "she's gone." OR three months now Philippe had very proud when he had come to this Feet alone in the tank. Nobody conclusion. ate eels any more. The few customers that came ordered rabbit, mutton, or beefsteak and potatoes. It would be foolish to have more eels sent in from the basin in the country. Jean-Pierre had explained that he would need for a time no more eels or shrimps, that he was making some changes. Every morning when the proprietor of the Chat qui Peche came down to open the door and put the tables and chairs out upon the pavement, Philippe lay sluggishly on the green bottom of his tank, the sunshine bringing out colors on his back that one had not known were there. It was an oblong glass tank with brass edges. Fresh water came up through a little spout in the middle of it, and the stale water was sucked away through a pipe in one corner, which was covered with a bubbleshaped piece of netting. Looking into the tank one day, Jean-Pierre wondered why the netting was shaped like that; then he reflected that if the wire had been flat over the mouth of the pipe, it would have been clogged always with bits of dirt and food, which would float up to settle on it. He felt Philippe had been at one time graygreen in color, and thin and very active. Now he was green-black, with a valance standing up along his spine of transparent purple, and with two little pale-green fins behind his head. He was big now, but as lithe as ever. Jean-Pierre had heard queer tales about eels; he did not know how much truth there was in them. He had heard that their mothers came ashore to give birth to them; that they were born, like little animals, not laid, like eggs. And when they were small they were called "elvers." And he had been told that after they were born, their mothers left them, and went away. And in a little while the elvers started out for themselves in search of pools to live in. And if it so happened that the pools near by had dried up with the heat, they went farther. And it was said that they have gone as far as twenty miles, across the land, in search of water, thousands of them, an army of little eels. of little eels. And no human eye had witnessed their sinuous migration. Only from time to time there was found a dead elver in the grass, and people knew the eels had passed that way. "Dis-moi un peu, Philippe," said Jean-Pierre. "You are a droll one, are n't you?" The days went by, and nothing happened in them. Every day a few people came to eat there. Once there had been ten at a time, and JeanPierre had said to himself that if this kept on, he would have to get a waiter. But it did not keep on. Every day he missed his wife more keenly. One day he went across the rue de Médicis into the Luxembourg Gardens, and walked up and down past the place where he had first seen her. A young woman was sitting under the tree, embroidering, but she was not Margot. She had two children with her, two little girls, dressed just alike, in very short dresses made all of pale blue silk ruffles. They were chasing one another up and down the walk and calling in shrill voices. One of them lost her hair-ribbon, a pale blue silk bow, and ran sidewise up to her mother, holding in one hand the ribbon and lifting with the other a lock of straight blond hair at the top of her head; but all the time calling to her sister, "Attends! Attends, Juliette!" and pawing the earth with brown, impatient legs. Jean-Pierre wished very much that his only child, his and Margot's, had not died of diphtheria. She would have been much prettier than either of these little girls; she had looked like her mother. And she would be a companion for him now. If she were here this afternoon, he would take her to the Jardin des Plantes and show her all the different-colored birds. And after that they would go to the Café des Deux Magots and sit outside, and he would have a half-blond beer, and she would have a grenadine. And he would buy her one of those small whiteand-brown rabbits made all of real fur that hop when you press a bulb, such as old men are always peddling along the pavement from trays suspended in front of their stomachs by a cord about their necks. THE days went by and went by. May passed, and June passed. One day there came a post-card from Maurice, a picture bearing the title, "Panorama de Metz." On it was written carefully in pencil, “Bon souvenir d'un nouveau poilu aviateur." JeanPierre was very excited about the post-card. Four times that day he drew it from his pocket and read it aloud, then turned it over and read with happiness his own name on the front of it. Late in the afternoon it occurred to him with pleasure that he had not yet read it to Philippe, and he hastened to do so. But from his wife there had come no word. It seemed to Jean-Pierre that he would give everything he had in the world if he might once again hear Margot wail from the terrace, "Un-e souu-u-u-u-pe!" And, oh, to be called once more a dirty camel, a robber, or a species of Chinaman! He went to the tank and leaned over the quivering water. "You are my wife, Philippe. You know?" said Jean-Pierre. "You are a salope!" Having delivered himself of which genial insult, he felt happier, and stood for some moments in his doorway with his arms folded, looking boldly out upon the world. “ÇA va, mon vieux?" he accosted the eel one morning, and stirred the top of the water with a lobster-claw. But |