In the hall outside, as I waited to light my pipe, I questioned the landlord, who made his sociable appearance, as to M. Carabas Cabarus, mentioning how we had encountered him in the train.
“Ah! truly?” he answered. “He is on his way from Paris, whither he has been to negotiate the publication of his poems. A native of Montpelier, Monsieur, where his father was a coachbuilder. Hence his name, given him, perhaps, in irony, for he was a stupid child. But the race is not always to the swift, nor bread to the wise. He who was slow is the first at the goal, and, being there, is poor.”
“First at the goal? You regard him highly, then?”
“Surely, Monsieur. There is none better of his kind in Provence. He is of the great succession—a minstrel worthy to be compared with Raymond Ferraud, both for his verse and his excessive gallantry.”
Fifine and I went out for a final stroll before bedtime, which in the vagabond’s life comes early.
“That landlord,” I said, “is a well-informed man. I have read of that Raymond—a distinguished rascal, who actually persuaded a lady president of the puissant Court of Love at les Baux to share his melodious wanderings with him. They called one another in these connexionscommère—or gossip, as we might say. It is a good thought, Fifine: supposing we adopt it? But, as to this Carabas, the fellow promises to be a nuisance, and I propose that we rid ourselves of him with all possible despatch. I do not intend staying here long: Nîmes is only the antechamber to fruitfuller delights. So to-morrow we will finish with it, and the morning after, very quietly and unostentatiously, slip over to the station with our rücksack, and take train south for Aigues-Mortes and the wilderness. What do you say, gossip?”
“That I am entirely in your hands, gossip,” answered Fifine.
Wecarried out our programme to the letter, “finishing” Nîmes the following day, and, as good fortune would have it, without once encountering the objectionable troubadour within doors or abroad. I hoped he had gone on to Montpelier, and that we had seen the last of him—but I had overlooked the knapsack. Wedidthe churches, and the Porte d’Auguste, and we visited again the fountain of the Nymphs with its fair climbing garden, up which we mounted to the old ruined Mausoleum called the Tour de Magne, where Fifine was much more interested in the flying grasshoppers, with their marbled jackets and underwings of crimson or azure, than in the supposititious history of the building itself, to which I tried vainly to get her to attend. But she was in a wilful mood, aggravated, perhaps, by the two or three mosquito bites, which, for all our precautions, she had not escaped. With one exception they were on her fingers; and the exception was quite pretty in effect, forming a sort of beauty mark near her left ear. I told her they looked like little swelling buds on a fair stem, but without reconciling her to the disfigurement or the intolerable itching. Poising an insect on her finger-tip, she would not even look at the tower.
“Iwillnot be interested in it,” she said. “I don’t care a fig whether it was a lighthouse, or a treasury, or a tomb; or whether it is built of ashlar or cream-cheese; or whether it is an octagon or an octopus. If you will paint it for me I will love it; if you won’t, I shall catch grasshoppers.”
“Mayn’t I just sometimes,” I said, “enjoy myself, without making a business transaction of my enjoyment?”
“That’s it,” she answered, watching the thing take flight. “You are exactly like a schoolboy. A book, which you might delight in reading voluntarily, becomes ataskif imposed upon you as a duty. I want you to paint this, so you don’t want to paint it. Your attention wanders, just as the schoolboy’s would, to all sorts of extraneous interests that don’t matter. Your art should be your enthusiasm and your obsession, and the difficult thing should be to get you away from a subject, not to attract you to it. I daresay, clever as you are, you might take a lesson in perseverance from many smaller men.”
“Perseverance, Fifine, is a dreadfully plebeian virtue,” said I.
“Well, then,” she retorted, “I like plebeian virtues. I can imagine even your despised M. Cabarus coming up here and refusing to leave until he had turned its poetic inspiration to some account.”
“To the account of scratching his egregious name on the walls, I expect.”
“Yes, you may joke. But anyhowhismastering purpose is to excel in the gift which Nature has bestowed on him.”
I fairly whistled out my astonishment.
“My good gossip, you are talking entirely without book. You know absolutely nothing about his mastering purpose. Why, you have only spoken to him once, like myself; and we have heard what the landlord said. I have just as much right from that to pronounce him a peddling coxcomb, idling away his time between rhyming and philandering. I should define him, if you asked me, as probably an erotic sentimentalist.”
“I don’t ask you. Besides, I like sentimentality—in reason.”
“Well, I don’t; and it is never in reason. I abhor it. It is always a manufactured emotion—like spread chords. The people who use spread chords, in playing, or singing, or talking, are hypocrites and impostors. I should liken them, morally, to procurers. They do not feel, they calculate, emotional effects. I have heard Shelley’s ‘Indian Serenade’ sung by that sort in a way to make one sick. ‘I ara-aise from dreams of thee in the first sweet er-ser-leep of night.’ Bah!”
“Felix!” said Fifine, amazed; “are you off your head?”
“Are you,” I said, “when you chastise me—mewith that meretricious little skipjack?”
“But, how do you know he is meretricious? You have seen no more of him than I have.”
“Exactly. My opinion of him has precisely the value of yours; and they are both worth nothing.”
She came and put her hand upon my arm, and looked up in my face.
“I did not mean to hurt you, Felix.”
“With that?” I answered. “My mail is proof against better than pea-shooters, Fifine.”
“You are not offended?”
“God bless you, no, child. I was as much in jest as you were.”
“Yes,” she said, and turned away.
But, as we walked down the hill together, after a long silence she suddenly broke upon me again:—
“How dared I presume to read lessons to you—and after your yesterday’s proof! I think you are the sweetest-tempered man I have ever known, Felix.”
I laughed.
“O, no flattery, gossip!” I said. “The last thing I want is to be exalted to a height I should have the deuce’s own trouble to maintain. And, as to presumption, I am not so confident of myself as to resent criticism of my methods.”
“No,” she said: “I wish—sometimes—for both our sakes—you were.” And leaving me that cryptic pronouncement to digest, she fell silent again.
Well, we got off early, as arranged, the next morning, and without any hint given as to our destination, though the waiter, who brought our coffee and ournoteto command, was officious in his attentions and enquiries.
“That was because you tipped him too much,” said Fifine, as we walked to the station. “You men are always foolish in that respect. It is stupid, because they have no legal right to demand anything at all.”
“Tipping is a detestable custom,” I answered; “but, when you talk of legality, a waiter has as much right to expect a douceur as any other tradesman. I have heard it said that the real and only definite line of social demarcation lies between the tippable and the untippable; but that is nonsense. We are all open to receive gratuities, in the sense of supercharges on services rendered or goods retailed. The lawyer who attunes his bill to the financial position of his client; the doctor whose fee is this for the poor man and that for the rich; the soldier or the sailor who, through interest, obtains preferment over men, worthier, perhaps, but less fortunate than himself; the politician who uses office as an invitation to bribery; the adulterating shopkeeper; the preacher who rates his eloquence at a pound more or less in the plate; not to speak of the sportsman who accepts his vail in plain terms, and makes no bones about it—what are they all but receivers of tips? It is the bit, little or much, over and above the recognised scale of charges, which constitutes the tip; and the waiter is as much entitled to expect his bonus as any other wage-earner.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” said Fifine. “I said you tipped him too much. But I didn’t mean to start you going. That is the worst of you: you seem to hold contradictory opinions on every subject one may mention.”
“M’amie, my gossip: controversy is the very essence of education.”
“O, don’t! we shall miss our train. It is past seven now.”
We caught it, however, easily, and again had a compartment to ourselves; a boon which, in our then frame of mind, we were not backward in appreciating. For we were full of happiness and gaiety, a jocund irresponsible couple, who had now finally shaken off the shackles of constraint, and were bound for the wilderness where no proprieties were to question nor dangers to apprehend. Even the absurd little shadow of Carabas was to me, in its dissipating, a matter for some small self-congratulation, and I felt our flight into the seaboard solitudes the breezier for its absence. As the long wastes came about us, I flapped my wings, literally, like an imprisoned gull that smells the ocean salt borne inland on a gale, and I croaked out my jubilance. Fifine laughed, protestingly but indulgently.
“What a child you are!” she said.
“And just now I was a pedant,” I answered. “Truly some gossips are hard to please.”
But suppressed excitement glowed in her all the same. It was her habit to take it sedately; yet I could read the underlying emotion in every pulse of colour that came and went in her cheek. Her eyes might dream slumberous; but in their depths was an exulting spark that confessed their vivid wakefulness. And she cried out once with rapture when there passed close by the windows of the running train a characteristic little procession—a shepherd boy, driving a flock of twenty or so sheep, each individual member of which wore a favour of crimson ribbon knotted into the wool above his withers.
“O, how pretty!” cried Fifine. “We are in Arcady, Felix—and—and I will never eat mutton again.”
“Arcady it may be,” said I: “but, if so, Arcady has its wolves. Do you see that great dim cliff of a hill over there?” (we were then nearing Vauvert). “That is in the Cevennes, Fifine, and its name is Le Loup.”
“It shall stand for the symbol of all the wolves that ever were,” said Fifine; “stricken into stone for their cruelties. I say this is Arcady; and it shall be.”
“Very well,” I answered. “I am agreeable. Arcady it shall be—the land of lovingkindness, where to be fond is not to be suspected. We can be better friends than ever in Arcady, Fifine.”
“Can we?” she said, turning to look again from her window. “O, yes! I suppose so.”
“Why!” I said. “Don’t you want us to be?”
She did not answer, and I left her to her momentary mood, whatever that might betoken. The needle of a woman’s mind is an unsafe compass to steer by. It may point warm west, and lead you, if you follow it, crash on an arctic iceberg.
Deeper and deeper into that land of loneliness we ran on, until the vine-strewn levels, rosy and flaming, which at first had accompanied our flight, were all faded, as a sunset fades, into league-wide wastes of melancholy grey. Harsh bents of grass and lifeless sand came all about us, with pools of motionless water, from whose reeds great birds flapped slowly upwards, sailing away to meet a low horizon. And then at last, at near two hours from our starting, we saw, at the lean land’s end, the pictured shadow of our goal; and there was the grim old fortress town, its feet in the stagnant lagoons, its long ramparts extending as massive and unbroken as when, at Philip the Bold’s bidding, they first rose from the marshes.
Impregnable; unapproachable: but who would want to approach it? That was the thought which occurred to Fifine, when first contemplating that desolate outpost of the ages.
“I suppose nobody could get in, and I suppose nobody could get out,” she said. “I hope that satisfied them. I should have thought the best thing their enemies could have done would be to leave them stuck there, and go round another way.”
“You have an excellent reasoning power in you, gossip,” said I. “But you are no philosopher, or you would know that man is the one organism congenitally incapable of leaving well alone. To let him escape a wild beast by the skin of his teeth is merely to have him provoked to borrow the first inadequate weapon, and go back to try conclusions with his enemy. If you were to throw an empty biscuit tin into the middle of the great Bog of Allen, and loudly proclaim that any man who attempted to redeem it would do so at peril of your deadly wrath, a hundred fools would be ready at once to risk their lives in the reclaiming of that piece of lumber. And, after all, I shouldn’t be prepared to blame the fools. I don’t know why; except that there is something very inflaming to one’s obstinacy in overbearance.”
“If you have finished,” said Fifine, “we may as well go on.”
We went on, and, traversing the stretch of ground which curves between the station and the walls, discovered, a little to our consternation, that it was fair-day in Aigues-Mortes. Booths and caravans lined the approach to the great entrance gate, called la Gardette, and all about them, and thronging the entrance, were swarms of holiday folk, motley and garish in their Sunday best.
Well, there was no help for it, and our only resource was to accept the thing mediævally. The barbaric colour even assisted to that frame of mind; for indeed the workaday trappings of modern France are much of a dingy sameness everywhere, and it is only sparely, as in the case of the cattle-drovers of the Camargue, that one encounters a local survival of the ancient costumes. Dressed almost without exception as our own men, even to the ugly cloth cap, are the labouring and mechanic classes; in places, too, as remote as Aigues-Mortes; while the women have been as ready on the whole to exchange for drab and fustian the livelier raiment of past times. Wherefore this festive frippery, though florid and vulgar in itself, had here its seeming place in the context of stone walls and frowning battlements.
At any rate we tried to think so, as we passed under the archway into that intricacy of narrow streets, and made our way with some difficulty over the filthy pavements.
They were filthy, those pavements. When I had visited the town earlier, it had been in spring, before the grapes were thought of, or the wine-presses disinterred from their winter quarters. Now everywhere the place was littered with the discarded refuse of the harvest, great heaps of decomposing filth, thrown out to await the scavengers, but whether human or elemental who might say. Only their stench was a certain thing—horrible, indescribable, the Genie in expansion of that rank acidity which in its condensed form inhabited the bottled article. It rose from the gutters; from the mounds of fœtid grape-skins piled about the inner walls; from a belated wine-press still in use in the open streets, and revealing itself crusted with the black scum its champings had rejected. Only here and there, in the wider thoroughfares, or in the openPlace, could one escape the pursuing poison. Still we religiouslydidour Aigues-Mortes, though, I confess, with some failing confidence on my part. And at last I stopped.
“The battlements, gossip!” I gasped. “The battlements—before all illusion spends itself, and we fall stifled!”
Ah! that was another pair of shoes. We took our official pass at the gateway—for the walls are a “Monument Historique”—and, mounting by way of the Tour de Constance at the north angle, were quickly in that atmosphere we had come to seek. Here from the summit we could first descry the whole compact quadrilateral of the town, with its many gates and towers, sitting, like some huge mediæval ark, on the shores of the desolate land on which it had grounded and settled. On all sides else were waste and water—marsh, and the long ribs of sand, and weedy dreariness stretching to the horizon.
Well, this tower itself had its particular history; but that is for the guidebooks. For us, in excelsis, were the long battlements, whence one may gather one’s glorified impression of the place. High up we wandered, and saw the whole tight little town packed, like a box of bricks, within its walls. The odours reached not to us, but the sun was gay so high, and it was sweet to loiter, and look down on the cradled roofs and the almost empty streets—for the life of them had gravitated fairwards. Once in a little garden we saw a pomegranate tree in rosy fruit—a lovely touch of colour; and once a group of merry girls went by, bareheaded and unadorned, fruit almost as fair. Elsewise, it seemed, we had these deserted ramparts to ourselves, and the view therefrom.
“But grant me still a friend in my retreat,” quoth and quoted I, “whom I may whisper—Solitude is sweet.”
And at that instant, turning an angle, we saw the whole perspective of battlements ahead fringed with human forms.
Fifine laughed delightfully, hearing my gasp of dismay.
“But they are bending over to look down at something,” she said. “Wemustgo and see what it is.”
I leaned through an embrasure, straining my neck to view.
“O, don’t!” she exclaimed, pulling at my coat: “You will fall.”
“All right,” said I, recovering myself. “It is—why, Fifine, what is the matter with you?” Her face was quite pale.
“You frightened me so,” she said. “Don’t, please, do that again.”
“Well, I will not.” I patted her shoulder, surprised and a little touched. “One certainly has no right to take risks in a position like mine—with a little gossip dependent on me.”
She lifted her face, with a tiny stamp of her foot.
“I tell you,” she said, “that if you were to fall, I should jump after you.”
I looked at her a moment without answering; then I said, with a note of huskiness in my voice which I could not quite control, “Allons, donc, Fifine! Then it is certain I must not fall. Come; I am going to show you a Provençal bull-fight. That is what the excitement is all about.”
We found an unoccupied embrasure, through which we could command the scene below. Right under the walls, on the strip of land which divided them from the water, they had erected a frail barrier enclosing a goodish space of ground; and within this area was enacting the game which above all others these southerners love. And a game it is, no more, and a manly game, calling for courage and dexterity, and without any suggestion of the brutality which characterises the baser business. They drive in a bull—commonly one of those, small and black, which are especially raised for theseferrades, or fêtes—having a rosette pinned between his horns; and the man who can succeed in snatching this token wins the prize. That is all; but it affords fair enough exercise for pluck and agility. Any one who likes may take part in the sport: you will see some twenty or thirty engaged in it as a rule: and the bull himself is often the most rompish member of the party. Of course hemeansbusiness, but it is very seldom that he gets the chance for a literalstrokeof it. Still, it is that off-chance which constitutes the excitement; and, if he is a good bull, he affords one a plenitude. The drawback to the thing, as an entertainment, is the lack of colour, owing to the reason aforesaid. These cuadrillas might, so far as their clothes go, be just a body of ordinary young bank holiday-makers, roystering in Battersea-Park. And perhaps it is on that account that, after a bull or two—the bouts as a rule last only a few minutes—the novelty of the thing stales and one has had enough of it.
Fifine was greatly excited at first, and in terror lest the beast in one of his rushes should “get home.” “They can never go on misleading him,” she said. “He will turn suddenly on a side-skip like that, and have the man on his horns. O, Dieu merci! Did you see?”
“Rest happy, m’amie,” said I. “The bull will never do as you fear. And for what reason, do you think. Why, because he charges with his eyes shut.”
“His eyes shut?”
“Ah, yes! That is the players’ safety. If it were a cow, now, it would be different. She would leave her tale of victims behind her, no question; because she would keep her eyes open. A woman’s weapons are not strength but vision. She sees very clearly what she is after, and the best way to get it.”
“Does she indeed!” said Fifine, perking her lip at me. “And that is only to flatter her with not being a blundering stupid.”
There was a goodish clustering of natives here, come up to view the sport gratis, and so we walked on to regain our cherished solitude. Long time we spent on those ramparts, utterly happy and at peace, until hunger began to remind us of the hour.
“I have not asked you,” said Fifine, as we started to retrace our steps, making lunchwards; “I don’t even know that I shall; I am not sure that I want to know; I don’t know that I care——”
“Good gracious! What is it all about?”
“What your plans are—whether you propose stopping here, or going on to—where?”
“I had meant to stay here, of course—say for a few days. We cannot feel securer than at the world’s end.”
“O!”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Only O!”
“Now, what is in your mind? But let that pass. Supposing we go and lunch before deciding anything further.”
There is only one Hôtel worth its title in Aigues-Mortes—that of the St. Louis, near the little squat Place of its name. It is at best a glorified cabaret, with quite a spacious room to feed in. We entered this room, and the first person our eyes fell on was Carabas.
Now, I ask you, why should not M. Carabas Cabarus be free to visit Aigues-Mortes precisely as and whenever he chose? I put the question to avoid mistakes, and to anticipate any objections you might offer as to his obtruding himself where he was neither wanted nor invited. He was a wayfarer like ourselves, at perfect liberty to wander whither he listed, and accountable in no way to whatever chance prejudices might have been formed against him. Very well; then you will oblige me by accepting him, as we did, with a cordiality which, if it masks any sentiment, shall mask no sentiment of a less lively nature than resignation.
I said “Damnation!” I think; but that was because I had run against the corner of a table. It was an unoccupied table, and incontinently we sat down at it; whereupon Carabas, who had not yet begun his meal, jumped up from his place elsewhere, and came over to join us.
“Bien rencontré, Monsieur et Mademoiselle!” he said, with such an enthusiasm of welcome that really I felt for the moment abashed. “Did I not say there was a providence in our meeting? It is confirmed in this reunion. I asked myself, when I heard you were gone—Whither? I asked also the landlord. The omnibus-man, who was standing near, answered for him. He had happened to be behind you when you took your tickets. ‘Ah,’ thought I, ‘they will welcome a cicerone native to the district, one who can tell them things they will not hear else—a man, moreover, of some reputation; of insight, of a picturesque habit of mind, maybe’—but, bah! it is no matter. To reach my destination by a roundabout way—also, where was the objection? The advantage, rather, since it rejoined me to comrades so amiable—and again, so seductive. Wherefore I followed by the midday train.”
“Bon!” said I, quite cheerfully. “Only I fail to see the providence.”
“It took the shape of the omnibus-man,” said Fifine. “How stupid you are.”
Carabas glanced at her approvingly, and at me disdainfully; and at the moment a wan, malaria-whitened young woman, of a type common enough in that infested district, laid on the table the hors-d’œuvre—blackened potatoes baked, or rather unbaked, in their jackets, and a saucer of olives.
But better was to come—to wit, after an indifferent potage, that noblest of Provençal fish-courses, a dish ofpetits-rougetsas they call them, small things of the mullet tribe and cooked like whitebait, than which I could desire no sweeter satisfaction for a hungry man. Followed a ragout of mutton, served with a mess of white beans full of the little surprises of vegetable and fatty garnish the French know how to introduce; and the end came in a dish of becs-fins.
Now, appetite being the absorbing consideration, I regarded little else while I satisfied mine, listening only with my elbows, as they say, to the mixed jargon of sentimentality, rhapsody, and unblushing self-glorification with which Carabas, always addressing himself to my companion, filled up the intervals between the courses. Elsewise he was as busily occupied as the best of us—until it came to the birds. And then I watched him with some secret amusement. I saw him glance abstractedly at the dish, and appear as if about to help himself; then, flashing a guilty look at Fifine, he pushed the seduction away, with a magnificently affected air of offence.
“M. Cabarus,” I said, “what, sentimentally considered, is the difference between a little bird and a little fish?”
“It is a matter of taste,” said he—rather well, I thought.
I laughed and leaned back. He waved his hand, as if he had dismissed a foolish impertinence. He had early, I think, taken what he considered my measure as a trifler and outsider. Yet I could not but wonder over the incredible self-assurance which could thus assert itself against all reason and policy. Surely, if hisobjetwere the sister, the sensible thing would be to propitiate the guardianbrother? But that did not seem to occur to him. I was merely a tiresome obstacle in the way to that perfect rapprochement which nature and circumstance had decreed between him and her. They were souls affinitive, mutually attracted, and, as such and thenceforth, discharged from all conventional obligations. It was ludicrous, if you like; laughable to a degree; yet, if you have observed, you will recognise that attitude of mind, goatish and transcendental in one, as an attitude not uncommon among Latins.
And how about Fifine’s acceptance of the implied understanding? Well, a riddle will women always be! First I noticed, to my immense amusement, how, after trifling a little with her birdlet, she left it on her plate untasted. Carabas observed that too, and, you may be sure, drew flattering conclusions from it. Moreover, it was obvious that she was interested in him—and genuinely, for all her pretence of secretly playing upon his foibles for my behoof. His enthusiasm, his sentiment, his play of imagery on the subject of ancient legends, his minute local knowledge, all attracted her; and when, lunch being finished, she drew me aside, I knew what to expect.
“He is really very amusing, mon ami. I think we could do worse, after all, than accept him as a guide.”
“Much worse, I am sure,” said I. “Tell him to lead on, and we will follow.”
Nothing loth, he led on—and in that hat of hats. I just glanced at Fifine, when he appeared in it; but she did not seem to notice. Presently I fell behind, leaving them together, and, slipping away unobserved, sought my own entertainment in my own way.
I re-entered the Porte de la Gardette somewhere near four o’clock, and found the couple awaiting my appearance hard by. Fifine looked disturbed and a little pale. She hurried to me.
“O, wherehaveyou been?” she said. “We have been hunting for you everywhere.”
“Why, to enjoy,” said I, pulling out my watch, “what you should not have missed—the view of the town from the outside. But, if you are ready, we must move to catch our train.”
She looked at me queerly a moment, her face working in an odd way between question and reproach.
“Must we?” she said. “So you have made up your mind to go?”
“To Arles, yes,” I answered. “The prospect of this smell and Carabas combined is more than I can face.”
“But he will be certain to accompany us!”
“There is room to breathe in Arles.”
“Felix, how absurd you are!”
“Honestly, m’amie,” said I gravely, “I could not take the responsibility of recommending you this place for a stay. It was spring when I was here before. I had not guessed its possibilities. If you please, you must come with me—unless——” I looked significantly at M. Carabas Cabarus, where he stood haughtily aside.
“If you dare to say another word,” said Fifine, in a low voice, “I will never speak to you again.”
M. Cabarusaccompanied us. We had to change trains at Aimargues, and did not reach Arles until long after sunset. He and Fifine had chatted most of the way together, ostentatiously, on her part, to my exclusion. At Arles, I helped M. Cabarus to shoulder his knapsack, a service for which he returned me a rather frigid acknowledgment.
“Our quarters,” I said to him, “will be at the Hôtel du Nord Pinus. It will afford us much pleasure if you decide to make yours there too.”
He bowed, a little astonished, I thought. But Fifine struck in immediately, in a very cold voice:—
“We have presumed too much already on M. Cabarus’s good-nature. Please leave him, Felix, to make his own arrangements.”
“They are made, Mademoiselle,” said Carabas gallantly, and with a most charming and ingratiatory smile. “Can Mademoiselle doubt it?”
“I am at a loss for your meaning, Monsieur,” said Fifine. “I have no claim upon your confidence, nor any desire to share my own with a stranger—” and she turned icily away from him.
I never saw a man more taken aback. He looked as if he had received a tumbler of cold water in his face. And when, Fifine having touched my arm, she and I moved to leave the station, he followed in our wake like a crestfallen poodle, pondering, no doubt, that same riddle of woman which had already exercised my mind.
We traversed the dusty stretch from the station to the town in almost complete silence, until, mounting the slope by the amphitheatre, Fifine pressed against me with a sudden exclamation:—
“O, Felix! How beautiful!”
“We will come and see it at sunset,” I said. “That is the great time.”
“Yes,we,” she answered, with a meaning emphasis on the pronoun which gave me an inward chuckle, for Carabas was standing close beside.
She ignored him entirely, even until we had entered the Place du Forum, and stood facing the Hôtel, with our backs to Mistral’s statue; and then she turned upon him with the sweetest smile and her hand extended.
“Good-night, Monsieur, and thank you a thousand times for your kindness.”
“But I am myself going to stay here,” answered the troubadour, with an appealing look at her.
She said “O!” and, turning her back on him, walked straight into the hall.
Rooms for Monsieur Dane and Mademoiselle his sister? Assuredly; there were two of the best vacant at the moment on the first floor. The first floor meant first prices; but was not the lady to be entertained a Countess incognito? “Va, Madame!” said I to the distinguished proprietress; and Fifine and I were shown up. I don’t know where M. Cabarus bestowed himself, but in quarters, I expect, less luxurious than ours. We did not see him again that evening; but, once quit of his presence, Fifine’s manner to me recovered something of its severity. For some minutes, after we had rejoined company at the table d’hôte, she answered my remarks in only the coldest of monosyllables.
But presently she thawed. It was when a bottle of Veuve Clicquot I had ordered was placed on the table.
“Champagne!” she said. “That is too-great an extravagance, Felix.”
“Anything,” I responded, “for a summery atmosphere.”
She thought it wise to ignore my remark. “What makes champagne so expensive?” she said: “the insignificance of the crop that produces it?”
“It is made from a small grape,” I answered, “something like our English sweet-water; but that is not it. One of the chief reasons is the number of bottles broken during fermentation—that, and the complex nature of its preparation—” and I launched out into an elaborate disquisition on stopping and fining and sulphuring, on liqueuring and depositing and disgorging, only to find, when in the full flood of eloquence, that Fifine was not paying the slightest attention to me. I stopped; and she said immediately, in the most shameless manner:—
“Why did you invite him to come here?”
“Invite whom?” I asked.
“You know.”
“Well, I thought it would please you.”
“It doesn’t, then.”
“And I thought, after what we owed to him, that as a gentleman I could do no less.”
“A gentleman, indeed! Much sense he showed of recognising one when you helped him on with his knapsack.”
“Still, you know, Fifine——!”
“No, I don’t know. And now you have just got to answer to me.”
“For what?”
“Please don’t pretend.”
“For why I deserted you so basely out there, you mean? I had a wish to vary the entertainment; and I concluded you were quite happy without me.”
“Felix, that is to be like a woman.”
“Like yourself, m’amie?”
“No; when I went with M. Cabarus, I had no thought of punishing any one.”
“Punishing?”
“Do you fancy I enjoyed myself? I was thinking of what had become of you all the time, and I was miserable. I even wondered if you had gone back to Nîmes, and left me to shift for myself.”
“O! that is unkind, Fifine. What a brute you must have thought me!”
“No, that I never did. I only thought, all in a moment, that, though I had had no intention to offend you, I wanted to ask your forgiveness.”
“Fifine, your glass is empty. Drink to me only—eh? and I—you know, or perhaps you don’t know. Look at me, Fifine. I am a fool, and a remorseful fool. Let us be the best of gossips again.”
“It is too ridiculous,” she said, the tiniest of wet sparkles in her eyes. “That absurd little creature, and his airs and pretensions!”
“You did not find him so entertaining as you had expected, then?”
“Yes, I did. To be honest, I found him, when I could forget my anxiety, very entertaining indeed—on his own ground.”
“What is his own ground?”
“Provence, Felix—the Provence of story and poetry. He seems to know everything about it—its history, its legends, its places and people. And he has a really picturesque way of putting things. He told me quite a number of tales—one, very pretty, about a couple called Briande and Bérard.”
“What about them?”
“O! It was quite a simple little story. Really all its charm lay in his wording of it; and I could not reproduce that.”
“Try.”
“I will try to tell the story if you like; but it must be in my own way. It was about a beautiful lady who lived in Aigues-Mortes in the time of the holy King Louis. She was so beautiful that her fame spread far around, bringing innumerable suitors, great lords and warriors among them, to her feet. But she was cold and haughty; and not one of them all was successful in touching her heart. She would never deign to barter that, she said, against rank and power, though it were the Count of Dauphiny himself who should come to woo her; but she would yield it to his meanest henchman did he please her. Briande was her name; and she was called Briande Sans-fleur, for the strange reason that never a flower was to be seen upon her or in her chambers. She hated to have them plucked, and the surest way to her antipathy was for one to woo her with a posy. They thought that sinister and unwomanly; but so great was the force of her loveliness, there was not a gallant among them but would have pledged his soul to her, though she had been proved a witch.
“Well, it happened once that that saying of hers, whether true or false, reached the ears of the Count of Dauphiny, a hard man and a proud; and he laughed, and swore to himself, ‘It was designed for a challenge, and that I should hear it. I will woo her, then, but in such disguise that only she shall penetrate its secret. We shall see then, if, knowing what she knows, she will reject the Count of Dauphiny. And after? Ah, low shall lie the head of this Briande Sans-fleur!’
“So he caused it privately to be whispered in the ears of Briande—by one who, in seeming, betrayed a jealous confidence—that the Count of Dauphiny, stung by her professed disdain, designed to visit her in the guise of a wandering minstrel of humble birth, thus to woo and win her by virtue of his sole sweet persuasion, while she, unguessing the truth, should fall a captive to that dear deception.
“And thus it was done; and when one day a troubadour, coming from Dauphiny, was brought into the lady’s presence, Briande, guessing the Count underneath those trappings, smiled, and said in her heart, ‘He does not win me so.’ But she said aloud, ‘What is thy name?’ And the stranger answered, ‘I am called Bérard the bird-fingered.’ ‘Why so?’ she asked—‘since birds have no fingers.’ Then he held up his hand, the fingers of which were long and white, like the wing pinions of an ibis; and he said, ‘As their feathers harp sweetly on the wind, so do these beat music from the air.’ ‘Sing to me,’ she said; and, unlooping his instrument, he both played and sang to her. And, as she listened, something that had never entered there before stole into Briande’s heart, and her cheeks flushed and then paled. But when he had finished, she strove with herself enough to ask with scorn, ‘What is the station in life of so accomplished a minstrel?’ And he answered, ‘I am the son of Carel the notary.’ And at that she laughed and dismissed him, knowing and contemning the deception.
“Now the next day, meeting him alone in the garden, ‘Here is the nightingale,’ says she, ‘but, it seems, lacking his rose. Prithee pick thyself one, Master Notary, and wear it in thy ear for a grace note.’ But he drew back only, shaking his head. ‘You will not?’ she asked astonished. ‘Why will you not?’ ‘They are the tender offspring of Nature,’ he said. ‘I would as lief kill a child. And these are pretty children, and children always from their birth till death, never changing or growing older till they close their creamy lids and drop asleep to wake in heaven. No flower is ever plucked by me.’ At that, opening wide her eyes, Briande answered him: ‘It is no libertine who speaks here.’ ‘No, by love’s grace,’ he said, ‘but as virgin speaks to virgin.’ Then, very softly she said to him, ‘I have never yet met another until thee who thinks with me in this. For every blossom pulled on earth our heaven will be one fruit the less. Take up thy song.’ Then he sang to her again (words, Felix, that were spoken—I don’t know if he improvised them on the spot); and often afterwards again, until by degrees her proud heart melted to him, and then surrendered, and they were lovers.”
Fifine paused a moment. “Surely that is not the end?” I said.
“O, no!” said she; “but it all seems so bald as I tell it.”
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “Far from it. Go on.”
“Well,” she continued, “this Briande, at last so humbled in her self-will, awaited the moment when her disguised suitor, having conquered, should reveal himself to her and acclaim his victory. But he never spoke; and so one day, in proud submissiveness, she bowed her head before him and herself confessed. ‘Sweetheart, I have known thee all the time for what thou art—the lord of Dauphiny. I have saved this bird in my bosom until now; but no longer can I stay its singing. Make what thou wilt of thy triumph and of my humiliation.’ Then Bérard looked at her like one who hears his death sentence; and suddenly he was weeping and groaning. ‘It is not so,’ he said; ‘but in very truth I am Bérard, son of Carel the notary. It was the lord of Dauphiny who laid this snare for thy pride’s undoing, sending me to represent him, and in such wise as that thou shouldst think me him disguised. “And so,” says he, “I’ll teach her at what henchman’s rate I value her regard. Take from her, Bérard; and the more thou canst take, before revealing thyself, the better thou wilt please me.” And light of heart I came to do his bidding; and here I stand.’ ‘Thou hast not done it,’ she answered, her lip curling. ‘Why dost thou falter in thy villainy?’ ‘Ah! lady,’ he said, weeping for very shame; ‘how could I think to pluck the flower of all flowers, who never wronged a blossom in my life?’ ‘I spare thee for that,’ she said. ‘But go, and never let me see thy face again.’
“But Bérard being gone left that behind him which he guessed not. And often Briande thought of him, until of her thoughts was born a very passion for the past. ‘As was his love for flowers,’ she sighed, ‘so was his love for me—not to despoil, where perchance the stem was weak.’ And, while her coldness to all others grew to a rigid frost, his memory in her heart became a tender spring, amongst whose blossoms she wandered, for ever full of wistful dreamings. And at last she could bear her pain no more. ‘I must find him,’ she thought; ‘or die. I will go alone across the marshes to Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and beg their intercession that my love may be restored to me.’”
“We, too, will go there, Fifine,” I said, as the narrator paused; “and mark the spot of Briande’s pilgrimage. A woeful journey for that gentle lady!”
“So she found it,” said Fifine; “and often on the long desolate way she gave herself up for lost. But at length she reached the little town, and found the church she sought, in whose shrine——”
“Well?” I said, seeing she stopped again.
“I have forgotten,” said Fifine, “whose bones they were.”
“Why whose, but the three Marys’—Magdalene, Bethany, and St. James his mother. But go on; what does it matter?”
“I like to be accurate,” said Fifine: “and every detail in these stories has its point.”
“I don’t see one here—unless it is the Magdalene. But never mind that.”
“Well, after entering and praying, Briande was leaving the church, when at the very door she met him face to face.”
“Bérard?”
“Yes. He was dressed like a priest. Banished by his love, in misery and penitence he had fled thither and, adjuring the world for ever, had given his life to God.”
“And is that the end?”
“No; the prettiest bit is to come. They met thus again; but only to know the tragedy of their love and part. Like soiled armour which, being cleaned, looks richer than when new, so, under the rubs of Fate, was Bérard’s soul to reveal its intrinsic worth. And Briande took a little house next to the Presbytery, between whose garden and hers was a wall both high and frail, and yet to them a barrier of rock which no speciousness might scale or passion overthrow. And there, on either side, they grew their flowers; and that was the sole bond between them. And, like him, she gave her virgin life to God until she died. Very young she died, Felix, and on the same day died Bérard. And because their end had been saintly and their story was known, amongst their flowers by the wall they buried them, he on his side and she on hers. And, when the spring came, from each grave had shot a rose-tree, from hers a white and from his a red, that climbed the wall with eager fingers until the two met above, and there they mingled; and the flowers when they blossomed were not some white, some red; but each was red and white at once—the Provençal love rose. There!”
She ended, breathless, and I applauded with enthusiasm, making cymbals of my thumbnails.
“You have told it famously, gossip,” I said; “and M. Cabarus may congratulate himself on the most faithful and attentive of pupils. You have reproduced his very accents, I will swear, and touched them with Fifine’s for music. Yet I think it a finer end than they deserved; for both, after all, were deceivers.”
“Why she?” said Fifine.
“She should have declared at once who she suspected him to be, if her pride was all she pretended, and not have risked that temporising with a serpent. Deceit of any sort between man and woman is a dangerous weapon to trifle with; it may at any moment recoil upon the deceiver.”
“Yes,” said Fifine, in a thoughtful voice, her fingers crumbling her bread; “I suppose it is. You wouldn’t like to think I could deceive you, would you, Felix?”
“No,” I said. “Candidly I shouldn’t like it. But then you couldn’t, you know.”
“Couldn’t I? Why not?”
“Because I am a seer, Fifine, with a gift for second-sight. Now, if you are ready, let us go and take a stroll in the town.”
I went out on the steps to light my pipe, while Fifine ran upstairs to fetch her cloak. I was feeling in an odd mood. It was satisfying to know that my comrade and I were on good terms again, yet somehow I found that sense of relief tempered with a certain gravity which was novel enough in its character to set me thinking. Indispensability—the word seemed involuntarily to shape itself in my mind like a spectre only newly realised out of subconsciousness. Yet what possible association could it have with such a transitory connexion as ours? In a brief space of time that would have become for both of us the merest memory, whimsical, a little tender perhaps, perhaps a little pathetic, and there an end. There could be claimed for it nothing of that spirit of inseparability which discovers a mutual unhappiness in even a temporary severance. Yet had I not come to be conscious in myself of a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, when Fifine was not with me? I must suppose so; or why should I object to her consorting as freely as she chose with chance acquaintances; and, worse, exhibit, as she herself had hinted, the temper of a jealous woman when I fancied myself and my first importance to be ever so little slighted by her? It was not enough for me to tell myself that I simply objected to being called upon to play second fiddle to aprécieux ridiculelike Carabas; I knew that the truth of my small secret resentment that afternoon had lain in the realisation that under any circumstances, and however temporarily, my comrade could dispense with my company. If it was jealousy, it was jealousy notofthat absurd littlegrimacier, butforthe integrity of our partnership; and what was the moral of that?
But that was not, perhaps, the most serious side of the matter. The truth was that my own small revolt had served to reveal an almost reciprocal state of mind on the other side—a state of mind which, as now regarded, appeared the inevitable consequence of certain late drifts and tendencies, which, seeming unimportant in themselves, had become a danger in their cumulative result. So that, it seemed, if the word Indispensability was to be ruled out between us, now was the time when the situation should be faced, and readjusted to its most commonsensible effect.
This all came to me as I stood and pondered; and, seeing things thus in a clearer and steadier light, I said to myself that this would hardly do, that there was a threat of my becoming involved in a complication altogether outside my original purpose, and that both reason and good-feeling forbade my disregarding a warning when once it was known and analysed. Not that I would admit to myself even now that I was under bond to any moral compact whatsoever; I had expressly stated that I would not be; only there was Fifine’s own happiness to consider. Ihadengaged myself to be her protector, using the word in its purer sense; and if herself proved one, and not the weakest, of her enemies, I was not the less called upon on that account to stand by and defend her.
An heroic resolve—I may claim that for it at least—though destined, like many another of my brightest and best, to an impotent conclusion. In the meanwhile I went so far as to propose to myself an actual tactical encouragement of the ridiculous stranger, with his appeal, whatever it might be, to the romantic in my young comrade’s breast. No harm could possibly come of so detached an interest, while I myself should appear to repudiate the least right of sole authority over her wishes and caprices. My one object should be to make her feel that, for all purposes save that of travel, we were independent of one another. Alas!de sot homme sot songe!
Fifine rejoined me in a moment, and we went down into the little square, gay with lights and vehicles.
“Mistral!” she said, seeing me turn her southwards. “Am I not to worship first at the great man’s shrine?”
“O, the statue!” I answered. “You have only seen its back, of course. For myself I am a little tired of the eternal cult. He is as great a nuisance in his place as the Dairyman’s daughter is in hers, or as Kingsley at Westward Ho, where the very engines carry his name about. Mistral did not create Provence, any more than Stevenson created childhood, as some of his fatuous adorers would have us believe. But, come.”
“All that is Greek to me,” said Fifine, as we sought the front of the statue. “But if it means England——”
“It does.”
“Do you ever wish for your own country again, Felix? You have been a great traveller, have you not?”
“Here and there—and I hope to be again.”
“But not yet?”
“Why not? Likely this pleasant little episode will give me a renewed taste for it, and I shall be off again as soon as returned.”
Thus I seized my opening chance to prepare the way to my resolve. And with what result? Fifine spoke hardly a word during that our preliminary stroll about the lighted town, but early complained of being tired, and went back to bed, after bidding me good-night in a distant voice. And to bed I too retreated shortly afterwards, in a mood between depression and wrath.
ThoseArlesian days always come back to my memory with a peculiar glow and poignancy all their own. The town itself is one of the very fairest in the Rhone valley, beautiful in its ruins, in its situation, in the stately picturesqueness of its people. I never think of it but I am somehow reminded of Ariel’s song:—
“Of his bones are coral made;Those are pearls that were his eyes:Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.”
“Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
For in truth that very sea-change is there, dating from a time when the city stood, like Venice, in the midst of wide lagoons, which extended so far as the great rock of Montmajour three miles northward, and which have since receded to leave bare the vast lonely delta of the Camargue. Ariel and Arles! there seems even a significance in the imperfect anagram; for does not wild music for ever haunt the place, melodiously sounding the dirge of kings long dead, of knights and fair ladies and courtly revels, whose iridescent dust yet clings about the walls, or flutters in golden flakes and scales over the sunburnt roofs.
“Into something rich and strange.” So it would appear. Its lumber is the accumulation of rich ages—the loveliness of Greece, the pride of Rome, the polychromatic splendour of the renaissance. All have contributed to produce an impression which I can liken only to that conveyed by opal, or mother-of-pearl, or long-buried glass or pottery. I have felt the same mystery of blended colour in the sweep of infinite downs, in the damasked glooms of Chartres cathedral, or when standing before the great west window at Winchester, with its mad inimitable mosaic of broken fragments, starry, kaleidoscopic, translucent, a waste of wild-set jewels, for which I know not what past genius was responsible, but may his perfect inspiration never fall under the curse of the restorer. And Arles is a spectre of that spectrum—at least so it haunts my inner vision—a town over which the sea of ages has flowed, to leave it finally rich in a myriad tints and corals, the infinite jetsam of time.
Perhaps association colours my view. It may very well be, for it stands emblazoned enough in my memory, where, before walls which a thousand years of sunshine have transmuted into gold, flits ever a rainbow crowd of dreams and thoughts and emotions, not to be separated from the living entities who gave them being and hospitality.
Well, I had struck for solitude, and only once more, it seemed, to be outmanœuvred by circumstance. To Arles we were come, and so with gay hearts to make the very best of a good thing.
To Fifine at least it was all au teint frais. She was enraptured with the antiquities, and more, perhaps, with the modernities—the sparkle of life, the jolly littlePlacein which we were ensconced, the friendly men, the stately women, with their chapelles and cap-ribbons—now, alas, subdued, like Venetia’s gondolas, from hues once double-dyed to sombre black—with the spirit of song and dance which still animated this people out of the old melodious years. Very early we went to see the sun set over the amphitheatre—a vision of transcendent beauty. The Rondpoint was almost deserted: we halted high up on the slope, so that our view could command, over and beyond the vast stone cylinder whose base adapted itself to the fall of the hill, the roofs and towers of the buildings beyond. The sun was down below our level; but those house-tops stood up in its glow, making a vividly intense background to the shadowy blue sweep of the arena. Their walls were primrose, their tiles were burning vermilion; here and there a raw advertisement stood translated into terms of jewelled gold and azure. And overhead, in a sky green as deep water, hung a large bright moon, already swelling to its full. There was no breath of wind to vex the quiet of the lovely scene; and only a voice here and there, sounding strange and unreal through the hollow silences, broke like a ripple on the universal peace. I heard Fifine sigh—a song without words, with which I felt in full concord and content.
I take these impressions, as they arise, without order or sequence. Time for a brief space stood still with us, and there are no milestones to mark his way. St. Trophime, into which one enters through a grey façade flush with its neighbour houses—as it might be only number so-and-so in the row—to find beyond deep caverns of antique craftsmanship, and sombre vaulted glooms spangled with gems, and, still further, long fretted cloisters arching away into the inmost recesses of sunlight: the ruined theatre which, sunk in its green oasis among the houses, gave its pagan bones to prop those very cloisters, and yet, shattered and desolate as it stands, speaks more eloquently of the unconquerable pride of the past than any relic I have known elsewhere: the Aliscamps, that old, old place of Roman-Christian sepulture, so sacred—having been consecrated by Christ Himself in a vision—that to be buried there ensured one salvation, for which reason the unhallowed dead, being set afloat on rafts all up the Rhone, would drift down, thedrue de mourtalagein their stiffened fingers, to find redemption at the hands of careful watchers—all these were subjects for our curious inquisition, and many smaller interests.
Mention of the Aliscamps, or Champs Elysées, recalls a minute incident, which has often recurred to me since, and will again. We were loitering down the lane of tombs—a long alley lined with thin shrubs and trees, and before them on either side set ranks of stone sarcophagi—when, stopping awhile to regard some prospect, as I turned to speak to Fifine I found she was gone. She had utterly vanished; the lane stretched both ways devoid of life; there was no trunk large enough for her to have slipped behind to hide herself. I stood astonished; I hunted up and down, stooping and peering; finally I shouted her name. A little laugh answered me, and she rose from a tomb. In a spirit of mischief she had tiptoed from me, and stretched herself flat in a deep sarcophagus. As I brushed the dust and moss from her clothes, I asked her what on earth had induced her to such an insane prank. “I wanted to play at being dead,” she said; “and to wonder how you would feel if I were.”
“A pretty thought,” I said—“only with a moral a little like that of the frogs stoned by the boys in the fable. Don’t play such tricks again, if you love me.”
There was just that in my voice which I could not entirely control. She put an impulsive hand on my arm, looked as if about to answer me in kind, but withdrew it without a word.
One whole morning we devoted to a visit to St. Gilles, that town of one considerable church and fifty considerable smells; another to a trip to Montmajour, tramping the three miles to the latter on foot, for the day was pleasant and we were wayfarers after all. There is a little light railway (of whose vagaries more anon), running over the plain, and we had designed to return by that; but after, having left the ruins, we had discovered thehalte—a task of some difficulty, for it consisted of nothing more than a casual bench in a field by the side of the single line track—and had waited there for our train some three quarters of an hour beyond its scheduled time, we decided that we would rather foot it back than risk the loss of lunch, and so started off—only, of course, to espy the abominable thing approaching when we were just too far away to make a successful return run for it. However, the morning was worth its labour.
It is a ruin to remember among the most striking of its kind, that of the vast shattered Abbey crowning its mighty crag, which rises abruptly from the plain, lonely and austere, like an inland Mont St. Michel. It was surrounded by water once, and could be reached only by boat—a meet and mighty sentinel to command the approaches to that great stone-hewn city of the rocks, les Baux, which can just be descried, some nine miles north-east, fretting the low clouds with its hundred jagged splinters. And yet, whatever strategic advantages it might appear to possess, this Montmajour had to wait, it seems, for a soldier of Christ to realise and turn them to account. For it was hither clomb Trophimus—disciple of Paul and first teacher of Christianity in the Roman Prefecture of Arles, or Arelate—to excavate on the height his little chapel of the rocks with its confessional and cell, and there make converts, who, according to tradition, flocked to him in such numbers as to leave him scarce leisure for grace or meat.
It is a curious little burrow that chapel, and yet, with its single cell—the protoplast from which all the vast superincumbent fabric of the Abbey was to develop itself—by far the most impressive corner of the ruins. There still may be seen, shelving upwards from the back of the tiny follicle, the narrow fissure in the rock through which Trophimus scuttled into hiding like a rabbit, what time the Cæsarean soldiers were on his track. We had not the enterprise to climb and slither the way he went; but no doubt, in the deep dead silence of that retreat, we might have distinguished the throb of a Saint’s heart-beats still haunting its dark recesses. The waste pomp and circumstance of the Titanic remains above made no appeal to the imagination like that of the little underground chapel, on whose credit and interest they rested.
So those days return to me, full of the sunshine of both heart and climate. We were lucky in our weather from first to last, never tasting but in fitful spasms the curse of that mistral which dries the kindly marrow in men’s bones. They were days to remember; yet not altogether in the unbroken sequence in which I have recorded them. They came and passed; but there were interludes, while still the sun shone, of a moral atmosphere less satisfying. And again Carabas was the cause.
He had soon reappeared, that most persistent and uncrushable of troubadours. He could not believe in the reality of his cold-shouldering; but, like some other people I have met, seemed to think that it was only one’s imperfect realisation of his attractions which prevented one’s complete enslavement by them. To know him was the one necessity: the restmustensue thereon. So he haunted us—in the streets, in the hotel vestibule, at our table in the salle-à-manger—which, by the way, looked out straight on a little shop in the Rue de Palais, whose windows, full of bric-à-brac, silver tea-strainers, and old embroidered cap ribbons, were a perpetual apéritif to me. He would interrogate us volubly from his place at the long board, enquiring of our sight-seeing, and condescending thereon from the height of his superior knowledge; sometimes he would come over and talk, but always addressing Fifine through me, with shrewd sidelong glances to note the impression his eloquence was making on her. For myself, I met his advances genially enough; I had no quarrel with the man, and his unshakable self-sufficiency was a pure joy to me. But with Fifine it was different. She was as cold and distant to him as the north. I have known a single awkwardness in a man lose him the wife he coveted—turn the balance of her wavering mind from liking to contempt; so, I supposed, that one little solecism of a too smug self-confidence had dished M. Carabas’s chances for him.
Good sooth, I pitied the creature: he was so patently perplexed, distressed, at a loss to understand what could have so suddenly turned against him this charming stranger, on the strength of whose tender condescension he had been flattering in himself God knows what dreams of romantic achievement. Certainly Fifine was very ungrateful, seeing the use she had allowed herself to make of his sudden infatuation. I told her so one day, and she wanted to know why.
“One ought not to accept gifts,” I said, “and then snub the giver.”
“Gifts!” she exclaimed.
“Yes, certainly,” I answered. “What are his fables, his imagery, his storied eloquence but the highest gifts a genius can bestow on his fellows? They are as much his exclusive property as diamonds would be, and in accepting them you laid yourself under as great an obligation as if you had accepted a costly necklace from him.”
She laughed a little; then looked grave.
“I think, do you know, Felix,” she said, “that you are rather stupid.”
“Very likely I am,” I answered; “but why?”
“Not to see,” she began—and stopped. Then suddenly she went on: “I thought anyhow I was considering you in adopting this attitude.”
“In that case,” I said, “please to consider me a gentleman.”
“And the moral of that is,” she said, “that my treatment of M. Cabarus proves me to be not a lady.”
“I never dreamt of implying such a thing, or of thinking it.”
“Well, anyhow I am not a lady in the sense that you are a gentleman. I accept presents from strangers and then snub them. Very well. I cannot return M. Cabarus his magnificent gifts, but I can at least return him what he, I am sure, thinks much more important—his magnificent attentions. You shall see.”
“Nonsense,” I answered; but she was as good as her word, and thenceforth Carabas, restored to her smiles and graces, was like a soul renewed, strutting in a seventh heaven of confidence and gratified vanity. I had asked Fifine for a breeze, and she had answered womanlike with a gale, with the result that the fellow was blown up to an inordinate figure of pride—of bounce, I might say, in that inflated connection. He assumed a sort of amative proprietorship over my companion, while he tolerated rather than patronised me. And I was the one cold-shouldered now, Fifine seeming to relish that fatuous devotion the more, the more she was besieged by it.
So, I might congratulate myself, were things obligingly accommodating themselves to the exact end I had in view; and, better still, it was now plain to me that my apprehensions as to the state of the young lady’s feelings had been wholly without justification. It was all, in fact, as it should be and as I would have it, I told myself; and, though it might appear characteristically feminine to forget sober services such as mine in the intoxication wrought of a flattering pursuit, I was not going to make a sex squabble of the matter. Woman’s capacity for absorbing flummery was notoriously beyond man’s gauging, and if in that respect quality counted for anything, it was merely the quality which could untiringly repeat itself. And there, I was sure, Carabas was infinitely my superior: his resources in the way of picturesque lip-homage were no doubt inexhaustible. So altogether I resolved to take advantage of the opening the gods had given me to shake free of a possible embarrassment. I would let it appear that I felt not the slightest resentment over the young woman’s behaviour, or assumed to myself the least authority over, or personal concern in, her preferences. And then, of course, I was quite satisfied in my mind and happy.
But, before this state of things came wholly to pass—and it was a matter of some days’ growth—the poor troubadour had to run his gauntlet, erst-mentioned, of bitter snubs and mortifications. I really commiserated him, as I have said, in his dole, which nevertheless he persisted in courting with the most unblenching stoicism. In these sad hours he even showed towards me a certain spirit of propitiation, though never to the extent of seeming to allow me the least of proprietary interests in the object of his adoration. He regarded me rather as the thorn in the wilderness, which, troublesome in itself, had yet acquired a sort of spurious importance through its connexion with the rose of his desire. Once or twice, when Fifine was not by, we exchanged amenities of a sort; and once I was actually bold enough to question him on a detail of his tenderer confidences.
“That was a pretty legend,” I said, “you told Mademoiselle Dane.”
“Which legend, Monsieur?” he answered, pricking up his ears at the name.
“That of Bérard and Briande Sans-fleur.”
“Ah!” he said, “I can charm a skeleton into life; from a little seed I can produce a fruitful vine. That is to be what I am. Into the alembic of this mind one puts a pinch of dust; and, lo! I return it to him, a golden nugget. Mademoiselle was transported?”
“She liked it anyhow, well enough to tell it me again. Only one point she failed over—Bérard’s song.”
“She would fail,” he said; “but not from want of appreciation. It moved her?”
“I daresay it did.”
“Ah! its music sleeps in the whorls and dimples of that little ear, as the voice of old seas haunts the shell; but from the ear to the lips is a journey impossible to most—even to lips so sweetly eloquent as hers. Yet I fain would hear that honeysuckle strive to repeat its lesson of the sun and dew, however brokenly—” he sighed dismally—“but it is not for me.”
“The legend,” I said, “stands therefore incomplete so far as I am concerned. Will you not do me the favour, Monsieur, to supply the broken link?”
“You wish for the song?”
“Assuredly, if you will be so good.”
“It was extempore—but that is nothing.” He looked at me—there is no other word for it but balefully. “You wish, no doubt,” he said, “to snigger in your sleeve over what you will be pleased to call the meretricious rhapsodies of an improvisatore? It will certainly be more sound than sense, you think, taking refuge from reason under a professed imaginativeness. So are some built, impervious to the spirituality underlying all things, blind to what they cannot see, deaf to what they cannot hear. I tell you, Monsieur, that those who are for ever questioning the truth of literature are incapable of understanding the truth of life.”
He seemed almost in a passion. It was positively petrifying.
“I am quite at a loss, Monsieur,” I said, “for the reason of this jeremiad, or to understand how it is justified by anything I said. I am certainly no captious critic of either life or literature, and as to Imagination, I try myself to be her humble minister. But leave the song by all means unrepeated. The loss, being mine, need not trouble you.”
He was really a little ashamed of himself, I think; though he would not admit it.