“Pour qu’j’finisseMon serviceAu Tonkin je suis parti—Ah! quel beau pays, mesdames!C’est l’paradis des p’tites femmes!”
I rose from the chair on my little porch, to go to bed; but I was reminded of something, and called to him.
“Monsieur?” his voice came briskly.
“How often do you see your friend, Jean Ferret, the gardener of Quesnay?”
“Frequently, monsieur. To-morrow morning I could easily carry a message if—”
“That is precisely what I do not wish. And you may as well not mention me at all when you meet him.”
“It is understood. Perfectly.”
“If it is well understood, there will be a beautiful present for a good maitre d’hotel some day.”
“Thank you, monsieur.”
“Good night, Amedee.”
“Good night, monsieur.”
Falling to sleep has always been an intricate matter with me: I liken it to a nightly adventure in an enchanted palace. Weary-limbed and with burning eyelids, after long waiting in the outer court of wakefulness, I enter a dim, cool antechamber where the heavy garment of the body is left behind and where, perhaps, some acquaintance or friend greets me with a familiar speech or a bit of nonsense—or an unseen orchestra may play music that I know. From here I go into a spacious apartment where the air and light are of a fine clarity, for it is the hall of revelations, and in it the secrets of secrets are told, mysteries are resolved, perplexities cleared up, and sometimes I learn what to do about a picture that has bothered me. This is where I would linger, for beyond it I walk among crowding fantasies, delusions, terrors and shame, to a curtain of darkness where they take my memory from me, and I know nothing of my own adventures until I am pushed out of a secret door into the morning sunlight. Amedee was the acquaintance who met me in the antechamber to-night. He remarked that Madame d’Armand was the most beautiful woman in the world, and vanished. And in the hall of revelations I thought that I found a statue of her—but it was veiled. I wished to remove the veil, but a passing stranger stopped and told me laughingly that the veil was all that would ever be revealed of her to me—of her, or any other woman!
I was up with the birds in the morning; had my breakfast with them—a very drowsy-eyed Amedee assisting—and made off for the forest to get the sunrise through the branches, a pack on my back and three sandwiches for lunch in my pocket. I returned only with the failing light of evening, cheerfully tired and ready for a fine dinner and an early bed, both of which the good inn supplied. It was my daily programme; a healthy life “far from the world,” as Amedee said, and I was sorry when the serpent entered and disturbed it, though he was my own. He is a pet of mine; has been with me since my childhood. He leaves me when I live alone, for he loves company, but returns whenever my kind are about me. There are many names for snakes of his breed, but, to deal charitably with myself, I call mine Interest-In-Other-People’s-Affairs.
One evening I returned to find a big van from Dives, the nearest railway station, drawn up in the courtyard at the foot of the stairs leading to the gallery, and all of the people of the inn, from Madame Brossard (who directed) to Glouglou (who madly attempted the heaviest pieces), busily installing trunks, bags, and packing-cases in the suite engaged for the “great man of science” on the second floor of the east wing of the building. Neither the great man nor his companion was to be seen, however, both having retired to their rooms immediately upon their arrival—so Amedee informed me, as he wiped his brow after staggering up the steps under a load of books wrapped in sacking.
I made my evening ablutions removing a Joseph’s coat of dust and paint; and came forth from my pavilion, hoping that Professor Keredec and his friend would not mind eating in the same garden with a man in a corduroy jacket and knickerbockers; but the gentlemen continued invisible to the public eye, and mine was the only table set for dinner in the garden. Up-stairs the curtains were carefully drawn across all the windows of the east wing; little leaks of orange, here and there, betraying the lights within. Glouglou, bearing a tray of covered dishes, was just entering the salon of the “Grande Suite,” and the door closed quickly after him.
“It is to be supposed that Professor Keredec and his friend are fatigued with their journey from Paris?” I began, a little later.
“Monsieur, they did not seem fatigued,” said Amedee.
“But they dine in their own rooms to-night.”
“Every night, monsieur. It is the order of Professor Keredec. And with their own valet-de-chambre to serve them. Eh?” He poured my coffee solemnly. “That is mysterious, to say the least, isn’t it?”
“To say the very least,” I agreed.
“Monsieur the professor is a man of secrets, it appears,” continued Amedee. “When he wrote to Madame Brossard engaging his rooms, he instructed her to be careful that none of us should mention even his name; and to-day when he came, he spoke of his anxiety on that point.”
“But you did mention it.”
“To whom, monsieur?” asked the old fellow blankly.
“To me.”
“But I told him I had not,” said Amedee placidly. “It is the same thing.”
“I wonder,” I began, struck by a sudden thought, “if it will prove quite the same thing in my own case. I suppose you have not mentioned the circumstance of my being here to your friend, Jean Ferret of Quesnay?”
He looked at me reproachfully. “Has monsieur been troubled by the people of the chateau?”
“‘Troubled’ by them?”
“Have they come to seek out monsieur and disturb him? Have they done anything whatever to show that they have heard monsieur is here?”
“No, certainly they haven’t,” I was obliged to retract at once. “I beg your pardon, Amedee.”
“Ah, monsieur!” He made a deprecatory bow (which plunged me still deeper in shame), struck a match, and offered a light for my cigar with a forgiving hand. “All the same,” he pursued, “it seems very mysterious—this Keredec affair!”
“To comprehend a great man, Amedee,” I said, “is the next thing to sharing his greatness.”
He blinked slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, reverting to his puzzle.
“But is it not incomprehensible that people should eat indoors this fine weather?”
I admitted that it was. I knew very well how hot and stuffy the salon of Madame Brossard’s “Grande Suite” must be, while the garden was fragrant in the warm, dry night, and the outdoor air like a gentle tonic. Nevertheless, Professor Keredec and his friend preferred the salon.
When a man is leading a very quiet and isolated life, it is inconceivable what trifles will occupy and concentrate his attention. The smaller the community the more blowzy with gossip you are sure to find it; and I have little doubt that when Friday learned enough English, one of the first things Crusoe did was to tell him some scandal about the goat. Thus, though I treated the “Keredec affair” with a seeming airiness to Amedee, I cunningly drew the faithful rascal out, and fed my curiosity upon his own (which, as time went on and the mystery deepened, seemed likely to burst him), until, virtually, I was receiving, every evening at dinner, a detailed report of the day’s doings of Professor Keredec and his companion.
The reports were voluminous, the details few. The two gentlemen, as Amedee would relate, spent their forenoons over books and writing in their rooms. Professor Keredec’s voice could often be heard in every part of the inn; at times holding forth with such protracted vehemence that only one explanation would suffice: the learned man was delivering a lecture to his companion.
“Say then!” exclaimed Amedee—“what king of madness is that? To make orations for only one auditor!”
He brushed away my suggestion that the auditor might be a stenographer to whom the professor was dictating chapters for a new book. The relation between the two men, he contended, was more like that between teacher and pupil. “But a pupil with gray hair!” he finished, raising his fat hands to heaven. “For that other monsieur has hair as gray as mine.”
“That other monsieur” was farther described as a thin man, handsome, but with a “singular air,” nor could my colleague more satisfactorily define this air, though he made a racking struggle to do so.
“In what does the peculiarity of his manner lie?” I asked.
“But it is not so much that his manner is peculiar, monsieur; it is an air about him that is singular. Truly!”
“But how is it singular?”
“Monsieur, it is very, very singular.”
“You do not understand,” I insisted. “What kind of singularity has the air of ‘that other monsieur’?”
“It has,” replied Amedee, with a powerful effort, “a very singular singularity.”
This was as near as he could come, and, fearful of injuring him, I abandoned that phase of our subject.
The valet-de-chambre whom my fellow-lodgers had brought with them from Paris contributed nothing to the inn’s knowledge of his masters, I learned. This struck me not only as odd, but unique, for French servants tell one another everything, and more—very much more. “But this is a silent man,” said Amedee impressively. “Oh! very silent! He shakes his head wisely, yet he will not open his mouth. However, that may be because”—and now the explanation came—“because he was engaged only last week and knows nothing. Also, he is but temporary; he returns to Paris soon and Glouglou is to serve them.”
I ascertained that although “that other monsieur” had gray hair, he was by no means a person of great age; indeed, Glouglou, who had seen him oftener than any other of the staff, maintained that he was quite young. Amedee’s own opportunities for observation had been limited. Every afternoon the two gentlemen went for a walk; but they always came down from the gallery so quickly, he declared, and, leaving the inn by a rear entrance, plunged so hastily into the nearest by-path leading to the forest, that he caught little more than glimpses of them. They returned after an hour or so, entering the inn with the same appearance of haste to be out of sight, the professor always talking, “with the manner of an orator, but in English.” Nevertheless, Amedee remarked, it was certain that Professor Keredec’s friend was neither an American nor an Englishman. “Why is it certain?” I asked.
“Monsieur, he drinks nothing but water, he does not smoke, and Glouglou says he speaks very pure French.”
“Glouglou is an authority who resolves the difficulty. ‘That other monsieur’ is a Frenchman.”
“But, monsieur, he is smooth-shaven.”
“Perhaps he has been a maitre d’hotel.”
“Eh! I wish one thatIknow could hope to dress as well when he retires! Besides, Glouglou says that other monsieur eats his soup silently.”
“I can find no flaw in the deduction,” I said, rising to go to bed. “We must leave it there for to-night.”
The next evening Amedee allowed me to perceive that he was concealing something under his arm as he stoked the coffee-machine, and upon my asking what it was, he glanced round the courtyard with histrionic slyness, placed the object on the table beside my cap, and stepped back to watch the impression, his manner that of one who declaims: “At last the missing papers are before you!”
“What is that?” I said.
“It is a book.”
“I am persuaded by your candour, Amedee, as well as by the general appearance of this article,” I returned as I picked it up, “that you are speaking the truth. But why do you bring it to me?”
“Monsieur,” he replied, in the tones of an old conspirator, “this afternoon the professor and that other monsieur went as usual to walk in the forest.” He bent over me, pretending to be busy with the coffee-machine, and lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. “When they returned, this book fell from the pocket of that other monsieur’s coat as he ascended the stair, and he did not notice. Later I shall return it by Glouglou, but I thought it wise that monsieur should see it for himself.”
The book was Wentworth’s Algebra—elementary principles. Painful recollections of my boyhood and the binomial theorem rose in my mind as I let the leaves turn under my fingers. “What do you make of it?” I asked.
His tone became even more confidential. “Part of it, monsieur, is in English; that is plain. I have found an English word in it that I know—the word ‘O.’ But much of the printing is also in Arabic.”
“Arabic!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, monsieur, look there.” He laid a fat forefinger on “(a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2.” “That is Arabic. Old Gaston has been to Algeria, and he says that he knows Arabic as well as he does French. He looked at the book and told me it was Arabic. Truly! Truly!”
“Did he translate any of it for you?”
“No, monsieur; his eyes pained him this afternoon. He says he will read it to-morrow.”
“But you must return the book to-night.”
“That is true. Eh! It leaves the mystery deeper than ever, unless monsieur can find some clue in those parts of the book that are English.”
I shed no light upon him. The book had been Greek to me in my tender years; it was a pleasure now to leave a fellow-being under the impression that it was Arabic.
But the volume took its little revenge upon me, for it increased my curiosity about Professor Keredec and “that other monsieur.” Why were two grown men—one an eminent psychologist and the other a gray-haired youth with a singular air—carrying about on their walks a text-book for the instruction of boys of thirteen or fourteen?
The next day that curiosity of mine was piqued in earnest. It rained and I did not leave the inn, but sat under the great archway and took notes in colour of the shining road, bright drenched fields, and dripping sky. My back was toward the courtyard, that is, “three-quarters” to it, and about noon I became distracted from my work by a strong self-consciousness which came upon me without any visible or audible cause. Obeying an impulse, I swung round on my camp-stool and looked up directly at the gallery window of the salon of the “Grande Suite.”
A man with a great white beard was standing at the window, half hidden by the curtain, watching me intently.
He perceived that I saw him and dropped the curtain immediately, a speck of colour in his buttonhole catching my eye as it fell.
The spy was Professor Keredec.
But why should he study me so slyly and yet so obviously? I had no intention of intruding upon him. Nor was I a psychological “specimen,” though I began to suspect that “that other monsieur” WAS.
I had been painting in various parts of the forest, studying the early morning along the eastern fringe and moving deeper in as the day advanced. For the stillness and warmth of noon I went to the very woodland heart, and in the late afternoon moved westward to a glade—a chance arena open to the sky, the scene of my most audacious endeavours, for here I was trying to paint foliage luminous under those long shafts of sunshine which grow thinner but ruddier toward sunset. A path closely bordered by underbrush wound its way to the glade, crossed it, then wandered away into shady dingles again; and with my easel pitched in the mouth of this path, I sat at work, one late afternoon, wonderful for its still loveliness.
The path debouched abruptly on the glade and was so narrow that when I leaned back my elbows were in the bushes, and it needed care to keep my palette from being smirched by the leaves; though there was more room for my canvas and easel, as I had placed them at arm’s length before me, fairly in the open. I had the ambition to paint a picture here—to do the whole thing in the woods from day to day, instead of taking notes for the studio—and was at work upon a very foolish experiment: I had thought to render the light—broken by the branches and foliage—with broken brush-work, a short stroke of the kind that stung an elder painter to swear that its practitioners painted in shaking fear of the concierge appearing for the studio rent. The attempt was alluring, but when I rose from my camp-stool and stepped back into the path to get more distance for my canvas, I saw what a mess I was making of it. At the same time, my hand, falling into the capacious pocket of my jacket, encountered a package, my lunch, which I had forgotten to eat, whereupon, becoming suddenly aware that I was very hungry, I began to eat Amedee’s good sandwiches without moving from where I stood.
Absorbed, gazing with abysmal disgust at my canvas, I was eating absent-mindedly—and with all the restraint and dignity of a Georgia darky attacking a watermelon—when a pleasant voice spoke from just behind me.
“Pardon, monsieur; permit me to pass, if you please.”
That was all it said, very quietly and in French, but a gunshot might have startled me less.
I turned in confusion to behold a dark-eyed lady, charmingly dressed in lilac and white, waiting for me to make way so that she could pass.
Nay, let me leave no detail of my mortification unrecorded: I have just said that I “turned in confusion”; the truth is that I jumped like a kangaroo, but with infinitely less grace. And in my nervous haste to clear her way, meaning only to push the camp-stool out of the path with my foot, I put too much valour into the push, and with horror saw the camp-stool rise in the air and drop to the ground again nearly a third of the distance across the glade.
Upon that I squeezed myself back into the bushes, my ears singing and my cheeks burning.
There are women who will meet or pass a strange man in the woods or fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind. Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being; and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy only, however, and admitted no reference to the fact that at the first sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked a camp-stool twenty feet, and now stood blushing, so shamefully stuffed with sandwich that I dared not speak.
“Thank you,” she said as she went by; and made me a little bow so graceful that it almost consoled me for my caperings.
I stood looking after her as she crossed the clearing and entered the cool winding of the path on the other side.
I stared and wished—wished that I could have painted her into my picture, with the thin, ruddy sunshine flecking her dress; wished that I had not cut such an idiotic figure. I stared until her filmy summer hat, which was the last bit of her to disappear, had vanished. Then, discovering that I still held the horrid remains of a sausage-sandwich in my hand, I threw it into the underbrush with unnecessary force, and, recovering my camp-stool, sat down to work again.
I did not immediately begin.
The passing of a pretty woman anywhere never comes to be quite of no moment to a man, and the passing of a pretty woman in the greenwood is an episode—even to a middle-aged landscape painter.
“An episode?” quoth I. I should be ashamed to withhold the truth out of my fear to be taken for a sentimentalist: this woman who had passed was of great and instant charm; it was as if I had heard a serenade there in the woods—and at thought of the jig I had danced to it my face burned again.
With a sigh of no meaning, I got my eyes down to my canvas and began to peck at it perfunctorily, when a snapping of twigs underfoot and a swishing of branches in the thicket warned me of a second intruder, not approaching by the path, but forcing a way toward it through the underbrush, and very briskly too, judging by the sounds.
He burst out into the glade a few paces from me, a tall man in white flannels, liberally decorated with brambles and clinging shreds of underbrush. A streamer of vine had caught about his shoulders; there were leaves on his bare head, and this, together with the youthful sprightliness of his light figure and the naive activity of his approach, gave me a very faunlike first impression of him.
At sight of me he stopped short.
“Have you seen a lady in a white and lilac dress and with roses in her hat?” he demanded, omitting all preface and speaking with a quick eagerness which caused me no wonder—for I had seen the lady.
What did surprise me, however, was the instantaneous certainty with which I recognised the speaker from Amedee’s description; certainty founded on the very item which had so dangerously strained the old fellow’s powers.
My sudden gentleman was strikingly good-looking, his complexion so clear and boyishly healthy, that, except for his gray hair, he might have passed for twenty-two or twenty-three, and even as it was I guessed his years short of thirty; but there are plenty of handsome young fellows with prematurely gray hair, and, as Amedee said, though out of the world we were near it. It was the new-comer’s “singular air” which established his identity. Amedee’s vagueness had irked me, but the thing itself—the “singular air”—was not at all vague. Instantly perceptible, it was an investiture; marked, definite—and intangible. My interrogator was “that other monsieur.”
In response to his question I asked him another:
“Were the roses real or artificial?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, with what I took to be a whimsical assumption of gravity. “It wouldn’t matter, would it? Have you seen her?”
He stooped to brush the brambles from his trousers, sending me a sidelong glance from his blue eyes, which were brightly confident and inquiring, like a boy’s. At the same time it struck me that whatever the nature of the singularity investing him it partook of nothing repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him “different” and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think him odd enough.
“Isn’t your description,” I said gravely, thinking to suit my humour to his own, “somewhat too general? Over yonder a few miles lies Houlgate. Trouville itself is not so far, and this is the season. A great many white hats trimmed with roses might come for a stroll in these woods. If you would complete the items—” and I waved my hand as if inviting him to continue.
“I have seen her only once before,” he responded promptly, with a seriousness apparently quite genuine. “That was from my window at an inn, three days ago. She drove by in an open carriage without looking up, but I could see that she was very handsome. No—” he broke off abruptly, but as quickly resumed—“handsome isn’t just what I mean. Lovely, I should say. That is more like her and a better thing to be, shouldn’t you think so?”
“Probably—yes—I think so,” I stammered, in considerable amazement.
“She went by quickly,” he said, as if he were talking in the most natural and ordinary way in the world, “but I noticed that while she was in the shade of the inn her hair appeared to be dark, though when the carriage got into the sunlight again it looked fair.”
I had noticed the same thing when the lady who had passed emerged from the shadows of the path into the sunshine of the glade, but I did not speak of it now; partly because he gave me no opportunity, partly because I was almost too astonished to speak at all, for I was no longer under the delusion that he had any humourous or whimsical intention.
“A little while ago,” he went on, “I was up in the branches of a tree over yonder, and I caught a glimpse of a lady in a light dress and a white hat and I thought it might be the same. She wore a dress like that and a white hat with roses when she drove by the inn. I am very anxious to see her again.”
“You seem to be!”
“And haven’t you seen her? Hasn’t she passed this way?”
He urged the question with the same strange eagerness which had marked his manner from the first, a manner which confounded me by its absurd resemblance to that of a boy who had not mixed with other boys and had never been teased. And yet his expression was intelligent and alert; nor was there anything abnormal or “queer” in his good-humoured gaze.
“I think that I may have seen her,” I began slowly; “but if you do not know her I should not advise—”
I was interrupted by a shout and the sound of a large body plunging in the thicket. At this the face of “that other monsieur” flushed slightly; he smiled, but seemed troubled.
“That is a friend of mine,” he said. “I am afraid he will want me to go back with him.” And he raised an answering shout.
Professor Keredec floundered out through the last row of saplings and bushes, his beard embellished with a broken twig, his big face red and perspiring. He was a fine, a mighty man, ponderous of shoulder, monumental of height, stupendous of girth; there was cloth enough in the hot-looking black frock-coat he wore for the canopy of a small pavilion. Half a dozen books were under his arm, and in his hand he carried a hat which evidently belonged to “that other monsieur,” for his own was on his head.
One glance of scrutiny and recognition he shot at me from his silver-rimmed spectacles; and seized the young man by the arm.
“Ha, my friend!” he exclaimed in a bass voice of astounding power and depth, “that is one way to study botany: to jump out of the middle of a high tree and to run like a crazy man!” He spoke with a strong accent and a thunderous rolling of the “r.” “What was I to think?” he demanded. “What has arrived to you?”
“I saw a lady I wished to follow,” the other answered promptly.
“A lady! What lady?”
“The lady who passed the inn three days ago. I spoke of her then, you remember.”
“Tonnerre de Dieu!” Keredec slapped his thigh with the sudden violence of a man who remembers that he has forgotten something, and as a final addition to my amazement, his voice rang more of remorse than of reproach. “Have I never told you that to follow strange ladies is one of the things you cannot do?”
“That other monsieur” shook his head. “No, you have never told me that. I do not understand it,” he said, adding irrelevantly, “I believe this gentleman knows her. He says he thinks he has seen her.”
“If you please, we must not trouble this gentleman about it,” said the professor hastily. “Put on your hat, in the name of a thousand saints, and let us go!”
“But I wish to ask him her name,” urged the other, with something curiously like the obstinacy of a child. “I wish—”
“No, no!” Keredec took him by the arm. “We must go. We shall be late for our dinner.”
“But why?” persisted the young man.
“Not now!” The professor removed his broad felt hat and hurriedly wiped his vast and steaming brow—a magnificent structure, corniced, at this moment, with anxiety. “It is better if we do not discuss it now.”
“But I might not meet him again.”
Professor Keredec turned toward me with a half-desperate, half-apologetic laugh which was like the rumbling of heavy wagons over a block pavement; and in his flustered face I thought I read a signal of genuine distress.
“I do not know the lady,” I said with some sharpness. “I have never seen her until this afternoon.”
Upon this “that other monsieur” astonished me in good earnest. Searching my eyes eagerly with his clear, inquisitive gaze, he took a step toward me and said:
“You are sure you are telling the truth?”
The professor uttered an exclamation of horror, sprang forward, and clutched his friend’s arm again. “Malheureux!” he cried, and then to me: “Sir, you will give him pardon if you can? He has no meaning to be rude.”
“Rude?” The young man’s voice showed both astonishment and pain. “Was that rude? I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to be rude, God knows! Ah,” he said sadly, “I do nothing but make mistakes. I hope you will forgive me.”
He lifted his hand as if in appeal, and let it drop to his side; and in the action, as well as in the tone of his voice and his attitude of contrition, there was something that reached me suddenly, with the touch of pathos.
“Never mind,” I said. “I am only sorry that it was the truth.”
“Thank you,” he said, and turned humbly to Keredec.
“Ha, that is better!” shouted the great man, apparently relieved of a vast weight. “We shall go home now and eat a good dinner. But first—” his silver-rimmed spectacles twinkled upon me, and he bent his Brobdingnagian back in a bow which against my will reminded me of the curtseys performed by Orloff’s dancing bears—“first let me speak some words for myself. My dear sir”—he addressed himself to me with grave formality—“do not suppose I have no realization that other excuses should be made to you. Believe me, they shall be. It is now that I see it is fortunate for us that you are our fellow-innsman at Les Trois Pigeons.”
I was unable to resist the opportunity, and, affecting considerable surprise, interrupted him with the apparently guileless query:
“Why, how did you know that?”
Professor Keredec’s laughter rumbled again, growing deeper and louder till it reverberated in the woods and a hundred hale old trees laughed back at him.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he shouted. “But you shall not take me for a window-curtain spy! That is a fine reputation I give myself with you! Ho, ho!”
Then, followed submissively by “that other monsieur,” he strode into the path and went thundering forth through the forest.
No doubt the most absurd thing I could have done after the departure of Professor Keredec and his singular friend would have been to settle myself before my canvas again with the intention of painting—and that is what I did. At least, I resumed my camp-stool and went through some of the motions habitually connected with the act of painting.
I remember that the first time in my juvenile reading I came upon the phrase, “seated in a brown study,” I pictured my hero in a brown chair, beside a brown table, in a room hung with brown paper. Later, being enlightened, I was ambitious to display the figure myself, but the uses of ordinary correspondence allowed the occasion for it to remain unoffered. Let me not only seize upon the present opportunity but gild it, for the adventure of the afternoon left me in a study which was, at its mildest, a profound purple.
The confession has been made of my curiosity concerning my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; however, it had been comparatively a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so suddenly and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine, I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying over and over aloud, “What is wrong with him? What is wrong with him?”
This was the sillier inasmuch as the word “wrong” (bearing any significance of a darkened mind) had not the slightest application to “that other monsieur.” There had been neither darkness nor dullness; his eyes, his expression, his manner, betrayed no hint of wildness; rather they bespoke a quick and amiable intelligence—the more amazing that he had shown himself ignorant of things a child of ten would know. Amedee and his fellows of Les Trois Pigeons had judged wrongly of his nationality; his face was of the lean, right, American structure; but they had hit the relation between the two men: Keredec was the master and “that other monsieur” the scholar—a pupil studying boys’ textbooks and receiving instruction in matters and manners that children are taught. And yet I could not believe him to be a simple case of arrested development. For the matter of that, I did not like to think of him as a “case” at all. There had been something about his bright youthfulness—perhaps it was his quick contrition for his rudeness, perhaps it was a certain wistful quality he had, perhaps it was his very “singularity”—which appealed as directly to my liking as it did urgently to my sympathy.
I came out of my vari-coloured study with a start, caused by the discovery that I had absent-mindedly squeezed upon my palette the entire contents of an expensive tube of cobalt violet, for which I had no present use; and sighing (for, of necessity, I am an economical man), I postponed both of my problems till another day, determined to efface the one with a palette knife and a rag soaked in turpentine, and to defer the other until I should know more of my fellow-lodgers at Madame Brossard’s.
The turpentine rag at least proved effective; I scoured away the last tokens of my failure with it, wishing that life were like the canvas and that men had knowledge of the right celestial turpentine. After that I cleaned my brushes, packed and shouldered my kit, and, with a final imprecation upon all sausage-sandwiches, took up my way once more to Les Trois Pigeons.
Presently I came upon an intersecting path where, on my previous excursions, I had always borne to the right; but this evening, thinking to discover a shorter cut, I went straight ahead. Striding along at a good gait and chanting sonorously, “On Linden when the sun was low,” I left the rougher boscages of the forest behind me and emerged, just at sunset, upon an orderly fringe of woodland where the ground was neat and unencumbered, and the trimmed trees stood at polite distances, bowing slightly to one another with small, well-bred rustlings.
The light was somewhere between gold and pink when I came into this lady’s boudoir of a grove. “Isar flowing rapidly” ceased its tumult abruptly, and Linden saw no sterner sight that evening: my voice and my feet stopped simultaneously—for I stood upon Quesnay ground.
Before me stretched a short broad avenue of turf, leading to the chateau gates. These stood open, a gravelled driveway climbing thence by easy stages between kempt shrubberies to the crest of the hill, where the gray roof and red chimney-pots of the chateau were glimpsed among the tree-tops. The slope was terraced with strips of flower-gardens and intervals of sward; and against the green of a rising lawn I marked the figure of a woman, pausing to bend over some flowering bush. The figure was too slender to be mistaken for that of the present chatelaine of Quesnay: in Miss Elizabeth’s regal amplitude there was never any hint of fragility. The lady upon the slope, then, I concluded, must be Madame d’Armand, the inspiration of Amedee’s “Monsieur has much to live for!”
Once more this day I indorsed that worthy man’s opinion, for, though I was too far distant to see clearly, I knew that roses trimmed Madame d’Armand’s white hat, and that she had passed me, no long time since, in the forest.
I took off my cap.
“I have the honour to salute you,” I said aloud. “I make my apologies for misbehaving with sandwiches and camp-stools in your presence, Madame d’Armand.”
Something in my own pronunciation of her name struck me as reminiscent: save for the prefix, it had sounded like “Harman,” as a Frenchman might pronounce it.
Foreign names involve the French in terrible difficulties. Hughes, an English friend of mine, has lived in France some five-and-thirty years without reconciling himself to being known as “Monsieur Ig.”
“Armand” might easily be Jean Ferret’s translation of “Harman.” Had he and Amedee in their admiration conferred the prefix because they considered it a plausible accompaniment to the lady’s gentle bearing? It was not impossible; it was, I concluded, very probable.
I had come far out of my way, so I retraced my steps to the intersection of the paths, and thence made for the inn by my accustomed route. The light failed under the roofing of foliage long before I was free of the woods, and I emerged upon the road to Les Trois Pigeons when twilight had turned to dusk.
Not far along the road from where I came into it, stood an old, brown, deep-thatched cottage—a branch of brushwood over the door prettily beckoning travellers to the knowledge that cider was here for the thirsty; and as I drew near I perceived that one availed himself of the invitation. A group stood about the open door, the lamp-light from within disclosing the head of the house filling a cup for the wayfarer; while honest Mere Baudry and two generations of younger Baudrys clustered to miss no word of the interchange of courtesies between Pere Baudry and his chance patron.
It afforded me some surprise to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under his arm; altogether equipped to such a high point of pedestrianism that a cynical person might have been reminded of loud calls for wine at some hostelry in the land of opera bouffe. He was speaking fluently, though with a detestable accent, in a rough-and-ready, pick-up dialect of Parisian slang, evidently under the pleasant delusion that he employed the French language, while Pere Baudry contributed his share of the conversation in a slow patois. As both men spoke at the same time and neither understood two consecutive words the other said, it struck me that the dialogue might prove unproductive of any highly important results this side of Michaelmas; therefore, discovering that the very pedestrian gentleman was making some sort of inquiry concerning Les Trois Pigeons, I came to a halt and proffered aid.
“Are you looking for Madame Brossard’s?” I asked in English.
The traveller uttered an exclamation and faced about with a jump, birdlike for quickness. He did not reply to my question with the same promptness; however, his deliberation denoted scrutiny, not sloth. He stood peering at me sharply until I repeated it. Even then he protracted his examination of me, a favour I was unable to return with any interest, owing to the circumstance of his back being toward the light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert, well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his whole little person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether unknown about certain “American Bars” of Paris, and usually connected (more or less directly) with what is known to the people of France as “le Sport.”
“Say,” he responded in a voice of unpleasant nasality, finally deciding upon speech, “you’re ‘Nummeric’n, ain’t you?”
“Yes,” I returned. “I thought I heard you inquiring for—”
“Well, m’ friend, you can sting me!” he interrupted with condescending jocularity. “My style French does f’r them camels up in Paris all right. ME at Nice, Monte Carlo, Chantilly—bow to the p’fess’r; he’s RIGHT! But down here I don’t seem to be GUD enough f’r these sheep-dogs; anyway they bark different. I’m lukkin’ fer a hotel called Les Trois Pigeons.”
“I am going there,” I said; “I will show you the way.”
“Whur is’t?” he asked, not moving.
I pointed to the lights of the inn, flickering across the fields. “Yonder—beyond the second turn of the road,” I said, and, as he showed no signs of accompanying me, I added, “I am rather late.”
“Oh, I ain’t goin’ there t’night. It’s too dark t’ see anything now,” he remarked, to my astonishment. “Dives and the choo-choo back t’ little ole Trouville f’r mine! I on’y wanted to take a LUK at this pigeon-house joint.”
“Do you mind my inquiring,” I said, “what you expected to see at Les Trois Pigeons?”
“Why!” he exclaimed, as if astonished at the question, “I’m a tourist. Makin’ a pedestrun trip t’ all the reg’ler sights.” And, inspired to eloquence, he added, as an afterthought: “As it were.”
“A tourist?” I echoed, with perfect incredulity.
“That’s whut I am, m’ friend,” he returned firmly. “You don’t have to have a red dope-book in one hand and a thoid-class choo-choo ticket in the other to be a tourist, do you?”
“But if you will pardon me,” I said, “where did you get the notion that Les Trois Pigeons is one of the regular sights?”
“Ain’t it in all the books?”
“I don’t think that it is mentioned in any of the guide-books.”
“NO! I didn’t say it WAS, m’ friend,” he retorted with contemptuous pity. “I mean them history-books. It’s in all o’ THEM!”
“This is strange news,” said I. “I should be very much interested to read them!”
“Lookahere,” he said, taking a step nearer me; “in oinest now, on your woid: Didn’ more’n half them Jeanne d’Arc tamales live at that hotel wunst?”
“Nobody of historical importance—or any other kind of importance, so far as I know—ever lived there,” I informed him. “The older portions of the inn once belonged to an ancient farm-house, that is all.”
“On the level,” he demanded, “didn’t that William the Conker nor NONE o’ them ancient gilt-edges live there?”
“No.”
“Stung again!” He broke into a sudden loud cackle of laughter. “Why! the feller tole me ‘at this here Pigeon place was all three rings when it come t’ history. Yessir! Tall, thin feller he was, in a three-button cutaway, English make, and kind of red-complected, with a sandy MUS-tache,” pursued the pedestrian, apparently fearing his narrative might lack colour. “I met him right comin’ out o’ the Casino at Trouville, yes’day aft’noon; c’udn’ a’ b’en more’n four o’clock—hol’ on though, yes ‘twas, ‘twas nearer five, about twunty minutes t’ five, say—an’ this feller tells me—” He cackled with laughter as palpably disingenuous as the corroborative details he thought necessary to muster, then he became serious, as if marvelling at his own wondrous verdancy. “M’ friend, that feller soitn’y found me easy. But he can’t say I ain’t game; he passes me the limes, but I’m jest man enough to drink his health fer it in this sweet, sound ole-fashioned cider ‘at ain’t got a headache in a barrel of it. He played me GUD, and here’s TO him!”
Despite the heartiness of the sentiment, my honest tourist’s enthusiasm seemed largely histrionic, and his quaffing of the beaker too reminiscent of drain-the-wine-cup-free in the second row of the chorus, for he absently allowed it to dangle from his hand before raising it to his lips. However, not all of its contents was spilled, and he swallowed a mouthful of the sweet, sound, old-fashioned cider—but by mistake, I was led to suppose, from the expression of displeasure which became so deeply marked upon his countenance as to be noticeable, even in the feeble lamplight.
I tarried no longer, but bidding this good youth and the generations of Baudry good-night, hastened on to my belated dinner.
“Amedee,” I said, when my cigar was lighted and the usual hour of consultation had arrived; “isn’t that old lock on the chest where Madame Brossard keeps her silver getting rather rusty?”
“Monsieur, we have no thieves here. We are out of the world.”
“Yes, but Trouville is not so far away.”
“Truly.”
“Many strange people go to Trouville: grand-dukes, millionaires, opera singers, princes, jockeys, gamblers—”
“Truly, truly!”
“And tourists,” I finished.
“That is well known,” assented Amedee, nodding.
“It follows,” I continued with the impressiveness of all logicians, “that many strange people may come from Trouville. In their excursions to the surrounding points of interest—”
“Eh, monsieur, but that is true!” he interrupted, laying his right forefinger across the bridge of his nose, which was his gesture when he remembered anything suddenly. “There was a strange monsieur from Trouville here this very day.”
“What kind of person was he?”
“A foreigner, but I could not tell from what country.”
“What time of day was he here?” I asked, with growing interest.
“Toward the middle of the afternoon. I was alone, except for Glouglou, when he came. He wished to see the whole house and I showed him what I could, except of course monsieur’s pavilion, and the Grande Suite. Monsieur the Professor and that other monsieur had gone to the forest, but I did not feel at liberty to exhibit their rooms without Madame Brossard’s permission, and she was spending the day at Dives. Besides,” added the good man, languidly snapping a napkin at a moth near one of the candles, “the doors were locked.”
“This person was a tourist?” I asked, after a pause during which Amedee seemed peacefully unaware of the rather concentrated gaze I had fixed upon him. “Of a kind. In speaking he employed many peculiar expressions, more like a thief of a Parisian cabman than of the polite world.”
“The devil he did!” said I. “Did he tell you why he wished to see the whole house? Did he contemplate taking rooms here?”
“No, monsieur, it appears that his interest was historical. At first I should not have taken him for a man of learning, yet he gave me a great piece of information; a thing quite new to me, though I have lived here so many years. We are distinguished in history, it seems, and at one time both William the Conqueror and that brave Jeanne d’Arc—”
I interrupted sharply, dropping my cigar and leaning across the table:
“How was this person dressed?”
“Monsieur, he was very much the pedestrian.”
And so, for that evening, we had something to talk about besides “that other monsieur”; indeed, we found our subject so absorbing that I forgot to ask Amedee whether it was he or Jean Ferret who had prefixed the “de” to “Armand.”