“No, Monsieur,” he said, gnawing his knuckles—“no. In justice to myself and the completeness of my art I will gratify you. Listen, then: it went somewhat this way.”
He chaunted rather than spoke the lines, lyric interspersed with prose, a song of the fashion called in Provençal “Cansounetto émé parla.” I do not attempt to reproduce the verse, which was quite picturesque and musical. Its sense was more or less as follows:—
“I followed Beauty as the shadow of a flying bird across the sward. It seemed to wing and settle; and, lo! as I ran to grasp it, it was but a shadow, the shadow of a song that rose into the sky. Quivering it rose, and the shadow quivered to its ecstasy. And as both wing and voice receded up the heights, so did their shadow pale and die from out the grass. Only the shadow of a shadow remained to vex my heart.
“Like the flowers of thesaladellewere my love’s eyes. It was in the chill of winter they gave their blue heaven to my soul. Returning from the long harvest, in summer I resought them, and behold! they were red to me. There is no truth in mortal beauty.
“I followed Beauty in a lonely place; and one, staying me, asked whither. ‘I follow a maid,’ I said. ‘Quick,’ he answered, ‘or you will never find her.’
“O, elusive is that golden quarry! Headlong we rush over the brink of death, and are still pursuing it. I met a sage, who laughed and said, ‘It is the blind side of the eye you set to externals. Will mortals never understand that? The other side it is that sees the truth. Hunt inwards, fool, where Truth and Beauty hide from you secure and unsuspected.’
“Lady, I have never doubted him till now.”
Such was the substance of the song which Bérard, or Carabas, sang to Briande, or Fifine. It was marked by the sort of mystic symbolism characteristic of the old-time cantefable and the rather vague rhapsodies of the early troubadours, and, if really first uttered impromptu, vindicated something of the singer’s claim to a genuine inheritance. At the end I said:—
“That was a fine improvisation, Monsieur. I congratulate myself on the favour bestowed on me.”
“You have perhaps reason to,” answered the poet loftily—and did you ever know the like of that for vanity?
It was to prove the sole favour of its kind, however; for thereafter soon came to pass the creature’s re-establishment in Fifine’s good graces, and my consequent second cold-shouldering by the two. That was to be, I suppose, though without any question of preordination, in which I don’t believe. Chance governs the world, and life is a long chapter of unforeseen accidents. In this case, no doubt, Destiny, bent to a particular purpose, seized on the first instrument at hand to effect it. It is the way of Destiny, whom the vulgar call Haphazard. He hears the hour strike, and straight he catches at any chance weapon—it may be a fly in the milk-jug to choke a Pope withal, an avalanche to crush an infant, a piece of orange-peel cast down to throw a giant. On that supposition, and that supposition alone, could Carabas’s unasked and monstrous intrusion into our privacy be accounted for. It is true he was a blunt instrument; but then, as no particular harm was intended, he served to do his work perhaps better than another and a sharper.
One morning I said to Fifine:—
“I propose for myself a day at Les Saintes Maries. Do you wish to come?”
“Why not?” she answered quietly.
“Very well,” I said. “Only, from a purely personal point of view, I am bound to make a stipulation—that M. Cabarus does not form one of our party.”
“If he chooses to come,” said Fifine, “how can I possibly prevent him?”
“I must leave that to you, m’amie.”
“But that is unfair, Felix—” She broke off, her face flushed, and she made as if to leave me, but altered her mind and turned again. “I have no right whatever to dictate to him as to his movements. Felix”—she put a hesitating hand on my arm—“you said you would take me there.”
There was a look of hurt in her face, and of something more—an emotion I could not fathom; but it helped me back to instant sanity. The perversity of my attitude struck me all at once as being in the last degree ridiculous, and it behoved me to hasten to amend it if I would not lose all faith in myself as a reasonable and consistent being. How could Fifine, a child sixteen years my junior, be expected to hold herself the exclusive property of a companion so sober and mature, or to waive on my behoof her perfectly natural instincts for coquetry and flirtation? The thing was harmless; and moreover agreeable to my plans. I uttered a clearing laugh.
“What a dog in the manger you must think me!” I said. “Never mind what I stipulated. Ask him to come, if you like.”
“But I never said I did like,” she answered. “Cannot we give him the slip somehow, and get to the station without his knowing?”
And that is what we did; though it meant a pretty panic run in the open, the little Gare de la Camargue lying across the river, with the whole stretch of the iron suspension bridge between. However, we reached it and got off undetected, and were quickly on our way again into the wilderness.
And here, indeed, was the real thing—no case of those half measures we had known on the Aigues-Mortes route, which takes one only along the civilised edge of the Camargue. This hour and a half’s run in the dancing and reeling little train, which winds up its iron thread of leagues across the very mid-loneliness of the delta, is a far wilder experience, more melancholy, more desolate, and at the same time infinitely fuller of the mystery which inhabits desolations. It is common to hear strange voices, to catch glimpses of strange faces, on hills or in wooded solitudes; but the spirits that peer and flit on lonely wastes are no less in certain evidence because we neither see nor hear them. Only we know that beyond this bent or that, peering through the reeds on the pool’s rim, or watching our receding footsteps from behind some bush we have just passed, is something which would not be there if we went to look. Here we learn the story that there is in far horizons: there is no end to its sadness; nor to its sweetness nor hope. And the sky is one vast iridescent dome, like a bubble floating on water, with the flat earth for its floor; and, underneath, what unfathomable secrets!
But I am encroaching on Carabas’s preserves, and must decline from rhapsody to commonplace. The prosaic fact is that the light railway from Arles to Les Saintes Maries bisects, roughly, the Camargue, and that the most of one’s journey by it is made through a monotonous and unpeopled solitude. It is a very impressive solitude, for those who can appreciate the charm of league-wide isolation from an overcrowded world, and its outstanding features are such as we should expect it to display, the natural offspring of primeval incoherence and desolation—the booming bittern; the mournful curlew; flamingoes (though we were too late to see them), silently trailing their lengths, like whisps of rosy sunset, against a pearly sky, and bill-clapping frog-eating cranes. Reeds are its prominent growth, with, everywhere, unending thickets of tamarisk and juniper; and water, in ponds, in pools, in the little irrigating canals which they callroubines, blots the surface eternally. Now and again a clump of silver poplars, or of that most beautiful of its family the umbrella-pine, will rise to trance the austerity with its lovelier mood; but they are rare benedictions. For the most part one seems to travel on the near-barren margin between Life and Death—and so to the symbol and expression of it all, the solitary fortress-church on the edge of the sea.
That is where God and man have closed to try conclusions—power mortal and power immortal locked in one embrace. It is the quaintest, loneliest church in the world—a temple and a stronghold in one. Long, narrow, and crowned with battlements, its crest was lifted to defy what its heart was opened to cherish, the spirit of Christian love and forbearance. There, above, its wardens bristled for the fight, while below slept in eternal peace the bones of those who had inherited direct from the Saviour His lessons of charity and forgiveness. You may see at this day the casket which is said to contain them. It is lowered periodically by machinery, from a chamber above the altar, for the worship of pilgrims. And there is even an odder worship connected with the place—that of Sarah, the Egyptian, who, according to tradition, accompanied the three Marys hither as their servant. She is buried, so it is reported, in the crypt chapel, a deep and darksome cavern excavated underneath the chancel, to which, on a certain day in October, flock from all quarters crowds of gypsies, to pay homage at the shrine of their ancestress.
The whole church is a picture of isolation without and gloom within. It is barely lighted by its few narrow windows; its little lamps are mere glow-worms in a vast concavity; there it stands by the salt sea, solemn and forgotten, like the scapegoat of all religion. It has a village about it, a little village, by now the smallest debris of its past estate. Still it has its great days—and I was thankful we had not alighted on one of them. It was hugely more impressive as it stood.
Fifine was disappointed in it. She could by no means bring herself to associate this forlorn relic with Briande’s tender pilgrimage. And the presbytery, when we found it, did not fit in with the poet’s description at all. It was an illusion laid, I fear, though I did what I could to claim for romantic licence its prerogatives. But the bitterest moment came with the discovery in the good curé himself of the shrewdest of caterers in the matter of picture-postcards, crosses, medals, and other such local baits for the curious or the pious, with which his office was stocked. An original charter of King Réné, which he produced for our benefit, did little to mend the disenchantment, so interminably and so drily did he drawl over it, while we were suffering to escape. The day, I felt, was a failure.
We were no longer good gossips—that, I think, was the truth of it. There had come something between us, which Fifine was too proud, and I too diplomatic, to own. The fact is a grievance cannot be patched, and there was a grievance here unconfessed. It had to be admitted and pulled to pieces before anything could be affected in the way of an understanding. So, though we were nominally on the usual terms, it was really the false coin of comradeship we were interchanging. We pretended sympathetic goodfellowship, and what was only perfectly obvious was the pretence.
We had brought our lunch with us and eaten it in the train. More than an hour remained to us after we had finished with the curé, and it passed slowly, though it had been killed merrily enough under the old circumstances. There was nothing whatever of interest in the place beyond the church, and we loitered aimlessly in the direction of nowhere. I am sure we both sighed our relief when the time came to return to the station.
In the train, while Fifine pretended to sleep, I sat chewing the cud of injurious reflection. “She is comparing her day,” I thought, “with what it might have been had that fulsome yarn-slinging impostor accompanied us. I think, on the whole, and under the circumstances, she might have endured me more benignly. But I suppose it is impossible to woman to yield a point graciously, and without at least some negative nagging in the shape of a self-sacrificial, smiling-martyrdom pose.” And that led me to launch out in mental eulogy of the spacious vision which sees at once when all that it is necessary to say has been said—the broad mind which omits to dwell on little grievances, but can show all forbearance and accept all excuses within the royal compass of its catholicity—until it suddenly occurred to me that, while on the subject, I had better perhaps extend the limits of my own vision. And at that I was able to laugh at myself, if a little ruefully, and to re-utter the now rather mechanic formula that everything was working as it should, and as I had the best of reasons in the world for wishing that it should.
We did not reach our hotel until near seven o’clock, and there, of course, was Carabas, seated smoking a disconsolate cigarette on one of the two benches placed on either side the steps. His hat sat on his head like a penwiper; he was lounging at rest, when, seeing us, he heaved himself forward; but the weight of his poetic bow-window carried him back again, and he had to make a second attempt, which brought him to his feet with a stagger and his hat over one eye. Once on his legs, however, his face assumed a mixed expression of relief and plaintive upbraiding.
“Ah, Mademoiselle!” he said, taking possession of my companion; “but this has been a desolate day for some of us.”
“Et d’autre part,” says Miss, with a naughty smile, “for some of us, a very bright one. You should have come to Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, where the sun shone all day in the sky and in our hearts.”
He drooped his head, protruded his lower lip, and regarded her from the top of his eyeballs. It was designed for an expression of despair, and was quite sweetly laughable.
“Les Saintes Maries!” he whispered hoarsely. “There is a stab, Mademoiselle, in your every word. I should have come? Ah, truly! But by what instinct, seeing I was kept uninformed of your intentions? But doubtless that was deliberate, and in order to keep me from interposing my shadow between the sun and your happiness. It is well; then. And yet it is possible my company might have proved not altogether profitless. It is a desert spot, which yet the Magician’s wand can make to flower. Truly, Mademoiselle, I think you did perversely in discarding your most attached cicerone.”
I laughed, and ran up the steps, leaving Fifine to make her peace as she chose with her injured follower.
Comingout after dinner to enjoy my smoke in the open, I found Fifine and her preux chevalier already ensconced on one of the two seats placed on the pavement against the house front. It was a still and balmy evening, and the rattling illuminated littlePlacewas all one movement and babble of voices. I paused a moment to appreciate the scene, and then, as I descended the steps, somebody addressed me, a little doubtfully, from the second occupied seat:—
“Mr. Dane? It is Mr. Dane—isn’t it?”
“Présent!” I said, without a thought, and wheeled to look at the speaker. It was a young girl, indubitably English, who leaned forward to scrutinise me.
“Ah!” she said, turning merrily to a pleasant, placid-looking woman, who sat beside her—“he doesn’t know me, you see, Mother; I told you he wouldn’t.” And then she faced me again, a very white row of teeth witnessing to her nationality.
“Wait,” I said: “I am not such an insouciant as you think. You are Miss Clarice Brooking.”
I recalled her in that moment. She had been a student in Thirion’s atelier in Paris, where I had guinea-pigged two or three years earlier during the temporary absence through sickness of its master. Not a very promising pupil, if I remembered; but one, if I must confess it, with an inordinate admiration for the work of the teacher-substitute. But I had liked her, her gaiety, her freshness, her perfectly candid and voluble good-nature; and I was glad—for the moment—to meet her again.
She made a little motion, inviting me to sit beside her, and, as I did so, introduced me to her mother.
“And how about Thirion’s?” I said.
“O!” she answered; “that is all over, and you will never be put to the pains again of sparing me the knowledge of the muff I was.”
“You have abandoned art?”
“Now please to drop it, Mr. Dane. It would be mere pretence, you know, to say I abandoned what wasn’t mine—like jilting a man who had never proposed to you and didn’t mean to. But thank goodness the poor creature was saved any further embarrassment on my account by our coming into money. Yes, that is the glorious truth, and Mother and I have been busy for months in visiting all the places we have ever wanted to see and couldn’t—making up for lost time.”
“Thank you for my part in the benediction.”
“O!” She laughed cheerily. “I learned more from you than from any one; but it was all no good; I remained arapinto the very end. To see you paint always made me despair.”
“You are not alone in that sentiment. It makes some people even use bad language.”
She looked at me questioningly, quizzically.
“I didn’t mean in that way. I simply adored your work. Have you not been successful? People say, you know, that success spells mediocrity.”
“Those are the people, I expect, who would say anything to vindicate their own want of it. Success is a question of some quality in one which finds its affinity in the greatest number.”
“Well, it seems to me, that is the same thing, because the greatest number are perfect idiots in everything but their own business. Are you painting about here?”
“A little.”
“All by yourself?”
“No—I have a companion with me.”
The moment I had said it a sense of the equivocalness of my position flashed upon me, and I wished that I could have warned Fifine before making that impulsive admission. But it was too late now.
“Does he paint too?” asked Miss Brooking.
“It is not ahe,” I said.
“O!”
Was there a note of alarm, of instinctive recoil, in that single interjection? I wondered. Mamma, who took but a monosyllabic part in the conversation, smiled continually, like one who could be suavely tolerant of most worldly idiosyncrasies; and Clarice herself had been, after all, a student in Paris. Still, I felt I could not leave the matter at that abrupt round full-stop.
“She is a—a sort of connexion,” I said, with a slight hesitation, “whom I am accompanying back to Paris at the request of my step-sister.”
I spoke somewhat nervously, incapable, on the spur of the moment, of the finessing which was needed at once to betray no secrets and to create no inextricable entanglements. To my surprise the girl responded with alacrity:—
“O, of course! I remember now. Your step-sister is a Miss Herold, is she not?”
I gave a little gasp and murmured an admission, marvelling what was to come.
“You will wonder how I know, perhaps,” said Miss Brooking. “It is rather curious, but it is always funnily occurring, that question of associations. She—your step-sister, I mean—governesses Josephine de Beaurepaire, doesn’t she?”
I answered, “Yes, in a way,” in a voice I strove not to make aghast.
“Well,” said the young lady, “I was engaged myself for a short time to give Josephine drawing lessons—cheek of me, wasn’t it?—and I heard before I left that Miss Herold was coming to be her companion. I can’t remember who it was told me; but somehow I learnt that it was your step-sister who was expected. Is she still there?”
“O, yes!” I sat up with a jerk, in the desperate hope to interpose my body between the speaker and her view of Fifine close by.
“I wonder how she likes it?” questioned the girl.
“Why shouldn’t she?” I asked, hardly remembering of whom it was I was speaking.
“O! I don’t know,” she said. “She may have a different temperament to mine, and of course heaps more wisdom. But I couldn’t, myself, have stood another week of it.”
“Of what? Of the young lady?”
“Of everything. It was a horrible household. And the Marquis himself was, I really think, half demented.”
She was frankly outspoken, you observe. I had turned, facing her, and, watching her eyes, manœuvred to keep their inquisition from escaping beside and beyond me—a quite useless precaution.
“And your young pupil herself?” I asked. “Was she as impossible?”
“Tel père, telle fille,” answered Miss Brooking—“all affability at one moment and fury the next. I think she was neurotic, poor girl; and she led a fearful life of it with that madman. I couldn’t have stood it any longer; it frightened and offended me; and so I cut the connexion. But I hope——” she looked at me in sudden hesitation.
“Not in the least,” I said. “There is no apology called for on behalf of my step-sister. She has twice your years, and I should think twenty times your inflexibility and only a fraction of your sensitiveness. She has done very well, I understand, and has come to be quite an influence for good in the household.”
“I am so glad,” said the girl. “There was room for it, I am sure. And so you are on your way back to Paris—at once?”
“That depends upon my travelling-companion,” I said. “This is all a novelty to her, and she likes to linger over it.”
“Where is she? We should so like to be introduced to her. Will you?”
I rose at once, prompt and desperate to the chance. Under whatever pretext I must get Fifine away, explaining to her while I covered her retreat. Once gone, I might devise some excuse for her; but flight was the first essential.
But when, with a “Certainly, I will,” I turned to seek her, I found her already departed. No doubt she and her cavaliere-servente, seeing me occupied, had seized the opportunity to slip away together. Breathing again, I expressed my regrets to the ladies. “She was sitting there, with a friend,” I said, “but a minute ago.”
“What,” said Miss Brooking—“that very pretty girl? I was admiring her with all my eyes. Wassheyour relative?”
I stood and heard. On the first shock of those words followed an instant revulsion of feeling in my mind—from startled relief to incredulity, to amazement, to understanding; and so to an irresistible impulse to essay a daring test.
“Did you think her pretty?” I said. “My step-sister always professes to see in her a certain likeness to your former pupil.”
“To Josephine de Beaurepaire?” There was wonder in her tone.
“Yes.”
“She must have changed very much then since I knew her.”
“You don’t see it yourself?”
“O, no! I may have been deceived by the light; but I should never have thought for a moment of connecting them—not for a moment; unless, possibly, their figures might be something alike. But Josephine for one thing was fair—I don’t mean a blonde, but with hair of the neutral sort and palish eyelashes. No, really, I can’t understand it.”
There was no compromise about her. I felt the excitement in my heart as if beating on towards some emotional crisis, but whether fateful for loss or gain I could not foresee.
“O, well!” I said. “It is always a vexed question, that of likenesses. Some people can discover them where for others they simply don’t exist. Haven’t you ever known an infant that to this person was the image of its mother, to that of its father, while bearing to neither the least suggestion of the other parent? I daresay, if I could see Mademoiselle Beaurepaire, I should be as puzzled as you are to find a resemblance. Are you staying here long?”
“Only over to-morrow. We go on to Nîmes the day after. Mr. Dane—” she cooed honeyly—“I suppose you couldn’t—I suppose it wouldn’t be possible for you to—to sacrifice a little of your spare time to two poor outcast fellow-countrywomen? It would be so delightful to have you for a cicerone—if you could.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You will understand me, I am sure, when I say that I am at the mercy of a more exacting will than my own.”
I could not, indeed, give any definite answer at the moment—my thoughts were chaos, with still an instinctive dread in them of that introduction the prospect of which had at first dismayed me. On the other hand I recognised in this chance encounter a means to a certain end of unsentimentalising detachment. And more than that—I was really pleased to have run across this young compatriot of mine again; she carried with her a frank deodorising atmosphere which it was pleasant to breathe after the rather close and thunderous experiences of the last few days. I found myself looking at her very kindly: she was not exactly pretty, but as fresh and wholesome as the primroses of her own countryside; and breathing her, as it were, I seemed to feel, wistfully and faintly, a sense of the long exile which, though voluntarily, had severed me from my birthright. England, after all, smells very sweet across the seas.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Brooking. “She won’t want to be deprived of you for the sake of two strangers.”
But Clarice persisted: “Why shouldn’t she make one of us?”
“I will ask her,” I said. “Don’t think me a boor if I leave it at that. And that reminds me: I must go and look after the young lady, and see that she isn’t getting into any mischief—” and we parted with a cordial good-night, and I went my gait.
With what intention; and whom to seek? I felt in a very queer state of mind—cynical, puzzled, wrathful, and yet oddly elevated. What should I do—what say? Nothing, I resolved, after I had thought it all well out; but just let things take their course. In masterly inactivity lay the solution of most problems of conduct.
Mademoiselle my sister, the landlady informed me, when presently I returned to the Hôtel, had wished me to be informed that she had retired to bed with a slight headache, and did not desire to be disturbed. So? Then she should not be disturbed by me. I was merely the looker-on in a quaint little game of cross-purposes.
Fifine was before me at the breakfast-table the next morning. As I joined her, the two ladies came in, and took their seats, fortunately at some distance from us. We just exchanged bows, cheerily on their part, nervously on mine, for some dread of the unspeakable still haunted me. But it passed in the next moment and I felt troubled no more. I thought Clarice looked very attractive in her clean frock and dewy morning brightness, which contrasted oddly, I will not say flatteringly, with the more exotic charms of my companion.
“I knew her in Paris”—I volunteered the information to Fifine, who was patently, though with cold looks, canvassing my newly-discovered acquaintance of the night before. “She was a pupil of Thirion’s, and under my tuition for some months. She and her mother have come into money, and are travelling. They wanted me to show them the sights for a few hours to-day, and I couldn’t very well refuse. You won’t mind, will you?”
I did not think it necessary to relate the particulars of our conversation or of my apprehensions. It was obvious that the morning light had done nothing to reform that question of identification.
“They think you a connexion of mine, whom I am escorting to Paris at Marion’s request,” I went on. “You have nothing to do but uphold that fiction, and steer clear of all compromising details. Just hold your tongue about yourself, that is all. They go to-morrow.”
“Why should I do anything?” said Fifine. “They are not my friends.”
They were not. I observed her curiously. There was no sign of any recognition in her eyes either.
“But they would like to be,” I answered. “They asked particularly if you would not join us.”
“Then they may ask. I shall not come.”
“Let me introduce you to them at least. I promised to.”
“That is your look out. I don’t want to make their acquaintance.”
“Why not? You put me in a rather awkward position, you know. They will think you very ungracious.”
“I don’t care what anymaladroiteof an English Miss thinks me. It is hers that is the clumsy bad-taste in interposing herself where she is not wanted. You put yourself in that position, and you may get out of it as you like.”
“Very well. You must behave as you please. Only, if I go, what will you do with yourself in the meantime?”
“O! You needn’t trouble about me. Fortunately there is one upon whom I can depend more confidently for my entertainment.”
“You mean Carabas, of course.”
“Yes, of course. He is not like a butterfly to be led away any moment by a new fancy.”
“Well, you ought to know—such an old friend, and his attachments tendrils of such slow growth.”
I laughed; but Fifine was remote from laughter. She got up in a very few minutes and left the table and the room, her head held high.
I was really placed in an uncomfortable position, and hard put to it, when I joined the ladies, to find excuses for my companion’s rudeness. Of course they must have adjudged her in their minds an ill-bred unpleasant young woman; but their tactful kindness sought only to spare my feelings the knowledge of theirs. I said something lamely about her shyness of strangers—for her refusal to be introduced must have been perfectly obvious to them—and I conveyed from her a fictitious message to the effect that she regretted not being able to come, but that she had already engaged herself to a short expedition with a M. Cabarus, an acquaintance of ours. It was not much, but it was more than she deserved, even though my manner, I am afraid, must have given my invention the lie, for I was plainly embarrassed, and as plainly incensed against the cause of my embarrassment. But the two ladies affected, with a much finer tact, a genuine sympathy with the subject of my excuses.
“It is too bad,” said Mrs. Brooking, “for us to impose ourselves on you like this. You really mustn’t let us, Mr. Dane. Poor girl! I dare say she is wishing us at Jericho; and I can feel with her in her shyness of troublesome interlopers like ourselves. One wants to be free of all social obligations on a holiday. So please don’t consider yourself bound to us in any way. We can manage perfectly well by ourselves—can’t we, daughter?”
“Yes, of course,” said Clarice. “It was only a thoughtless suggestion on my part; and I really hardly expected it to be taken seriously.”
“It was taken,” I said, “not only seriously, but pridefully. You mustn’t deny me that sort of proprietary exaltation which one feels in playing local dragoman to a party of visitors. After exhausting the beauties of Arles, you will leave off with a vague impression that I am somehow to thank for them, simply because my knowledge of them is anterior to yours; and I wouldn’t forego that feeling of self-complacent superiority for anything. Moreover, I have no other engagement—I swear it.”
They laughed, and expostulated; but in the end we went off together, and made a quite pleasant day of it. Both mother and daughter were of that bright intelligence which gives to the reiteration of ancient commonplaces a perpetual new zest. They were interested in everything; they commented inanely on nothing. I enjoyed myself, I confess it; there was something exhilarating in this contact with the fresh clean North in a fervid land, and Clarice, as a fair young Englishwoman, did her country and me, I felt, the most gratifying credit. We went back to lunch at the Hôtel, to recruit against fresh exertions, and started off again without having seen anything of Fifine. That did not disturb me, but rather otherwise; I had had quite enough of her for the time being, and her presence in the room would have been nothing but an embarrassment. No reference to her was made by the ladies, and for that I was thankful. It had occurred to me only too late that she passed in the Hôtel for my sister, and I was struck aghast over the thought of what strategy would be necessary to accommodate that fiction to the asserted facts of my case. But fortunately our supposed relationship had not reached the ears of the two; nor, so far as I know, were they ever called upon to question my statement. I hope not, at least, for, absurd and illogical as it may sound, I would fain keep my credit unimpaired in the breast of that clean-souled young countrywoman of mine.
I dined alone at the end of the day, my friends preferring to be served in their room after their somewhat exhausting experience; and again Fifine was conspicuous by her absence. But I would make no enquiries about her, or allow myself to be disturbed in any way on her account. She had chosen her own course, and was welcome to bring it to whatever conclusion she pleased. After dinner, I strolled about the town for a time, and at near ten o’clock returned to the Hôtel and mounted to my room. I noticed Fifine’s shoes put outside her door as I passed; but I went by without a sign. Nevertheless I was conscious of a slight thrill of relief in the knowledge that she was safely housed.
Our rooms were both of them luxurious—mine little less than the other, a lofty two-bedded apartment, over fine for a vagabond’s accommodation, but I will not say unwelcome for its sheeted cosiness. If there was one thing we were both fastidious about it was our linen, which on every first opportunity was despatched to the laundress, and I was moving with satisfaction from my bed a little pile of freshly-washed clothes, when I heard a knock at the door and cried Entrez! Supposing it was the garcon de chambre, I did not turn for a moment, until the silence that followed the sound of the handle striking me, I looked round and saw Fifine. I just observed her face—mutiny still struggled in it with some softer emotion—and then, with my back to her, renewed my sorting.
“What is it?” I said.
She did not answer for a moment, until, it seemed, she could command her voice; and then she spoke:—
“I—I only wanted to ask you, Felix: have you had a pleasant day?”
“Very pleasant.”
“I think she is pretty—your friend—in the pale English way.”
“I think so too.”
I smiled secretively and grimly, as, my head bent down, I busied myself over the linen. A long pause followed—and then:—
“May I shut the door, Felix?”
“No,” I answered sharply; then, more reasonably: “Think of the misconception it might give rise to if you were seen leaving—there, I know what the fiction is; but fiction must be safeguarded against truth as much as truth against fiction; and ours has been used before now and found not impregnable. You can talk where you are: there is no danger of any one hearing you on this remote landing.”
I thought she would go at once; but to my surprise she did not move.
“What is it you want?” I asked presently, turning to face her, as she did not speak. The look of her, standing so, half disarmed me. She was so patently miserable, with still the proud misery of one who, wishing to atone, struggles against the self-abasement whose first knowledge may be of a place in old affections lost, perhaps irretrievably. Yet I could not keep that harshness from my voice, though I knew she felt it acutely. I had a policy to pursue, no less than a lesson to drive home; and certainly she had given me plentiful provocation for my attitude.
“Nothing,” she said—“only to say good-night.” She moved as if to go; but still lingered; and suddenly the submission came. “I didn’t mean you to be so offended; and—and I suppose it was natural in you to prefer your own countrywoman before a stranger.”
“My dear child,” I answered coolly, “I must point out to you two errors in that little speech: I did not regard you as a stranger, and I was not offended.”
A momentary light of hopefulness came into the eyes turned quickly up to me, but it faded on the instant.
“What were you, then?” she said. “Not anyhow yourself, as I thought I had come to know you.”
“Familiarity, young lady, sometimes breeds contempt. Let me hear this fancy portrait described, before I admit or reject it.”
“Why, philosophically just and forbearing; always ready to make allowances; humorously tolerant of the weaknesses of smaller natures.”
“I acknowledge the soft impeachment with a smirk. And now, how have I falsified your too generous estimate of me? Did I upbraid you for your ill-manners towards my friends, whose only offence lay in wishing to make your undesirable acquaintance? On the contrary, I expressed concern for the situation in which your own obstinacy placed you. Did I not make allowances? Assuredly I did, even to the extent of bearing on your behalf, as some slight amelioration of your discourtesy, an imaginary message from yourself to the ladies. Finally, what humorous tolerance was lacking in my reference to your devoted henchman, whose constancy I acclaim as a thing for admiration, while I cannot, of course, through my baser nature, hope to emulate it? I trust only—to return your kind enquiries—that it proved a source of as great gratification to you to-day as I am bound to confess myinconstancy did to me.”
Though she took unresisting my merciless chastisement, I would not spare her one sting of it. There was something more behind my virulence, you will understand, than mere resentment of a piece of bad-temper, or even of bad taste. But there was yet a stronger incentive: I must be either resolutely brutal, I felt, or irresolutely weak. One concession to the emotional, which fought in me to grant pity and forgiveness to this soft tragic young sinner, and the end for us would come in sure disaster. Yet the tears in her eyes as she gazed at me, with the expression of one who is realising for the first time the truth of a hopelessly alienated affection, were advocates I had a mortal struggle to resist. Let the fact that Ididresist them stand at least to my credit.
“I dare say you are justified,” she said, with a brave effort at self-control, “in speaking to me like that. I don’t defend myself, but only my opinion of you, which, being what it was, was the reason perhaps of my venturing to take such spoilt advantage of it. I won’t believe now that you are different from what I thought; I have tried you beyond your patience, that is all. But I think, Felix, you might have spared me all that bitter sarcasm. To use sarcasm, I have heard you say yourself, is to try to play the wit with a fool’s weapon. It hurts but it does not convince. I would much rather you told me straight out that you had had enough of my tempers and moods, and wanted to be rid of me.”
“I could not say that with truth, Fifine.”
“O, Felix! how are we to go on like this? Will it change your feelings to me at all to be told that I have been miserable, deservedly I know, all day?”
“What, in spite of your confident dependence on——”
“I have not been with him—I would not go, though he asked me. Most of the day I have spent in my bedroom.”
“Starving and punishing yourself? I am sorry for that, Fifine.”
“I bought some chocolates. Felix—” she put a light entreating hand on my arm—“take me away from here. O, do, Felix!”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know—only away.”
“Les Baux is the next on our itinerary. Very well. Only we cannot start until to-morrow afternoon.”
“Why not before?”
“Because—” I had a short desperate struggle with myself, and conquered—“I have undertaken to escort my friends to Montmajour, and that will take up the whole morning.”
“To Montmajour—where we went together!” There was a note of stricken wonderment in her voice. “Must you go?”
“Yes. I must go.”
“You will not expect me to come? But I will come, if you wish it.”
“No—if you can manage to amuse yourself somehow in the interval?”
“Yes, Felix.”
“I shall be back in good time. They have to start early for Nîmes.”
“Very well.” She raised her troubled eyes to mine, said “Good-night, Felix,” in a desolate little voice, and disappeared, closing the door behind her.
The instant she was gone I went like a lunatic, up and down, up and down, reviling and cursing myself. Once I paused, with my hand on the door, mad to follow her, to shut myself in with her, and, upbraiding my own cruelty, yield everything to a wild reconciliation. But the intolerable moment spent itself, and left me mercifully sane.
Ifpassion reveals the God in us, it was a wise policy of the Father God which fettered it with restrictions, lest, in aspiring to achieve angels, we should repeople chaos with abortions. Mercifully the streets and the trains, eating and drinking, business and the social duties, are always with us, to appropriate to themselves ninety-nine hundredths of our nervous energy: what remains for our divinity, the odd fiery fraction, is quite enough for all reasonably creative purposes. The poeticules of our latest movement are all for revolt against this state of things; they glory, openly and personally, in the passion that burns and blisters, which is, after all, I suppose, only their modern euphemism for venery in its vulgarest and most penalising form. That is to exalt unclean gods with a vengeance, and, though I do not go with the orthodox Jehovah in most things, I could follow him gratefully in any relentless campaign he instituted against these little wormy monstrosities of a new Gomorrah. The fact that most of them probably are callow and intellectually embryonic, proves nothing so much as the weak indulgence of an age which allows such undeveloped juvenilities to pipe their pretentious eroticisms unsmacked. When Art claims the right to discover and worship beauty in filthy disease, or in the iridescent scums over human corruption, it is time that Art was put away by its friends in an asylum for the neuroticly impossible. So far as I can make out from the published evidences, that asylum should need at the present moment considerable enlargement.
There is, in fact, no beauty, and there never can be, in incontinence; the point is too self-evident to need labouring. Restraint is the quality most to be studied in aiming at perfection of form, and to achieve it one must be content to concentrate on the hundredth fraction. Spiritually and materially, that man will find the highest happiness who is satisfied to yield the bulk of his being to the workaday and unemotional.
Morning lowered the pride of my own starry exaltation, and found me with a normal pulse and a brain swept clean as a housemaid’s step—with a deep thankfulness, moreover, that I was reawaking to a day of untroubled commonplace, and not to one of unquiet, responsible remorse. In action I looked to dissipate the last fumes of an intoxication, whose memory, though it lingered without nausea, was yet no proof against that glad consciousness of moral security. I whistled as I dressed.
Fifine did not come down to breakfast; and I was off with my friends before she had appeared. I knocked at her door, bidding her to expect me back about midday, when I should hope to have finished my task, and she answered “Very well”—coldly, I thought, and in a manner which I was relieved, I told myself, to recognise for one of reassuring indifference.
However, she was punctual to her appointment; and I found her awaiting me in the coffee-room, when I came in—a little late myself—after seeing the ladies off to the station.
“Well, they are gone,” I said. “And now for relaxation and refreshment following duty.”
She shot a quick glance at me; but relapsed immediately into the rather apathetic attitude with which she had accepted my reappearance. She looked a little pale and dark-eyed; but I was resolute to make no comment thereon, nor to imply in any way an understanding sympathy with her state. I expressed my contrition for my unpunctuality, and that was all.
“It doesn’t matter in the least,” she said. “I don’t think I am very hungry.”
“Nonsense,” I answered. “Youmusteat, after that—” I checked myself, on the brink of the undesired subject. “Besides,” I said, “we have this journey before us, and with only a problematic meal at the end of it. I don’t build implicitly on the resources of the place we are going to—unless it has altered considerably since my time.”
“Very well,” she said impassively: “I will try.”
“How have you amused yourself during my absence?” I asked.
“I went to the Muséon Arleten with M. Cabarus,” she answered in an indifferent voice: “we stayed there till it was time for him to go.”
“To go! What, has he actually taken his departure?”
“Yes—for les Baux. He went in a hired automobile.”
I sat back in my chair, and looked her fixedly in the face.
“Did you tell himwewere going there?”
“Yes, I told him.”
I said no more. Presently an uncontrollable fit of laughter began to shake me. It was too ridiculous. Was I for evermore to be haunted by this incubus with the inflated paunch and disordered head? But the moral was no less obvious than the absurdity—I could not shut my eyes to the fact. I had been crushing under in myself a sentiment which had no authority for existing. Perhaps, even, she had known all the time whither he was bound, and had manœuvred so as to induce me to follow in his footsteps. I could not quite believe that; but anyhow I felt myself handsomely made a fool of, and the thought of my own discomfiture appealed irresistibly to my sense of humour. One thing was now certain, that I might quit my conscience of any feeling of regret for my own harshness or irresponsiveness.
Fifine looked a little astonished over my hilarious reception of her thunderbolt; but she said nothing, and we finished our lunch almost in silence.
“Now,” said I, when all was done: “what time did you say our train started? You looked it out, didn’t you, as I asked you.”
“Yes,” she said. “It was at three-twenty.”
“Then we will pay our bill, collect our traps, and, by your leave, start leisurely for the station.”
All of which we did, arriving at the little terminus in ample time. It was somewhat disconcerting, however, to find the platform empty, the office closed, and no sign whatever of train or passengers.
“This is odd,” I said; but presently sighting a porter in the distance, I went to enquire of him. The result was illuminating.
“What time did you tell me our train went?” I asked Fifine, as I rejoined her.
“At three-twenty,” she repeated. “I copied it down, and can show you.”
She showed it me, in fact—a little note in pencil on a scrap of paper.
“Read it, please,” I said.
She obeyed—“Thirteen-twenty”—and stopped. “O—o!” she exclaimed—a prolonged interjection of dismay.
“Exactly,” I said. “Thirteen-twenty is one-twenty, goose. There is not another train for just two hours.”
She stood looking up at me. Her lower lip went down, positively like a dear pitiful baby’s in deprecation of the expected and well-merited scolding.
“O, Felix,” she said. “I’msosorry!”
I could have shaken her; I could have laughed; I could have snatched her to my heart and kissed her—it was so moving, after all, to see this change in her from that one-time confident assurance to propitiation and entreaty. In these latter days all her precocious dictatorialness seemed to have deserted her; and yet she did not know that I knew what I knew; to all intents and purposes she still figured to herself for a free agent. It was Carabas, the eternal Carabas, who had wrought the sad confusion.
“Never mind,” I said. “It will make us rather late, and it will be a little dull waiting; but we must kill the time as we can, and be glad it is no worse.”
She thanked me for my forbearance, though with only a pathetic look.
“Wouldn’t you like to go back into the town,” she said, “while I wait here for you? Please do. I shan’t mind, and it will make me feel less guilty.”
“Very well,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection—“if you are sure you won’t mind.”
“Quite sure,” she replied; and so I left her.
I knew why I had acquiesced; it was from policy, policy—I put it firmly to myself. It was from policy, also, no doubt, that I wandered no further than to the main platform—to which the other was related but locally—where I smoked and loitered aimlessly, acutely conscious all the time of my self-exile, obstinate to maintain it, yet never losing jealous mental sight of the forlorn figure awaiting my return a short stone’s-throw away. But I prevailed against inclination, even to the end, and did not return to Fifine until the train was actually in the station.
It was well past five when we started, and already there was an ominous drooping about the lids of the sky. Three-quarters of an hour’s run, with the stops at anhalteor two and the little midway station of Fontvieille, would surely carry us into something deeper than twilight at Paradou, which was where we had to alight for our final destination. I had not before approached les Baux from this quarter, and was ignorant as to its distance from Paradou, the character of the way, and the possibility of procuring a vehicle of some sort. However, let come what would; we were in for it.
It was a wild little train, a mere giddy colt of a thing, which rattled us through scenery for ever growing more into communion with its untamed self—great stretches of rock-strewn heather, and clattering gullies, and vast ramparts of hill which continually rose about us more savage and menacing. We could see the white road creeping up the valley, as though stealthily pursuing us, now touching us with a coil and gliding swiftly from the contact, now receding to worm itself through purple thickets, whence it would reappear far ahead, wheeling as if to strike us as we passed. The light sank from the sky, like blood from a dying face; the country grew featureless first, and then slowly indistinguishable; once through the little sparkling oasis of Fontvieille, we found ourselves committed without reserve to uncompromising darkness. Still there was a twenty minutes run before us, and I found myself anxiously peering by and by for some sign of twinkling reassurance amidst the glooms ahead. There had been carriages at Fontvieille; should we find their like at Paradou-les-Baux? And while I was still peering, the train slowed down, stopped, and we were at the station.
It seemed a mere isolated platform in an otherwise lightless desolation. We were the only passengers who got out. With a rather sinking heart, I took, after the train had started on its way again, the solitary official—who seemed to combine in himself the parts of stationmaster, ticket-collector, signalman and porter—into my confidence.
“The distance to les Baux, Monsieur?”
“By road,” he answered brusquely, “three miles.”
“An easy road?”
“But far from it. For yourself difficult; for Madame impossible.”
That was discomforting; but it was not accurate. The road, as we discovered next day, was a carriage road and easily distinguishable, though decidedly steep.
“A voiture?” I suggested.
The stationmaster shrugged his shoulders, and called to an urchin, who was hanging about by the platform wicket. A brief colloquy ensued between the two as to the probability of Charloun’s cart being available. Finally, in order to ascertain, the boy ran down the hill, on which the station was situated, into lower gulfs of blackness. He was absent ten or fifteen minutes, when he re-appeared with the information that there was no possibility of our procuring a trap of any sort whatever.
“A guide, possibly?” I asked.
It was certain, was the answer, that no one could be found at this time of night, and the day’s labour over, to put himself to the trouble.
“This is pleasant,” I said to Fifine; and turned again to the stationmaster:—
“There is, without question, an inn?”
O, yes, there was an inn, it appeared, one inn, but hardly of a quality to appeal to travellers of our distinction. It was merely, in short, a cabaret. “Still, if Monsieur and Madame——”
Monsieur and Madame held a short counsel of desperation, and agreed—if one may apply the term to Madame’s passive acquiescence—that it was a question of the undesirable inn or nothing.
“Conduct us to it,” I said to the boy, “and you shall earn the fifty centimes which travellers of distinction are accustomed to bestow upon the deserving.”
He led off, and we followed—down the gulf-like hill. There were no stars, and the wind blew upon us coldly.
“I’m afraid,” I said, “that there’s no help for it, Fifine. You’ll have to resign yourself to being parted from your troubadour for a few hours.”
She did not answer for a little; and then she looked suddenly up at me.
“How cruel you are,” she said. “I never should have thought it of you once.”
There was an odd catch in her voice; but she commanded it, and spoke clearly and precisely. Thereafter we walked in silence—a surprised, half-vindictive one on my part. Not that I was wrathful with Fifine, but with Fate. However unexceptionable my motives, it would not allow me, it seemed, the unequivocal expression of them, but must always be impelling me to say the provocative thing when I had meant only the playful. At least, so I told myself; but then one is not always quite honest in one’s self-confidences. It is extraordinary how gullible we can be when our own inclinations prompt us to mischief.
At the bottom of the hill we came to a crossroad, turning to the right along which we presently sighted the yellow end wall of a country caravansary, on which was emblazoned the magnificent legend “Grand Café Bellin.” It was, in truth, as we discovered on reaching it, a humble enough hostelry, standing in an arid little compound, with a row of plane trees before its windows; but it offered shelter, at least, and possibly some hope of refreshment. We knocked on the door, and a formidable cross-eyed woman opened and demanded our business.
At first it was allimpossible; the cooking was done with and the fire down; but finally she was prevailed on to admit us grudgingly; and we were shewn through a reeking little kitchen—which opened straight upon the compound, and where, it seemed, the whole staring household was assembled—into a great barn of a room, furnished with bare benches and tables, at which were seated a number of boors, quiteà l’hollandais, only drinking hot coffee in lieu of beer, and playing dominoes and cards with greasy little packs. There in a corner we sat, watching the curious scene, and awaiting meekly the moment when it should please the high-handed landlady to serve us the wherewithal for a meal. It came, and sooner and ampler than we had dared to hope—thin soup, a mess of mutton bones, the usual tough smoked cutlets, the usual rancid wine; but we were hungry and thankful, and remote from a critical mood. We blessed providence and ate; and afterwards sought to ruminate at ease, watching the coming and going, the rough but mannerly company, the animated expressions and the sober recreations. There was a billiard table at the further end of the long room; and presently I went and challenged to a game on it a young quarryman who was idly knocking the balls about. He was unwashed and heavy-booted; the lines of his common face and coarse clothes were filled thick with the dust of his labour; but he accepted with perfect courtesy—and gave me a complete thrashing into the bargain, his strokes being as deft and resourceful with a cue as they must have been violently destructive with a pick. We had apetit verretogether afterwards—the only palatable cheap drink in Provence—and parted very good friends. I went back to Fifine, and found her sitting quite patient, but with a strained tired look in her eyes.
“It is bed for you, by your leave,” I said. “Shall I call the girl and get her to show you up to your room?”
“I think,” she answered, “I—I will not go till you do, Felix.”
“Why not, Fifine?”
“I don’t know. I would rather not.”
“You are nervous, little goose. These rough surroundings frighten you; and you are recalling terrible tales of things done to belated travellers in lonely inns. Are you not?”
She smiled faintly, but did not answer.
“Believe me,” I said; “you are safer here than you would be in the Hôtel Ritz, and far less likely to meet with impertinences. But, of course, if you feel so, I will come. You ought, it is very certain, to be in your bed.”
“It is a shame to victimise you so. I am very sorry, Felix. I have been trying to fight it down; but I can’t—everything is so wild and strange.”
“Of course. Poor child!”
I caught up the rücksack, went to the door, summoned the little solemn-eyed Provençale who had waited on us, and bade her conduct us to our rooms. She went before, carrying a lighted candle, up a flight of stairs as steep and narrow as a ladder, and ushered us at the top into a dim windy chamber, sparely littered with furniture, whence opened a couple of doors into two box-like little cubicles, or compartments—our bedrooms. Each contained a bed, a tiny washstand, one chair, and a minute chest of drawers with a scrap of looking-glass on it. They were dingy, the discoloured paper was peeling from the walls, the boards were bare; but, wonder of wonders, each boasted a single switch and electric light. They were more civilized in Paradou than we had opined, and I hoped that Fifine’s nerves would take comfort from that reassurance. I made her choose her room, and deposited in it, as was our custom, the rücksack, having first removed from it my own necessities. Then I bade her good-night, and told her to sleep in peace and security, seeing my own cubicle was contiguous, and the wall between no thicker than match-boxes.
“If you whisper, I shall hear you,” I said. “Call to me, if anything frightens you.”
She promised, and I went—went perforce, though the look in her face made me feel as though I were abandoning a scared child to its night-terrors. There was a mosquito blind to the window in my room, and, raising it, I saw that it opened upon the row of plane trees, and the little compound faintly illuminated by the light from the common-room below. All else and around was dense obscurity—only that little spectral oasis shone isolated in a desert of night.
I sat there long, smoking and meditating. Now and again the door underneath would swing and bang, and a figure would cross the paddock of light and disappear into the glooms beyond. Gradually all sounds in the house ceased; and presently, after a wink or two, the light itself shrunk and was gone. Only still the faintest luminosity, proceeding from somewhere undetected, lingered in my neighbourhood. It took me a minute to discover that it shone through the close web of Fifine’s mosquito blind. So she was awake still; or slept with her light up.
And almost immediately I heard a little stifled call.
“Felix!”
“What is it, m’amie.”
“O, do come to me! There is something horrible!”
I laughed, as I got to my feet; then set my teeth, with a groan, as I softly slipped off my shoes.
“All right,” I whispered back; “I am coming.”
I opened noiselessly one door after the other, stepping like a panic-stricken thief. She was sitting up in bed, her hair coiling about her temples, the sheet clutched to her chin by her two convulsive hands. Her eyes met mine, piteous, deprecating, imploring.
“What is it?” I said.
“There!” She nodded her head frantically, looking beyond me at the wall. I turned; and saw a slowly-travelling centipede—truly a monstrum horrendum. It was about an inch and a half long, its body was encased in overlapping dusky-red scales, and its innumerable legs, unlike the brief pedicles of its more northern brethren, were as long as a house-spider’s, but like fine hairs. I seized up one of Fifine’s shoes that stood outside the door, flattened out the visitor with it, and he fell defunct.
“O, what was it?” She shivered. “Have you killed it?”
“As dead as Charity,” I assured her. “It was just a shield-bearing centipede, Fifine. Nothing worse. You find them about here.”
“Will another come?”
“I should think it unlikely.”
“Felix—will you—will you sit by me till I go to sleep?”
“I ought not to, you know, m’amie.”
“I will shut my eyes; I will not speak to you—not one word. Felix, I am very lonely and miserable.”
“Hush, child. Close your eyes, then. I will stay only on condition that you are absolutely true to your promise.”
She lay down at once, turning from me to obey. I just pushed to the door without latching it, and went and sat as far from her as possible. It was a strange vigil that followed; and yet I never once felt chill throughout it. The blood was always throbbing through my veins like a living fire; little reels of vertigo seemed to take me from time to time, half blissful, half delirious. When my thoughts grew masterful, my soul grew weak; and in those kind and pitiful moods I had to force myself to keep my place, lest a single movement should precipitate a tragedy. But I could not hide the truth from myself any longer. We must go home, I said to my suffering conscience: we must end it and go home. Did she guess the torture in my mind—had she even invited it? In that case I had a formidable task before me indeed.
I don’t know when she slept at last; probably the ferment in her brain, coupled with her consciousness of my presence, kept her long awake. That she could sleep at all, trustful in that consciousness like a child, was sufficiently moving to me. And somewhere in the little hours shedidsleep: I knew it, when it came, by the soft regularity of her breathing; and thereupon I rose, and padding it like a burglar, went away from her room into my own. Yet I could not pass her bed, I had not that self-command, but I must pause by it for one moment to look in her dear unconscious face. There was the tenderest flush upon the upturned cheek; the lips were the least bit parted; to look on innocent sleep is to know the bud before the flower, the locked secret, the loveliness nearest heaven. God forgive me!
I awoke, somewhat late, and stretched myself with a sense of luxurious felicity. Then I clasped my hands under my head, and lay luminously dreaming. It was very still. The sun came in at my open window, filtered through a confusion of vivid leaves, and made of my common coverlet a woodland tapestry, intricately woven of gold and grey. Half closing my eyes, the oblong of light became to them crystal and liquescent, as if it were water blotted with innumerable globes of oily green. Those floated and travelled spasmodically, whisking back, as soon as started, on the movement of an eyelash, but always venturing again on voyages of insistent discovery. It was their business to carry little cargoes of sunshine and emerald into my brain; and presently I ceased to resist them, and they swam one by one into port and unloaded.
That betokened a surrender on my part to the delicious inconsequence of the hour. Self was entitled to consider self an imponderable quantity, in that interval of suspension between the attractions of night and day, and I let mine swing to what bias it listed, only blissfully watching, as it were, its direction. There was no question about that; nor did I desire there should be. It took me into glowing reveries which I indulged to the full, so long as that sense of irresponsible neutrality lasted. Yet it did not last long; bias itself was fatal to it, for bias must sooner or later convey a sense of weight, and a sense of weight brings us promptly to earth.
I came to earth presently, with a renunciatory yawn—and than a vast physical yawn there is nothing more dispelling to illusionment. I sat up in bed, and called to Fifine through the frail partition.
“Are you awake?”
She answered, “Yes,” and I demanded again, “Is your blind up?”
“Yes,” she said; and I put it to her thereupon:—
“Do you remember that waking impression of mine, that puzzled you so, of the plane trees seen outside a window on a bright morning? If you do, wink once and blink once at your window, and then tell me what is the visual effect on you.”
There was a pause; and then, “O, I have winked a fly into my eye!” wailed Fifine.
I burst out laughing.
“Shall I come and remove it for you?” I asked.
“No,” she answered—“you mustn’t. It will be all right in a minute.”
“Bon!” I muttered to myself, à propos the momentary impulse which had thrilled my nerves. “She is wise in the daylight, God bless her!”
We joined company below, even with something a sense of an old comradeship recovered, though Fifine’s cheek flushed a little when she first saw me. I drew her out for a stroll while our coffee was preparing, and we walked together happily, tacitly eschewing all perilous topics. It was a lovely glowing morning, and the little village, sitting in its slipper of the hills, unfolded its simple charms prettily before us, rebuking our gloomy estimate of its last night’s inhospitality. But there was not much to detain us; and, breakfast finished, we were soon on our way for the mountain stronghold, which was the true siderite of our desires.
A siderite, in sooth, it appeared, burning sky-high. We were climbing all the way, and I had to strain like a pack-horse, loaded as I was.
“Is the knapsack heavy?” said Fifine. “But really, do you know, Felix, we are justifying its existence for the first time.”
“I shouldn’t mind that,” I said, “if it didn’t take such advantage of the favour shown it. Now I know why the rack in the train creaked.”
“Poor man,” she said. “Shall I help you?”
“Yes, take the rücksack, Fifine, and I will carry you. M. Cabarus would call that halving the burden to double the joy.”
It was a mistake to utter his name—and ironically. I don’t know why I did it—from natural perversity, I suppose. It re-created between us a little shadow, which was never wholly dissipated during the remainder of our walk.
At about a mile from Paradou we came, always climbing, to a sign-post, and thence, making to the right, in a moment there opened out before us the veritable wild glen of our pilgrimage, a vision from end to end of tumultuous beauty.
Is any description of les Baux wanted in these days? I suppose during the last dozen years or so it has been more “exploited” than throughout the whole interval of centuries dividing it from its heyday of power and prosperity, when the singing-men came flocking from all quarters of the land to its exotic love-pastures. Once and for long its towering silences existed but in vague report for the ordinary traveller. He heard of them, but as things not easily attainable—hazards a little remote from his purpose of orthodox sight-seeing. But the motor-car has altered all that; it has rendered accessible, to the read-as-it-runs class of tourist, fastnesses hitherto respected for their isolation and inhospitality. He whirls over from St. Remy, stops an hour to lunch, bolts a hasty snack of local gallimaufry, and rushes on again. Sadie and Goldshtein, with their voices nasal and nosey, invade the austere solitudes; and, though they may vex them but fitfully, the aggregate of their gothicisms must have done something to take its keen edge off the strangeness and romance of the place.
However, that desecration is relative, and, after all, quite inconsiderable. One may still spend a week, a month, a year, in les Baux, and never, if one likes, know more of the casual demons than is conveyed through the distant low of a horn, or the vision of gliding heads above a stone wall. And in time, no doubt, the speed-lust will spend itself, and these casemated defences of the mountains return to their primal loneliness—to be once more periodically discovered by earnest schoolmistresses and sentimental poets desiring copy.
Now, right in our front as we clomb, rose a mighty forehead of cliff. It was as the face of a sphinx, veiling the mysteries of the hills beyond. We passed it, and their stupendous contours unfolded themselves before us—rock upon rock, lifting to the sky, in derision of the toiling road, which struggled vainly to put itself on terms with that impossible ascent.