CHAPTER V
THEfirst thing a cat does on taking up its quarters in a new home is to make itself acquainted with its surroundings. It walks methodically with uplifted tail and quivering nose from vast monument of sideboard to commonplace of chair, from glittering palisade of fender to long lying bastion of couch, creeps by defences of walls noting each comfortable issue, prowls through lanes and squares innumerable formed by intricacies of furniture; and having once gone through the grave business, worries its head no more about topography and points of interests, but settles down to serene enjoyment of such features of the place as have appealed to its æsthetic or grosser instincts. In this respect the average human is nearer a cat than he cares to realise. The first hour on board a strange ship is generally devoted to an exhaustive exploration never repeated during the rest of the voyage, and doubtless a prisoner’s first act on being locked into his cell is to creep round the confined space and familiarise himself with his depressing installation.
Obeying this instinct common to cats and men, Martin and Corinna, as soon as they had finished breakfast the next morning, wandered forth and explored Brantôme. They visited the grey remains of the old abbey begun by Charlemagne. But Villon writing in the 15th Century and asking “Mais où est le preux Charlemaigne?” might have asked with equal sense of the transitory nature of human things: “Where is the Abbey which the knightly Charlemagne did piously build in Brantôme?” For the Normans came and destroyed it and one eleventh-century tower protecting a Romanesque Gothic church alone tells where the abbey stood. Strolling down to the river level along the dusty, shady road, they came to the terraced hill-side, past which the river once infinitely furious must have torn its way. In the sheer rock were doors of human dwellings, numbered sedately like the houses of a smug row. Above them, at the height of a cottage roof, stretched a grassy plain, from which, corresponding with each homestead, emerged the short stump of a chimney emitting thin smoke from the hearth beneath. Before one of the open doors they halted. Children were playing in the one room which made up the entire habitation. They had the impression of a vague bed in the gloom, a table, a chair or two, cooking utensils by the rude chimney-piece, bunks fitted into the living rock at the sides. The children might have been Peter Pan and Wendy and Michael and John and the rest of the delectable company, and the chimney-stump above them might have been replaced by Michael’s silk hat, and on the green sward around it pirates and Red Indians might have fought undetected by the happy denizens below.
Thus announced Corinna with lighter fancy. But Martin, serious exponent of truth, explained that the monks, in the desolate times when their Abbey was rebuilding had hewn out these abodes for cells and had dwelt in them many many years; and to prove it, having conferred, before her descent to breakfast, with the excellent Monsieur Bigourdin, he led her to a neighbouring cave, called in the district, Les Grottes—Hence the name of Bigourdin’s hotel—which the good monks, their pious aspiration far exceeding their powers of artistic execution, had adorned with grotesque and primitive carvings in bas-relief, representing the Last Judgment and the Crucifixion.
They paused to admire the Renaissance Fontaine Médicis, set in startling contrast against the rugged background of rock, with its graceful balustrade and its medallion enclosing the bust of the worthy Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbé de Brantôme, the immortal chronicler of horrific scandals; and they crossed the Pont des Barris, and wandered by the quays where men angled patiently for deriding fish, and women below at the water’s edge beat their laundry with lusty arms; and so past the row of dwellings old and new huddled together, a decaying thirteenth-century house with its heavy corbellings and a bit of rounded turret lost in the masonry jostling a perky modern café decked with iron balconies painted green, until they came to the end of the bridge that commands the main entrance to the tiny water-girt town. They plunged into it with childlike curiosity. In the Rue de Périgueux they stood entranced before the shop fronts of that wondrous thoroughfare alive with the traffic of an occasional ox-cart, a rusty one-horse omnibus labelled “Service de Ville” and some prehistoric automobile wheezing by, a clattering impertinence. For there were shops in Brantôme of fair pretension—is it not thechef lieu du Canton?—and you could buyarticles de Parisat most three years old. And there was a Pharmacie Internationale, so called because there you could obtain Pear’s soap and Eno’s Fruit salt; and a draper’s where were exposed for sale frilleries which struck Martin as marvellous, but at which Corinna curved a supercilious lip; and a shop ambitiously blazoned behind whose plate-glass windows could be seen a porcelain bath-tub and other adjuncts of the luxurious bathroom, on one of which, sole occupant of the establishment, a little pig-tailed girl was seated eating from a porringer on her knees; and there were all kinds of other shops including one which sold cabbages and salsifies and charcoal and petrol and picture postcards and rusty iron and vintage eggs and guano and all manner of fantastic dirt. And there was the Librairie de la Dordogne which smiled at you when you asked for devotional pictures or tin-tacks, but gasped when you demanded books. Martin and Corinna, however, demanded them with British insensibility and marched away with an armful of cheap reprints of French classics disinterred from a tomb beneath the counter. But before they went, Martin asked:
“But have you nothing new? Nothing from Paris that has just appeared?”
“Voici, monsieur,” replied the elderly proprietress of the Library of the Dordogne, plucking a volume from a speckled shelf at the back of the shop. “On trouve ça très joli.” And she handed himLe Maître de Forges, by Georges Ohnet.
“But this, madam,” said Martin, examining the venerable unsold copy, “was published in 1882.”
“I regret, monsieur,” said the lady, “we have nothing more recent.”
“I’ll buy it if it breaks me—as a curiosity,” cried Corinna, and she counted out two francs, seventy-five centimes.
“Ninety-five,” said the bookseller—she was speckled and dusty and colourless like the back of her library——”
“But in Paris——”
“In Paris it is different, mademoiselle. We are hereen province.”
Corinna added the extra twopence and went out with Martin, grasping her prize.
“This is the deliciousest place in the world,” she laughed. “Eighteen eighty-two! Why, that’s years before I was born!”
“But what on earth are we going to do for books here?” Martin asked anxiously.
“There is always the railway station,” said Corinna. “And if you kiss the old lady at the bookstall nicely, she will get you anything you want.”
“The ways of provincial France,” said Martin, “take a good deal of finding out!”
Thus began their first day in Brantôme. It ended peacefully. Another day passed and yet another and many more, and they lived in lotus land. Soon after their arrival came their luggage from Paris, and they were enabled to change the aspect of the road-worn vagabond for that of neat suburban English folk and as such gained the approbation of the small community. They had little else to do but continue to repeat their exploration. In their unadventurous wanderings Félise sometimes accompanied them and shyly spoke her halting English. To Corinna alone she could chatter with quaint ungrammatical fluency; but in Martin’s presence she blushed confusedly at every broken sentence. All her young life she had lived in her mother’s land and spoken her mother’s tongue. She had a vague notion that legally she was English, and she took mighty pride in it, but by training and mental habit she was the little French bourgeoise, through and through. With Martin alone, however, she abandoned all attempts at English, and gradually her shyness disappeared. She gave the first signs of confidence by speaking of her mother in Paris as of a dream woman of wonderful excellencies.
“You see her often, mademoiselle?” Martin asked politely.
“Alas! no, Monsieur Martin.” She shook her head sadly and gazed into the distance. They were idling on one of the bridges while Corinna a few feet away made a rapid sketch.
“But your father?”
“Ah, yes. He comes four times a year. It is not that I do not love him.J’adore papa.Every one does. You cannot help it. But it is not the same thing. A mother——”
“I know, mademoiselle,” said Martin. “My mother died a few months ago.”
She looked at him with quick tenderness. “That must have caused you much pain.”
“Yes, mademoiselle,” said Martin simply, and he smiled for the first time into her eyes, realising quite suddenly that beneath them lay deep wells of sympathy and understanding. “Perhaps one of these days you will let me talk to you about her,” he added.
She flushed. “Why, yes. Talking relieves the heart.” She used the French word “soulager”—that word of deep-mouthed comfort.
“It does. And your mother, Mademoiselle Félise?”
“She cannot walk,” she sighed. “All these years she has lain on her bed—ever since I left her when I was quite little. So you see, she cannot come to see me.”
“But you might go to Paris.”
“We do not travel much in Brantôme,” replied Félise.
“Then you have not seen her——”
“No. But I remember her. She was so beautiful and so tender—she had chestnut hair. My father says she has not changed at all. And she writes to me every week, Monsieur Martin. And there she lies day after day, always suffering, but always sweet and patient and never complaining. She is an angel.” After a little pause, she raised her face to him—“But here am I talking of my mother, when you asked me to let you talk of yours.”
So Martin then and on many occasions afterwards spoke to her of one that was dead more intimately than he could speak to Corinna, who seemed impatient of the expression of simple emotions. Corinna he would never have allowed to see tears come into his eyes; but with Félise it did not matter. Her own eyes filled too in sympathy. And this was the beginning of a quiet understanding between them. Perhaps it might have been the beginning of something deeper on Martin’s side had not Bigourdin taken an early opportunity of expounding certain matrimonial schemes of his own with regard to Félise. It had all been arranged, said he, many years ago. His good neighbour, Monsieur Viriot,marchand de vins en gros—oh, a man everything there was of the most solid, had an only son; and he, Bigourdin, had an only niece for whom he had set apart a substantial dowry. A hundred thousand francs. There were not many girls in Brantôme who could hide as much as that in their bridal veils. It was the most natural thing in the world that Lucien should marry Félise—nay, more, an ordinance of thebon Dieu. Lucien had been absent some time doing his military service. That would soon be over. He would enter his father’s business. The formal demand in marriage would be made and they would celebrate thefiançaillesbefore the end of the year.
“Does Mademoiselle Félise care for Lucien?” asked Martin.
Bigourdin shrugged his mountainous shoulders.
“He does not displease her. What more do we want? She is a good little girl, and knows that she can entrust her happiness to my hands. And Lucien is a capital fellow. They will be very happy.”
Thus he warned a sensitive Martin off philandering paths, and, with his French adroitness, separated youth and maiden as much as possible. And this was not difficult. You see Félise acted as manageress in the Hôtel des Grottes, and her activities were innumerable. There was the kitchen to be ruled, an eye to be kept on the handle of the basket—if it danced too much, according to the French phrase, the cook was exceeding her commission of a sou in the franc; there were the bedrooms and clean dry linen to be seen to, and the doings of Polydore, the unclean, and of Baptiste, the haphazard, to be watched; there were daily bills to be made out, accounts to be balanced, impatient bagmen to be cajoled or rebuked; orders forpâté de foie grasand truffles to be despatched—the Hôtel des Grottes had a famous manufactory of these delights and during autumn and winter supported a hive of workers and the shelves in the cool store-house were filled with appetising jars; and then the laundry and the mending and the polishing of the famous bathroom—ma foi, there was enough to keep one small manageress busy. Like abon hôtelier, Bigourdin himself supervised all these important matters, ordering and controlling, as an administrator, but Félise was the executive. And like an obedient and happy little executive Félise did not notice a subtle increase in her duties. Nor did Martin, honest soul, in whose eyes a betrothed maiden was as sacred as a married woman, remark any change in facilities of intercourse. For him she flashed, a gracious figure, across the half real tapestry of his present life. A kindly word, a smiling glance, on passing, sufficed for the maintenance of his pleasant understanding with Félise. For feminine companionship of a stimulating kind, there was always Corinna. For masculine society he had Bigourdin and his cronies of the Café de l’Univers, to whom he was introduced in his professorial dignity.
It was there, at the café table, in the midst of the notables of the little town, that he learned many things either undreamed of or uncared for during his narrow life at Margett’s Universal College. It startled him to find himself in the company of men passionately patriotic. Hitherto, as an Englishman living remote from Continental thought, he had taken patriotism for granted; his interest in politics had been mild and parochial; he had adopted a vague conservative outlook due, most likely, to antipathy to his democratic Swiss relatives, who sent eight pounds to the relief of his impoverished mother, and to a nervous shrinking from democracy in general as represented by his pupils. But in this backwater of the world he encountered a political spirit intensely alive. Vital principles formed the subject of easy, yet stern discussion. Beneath the calm of peaceful commerce and agriculture he felt the pulse of France throbbing in fierce determination to maintain her national existence. Every man had been a soldier; some of the elders had fought in 1870, and those who had grown up sons were the fathers of soldiers. Martin realised that whereas in England, in time of peace, the private soldier was tolerated as a picturesque, good-natured, harum-scarum sort of fellow, thepicu-piouin France was an object of universal affection. The army was woven into the whole web of French life; it permeated the whole of French thought; it coloured the whole of French sentiment. It was not a machine of blood and iron, as in Germany, but the soul sacrifice of a nation. “Vive la France!” meant “Vive l’armée!” And that mere expression “Vive la France!”—how often had he heard it during his short sojourn in the country. He cudgelled his brains to remember when he had heard a corresponding cry in England. It seemed to him that there was none. There was no need for one. England would live as long as the sea girded her shores and Britannia ruled the waves. We need not trouble our English heads any further. But in France conditions are different. From the Vosges to the Bay of Biscay, from Calais to the Mediterranean, every stroke on a Krupp anvil reverberated through France.
“Ça vient—when no one knows,” said the comfortable citizens, “but it is coming sooner or later, and then we shed the last drop of our blood. We are prepared. We have learned our lesson. There will never be another Sedan.”
They said it soberly, like men whose eyes were set on an implacable foe. And Martin knew that through the length and breadth of the land comfortable citizens held the same sober and stern discourse. Every inch of French soil was dear to these men, and to guard it they would shed the last drop of their blood.
Corinna informed of these conversations said lightly:
“You haven’t lived among them as long as I have. It’s just their Gallic way of talking.”
But Martin knew better. His horizons were expanding. He began, too, to conceive a curious love for a country so earnest, whose speech was the first that he had spoken. He had a vague impression that he was learning to live a corporate, instead of an individual life. When he tried to interpret these feelings to Corinna she cried out upon him:
“To hear you talk one would think you hadn’t any English blood. Isn’t England good enough for you?”
“It’s because I’m beginning to understand France that I’m beginning to understand England,” he replied in his grave way.
“Like practising on the maid before you dare make love to the mistress.”
“Very possibly,” said he, digging the blunt end of his fork into the coarse salt—they were at lunch. “To put it another way—if you learn Latin you learn the structure of all languages.”
“What a regular schoolmaster’s simile,” she remarked, scornfully.
He flushed. “I’m no longer a schoolmaster,” said he.
“Since when?”
“Since I came here.”
“Do you mean to say you’re not going back to it?”
He paused before replying to the sudden question which accident had occasioned. To himself he had put it many times of late, but hitherto had evaded a definite answer. Now, with a thrill, he looked at her.
“Never,” said he.
She laid down her knife and fork and stared at him. Was he, after all, taking this fool journey seriously? To her it had been a reckless adventure, a stolen trip into lotus-land, with the knowledge of an inevitable return to common earth eating into her heart. Even now she dreaded to ask how much of her twenty pounds had been spent. But she knew that the day of doom was approaching. She could not live without money. Neither could he.
“What do you propose to do for a living?”
“God knows,” said he. “I don’t. Anyhow, the squirrel has escaped from his cage, and he’s not going back to it.”
“What’s he going to do? Sit on a tree and eat nuts? Oh, my dear Martin!”
“There are worse fates,” he replied, answering her laughter with a smile. “At any rate, he has God’s free universe all around him.”
“That’s all very well; but analogies are futile. You aren’t a squirrel and you can’t live on acorns and east wind. You must live on bread and beef. How are you going to get them?”
“I’ll get them somehow,” said he. “I’m waiting for Fortinbras.”
To this determination had he come after three weeks residence in Brantôme. The poor-spirited drudge had drunk of the waters of life and was a drudge no more. He had passed into another world. Far remote, as down the clouded vista of long memory, he saw the bare, hopeless class room and the pale, pinched faces of the students. All that belonged to a vague past. It had no concern with the present or the future. How he had arrived at this state of being he could not tell. The change had been wrought little by little, day by day. The ten years of his servitude had been blocked out. He had the thrilling sense of starting life afresh at thirty, as he had started it, a boy of twenty. There was so much more in the open world than he had dreamed of. If the worst came to the worst he could go forth into it, knapsack on shoulders and seek his fortune; and every step he took would carry him further from Margett’s Universal College.
“When is that fraud of amarchand de bonheurcoming?” Corinna cried impatiently.
She put the question to Bigourdin the next time she met him alone—which was after the meal, on theterrasse. He could not tell. Perhaps to-night, to-morrow, the week after next. Fortinbras came and went like the wind, without warning. Did Mademoiselle Corinne desire his arrival so much?
“I should like to see him here before I go.”
“Before you go? You are leaving us, Mademoiselle?”
She laughed at his look of dismay. “I can’t stay idling here for ever.”
“But you have been here no time at all,” said he. “Just a little bird that comes and perches on this balustrade, looks this side and that side out of its bright eyes and then flies away.”
“Oui, c’est comme ça,” said Corinna.
“Voilà!” He sighed and turned to throw his broad-brimmed hat on a neighbouring table. “That’s the worst of our infamous trade of hotel keeping. You meet sincere and candid souls whose friendship you crave, but before you have time to win it, away they go like the little bird, for ever and ever out of your life.”
“But you have won my friendship, Monsieur Bigourdin,” said Corinna, with rising colour.
“You are very gracious, Mademoiselle Corinne. But why take it from me as soon as it is given?”
“I don’t,” she retorted. “I shall always remember you and your kindness.”
“Aïe, aïe!You know our saying:Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse. It is the way of the world, the way of humanity. We say that we will remember—but other things come to dim memory, to blunt sentiment—enfin, we forget, not because we want to, but because we must.”
“If we must,” laughed Corinna, “you’ll forget our friendship too. So we’ll be quits.”
“Never, mademoiselle,” he cried illogically. “Your friendship will always be precious to me. You came into this dull house with your youth, your freshness, your wit and your charm—different from the ordinary hotel guest you have joined my little intimate family life—Félise, for example adores you—were it not for her mother, you would be her ideal. And I——”
“And you, Monsieur Bigourdin?”
Her voice had the flat sound of a wooden mallet striking a peg. The huge man bowed with considerable dignity.
“I shall miss terribly all that you have brought into this house, Mademoiselle.”
Corinna relaxed into a mocking smile.
“Fortinbras warned us that you were a poet, Monsieur Bigourdin.”
“Every honest man whose eyes can see the beautiful things of life must be a poet of a kind. It is not necessary to scribble verses.”
“But do you? Do you write verse?”
“Jamais de la vie” he declared stoutly. “Anhôtelierlike me count syllables on his fingers?Ah, non!I can make excellent pâté de foie gras—no one better in Périgord—but I should make execrable verses.Ah, voyons donc!”
He laughed lustily and Corinna laughed too; and Martin, appearing on the verandah, asked and learned the reason of their mirth. After a word or two their host left them fanning himself with his great hat.
“What on earth brought you here?” said Corinna. “I was having the flirtation of my life.”
CHAPTER VI
AWEEKpassed and Fortinbras did not come. Corinna wrote to him. He replied:
“Have patience, cultivate Martin’s sense of humour and make Félise give you lessons in domestic economy. The cook might instruct you in the various processes whereby eggs are rendered edible and you might also learn how to launder clothes without disaster to flesh or linen. I am afraid you are wasting your time. Remember you’re not like Martin who needs this rest to get his soul into proper condition. I will come whither my heart draws me—for I yearn to see my little Félise—as soon as I am allowed to do so by my manifold avocations and responsibilities.”
Corinna, in a fury, handed the letter to Martin and asked him what he thought of it. He replied that, in his opinion, Fortinbras gave excellent advice. Corinna declared Fortinbras to be an overbearing and sarcastic pig and rated Martin for standing by and seeing her insulted.
“You gave him five francs for putting you on the road to happiness,” he replied. “He has done his best, and seems to keep on doing it—without extra charge. I think you ought to be grateful. His suggestions are full of sense.”
“Confound his suggestions,” cried Corinna.
“I think our friend Bigourdin would be pleased if you followed them.”
“I don’t see what our friend Bigourdin has to do with it.”
“He would give you all the help he could. A Frenchman likes a woman to know how to do things.”
“I won’t wash clothes,” said Corinna defiantly.
“You might rise superior to a brand of soap,” retorted Martin.
She turned her back on him and went her way. His gross sense of humour required no cultivation. It was a poisonous weed. And what did he mean by dragging in Bigourdin? She would never speak to Martin again, after his disgraceful innuendo. It took the flavour from the sympathetic relations that had been set up between her host and herself during the past week. A twinge of conscience exacerbated her anger against Martin. She certainly had encouraged Bigourdin to fuller professions of friendship than is usual between landlord and guest. The fresh flowers he had laid by her plate at every meal she wore in her dress. Only the night before she had ever so delicately hinted that Martin was capable of visiting the Café de l’Univers without a bear-leader, and the huge and poetical man had sat with her in the moonlight and in terms of picturesque philosophy had exposed to her the barren loneliness of his soul. She had enjoyed the evening prodigiously, and was looking forward to other evenings equally exhilarating. Now Martin had spoiled it all. She called Martin names that would have shocked Mrs. Hastings and caused her father to mention her specially during family prayers.
Then she defended herself proudly. Who was there to talk to in that Nowhere of a place? The conversation of Félise stimulated as much as that of a ten-year-old child. Martin she had sucked dry as a bone during their seven weeks companionship. He of course could hob-nob with men at the café. He also had picked up a curious assortment of acquaintance, male and female in the town, and had acquired a knack of conversing with them. A day or two ago she had come upon him in one of the rock dwellings discussing politics with a desperate villain who worked in the freestone quarries, while the frowsy mistress of the house lavished on him smiles and the horrible grey wine of the country which he drank out of a bowl. She, Corinna, had no café; nor could she find anything in common with desperadoes of quarrymen and their frowsy wives; to enter their houses savoured of district visiting, a philanthropic practice which she abhorred with all the abhorrence of a parson’s rebellious daughter. Where was she to look for satisfying human intercourse? She knew enough of the French middle-class manners and customs to be aware that she might live in Brantôme a thousand years before one lady would call on her—a mere question of social code as to which she had no cause for resentment. But she craved the stimulus, the give-and-take of talk, such as had been her daily food in Paris for the last three years. Huge, not at all commonplace, but somewhat of an enigma, Bigourdin lumbered on to her horizon. His first-hand knowledge of men and things was confined to Brantôme and Lyons. But with that knowledge he had pierced deep and wide. He had read little but astonishingly. He had a grasp of European, even of English internal affairs that disconcerted Corinna, who airily set out to expound to him the elements of world politics. Two phases of French poetry formed an essential factor of his intellectual life—the Fifteenth Century Amorists, and the later romanticists. He could quote Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Théodore de Banville by the mile. When stirred he had in his voice disquieting tones. He recited the “Chanson de Fortunio” and the “Chanson de Barberine” in the moonlight, and Corinna caught her breath and felt a shiver down her spine. It was a new sensation for Corinna to feel shivers down her spine at the sound of a man’s voice.
Mais j’aime trop pour que je dieQui j’ose aimer,Et je veux mourir pour ma mieSans la nommer.
Mais j’aime trop pour que je dieQui j’ose aimer,Et je veux mourir pour ma mieSans la nommer.
Mais j’aime trop pour que je dieQui j’ose aimer,
Mais j’aime trop pour que je die
Qui j’ose aimer,
Et je veux mourir pour ma mieSans la nommer.
Et je veux mourir pour ma mie
Sans la nommer.
She went to bed with the words singing in her ears like music.
Altogether it was much more comforting to talk to Bigourdin than to take lessons in household management from Félise.
At last the day came when she plucked up courage and demanded of Martin an account of his stewardship. He tried to evade the task by flourishing in her face a bundle of notes. They had heaps, said he, to go on with. But Corinna pressed her enquiry with feminine insistence. Had he kept any memoranda of expenditure? Of course methodical Martin had done so. Where was it? Reluctantly he drew a soiled note book from his pocket and side by side at a little table on the verandah, her fair hair brushing his dark cheek, they added up the figures and apportioned and divided and eventually struck the balance. Corinna was one franc seventy-five centimes in Martin’s debt. She had not one penny in the world. She had one franc seventy-five centimes less than nothing. She rose white-lipped.
“You ought to have told me.”
“Why?” asked Martin. “There’s plenty of money in the common stock.”
“There never was any such thing as a common stock.”
“I thought there was,” said Martin. “I thought we had arranged it with Fortinbras. Anyhow, there’s one now.”
“There isn’t,” she cried indignantly. “Do you suppose I’m going to live on your money? What kind of a girl do you take me for?”
“An unconventional one,” said Martin.
“But not dishonourable. To assert my freedom and live by myself in Paris and run about France alone with you may be unconventional. But for a girl to accept support from a man when—when she gives him nothing in return—is a different thing altogether.”
They argued for some time, and at the end of the argument neither was convinced. She upbraided. Martin ought to have struck a daily balance. He continued to put forward the plea of the common stock to which she had apparently given her tacit agreement.
“Well, well,” said Martin at last, “there’s no dishonour in a loan. You can give me an I.O.U. That’s a legal document.”
“But how do you suppose I am ever going to pay you?”
“That, my dear Corinna,” said he, “is a matter which doesn’t interest me in the least.”
She turned on him furiously. “Do you know what you are? Would you like me to tell you? You’re the most utterly selfish man in the wide, wide world.”
She flung away through the emptysalle-à-manger, and left Martin questioning the eternal hills of the Limousin. “I offer,” said he, in effect, “to share my last penny, in all honour and comradeship, with a young person of the opposite sex whom I have always treated with the utmost delicacy, who is absolutely nothing to me, who would scoff at the idea of marrying me and whom I would no more think of marrying than a Fifth of November box of fireworks, who has heaped on me all sorts of contumelious epithets—I offer, I repeat, to divide my last crust with her, and she calls me selfish. Eternal hills, resolve the problem.” But the hills enfolded themselves majestically in their autumn purple and deigned no answer to the little questionings of man.
Unsuccessful he strolled through the dining-room and vestibule and at the hotel entrance came upon the ramshackle hotel omnibus and the grey, raw-boned omnibus horse standing unattended and forlorn. To pass the time the latter shivered occasionally in order to jingle the bells on his collar and scatter the magenta fly-whisk hung between his eyes. Martin went up and patted his soft muzzle and put to him the riddle. But the old horse, who naturally thought that these overtures heralded a supply of bodily sustenance, and, in good faith, had essayed an expectant nibble, at last jerked his head indignantly and refused to concern himself with such insane speculation. Martin was struck by the indifferent attitude of hills and horses towards the queer vagaries of the human female.
Then from the doorway sallied forth a flushed Corinna booted and spurred for adventure. I need not tell you that a woman’s boots and spurs are on her head and not on her feet. Corinna wore the little hat with the defiant pheasant feather which she had not put on since her last night in Paris. A spot of red burned angrily on each cheek. Martin accustomed to ask: “Where are you going?” was on the point of putting the mechanical question when he was checked by one of her hard glances. Obviously she would have nothing to do with him. She passed him by and walked down the hill at a brisk pace. Martin watched her retreating figure until a turn in the road hid it from his view and then retiring into the house, went up to his room and buried himself in Montaigne, to which genial author, it may be remembered, he had been recommended by Fortinbras.
They did not meet till dinner, when she greeted him, all smiles. She apologised for wayward temper and graciously offered, should she need money, to accept a small loan for a short period. What her errand had been when she set forth in her defiant hat she did not inform him. He shrewdly surmised she had gone to thePostes et Télégraphesin the town; but he was within a million miles of guessing that she had despatched a telegram to Bordeaux.
The meal begun under these fair auspices was enlivened by a final act of depravity on the part of the deboshed waiter, Polydore. He had of late given more than usual dissatisfaction, to the point of being replaced by the chambermaid and Félise when fashionable motordom halted at the Hôtel des Grottes. Once Martin himself, beholding through theterrassedoorway Félise struggling around a large party of belated and hungry Americans, came to her assistance and lent an amused hand. The guests taking him for a deputy landlord, explained their needs in bad French. Félise thanked him in blushing confusion, while Bigourdin, as he had done a hundred times before, gave a week’s notice to Polydore, who, acting scullion, was breaking plates and dishes with drunken persistency. And now the truth is out as regards Polydore. With the sins of sloth, ignorance, and uncleanliness he combined the sin of drunkenness. Polydore was nearly always fuddled. Yet because of the ties of blood, the foster-sisterdom of respective grandmothers, Bigourdin had submitted to his inefficiency. Once more he revoked the edict of dismissal. Once more Polydore kept sober for a few days. Then once more he backslided. And he backslided irretrievably this night at dinner.
All went fairly well at first. It was a slack night. Only threecommis-voyageurssat at the long table, and thus there were only seven persons on whom to attend. It is true that his eye was somewhat glazed and his hand somewhat unsteady; but under the awful searchlight of Bigourdin’s glance, he nerved himself to his task. Soup and fish had been served satisfactorily; then came a long, long wait. Presently Polydore reeled in. As he passed by Bigourdin’s table he held up the finger of a dirty hand bound with a dripping bloody rag.
“Pardon, je me suis coupé le doigt,” he announced thickly and made a bee-line to Corinna, with the ostensible purpose of removing her plate. But just as he reached her, the extra dram that he must have taken to fortify himself against the shock of his wound, took full effect. He staggered, and in order to save himself clutched wildly at Corinna, leaving on her bare neck his disgusting sanguine imprint. She uttered a sharp cry and simultaneously Bigourdin uttered a roar and, rushing across the room, in a second had picked up the unhappy varlet in his giant arms.
“Ah, cochon!”—he called him the most dreadful names, shaking him as Alice shook the Red Queen. “En voilà la fin!I will teach you to dare to spread your infamous blood. I will break your bones. I will crush your skull, so that you’ll never set foot here again.Ah! triple cochon!”
A flaming picture of gigantic wrath, he swept with him to the door, whence he hurled him bodily forth. There was a dull thud. And that, as far as the three commercial travellers (standing agape with their napkins at their throats), Corinna, Martin, Félise and Bigourdin were concerned, was the end of Polydore. Bigourdin, with an agility surprising in so huge a man, was in an instant by Corinna’s side with finger bowl full of water and a clean napkin.
“Mademoiselle, that such a bestial personage should have dared to soil your purity with his uncleanness makes me mad, makes me capable of assassinating him. Permit me to remove his abominable contamination.”
“Let me do it,mon oncle,” said Félise, who had run across.
But Bigourdin waved her aside, and with reverent touch, as though she were a goddess, he cleansed Corinna. She underwent the operation in her cool way and when it was over smiled her thanks at Bigourdin.
“Mademoiselle Corinna,” he cried, “what can I say to you? What can I do for you? How can I repair such an outrage as you have suffered in my house? You only have to command and everything I have is yours. Command—insist—ordain.” He spread his arms wide, an agony of appeal in his eyes.
Martin, who had started to his feet, in order to save Corinna from the grip of the intoxicated Polydore, but had been anticipated by the impetuous rush of Bigourdin, gazed for a moment or two at his host and then gasped, as his vision pierced into the huge man’s soul. This perfervid declaration was not the good innkeeper’s apology for a waiter’s disgusting behaviour. It was the blazing indignation of a real man at the desecration inflicted by another on the body of the woman he loved. A shiver of comprehension of things he had never comprehended before swept through Martin from head to foot. He knew with absolute knowledge that should she rise and, with a nod of her head, invite Bigourdin to follow her to the verandah, she could be mistress absolute of Bigourdin’s destiny. He held his breath, for the first time in his dull life conscious of the meaning of love of women, conscious of eternal drama. He looked at Corinna smiling with ironic curl of lip up at the impassioned man. And he had an almost physical feeling within him as though his heart sank like a stone. But a week ago she had declared, with a vulgarity of which he had not thought her capable, that she had had the flirtation of her life with Bigourdin. She must have known then, she must know now that the man was in soul-strung earnest. What was her attitude to the major things of Life? His brain worked swiftly. If, in her middle-class English snobbery, she despised the French innkeeper, why did she admit him to her social plane on which alone flirtation—he had a sensitive gentleman’s horror of the word—was possible? If she accepted him as a social equal, recognising in him, as he, Martin, recognised, all that was vital in modern France—if she accepted him, woman accepting man, why that infernal smile on her pretty face? I must give you to understand that Martin knew nothing whatever about women. His ignorance placed him in this dilemma. He watched Corinna’s lips eager to hear what words would issue from them.
She said coolly: “So long as this really is the end of Polydore, honour is satisfied.”
Bigourdin stiffened under her gaze, and collecting himself, bowed formally.
“As to that, Mademoiselle,” said he, “I give you my absolute assurance.” He turned to the commercial travellers. “Messieurs, I ask your pardon. You will not have to wait any longer.Viens, Félise.”
And landlord and niece took Polydore’s place for the rest of the meal.
“Bigourdin’s a splendid fellow,” said Martin.
Elbow on table she held a morsel of bread to her lips. “He waits so well, doesn’t he?” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. What was the use of arguing with a being with totally different standards and conception of values? Some little wisdom he was beginning to acquire. He spent the evening at the Café de Périgueux with Bigourdin, who, with an unwonted cloud on his brow, abused the Government inatrabiliarterms.
The next morning Corinna, attired in her daintiest, wandered off to sketch lonely and demure. Atdéjeunershe made a pretence of eating and entertained Martin with uninteresting and (to him) unintelligible criticism of Parisian actors. Bigourdin passed a moment or two of professional commonplace at the table and retired. An inexperienced young woman of the town, with the chambermaid’s assistance, replaced the villain of last night’s tragedy. Corinna continued her hectic conversation and took little account of Martin’s casual remarks. A mind even less subtle than her companion’s would have assigned some nervous disturbance as a reason for such feverish behaviour. But of what nature the disturbance? Vaguely he associated it with the Sundayfied raiment. Could it be that she intended, without drum or trumpet, to fly from Brantôme?
“By the way, Martin,” she said suddenly, when the last wizened grape had been eaten, “have you ever taken those snapshots of the Château at Bourdeilles?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t,” said he.
“You promised to get them for me.”
“I’ll go over with my camera one of these days,” said Martin.
“That meansaux Kalendes Grecques. Why not this beautiful afternoon?”
“If you’ll come with me.”
“I’ve rather a headache—or I would,” said Corinna. “As it is, I think I’ll have to lie down. But you go. It would do you good.”
“Aha!” thought Martin astutely, “she wants to get rid of me, so that she can escape by the afternoon train to Paris.” Aloud he said, “I’ll go to-morrow.”
“Why not to-day?”
“I don’t feel like it,” said he.
Not for the first time she struck an obstinate seam in Martin. He turned a deaf ear both to her cajolings and her reproaches. To some degree he felt himself responsible for Corinna, as a man must do who acts as escort or what you will to an attractive and penniless young woman. If she had decided to rush home to England, it was certainly his duty to make commodious arrangements for her journey.
“I’m going to loaf about to-day,” he announced.
“Like the selfish pig you always are,” said Corinna.
“Comme tu veux,” said Martin cheerfully.
“Can’t you see I want you to go away for the afternoon?” said Corinna angrily.
“Any idiot could see that,” replied Martin.
“Then why don’t you?”
“I want to keep an eye on you.”
She flushed scarlet and rose from the table. “All right. Spy as much as you like. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Once more she left him with a dramatic whirl of skirts. The procedure having become monotonous impressed Martin less than on previous occasions. He even smiled at the conscious smile of sagacity. There was something up, he reflected, with Corinna, or he would eat his hat. She contemplated some idiotic action. Of that there could be no doubt. It behoved him, as the only protector she had in the world, to mount guard. He mounted guard, therefore, over cigarette and coffee in the vestibule of the hotel, and for some time held entertaining converse with Bigourdin on the decadence of Germanic culture, and while Martin was expounding the futile vulgarity of the spectacle of Sumurum which, on one of his rare visits to places of amusement, he had witnessed in London, the word of Corinna’s enigma was suddenly and dustily flashed upon him.
From a dusty two-seater car that drew up noisily at the door, sprang a dusty youth with a reddish face and a little black moustache.
“Is Mademoiselle Hastings in the hotel?” he asked.
“Yes, monsieur,” said Bigourdin.
“Will you kindly let her know that I am here—Monsieur Camille Fargot?”
“Monsieur Fargot,” repeated Bigourdin.
“Mademoiselle Hastings expects me,” said the young man.
“Bien, monsieur,” said Bigourdin. He retired, his duty as a good innkeeper compelling him.
Martin, comfortable in his cane chair, lit another cigarette and with dispassionate criticism inspected Monsieur Camille Fargot, who stood in the doorway, his back to the vestibule, frowning resentfully on the little car.
This then was the word of Corinna’s enigma. To summon him by telegraph had been the object of her sortie in the hat with the pheasant’s plume. To welcome him had been the reason of her festive garb. In order to hold unembarrassed converse she had tried to send Martin away to photograph Bourdeilles. This then was the famous student in medicine who was supposed to have won Corinna’s heart. Martin who had of late added mightily to his collection of remarkable men thought him as commonplace a young student as he had encountered since the far off days of Margett’s Universal College. He seemed an indeterminate, fretful person, the kind of male over whom Corinna in her domineering way would gallop and re-gallop until she had trampled the breath out of him. Being a kindly soul, he began to feel sorry for Camille Fargot. He was tempted to go up to the young fellow, lay a hand on his shoulder and say: “If you want to lead a happy married life, my dear chap, drive straight back to Bordeaux and marry somebody else.” By doing so, he would indubitably contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings and would rank among the philanthropists of his generation. But Martin still retained much of his timidity and he also had a comradely feeling towards Corinna. If she regarded this dusty and undistinguished young gentleman as the rock of her salvation, who was he, powerless himself to indicate any other rock of any kind, to offer objection?
So realising the absurdity of standing on guard against so insignificant a danger as Monsieur Camille Fargot, student in medicine, and not desiring to disconcert Corinna by his presence should she descend to the vestibule to meet her lover, he courteously begged pardon of the frowning young man who blocked the doorway, and, passing by him, walked meditatively down the road.