CHAPTER VII
WHENMartin returned to the hotel a couple of hours later, he found that Monsieur Camille Fargot had departed, and that Corinna had entrenched herself in her room. On the wane of the afternoon she sent word to any whom it might concern that, not being hungry, she would not come down for dinner. To Félise, anxious concerning her health, she denied access. Offers of comforting nourishment on a tray made on the outer side of the closed door she curtly declined. Mystery enveloped the visit of Camille Fargot.
Martin learned from a perturbed Bigourdin that she had descended immediately after he had left the vestibule and had led Fargot at once into theSalon de Lecture, a moth-eaten and fusty cubby-hole in which commercial travellers who found morbid pleasure in the early stages of asphyxiation sometimes wrote their letters. There they had remained for some time, at the end of which Monsieur Fargot—“il avait l’air hébété,” according to Baptiste, a witness of his exit—had issued forth alone and jumped into his car and sped away, presumably to Bordeaux. After a moment or two Mademoiselle Corinne, in her turn, had emerged from theSalon de Lectureand looking very haughty with her pretty head in the air—(again Baptiste)—had mounted to her apartment.
Those were the bare facts. Bigourdin narrated them simply, in order to account for Corinna’s non-appearance at dinner. With admirable taste he forbore to question Martin as to the relations between the lady and her visitor. Nor did Martin enlighten him. An art-student in Paris like Corinna must necessarily have a host of friends. What more natural than that one, finding himself in her neighbourhood, should make a passing call. Such was the tacit convention between Martin and Bigourdin. But the breast of each harboured the conviction that the visit had not been a success of cordiality. Bigourdin exhibited brighter spirits that night at the Café de l’Univers. He played his game of backgammon with Monsieur le Maire and beat him exultantly. Around him the coterie cursed the Germans for forcing the three years’ service on France. He paused, arm uplifted in the act of throwing the dice.
“Never mind. They seek it—they will get it.Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.Thebon Dieuis on our side, just as He is on mine in this battle here.Vlan!”
The dice rattled out of the box and they showed the number that declared him the winner. A great shout arose. The honest burgesses cried miracle.Voyons, it was a sign from heaven to France. “In hoc signo vinces!” cried a professor at theEcole Normale, and the sober company had another round of bocks to celebrate the augury.
Martin and Bigourdin walked home through the narrow, silent streets and over the bridges. There was a high wind sharpened by a breath of autumn which ruffled the dim surface of the water; and overhead a rack of cloud scudded athwart the stars. A light or two far up the gloomy scaur shewed the Hôtel des Grottes. Bigourdin waved his hand in the darkness.
“It is beautiful, all this.”
Martin assented and buttoned up his overcoat.
“It is beautiful to me,” said Bigourdin, “because it is my own country. I was born and bred here and my forefathers before me. It is part of me like my legs and my arms. I don’t say that I am beautiful myself,” he added, with a laugh, his French wit seeing whither logic would lead him. “But you understand.”
“Yes,” said Martin. “I can understand in a way. But I have no little corner of a country that I can call my own. I’m not the son of any soil.”
“Périgord is very fruitful and motherly. She will adopt you,” laughed Bigourdin.
“But I am English of the English,” replied Martin. “Périgord would only adopt a Frenchman.”
“I have heard it said and I believe it to be true,” said Bigourdin, “that every English artist has two countries, his own and France. And it is the artist who expresses the national feeling and not the university professors and philosophers; and all true men have in them something of the artistic, something which responds to the artistic appeal—I don’t know if I make myself clear, Monsieur Martin—but you must confess that all the outside inspiration you get in England in your art and your literature is Latin. I say ‘outside,’ for naturally you draw from your own noble wells; but for nearly a generation thefin esprit anglais, in all its delicacy and all its subtlety and all its humanity is in every way sympathetic with thefin esprit français. Is not that true?”
“Now I come to think of it,” said Martin, “I suppose it is. I represent the more or less educated middle-class Englishman, and, so far as I am aware of any influence on my life, everything outside of England that has moved me has been French. As far as I know, Germany has not produced one great work of art or literature during the last forty years.”
“Voilà!” cried Bigourdin, “how could a pig of a country like that produce works of art? I haven’t been to Berlin. But I have seen photographs of the Allée des Victoires.Mon cher, it is terrible. It is sculpture hewn out by orders of the drill sergeant’s cane.Ah, cochon de pays!But you others, you English—at last, after our hundred years of peace, you realise how bound you are to France. You realise—all the noble souls among you—that your language is half Latin, that for a thousand years, even before the Norman conquest, all your culture, all the sympathies of your poetry and your art are Roman—and Greek—enfinare Latin. Your wonderful cathedrals—Gothic—do you get them from Teutonic barbarism? No. You get them from the Comacine masters—the little band of Latin spiritualists on the shores of Lake Como. I am an ignorant man, Monsieur Martin, but I have read a little and I have much time to think and—voilà—those are my conclusions. In the great war that will come——”
“It can’t come in our time,” said Martin.
“No? It will come in our time. And sooner than you expect. But when it does come, all that is noble and spiritual in England will be passionately French in its sympathies.Tiens, mon ami—” he planted himself at the corner of the dark uphill road that led to the hotel, and brought his great hands down on Martin’s shoulders. “You do not yet understand. You are a wonderful race, you English. But if you were pure Frisians, like the German, you would not be where you are. Nor would you be if you were pure Latins. What has made you invincible is the interfusion since a thousand years of all that is best in Frisian and Latin. You emerged English after Chaucer—Saxon bone and Latin spirit. That is why, my friend, you hate all that is German. That is why you love now all that is French. And that is why we,nous autres Français, feel at last that England understands us and is with us.”
Having thus analysed the psychology of the Entente Cordiale in terms which proceeding from the lips of a small English innkeeper would have astounded Martin, Bigourdin released him and together they mounted homewards.
“I was forgetting,” said he, as he bade Martin good-night. “All of what I said was to prove that if you were in need of a foster-mother, Périgord will take you to her bosom.”
“I’ll think of it,” smiled Martin.
He thought of it for five minutes after he had gone to bed and then fell fast asleep.
Early in the morning he was awakened by a great thundering at his door. Convinced of catastrophe, he leaped to his feet and opened. On the threshold the urbane figure of Fortinbras confronted him.
“You?” cried Martin.
“Even I. Having embraced Félise, breakfasted, washed and viewed Brantôme proceeding to its daily labours, I thought it high time to arouse you from your unlarklike slumbers.”
Saying this he passed Martin and drew aside the curtains so that the morning light flooded the room. He was still attired in his sober black with theavoué’swhite tie which bore the traces of an all-night journey. Then he sat down on the bed, while Martin, in pyjamas and bare-foot, took up an irresolute position on the cold boards.
“I generally get up a bit later,” said Martin with an air of apology.
“So I gather from my excellent brother-in-law. Well,” said Fortinbras, “how are you faring in Arcadia?”
“Capitally,” replied Martin. “I’ve never felt so fit in my life. But I’m jolly glad you’ve come.”
“You want another consultation? I am ready to give you one. The usual fee, of course. Oh, not now!” As Martin turned to the dressing table where lay a small heap of money, he raised a soft, arresting hand. “The hour is too early for business even in France. I have no doubt Corinna is equally anxious to consult me. How is she?”
“Much the same as usual,” said Martin.
“By which you would imply that she belongs to the present stubborn and stiff-necked generation of young Englishwomen. I hope you haven’t suffered unduly.”
“I? Oh, Lord, no!” Martin replied, with a laugh. “Corinna goes her way and I go mine. Occasionally when there’s only one way to go—well, it isn’t hers.”
“You’ve put your foot down.”
“At any rate Corinna hasn’t put her foot down on me. I think,” said Martin, rubbing his thinly clad sides meditatively, “my journey with Corinna has not been without profit to myself. I’ve made a discovery.”
He paused.
“My dear young friend,” said Fortinbras, “let me hear it.”
“I’ve found out that I needn’t be trampled on unless I like.”
Fortinbras passed his hand over his broad forehead and his silver mane and regarded the young man acutely. Whatever possibilities he might have seen of a romantic attachment between the pair of derelicts no longer existed. Martin had taken cool measure of Corinna and was not the least in love with her. The Dealer in Happiness smiled in his benevolent way.
“Although in your present ruffled and unshorn state you’re not looking your best, you’re a different man from my client of two months ago.”
“Thanks to your advice,” said Martin, “my three weeks’ journey put me into gorgeous health and here I’ve been living in clover.”
“And the environment does not seem to be unfavourable to moral and intellectual development.”
“That’s Bigourdin and his friends,” cried Martin. “He is a splendid fellow, a liberal education.”
“He’s an apostle of sanity,” replied Fortinbras with an approving nod. “Meanwhile sanity would not recommend your standing about in this chilly air with nothing on. I will converse with you while you dress.”
“I’ll have my tub at once,” said Martin.
He disappeared into the famous bathroom and after a few moments returned and made his toilet while he gossiped with Fortinbras of the things he had learned at the Café de l’Univers.
“It’s a funny thing,” said he, “but I can’t make Corinna see it.”
“She’s Parisianised,” replied Fortinbras. “In Paris we see things in false perspective. All the little finnicky people of the hour, artists, writers, politicians are so close to us that they loom up like mountains. You learn more of France in a week at Brantôme than in a year at Paris, because here there’s nothing to confuse your sense of values. Happy young man to live in Brantôme!”
He sighed and, seeing that Martin was ready, rose and accompanied him downstairs. Félise, fresh and dainty, with heightened colour and gladness in her eyes due to the arrival of the adored father, poured out Martin’s coffee. They were old-fashioned in the Hôtel des Grottes, and drank coffee out of generous bowls without handles, beside which, on the plate, rested great spoons for such sops of bread as might be thrown therein.
“It is as you like it?” she asked in her pretty, clipped English.
“It’s always the best coffee I have ever drunk,” smiled Martin. He looked up at Fortinbras lounging in the wooden chair usually occupied by Corinna. “Do you know, Mr. Fortinbras, that Mademoiselle Félise has so spoilt me with food and drink that I shall never be able to face an English lodging-house meal again?”
Fortinbras passed his arm round his daughter’s waist and drew her to him affectionately.
“She would spoil me too, if she had the chance. It is astonishing what capability there is in this little body.”
Félise, yielding to the caress, touched her father’s hair. “It’s likemamman, when she was young,n’est-ce pas?” She spoke in French which came more readily.
“Yes,” said Fortinbras, in a deep voice. “Just like your mother.”
“I try to resemble her.Tu sais, every time I feel I am lazy or missing my duties, I think ofmamman, and I say, ‘No, I will not be unworthy of her.’ And so that gives me courage.”
“I’ve heard so much of Mrs. Fortinbras,” said Martin, “that I seem to know her intimately.”
A smile of great tenderness and sadness crept into Fortinbras’s eyes as he turned them on his daughter.
“It is good that you still think and speak so much of her. Ideals keep the soul winged for flight. If it flies away into the empyrean and comes to grief like Icarus and his later fellow pioneers in aviation, at least it has done something.”
He released her and she sped away on her duties. Presently she returned with a scared face.
“Monsieur Martin, what has happened? Here is Corinna going to leave us this morning.”
“Corinna going? Does she know I’m here?” asked Fortinbras in wonderment.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. I did not dream that she was up—she generally rises so late. But she has told Baptiste to take down her boxes for the omnibus to catch the early train for Paris.Mon Dieu, what has happened to drive her away?”
“Perhaps the visit yesterday of Monsieur Camille Fargot,” said Martin.
“Eh?” said Fortinbras sharply. Then turning to Félise. “Go, my dear, and lay my humble homage at the feet of Mademoiselle Corinna and say that as I have travelled for nearly a day and a night in order to see her, I crave her courtesy so far as to defer her departure until I can have speech with her. You can also tell Baptiste that I’ll break his neck if he touches those boxes. The omnibus might also anticipate its usual hour of starting.”
Félise departed. Fortinbras lit a cigarette, and holding it between his fingers, frowned at it.
“Camille Fargot? What was that spawn of nothingness doing here?”
“I fancy she sent for him,” said Martin. “I suppose I had better tell you all about it. I haven’t as yet—because it was none of my business.”
“Proceed,” said Fortinbras, and Martin told him of the famous balance-striking and of Corinna’s subsequent behaviour, including last night’s retirement into solitude after her mysterious interview with the spawn of nothingness.
“Good,” said Fortinbras, when Martin had finished. “Very good. And what had my excellent brother-in-law to say to it?”
“Your excellent brother-in-law,” replied Martin, with a smile, “seems to be a very delicate-minded gentleman.”
Fortinbras did not press the subject. Waiting for Corinna, they talked of casual things. Martin, now a creature of health and appetite, devoured innumerable rolls and absorbed many bowls of coffee, to the outspoken admiration of Fortinbras. But still Corinna did not come. Then Martin filled a pipe of caporal and, smoking it with gusto, told Fortinbras more of what he had learned at the Café de l’Univers. He expressed his wonder at the people’s lack of enthusiasm for their political leaders.
“The adventurer politician is the curse of this country,” said Fortinbras. “He insinuates himself into every government. He is out for plunder and his hand is at the throat of patriotic ministers, and he strangles France, while into his pockets through devious channels filters a fine stream of German gold.”
“I can’t believe it,” cried Martin.
“Oh! He isn’t a traitor in the sense of being suborned by a foreign Power. He is far too subtle. But he knows what policy will affect the world’s exchanges to his profit; and that policy he advocates.”
“A gangrene in the body politic,” said Martin.
Fortinbras nodded assent. “It will only be the sword of war that will cut it out.”
On this, in marched Corinna dressed for travel, with a little embroidered bag slung over her arm. She crossed the room, her head up, her chin in the air, defiant as usual, and shook hands with Fortinbras.
“I’ve come as you asked,” she said. “But let us be quick with the talking, as I’ve got to catch a train.”
“Sit down,” said Fortinbras, setting a chair for her.
She obeyed and there the three of them were sitting once more round a table in an empty dining room. But this time it was a cloudy morning in early November, in the heart of France, the distant mountains across the town half-veiled in mist, and a fine rain falling. Gusts of raw air came in through the open terrace window at the end of the room.
“So, my dear Corinna,” said Fortinbras, “you have not waited for the second consultation which was part of our programme.”
“That’s your fault, not mine,” said Corinna. “I expected you weeks ago.”
“Doubtless. But your expectation was no reason for my coming weeks ago. My undertaking, however, was a reason for your continuing to expect me and being certain that sooner or later I should come.”
“All right,” said Corinna. “This is mere talk. What do you want with me?”
“To ask you, my dear Corinna,” replied Fortinbras, in his persuasive tones, “why you have disregarded my advice?”
“And what was your advice?”
“To do nothing headstrong, violent and lunatic until we met again.”
“You should have come sooner. I find I am living now on Martin’s charity and the time has come to put all this rubbish aside and go home to my people with my tail between my legs. It’s vastly pleasant, I assure you.”
“Oh, young woman of little faith!—Why did you not put your trust in me, instead of in callow medical students with ridiculous mothers?”
Corinna flushed crimson and her eyes hardened in anger. “I suppose every gossiping tongue in this horrid little hotel has been wagging. That’s why I’m going off now, so that they can wag in my absence.”
“But my dear Penthesilea,” said Fortinbras soothingly, “why get so angry? Every living soul in this horrid hotel is on your side. They would give their eyes and ears to help you and sympathise with you and shew you that they love you.”
“I don’t want their sympathy,” said Corinna stubbornly.
“Or any human expression of affection or regret? You want just to pay your bill like any young woman in an automobile who has put up for the night and go your way?”
“No. I don’t. But I’ve been damnably treated and I want to get away back to England.”
“Who has treated you damnably here?” asked Fortinbras.
“Don’t be idiotic,” cried Corinna. “Everybody here has been simply angelic to me—even Martin.”
“On the whole I think I’ve behaved fairly decently since we started out together,” Martin observed.
“At any rate you act according to the instincts of a gentleman,” she admitted.
Fortinbras leaned back in his chair and drew a breath of relief.
“I’m glad to perceive that this hurried departure is not an elopement.”
“Elopement!” she echoed. “Do you think I’d——”
Fortinbras checked her with his uplifted hand. “Sh! Would you like me to tell you in a few words everything that has happened?” He bent his intellectual brow upon her and held her with his patient, tired eyes. “Being at the end of your resources, not desiring to share in the vagabond’s pool with Martin, and losing faith in my professional pledge, you bethink you of the young popinjay with whom, in your independent English innocence, but to the scandal of his French relatives, you have flaunted it in the restaurants and theatres of Paris.Il vous a conté fleurette.He has made his little love to you. All honour and no blame to him. At his age”—he bowed—“I would have done the same. You correspond on the sentimental plane. But in all his correspondence you will find not one declaration in form.”
Corinna mechanically peeled off her gloves. Fortinbras drew a whiff of his cigarette. He continued:—
“You think of him as a possible husband: I am frank—it is my profession to be so. But your heart,”—he pointed dramatically to her bosom—“has never had a flutter. You don’t deny it. Good. In your extremity, as you think, you send him an urgent telegram, such as no man of human feeling could disregard. He borrows his cousin’s husband’s motor-car and obeys your summons. You interview him in yonder little fly-blown, suffocating salon. You put your case before him—with no matter what feminine delicacy. He perceives that he is confronted with a claim for a demand in marriage. He draws back. He cannot by means of any quirk or quibble of French law marry you without his parent’s consent. This they would never give, having their own well-matured and irrefragable plans. Marriage is as impossible as immediate canonization. ‘But,’ says he, ‘we are both young. We love each other, we shall both be in thequartierfor time indefinite’—time is never definite, thank God, to youth—‘Why should we not set up housekeeping together? I have enough for both—and let the future take care of itself.’ ”
Corinna rose and looked at him haggardly and clutched him by the shoulder.
“How, in the name of God, do you know that? Who told you? Who overheard that little beast propose that I should go and live with him as his mistress?”
Fortinbras patted the white-knuckled hand and smiled, as he looked up into her tense face. “Do you suppose, my dear child, that I have been the father confessor of half theRive Gauchefor twenty years without knowing something of the ways of theRive Gauche? without knowing something, not exactly of international, but say of multi-national codes of social observance, morality, honour, and so forth, and how they clash, correspond and interact? I know the two international forces—yours and Camille Fargot’s, converging on the matrimonial point—and with simple certainty I tell you the resultant. It’s like a schoolboy’s exercise in mathematics.”
She freed herself and sat down again dejectedly. Everything had happened as Fortinbras declared. His only omission, to repair which she had not given him time, was the scene of flaming indignation incident to Camille Fargot’s dismissal. And his psychology was correct. The young man’s charming love-making had flattered her, had indeed awakened foolish hopes; but she had never cared a button for him. Now she loathed him with a devastating hate. She thrummed with her fingers on the table.
“What is there left for me to do?”
“Ah, now,” said Fortinbras genially, “we’re talking sense. Now we come to our famous second professional consultation.”
“Go ahead then,” said Corinna.
“I mentioned the word ‘professional,’ ” Fortinbras remarked.
Martin laughed and put a ten-franc piece into the soft open palm.
“I’ll pay for both,” said he.
“It’s like having your fortune told at a fair,” said Corinna. “But hurry up!” she glanced at her watch. “As it is, I shan’t have time to pay my bill. Will you see after it?” she drew from her bag one of the borrowed notes and threw it across to Martin. “Well, I am all attention. I can give you three minutes.”
But just then a familiar sound of scrunching wheels came through the open doors of the vestibule and dining-room. She started.
“That’s the omnibus going.”
“The omnibus gone,” said Fortinbras.
“I’ll miss my train.”
“You will,” said Fortinbras.
“My luggage has gone with it.”
“It has not,” said Fortinbras. “I gave instructions that it should not be brought down.”
Corinna gasped. “Of all the cool impertinence——!” She looked at her watch again. “And the beastly thing has started long before its time!”
“At my request,” said Fortinbras. “And now, as there is no possibility of your getting away from Brantôme for several hours, perhaps you might, with profit, abandon your attitude of indignation and listen to the voice of reason.”
“By the way,” said Martin, “have you had yourpetit déjeuner?”
“No,” said Corinna sullenly.
“Good God!” cried Fortinbras, holding up his hands, “and they let women run about loose!”
CHAPTER VIII
CORINNAfortified by urgently summoned nourishment lit a cigarette and sarcastically announced her readiness to listen to the oracle. The oracle bowed with his customary benevolence and spoke for a considerable time in florid though unambiguous terms. To say that Corinna was surprised by the proposal which he set before her would inadequately express her indignant stupefaction. She sat angry, with reddened cheek-bones and tightly screwed lips, perfectly silent, letting the wretched man complete his amazing pronouncement before she should annihilate him. He was still pronouncing, however, when Bigourdin appeared at the door. Fortinbras broke off in the middle of a sentence and called him into the room.
“My good Gaspard,” said he, in French, for Bigourdin knew little English, “I am suggesting to mademoiselle a scheme for her perfect happiness of which I have reason to know you will approve. Sit down and join our conclave.”
“I approve of everything in advance,” said the huge man, with a smile.
“Then I suppose you’re aware of this delicious scheme?” she asked.
“Not at all,” said he; “but I have boundless confidence in my brother-in-law.”
“His idea is that I should enter your employment as a kind of forewoman in yourfabrique.”
“But that is famous!” exclaimed Bigourdin, with a sparkle in his eyes. “It could only enter into that wise head yonder. The trade is getting beyond Félise and myself. Sooner or later I must get some one, a woman, to take charge of the manufacturing department. I have told Daniel my difficulties and he comes now with this magnificent solution.Car c’est vraiment magnifique.” He beamed all over his honest face.
“You would have to learn the business from the beginning,” said Fortinbras quickly. “That would be easy, as you would have willing instructors, and as you are not deficient in ordinary intelligence. You would rise every day in self-esteem and dignity and at last find yourself of use in the social organism.”
“You propose then,” said Corinna, restraining the annihilatory outburst owing to Bigourdin’s presence and shaking with suppressed wrath, “you propose then that I should spend the life that God has given me in makingpâté de foie gras.”
“Better that than spend it in making bad pictures or a fool of yourself.”
“I’ve given up painting,” Corinna replied, “and every woman makes a fool of herself. Hence the perpetuation of the human species.”
“In your case, my dear Corinna,” said Fortinbras, “that would be commendable folly.”
“You are insulting,” she cried, her cheeks aflame.
“Tiens, tiens!” said Bigourdin, laying his great hand on his brother-in-law’s arm.
But Fortinbras stroked back his white mane and regarded them both with leonine serenity.
“To meet a cynical gibe with a retort implying that marriage and motherhood are woman’s commendable lot cannot be regarded as an insult.”
Corinna scoffed: “How do you manage to do it?”
“Do what?”
“Talk like that.”
“By means of an education not entirely rudimentary,” replied Fortinbras in his blandest tone. “In the meanwhile you haven’t replied to my suggestion. Once you said you would like to take life by the throat and choke something big out of it. You still want to do it—but you can’t. You know you can’t, my dear Corinna. Even the people that can perform this garrotting feat squeeze precious little happiness out of it. Happiness comes to mortals through the most subtle channels. I suggest it might come to you through the liver of an overfed goose.”
At Corinna’s outburst, Bigourdin’s sunny face had clouded over. “Mademoiselle Corinna,” said he earnestly, “if you would deign to accept such a position, which after all has in it nothing dishonourable, I assure you from my heart that you would be treated with all esteem and loyalty.”
The man’s perfect courtesy disarmed her. Of course she was still indignant with Fortinbras. That she, Corinna Hastings, last type of emancipated English womanhood, bent on the expression of a highly important self, should calmly be counselled to bury herself in a stuffy little French town and become a sort of housekeeper in a shabby little French hotel. The suggestion was preposterous, an outrage to the highly-important self, reckoning it a thing of no account. Why not turn her into a chambermaid or a goose-herd at once? The contemptuous assumption fired her wrath. She was furious with Fortinbras. But Bigourdin, who treated the subject from the point of view of one who asked a favour, deserved a civil answer.
“Monsieur Bigourdin,” she said with a becoming air of dignity tempered by a pitying smile, “I know that you are everything that is kind, and I thank you most sincerely for your offer, but for private reasons it is one that I cannot accept. You must forgive me if I return to England, where my duty calls me.”
“Your duty—to whom?” asked Fortinbras.
She petrified him with a glance. “To myself,” she replied.
“In that case there’s nothing more to be said,” remarked Bigourdin dismally.
“There’s everything to be said,” declared Fortinbras. “But it’s not worth while saying it.”
Corinna rose and gathered up her gloves. “I’m glad you realise the fact.”
Bigourdin rose too and detained her for a second. “If you would do me the honour of accepting our hospitality for just a day or two”—delicately he included Félise as hostess—“perhaps you might be induced to reconsider your decision.”
But she was not be moved—even by Martin who, having smoked the pipe of discreet silence during the discussion, begged her to postpone her departure.
“Anyhow, wait,” said he, “until our good counsellor tells us what he proposes to do for me. As we started in together, it’s only fair.”
“Yes,” said Corinna. “Let us hear. Whatordonnance de bonheurhave you for Martin?”
“Are you very anxious to know?” asked Fortinbras.
“Naturally,” said Martin, and he added hastily in English, being somewhat shy of revealing himself to Bigourdin: “Corinna can tell you that I’ve been loyal to you all through. I’ve had a sort of blind confidence in you. I’ve chucked everything. But I’m nearly at the end of the financial tether, and something must happen.”
“Sans doute,” said Fortinbras. So as to bring Bigourdin into range again, he continued in French. “To tell you what is going to happen is one of the reasons why I am here.”
“Well, tell us,” said Corinna, “I can’t stand here all day.”
“Won’t you sit down, mademoiselle?” said Bigourdin.
Corinna took her vacated chair.
“Aren’t you ever going to begin?”
“I had prepared,” replied Fortinbras benevolently, “an exhaustive analysis of our young friend’s financial, moral and spiritual state of being. But, as you appear to be impatient, I will forego the pleasure of imparting to you this salutary instruction. So perhaps it is better that I should come to the point at once. He is practically penniless. He has abandoned all ideas of returning to his soul-stifling profession. But he must, in the commonplace way of mortals, earn his living. His soul has had a complete rest for three months. It is time now that it should be stimulated to effort that shall result in consequences more glorious than the poor human phenomenon that is, I can predict. My prescription of happiness, as you, Corinna, have so admirably put it, is that Martin shall take the place of the unclean Polydore, who, I understand, has recently been ejected with ignominy from this establishment.”
His small audience gasped in three separate and particular fashions.
“Mon vieux, c’est idiot!” cried Bigourdin.
“What a career,” cried Corinna, with a laugh.
“I never thought of that,” said Martin, thumping the table.
Fortinbras rubbed his soft hands together. “I don’t deal in the obvious.”
“Mon vieux, you are laughing at us,” said Bigourdin. “Monsieur Martin, a gentleman, a scholar, a professor——!”
“A speck of human dust in search of a soul,” said Fortinbras.
“Which he’s going to find among dirty plates and dishes,” scoffed Corinna.
“In the eyes of the Distributing Department of the Soul Office of Olympus, where every little clerk is a Deuce of a High God, the clatter of plates and dishes is as important as the clash of armies.”
Corinna looked at Bigourdin. “He’s raving mad,” she said.
Fortinbras rose unruffled and laid a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “My excellent friend and disciple,” said he, “let us leave the company of these obscurantists, and seek enlightenment in the fresh air of heaven.”
Whereupon he led the young man to the terrace and walked up and down discoursing with philosophical plausibility while his white hair caught by the gusty breeze streamed behind like a shaggy meteor.
Bigourdin, who had remained standing, sat down again and said apologetically:
“My brother-in-law is an oddity.”
“I believe you,” assented Corinna.
There was a short silence. Corinna felt that the time had come for a dignified retirement. But whither repair at this unconscionably early hour? The hotel resembled now a railway station at which she was doomed to wait interminably, and one spot seemed as good as another. So she did not move.
“You have decided then to leave us, Mademoiselle Corinna?” said Bigourdin at last.
“I must.”
“Is there no means by which I could persuade you to stay? I desire enormously that you should stay.”
Her glance met his and lowered. The tone of his voice thrilled her absurdly. She had at once an impulse to laugh and a queer triumphant little flutter of the heart.
“To makepâté de foie gras? You must have unwarrantable faith in me.”
“Perhaps, in the end,” said he soberly, “it might amuse you to makepâté de foie gras. Who knows? All things are possible.” He paused for a moment, then bent forward, elbow on table and chin in hand. “This is but a little hotel in a little town, but in it one might find tranquillity and happiness—enfin, the significance of things,—of human things. For I believe that where human beings live and love and suffer and strive, there is an eternal significance beneath the commonplace, and if we grasp it, it leads us to the root of life, which is happiness. Don’t you think so, mademoiselle?”
“I suppose you’re right,” she admitted dubiously, never having taken the trouble to look at existence from the subjective standpoint. Her attitude was instinctively objective.
“I thank you, mademoiselle,” said he. “I said that because I want to put something before you. And it is not very easy. I repeat—this is but a little hotel in a little town. I too am but a man of the people, Mademoiselle; but this hotel—my father added to it and transformed it, but it is the same property—this hotel has been handed down from father to son for a hundred years. My great-grandfather, a simple peasant, rose to beGénéral de Brigadein theGrand Arméeof Napoléon. After Waterloo, he would accept no favour from the Bourbons, and retired to Brantôme, the home of his race, and with his little economies he bought the Hôtel des Grottes, at which he had worked years before as a littleva-nu-pieds, turnspit, holder of horses—que sais-je, moi? Those were days, mademoiselle, of many revolutions of fortune.”
“And all that means——?” asked Corinna, impressed, in spite of English prejudice, by the simple yet not inglorious ancestry of the huge innkeeper.
“It means, mademoiselle,” said Bigourdin, “that I wish to present myself to you as an honest man. But as I am of no credit, myself, I would like to expose to you the honour of my family. My great-grandfather, as I have said, wasGénéral de Brigadein theGrande Armée. My grandfather,simple soldat, fought side by side with the English in the Crimea. My father, Sergeant of Artillery, lost a leg and an arm in the War of 1870. My younger brother was killed in Morocco. For me, I have done myservice militaire.Ou fait ce qu’on peut.It is chance that I am forty years of age and live in obscurity. But my name is known and respected in all Périgord, mademoiselle——”
“And again—all that means?”
“That if apetit hôtelierlike me ventures to lay a proposition at the feet of ajeune fille de famillelike yourself—thepetit hôtelierwishes to assure her of the perfecthonorabilitéof his family. In short, Mademoiselle Corinne, I love you very sincerely. I can make no phrases, for when I say I love you, it comes from the innermost depths of my being. I am a simple man,” he continued very earnestly, and with an air of hope, as Corinna flashed out no repulse, but sat sphinx-like, looking away from him across the room, “a very simple man; but my heart is loyal. Such as I am, Mademoiselle Corinne—and you have had an opportunity of judging—I have the honour to ask you if you will be my wife.”
Corinne knew enough of France to realise that all this was amazing. The average Frenchman, whom Bigourdin represented, is passionate but not romantic. If he sets his heart on a woman, be she the angel-eyed spouse of another respectable citizen or the tawdry and naughty little figurante in a provincial company, he does his honest (or dishonest) best to get her.C’est l’amour, and there’s an end to it. But he envisages marriage from a totally different angle. Far be it from me to say that he does not entertain very sincere and tender sentiments towards the young lady he proposes to marry. But he only proposes to marry a young lady who can put a certain capital into the business partnership which is an essential feature of marriage. If he is attracted towards a damsel of pleasing ways but devoid of capital, he either behaves like the appalling Monsieur Camille Fargot, or puts his common sense, like a non-conducting material, between them, and in all simplicity, doesn’t fall in love with her. But here was a manifestation of freakishness. Here was Bigourdin, man of substance, who could have gone to any one of twenty families of substance in Périgord and chosen from it an impeccable and well-dowered bride—here he was snapping his fingers at French bourgeois tradition—than which there is nothing more sacrosanct—putting his common sense into his cap and throwing it over the windmills, and acting in a manner which King Cophetua himself, had he been a Frenchman, would have condemned as either unconventional or insane.
Corinna’s English upper middle-class pride had revolted at the suggestion that she should become an employee in a little bourgeois inn; but her knowledge of French provincial life painfully quickened by her experience of yesterday assured her that she was the recipient of the greatest honour that lies in the power of a French citizen to offer. An English innkeeper daring to propose marriage she would have scorched with blazing indignation, and the bewildered wretch would have gone away wondering how he had mistaken for an angel such a Catherine-wheel of a woman. But against Bigourdin, son of other traditions so secure in his integrity, so delicate in his approach, so intensely sincere in his appeal, she could find within her not a spark of anger. All conditions were different. The plane of their relations was different. She would never have confessed to a flirtation with an English innkeeper. Besides, she had a really friendly feeling for Bigourdin, something of admiration. He was so big, so simple, so genuine, so intelligent. In spite of Martin’s complaint that she could not realise the spirit of modern France, her shrewd observation had missed little of the moral and spiritual phenomena of Brantôme. She was well aware that Bigourdin,petit hôtelierthat he was, stood for many noble ideals outside her own narrow horizon. She respected him; she also derived feminine pleasure from his small mouth and the colour of his eyes. But the possibility of marrying him had never entered her head. She had not the remotest intention of marrying him now. The proposal was grotesque. As soon as she got clear of the place she would throw back her head and roar with laughter at it; a gleeful little devil was already dancing at the back of her brain. For the moment, however, she did not laugh: on the contrary a queer thrill again ran through her body, and she felt a difficulty in looking him in the face. After having thrown herself at a man’s head yesterday only to be spurned, her outraged spirit found solace in having to-day another man suppliant at her feet. Of his sincerity there could be no possible question. This big, good man loved her. For all her independent ways and rackety student experiences, no man before had come to her with the loyalty of deep love in his eyes, no man had asked her to be his wife. Absurd as it all was, she felt its flattering deliciousness in every fibre of her being.
“Eh bien, Mademoiselle Corinne, what do you answer?” asked Bigourdin, after a breathless silence during which, with head bent forward over the table, she had been nervously fiddling with her gloves.
“You are very kind, Monsieur Bigourdin. I never thought you felt like that towards me,” she said falteringly, like any well-brought-up school-girl. “You should have told me.”
“To have expressed my feelings before, Mademoiselle, would have been to take advantage of your position under my roof.”
Suddenly there came an unprecedented welling of tears in her eyes, and a lump in her throat. She sprang to her feet and with rare impulsiveness thrust out her hand.
“Monsieur Bigourdin, you are the best man I have ever met. I am your friend, your very great friend. But I can’t marry you. It is impossible.”
He rose too, holding her and put the eternal question.
“But why?”
“You deserve a wife who loves you. I don’t love you. I never could love you”—and then from the infinite spaces of loneliness there spread about her soul a frozen desolation, and she stood as one blasted by Polar wind—“I shall never love a man all my life long. I am not made like that.”
And she seemed to shrivel in his grasp and, flitting between the snow-clad tables like a wraith, was gone.
“Bigre!” said Bigourdin, sitting down again.
Soon afterwards, Fortinbras and Martin, coming in from the terrace, found him sprawling over the table a monumental mass of dejection. But, full of their own conceits, they did not divine his misery. Fortinbras smote him friendly wise on his broad back and aroused him from lethargy.
“It is all arranged,mon vieuxGaspard,” he cried heartily. “I have been pouring into awakening ears all the divine distillations of my philosophy. I have initiated him into mysteries. He is a neophyte of whom I am proud.”
Bigourdin, in no mood for allusive hyperbole, shook himself like a great dog.
“What kind of imbecility are you talking?”
“The late Polydore——” Fortinbras began.
“Ah! Finish with it, I beg you,” interrupted Bigourdin, with an unusual air of impatience.
“It isn’t a joke, I assure you,” said Martin. “I have come to the end of my resources. I must work. You will, sooner or later have to fill the place of Polydore. Give me the wages of Polydore and I am ready to fill it. I could not be more incapable, and perhaps I am a little more intelligent.”
“It is serious?”
“As serious as can be.”
Bigourdin passed his hand over his face. “I went to sleep last night in a commonplace world, I wake up this morning to a fantastic universe in which I seem to be a leaf, like those outside”—he threw a dramatic arm—“driven by the wind. I don’t know whether I am on my head or my heels. Arrange things as seems best to you.”
“You accept me then as waiter in the Hôtel des Grottes?”
“Mon cher,” said Bigourdin, “in the state of upheaval in which I find myself I accept everything.”
The upheaval or rather overthrow—for he used the word “bouleversement”—of the big man was evident. He sat the dejected picture of defeat. No man in the throes of sea-sickness ever cared less what happened to him. Fortinbras looked at him shrewdly and his thick lips formed themselves into a noiseless whistle. Then he exchanged a glance with Martin, who suddenly conjectured the reason of Bigourdin’s depression.
“She ought to be spanked,” said he in English.
Fortinbras beamed on him. “You do owe something to me, don’t you?”
“A lot,” said Martin.
Félise, her face full of affairs of high importance ran into thesalle-à-manger.
“Mon Oncle, le Père Didier sends word that he has decided not to kill his calf till next week. What shall we do?”
“We’ll eat asparagus,” Bigourdin replied and lumbered out into the November drizzle.
Three pairs of wondering eyes sought among themselves a solution of this enigmatic utterance.
“Mais qu’est-ce que cela veut dire?” cried Félise, with pretty mouth agape.
“It means, my child,” said Fortinbras, “that your uncle, with a philosopher’s survey of the destiny of the brute creation, refuses to be moved either to ecstatic happiness or to ignoble anger by the information that the life of the obscure progeny of a bull and a cow has been spared for seven days. For myself I am glad. So is our tender-hearted Martin. So are you. The calf has before him a crowded week of frisky life. Send word to Père Didier that we are delighted to hear of his decision and ask him to crown the calf with flowers and send him along to-day for afternoon tea.”
He smiled and waved a dismissing hand. Félise, laughing, kissed him on the forehead and tripped away, having little time to spare for pleasantry.
The two men smoked in silence for some time. At last Fortinbras, throwing the butt end of his cigarette into Corinna’s coffee-bowl, rose, stretched himself and yawned heartily.
“Having now accomplished my benevolent purpose,” said he, “I shall retire and take some well-earned repose. In the meanwhile, Monsieur Polydore Martin, you had better enter upon your new duties.”
So Martin, after he had procured a tray and an apron from the pantry, took off his coat, turned up his shirt-sleeves and set to work to clear away the breakfast things.