*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60123 ***

                          [Cover Illustration]




                           THE WONDERFUL YEAR




                         _=BY THE SAME AUTHOR=_

Idols
Jaffery
Septimus
Viviette
Derelicts
The Usurper
Stella Maris
Where Love Is
The White Dove
Simon the Jester
A Study in Shadows
The Fortunate Youth
A Christmas Mystery
The Belovèd Vagabond
At the Gate of Samaria
The Glory of Clementina
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
The Demagogue and Lady Phayre
The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol




                                  THE
                             WONDERFUL YEAR

                                   BY
                            WILLIAM J. LOCKE
              AUTHOR OF “JAFFERY,” “THE FORTUNATE YOUTH,”
                      “THE BELOVÈD VAGABOND,” ETC.

                      NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
                   LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
                                 MCMXVI




                         Copyright, 1915, 1916,
                   By International Magazine Company
                                  ————
                            Copyright, 1916,
                          By John Lane Company

                                Press of
                      J. J. Little & Ives Company
                           New York, U. S. A.




                           THE WONDERFUL YEAR




                           THE WONDERFUL YEAR




                               CHAPTER I


“THERE is a letter for you, monsieur,” said the concierge of the Hôtel
du Soleil et de l’Ecosse.

He was a shabby concierge sharing in the tarnish of the shabby hotel
which (for the information of those fortunate ones who only know of the
Ritz, and the Meurice and other such-like palaces) is situated in the
unaristocratic neighbourhood of the Halles Centrales.

“As it bears the Paris postmark, it must be the one which monsieur was
expecting,” said he, detaching it from the clip on the keyboard.

“You are perfectly right,” said Martin Overshaw. “I recognise the
handwriting.”

The young Englishman sat on the worn cane seat in the little vestibule
and read his letter. It ran:

    Dear Martin,

    I’ve been away. Otherwise I should have answered your note
    sooner. I’m delighted you’re in this God-forsaken city, but what
    brought you here in August, Heaven only knows. We must meet at
    once. I can’t ask you to my abode, because I’ve only one room,
    one chair and a bed, and you would be shocked to sit on the
    chair while I sat on the bed, or to sit on the bed while I sat
    on the chair. And I couldn’t offer you anything but a cigarette
    (_caporal, à quatre sous le paquet_) and the fag end of a bottle
    of grenadine syrup and water. So let us dine together at the
    place where I take such meals as I can afford. _Au Petit
    Cornichon_, or as the snob of a proprietor yearns to call it,
    The “Restaurant Dufour.” It’s a beast of a hole in the Rue Baret
    off the Rue Bonaparte; but I don’t think either of us could run
    to the Café de Paris or Paillard’s and we’ll have it all to
    ourselves. Meet me there at seven.

                                              Yours sincerely,
                                                  Corinna Hastings.

Martin Overshaw rose and addressed the concierge.

“Where is the Rue Bonaparte?”

The concierge informed him.

“I am going to dine with a lady at a restaurant called the Petit
Cornichon. Do you think I had better wear evening dress?”

The concierge was perplexed. The majority of the British frequenters of
the hotel, when they did not dine in gangs at the table d’hôte, went out
to dinner in flannels or knickerbockers, and wore cloth caps, and looked
upon the language of the country as an incomprehensible joke. But here
was a young Englishman of a puzzling type who spoke perfect French with
a strange purity of accent, in spite of his abysmal ignorance of Paris,
and talked about dressing for dinner.

“I will ask Monsieur Bocardon,” said he.

Monsieur Bocardon, the manager, a fat, greasy Provençal, who sat over a
ledger in the cramped bureau, leaned back in his chair and threw out his
hands.

“Evening dress in a little restaurant of the _quartier_. _Mais non!_
They would look at you through the windows. There would be a crowd. It
would be an affair of the police.”

Martin Overshaw smiled. “Merci, monsieur,” said he. “But as you may have
already guessed, I am new to Paris and Paris ways.”

“That doesn’t matter,” replied Monsieur Bocardon graciously. “Paris
isn’t France. We of the south—I am from Nîmes—care that for Paris——”
he snapped his fingers. “Monsieur knows the Midi?”

“It is my first visit to France,” said Martin.

“_Mais comment donc?_ You speak French like a Frenchman.”

“My mother was a Swiss,” replied Martin ingenuously. “And I lived all my
boyhood in Switzerland—in the Canton de Vaud. French is my mother
tongue, and I have been teaching it in England ever since.”

“Aha! Monsieur is _professeur_?” Monsieur Bocardon asked politely.

“Yes, _professeur_,” said Martin, conscious for the first time in his
life of the absurd dignity of the French title. It appealed to a latent
sense of humour and he smiled wryly. Yes. He was a Professor—had been
for the last ten years, at Margett’s Universal College, Hickney Heath; a
professor engaged in cramming large classes of tradesmen’s children,
both youths and maidens, with such tricksters’ command of French grammar
and vocabulary as would enable them to obtain high marks in the
stereotyped examinations for humble positions in the Public and
semi-public services. He had reduced the necessary instruction to an
exact science. He had carried hundreds of pupils through their
examinations with flying colours; but he had never taught a single human
being to speak thirty consecutive coherent words of French or to read
and enjoy a French book. When he was very young and foolish he had tried
to teach them the French speech as a living, organic mode of
communication between human beings, with the result that his pupils
soul-strung for examinations had revolted and the great Cyrus Margett,
founder of the colossal and horrible Strasbourg goose factory known as
Margett’s Universal College, threatened to sack him if he persisted in
such damnable and unprofitable imbecility. So, being poor and
unenterprising and having no reason to care whether a Mr. James Bagshawe
or a Miss Susan Tulliver profited for more than the examination moment
by his teaching, he had taught the dry examination-bones of the French
language for ten years. And—“_Monsieur est professeur_,” from Monsieur
Bocardon!

Then, as he turned away and began to mount the dingy stairs that led to
his bedroom, it struck him that he was now only a professor _in
partibus_. He was no longer a member of the professorial staff of
Margett’s Universal College. The vast, original Margett had retired with
fortune, liver and head deservedly swollen to county magnateship,
leaving, for pecuniary considerations, the tremendous educational
institution to a young successor, who having adopted as his watchword
the comforting shibboleth, “efficiency,” had dismissed all those
professors who did not attain his standard of slickness. Martin Overshaw
was not slick. The young apostle of efficiency had dismissed Martin
Overshaw at a month’s notice, after ten years service. It was as though
a practised _gougeur_ or hand gorger of geese had been judged
obsolescent and made to give place to one who gorged them by Hertzian
rays. The new Olympian had flashed a glance, a couple of lightning
questions at Martin and that was the end.

In truth, Martin Overshaw did not emanate efficiency like the
eagle-faced men in the illustrated advertisements who undertake to teach
you how to become a millionaire in a fortnight. He was of mild and
modest demeanour; of somewhat shy and self-depreciatory attitude; a
negligible personality in any assemblage of human beings; a man
(according to the blasphemous saying) of no account. Of medium height,
thin, black-haired, of sallow complexion, he regarded the world
unspeculatively out of clear grey eyes, that had grown rather tired. As
he brushed his hair before the long strip of wardrobe mirror, it did not
occur to him to criticise his reflected image. He made no claims to
impeccability of costume. His linen and person were scrupulously clean;
his sober suit comparatively new. But his appearance, though he knew it
not, suffered from a masculine dowdiness, indefinable, yet obvious. His
ill-tied cravat had an inveterate quarrel with his ill-chosen collar and
left the collar stud exposed, and innocent of sumptuary crime he allowed
his socks to ruck over his ankles. . . . Once he had grown a full black
beard, full in the barber’s sense, but dejectedly straggling to the
commonplace eye of a landlady’s daughter who had goaded him into a tepid
flirtation. To please the nymph long since married to a virtuous plumber
whom Martin himself had called in to make his bath a going concern, he
had divested himself of the offending excrement and contented himself
thenceforward with a poor little undistinguished moustache. A very
ordinary, unarresting young man was Martin Overshaw. Yet, in his simple,
apologetic way—_exempli gratia_, when he smiled with deferential
confidence on the shabby concierge and the greasy Monsieur Bocardon—he
carried with him an air of good-breeding, a disarming, sensitiveness of
manner which commanded the respect, contemptuous though it might have
sometimes been, of coarser natures. A long, thin, straight nose with
delicate nostrils, the only noticeable feature of his face, may have had
something to do with this impression of refinement. Much might be
written on noses. The Great Master of Noseology, Lawrence Sterne, did
but broach the subject. On account, perhaps, of a long head terminating
in a long blunt chin, and a mild patience of expression, he bore at
Margett’s Universal College the traditional sobriquet of “Cab-horse.”

The cab-horse, however, was now turned out to grass—in August Paris. He
had been there three days and his head swam with the wonder of it. As he
walked along the indicated route to the Petit Cornichon in the airless
dark, he felt the thrill of freedom and of romance. Down the Boulevard
Sébastopol he went, past the Tour Saint Jacques, through the Place du
Châtelet over the Pont au Change and across the Île de la Cité to the
Boulevard Saint Michel, and turned to the right along the Boulevard
Saint Germain until he came to the Rue Bonaparte and his destination. It
was the sweltering cool of the evening. Paris sat out of doors, at
cafés, at gateways in shirt sleeves and loosened bodices, at shop
fronts, at dusty tables before humble restaurants. Pedestrians walked
languidly in quest of ultimate seats. In the wide thoroughfares the
omnibuses went their accustomed route; but motor-cabs whizzed unfrequent
for lack of custom—they who could afford to ride in taxi-autos on the
_rive gauche_ were far away in cooler regions—and the old horses of
crawling fiacres hung stagnant heads. Only the stale dregs of Paris
remained in the Boul’ Mich. Yet it was Fairyland to the emancipated
professor _in partibus_ who paused here and there to catch the odd
phrases of his mother tongue which struck his ears with delicious
unfamiliarity. Paris, too, that close, sultry evening, smelled of
unutterable things; but to Martin Overshaw it was the aroma of a Wonder
City.

He found without difficulty the Café-Restaurant Dufour whose gilded
style and title eclipsed the modest sign of the “Petit Cornichon”
prudently allowed to remain in porcelain letters on the glass of door
and windows. Under the ægis, as it were, of the poor “little gherkin”
and independent of the magnificent Dufour establishment, was the
announcement displayed: “_Déjeuners 1 fr. 50. Dîners 2 fr. Vin
Compris._” The ground floor was a small café, newly decorated with
fresco panels of generously unclad ladies dropping roses on goat-legged
gentlemen: symptoms of the progressive mind of the ambitious Monsieur
Dufour. Only two tables were occupied—by ruddy-faced provincials
engaged over coffee and dominoes. To Martin, standing embarrassed, came
a pallid waiter.

“_Monsieur désire?_”

“_Le Restaurant._”

“_C’est en haut, monsieur, Au premier._”

He pointed to a meagre staircase on the left-hand side. Martin ascended
and found himself alone in a ghostly-tabled room. From a doorway emerged
another pallid waiter, who also addressed him with the enquiry:
“_Monsieur désire?_”—but the enquiry was modulated with a certain
subtle inflection of surprise and curiosity.

“I am expecting a lady,” said Martin.

“_Bien, monsieur._ A table for two? _Voici._”

He drew back an inviting chair.

“I should like this one by the window,” said Martin. The room being on
the entresol, the ceiling was low and the place reeked with reproachful
reminders of long-forgotten one-franc-fifty and two-franc meals.

“I am sorry, Monsieur,” replied the waiter, “but this table is reserved
by a lady who takes here all her repasts. Monsieur can see that it is so
by the half-finished bottle of mineral water.”

He held up the bottle of Evian in token of his veracity. Scrawled in
pencil across the label ran the inscription, “Mlle. Hastings.”

“Mademoiselle Hastings!” cried Martin. “Why, that is the lady I am
expecting.”

The waiter smiled copiously. Monsieur was a friend of Miss Hastings?
Then it was a different matter. Mademoiselle said she would be back
to-night and that was why her bottle of Evian had been preserved for
her. She was the only one left of the enormous clientèle of the
restaurant. It was a restaurant of students. In the students’ season,
not a table for the chance comer. All engaged. The students paid so much
per week or per month for nourishment. It really was a pension, _enfin_,
for board without lodging. When the students were away from Paris the
restaurant was kept open at a loss; not a very great loss, for in Paris
one knew how to accommodate oneself to circumstance. Good provincials
and English tourists sometimes wandered in. One always then indicated
the decorations, real masterpieces some of them. . . . Only a day or two
ago an American traveller had taken photographs. If Monsieur would deign
to look round . . .

Martin deigned. Drawings in charcoal and crayon on the distempered
walls, caricatures, bold nudes, bars of music, bits of satiric verse,
flowing signatures, bore evidence of the passage of many generations of
students.

“It amuses them,” said the waiter, “and gives the place a character.”

He was pointing out the masterpieces when a young voice by the door sang
out:

“Hallo, Martin!”

Martin turned and met the welcoming eyes of Corinna Hastings,
fair-haired, slender, neatly dressed in blue serge coat and skirt and a
cheap little hat to which a long pheasant’s feather gave a touch of
bravado.

“You’re a real Godsend,” she declared. “I was thinking of throwing
myself into the river, only there would have been no one on the deserted
bridge to fish me out again. I am the last creature left in Paris.”

“I am more than lucky then to find you, Corinna,” said Martin. “For
you’re the only person in Paris that I know.”

“How did you find my address?”

“I went down to Wendlebury——”

“Then you saw them all?” said Corinna, as they took their seats at the
window-table. “Father and mother and Bessie and Joan and Ada, etcetera,
etcetera down to the new baby. The new baby makes ten of us
alive—really he’s the fourteenth. I wonder how many more there are
going to be?”

“I shouldn’t think there would be any more,” replied Martin gravely.

Corinna burst out laughing.

“What on earth can you know about it?”

The satirical challenge brought a flush to Martin’s sallow cheek. What
did he know in fact of the very intimate concerns of the Reverend Thomas
Hastings and his wife?

“I’m afraid they find it hard to make both ends meet, as it is,” he
explained.

“Yet I suppose they all flourish as usual—playing tennis and golf and
selling at bazaars and quarrelling over curates?”

“They all seem pretty happy,” said Martin, not overpleased at his
companion’s airy treatment of her family. He, himself, the loneliest of
men, had found grateful warmth among the noisy, good-hearted crew of
girls. It hurt him to hear them contemptuously spoken of.

“It was the first time you went down since——!” she paused.

“Since my mother died? Yes. She died early in May, you know.”

“It must be a terrible loss to you,” said Corinna in a softened voice.

He nodded and looked out of window at the houses opposite. That was why
he was in Paris. For the last ten years, ever since his father’s death
had hurried him away from Cambridge, after a term or two, into the wide
world of struggle for a living, he had spent all his days of freedom in
the little Kentish town. And these days were few. There were no long
luxurious vacations at Margett’s Universal College, such as there are at
ordinary colleges and schools. The grind went on all the year round, and
the staff had but scanty holidays. Such as they were he passed them at
his mother’s tiny villa. His father had given up the chaplaincy in
Switzerland, where he had married and where Martin had been born, to
become Vicar of Wendlebury, and Mr. Hastings was his successor. Mrs.
Overshaw, with her phlegmatic temperament, had taken root in Wendlebury
and there Martin had visited her and there he had been received into the
intimacy of the Hastings family and there she had died; and now that the
little villa was empty and Martin had no place outside London to lay his
leisured head, he had satisfied the dream of his life and come to Paris.
But even in this satisfaction there was pain. What was Paris compared
with the kind touch of that vanished hand? He sighed. He was a simple
soul in spite of his thirty years.

The waiter roused him from his sad reflections by bringing the soup and
a bottle of thin red wine. Conscious of food and drink and a female
companion of prepossessing exterior, Martin’s face brightened.

“It’s so jolly of them in Paris to throw in wine like this,” said he.

“I only hope you can drink the stuff,” remarked Corinna. “We call it
_tord-boyau_.”

“It’s a rare treat,” said Martin. “I can’t afford wine in England, and
the soup is delicious. Somehow no English landlady ever thinks of making
it.”

“England is a beast of a place,” said Corinna.

“Yet in your letter you called Paris a God-forsaken city.”

“So it is in August. The schools are closed. Not a studio is open. Every
single student has cleared out and there’s nothing in the world to do.”

“I’ve found heaps to do,” said Martin.

“The Pantheon and Notre Dame and the Folies Bergère,” said Corinna.
“There’s also the Eiffel Tower. Imagine a three years’ art-student
finding fun on the Eiffel Tower!”

“Then why haven’t you gone home this August as usual?” asked Martin.

Corinna knitted her brows. “That’s another story,” she replied shortly.

“I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to be impertinent,” said Martin.

She laughed. “Don’t be silly—you think wallowing in the family trough
is the height of bliss. It isn’t. I would sooner starve than go back. At
any rate I should be myself, a separate entity, an individual. Oh, that
being merely a bit of clotted family! How I should hate it!”

“But you would return to Paris in the autumn,” said Martin.

Again she frowned and broke her bread impatiently. All that was another
story. “But never mind about me. Tell me about yourself, Martin. Perhaps
we may fix up something merry to do together. Père la Chaise or the Tomb
of Napoleon. How long are you staying in Paris?”

“I can only afford a week—I’ve already had three days. I must look out
for another billet as soon as possible.”

“Another billet?”

Her question reminded him that she was ignorant of his novel position as
professor _in partibus_. He explained, over the _bœuf flammande_.
Corinna putting the “other story” of her own trouble aside listened
sympathetically. All Paris art-students must learn to do that; otherwise
who would listen sympathetically to them? And all art-students want a
prodigious amount of sympathy, so uniquely constituted is each in genius
and temperament.

“You can’t go back to that dog’s life,” she said, after a while. “You
must get a post in a good public-school.”

Martin sighed. “Why not in the Kingdom of Heaven? It’s just as possible.
Heads of Public Schools don’t engage as masters men who haven’t a degree
and have hacked out their youth in low-class institutions like
Margett’s. I know only too well. To have been at Margett’s damns me
utterly with the public-schools. I must find another Margett’s!”

“Why don’t you do something else?” asked the girl.

“What else in the world can I do? You know very well what happened to
me. My poor old father was just able to send me to Cambridge because I
had a good scholarship. When he died there was nothing to supplement the
scholarship which wasn’t enough to keep me at the University. I had to
go down. My mother had nothing but my father’s life insurance money—a
thousand pounds—and twenty pounds a year from the Freemasons. When she
wrote to her relations about her distress, what do you think my damned
set of Swiss uncles and aunts and cousins sent her? Two hundred francs!
Eight pounds! And they’re all rolling in money got out of the English. I
had to find work at once to support us both. My only equipment was a
knowledge of French. I got a post at Margett’s through a scholastic
agency. I thought it a miracle. When the letter came accepting my
application I didn’t sleep all night. I remained there till a week or so
ago, working twelve hours a day all the year round. I don’t say I had
classes for twelve hours,” he admitted, conscientiously, “but when you
see about a couple of hundred pupils a day and they all do written work
which needs correcting, you’ll find you have as much work in class as
out of class. Last night I dreamed I was confronted with a pile of
exercise books eight feet high.”

“It’s a dog’s life,” Corinna repeated.

“It is,” said Martin. “_Mais que veux-tu, ma pauvre Corinne._ I detest
it as much as one can detest anything. If even I was a successful
teacher—_passe encore_. But I doubt whether I have taught anybody even
the _régime du participe passé_ save as a mathematical formula. It’s
heart-rending. It has turned me into a brainless, soulless, heartless,
bloodless machine.”

For a moment or two the glamour of the Parisian meal faded away. He
beheld himself—as he had wofully done in intervals between the raptures
of the past few days—an anxious and despairing young man: terribly
anxious to obtain another abhorred teachership, yet desperate at the
prospect of lifelong, ineffectual drudgery. Corinna, her elbows on the
table, poising in her hand a teaspoonful of tepid strawberry ice,
regarded him earnestly.

“I wish I were a man,” she declared.

“What would you do?”

She swallowed the morsel of ice and dropped her spoon with a clatter.

“I would take life by the throat and choke something big out of it,” she
cried dramatically.

“Probably an ocean of tears or a Sahara of despair,” said a voice from
the door.

Both turned sharply. The speaker was a middle-aged man of a presence at
once commanding and subservient. He had a shock of greyish hair brushed
back from the forehead and terminating above the collar in a fashion
suggestive of the late Abbé Liszt. His clean-shaven face was broad and
massive; the features large: eyes grey and prominent; the mouth loose
and fleshy. Many lines marked it, most noticeable of all a deep,
vertical furrow between the brows. He was dressed, somewhat shabbily, in
a black frock coat suit and wore the white tie of the French attorney.
His voice was curiously musical.

“Good Lord, Fortinbras, how you startled me!” exclaimed Corinna.

“I couldn’t help it,” said he, coming forward. “When you turn the Petit
Cornichon into the stage of the Odéon, what can I do but give you the
reply? I came here to find our good friend Widdrington.”

“Widdrington went back to England this morning,” she announced.

“That’s a pity. I had good news for him. I have arranged his little
affair. He should be here to profit by it. I love impulsiveness in
youth,” he said addressing himself to Martin, “when it proceeds from
noble ardour; but when it marks the feather-headed irresponsibility of
the idiot, I cannot deprecate it too strongly.”

Challenged, as it were, for a response, “I cordially agree with you,
sir,” said Martin.

“You two ought to know one another,” said Corinna. “This is my friend,
Mr. Overshaw—Martin, let me introduce you to Mr. Daniel Fortinbras,
_Marchand de Bonheur_.”

Fortinbras extended a soft white hand and holding Martin’s benevolently:

“Which being translated into our rougher speech,” said he, “means Dealer
in Happiness.”

“I wish you would provide me with some,” said Martin, laughingly.

“And so do I,” said Corinna.

Fortinbras drew a chair to the table and sat down.

“My fee,” said he, “is five francs each, paid in advance.”




                               CHAPTER II


AT this unexpected announcement Martin exchanged a swift glance with
Corinna. She smiled, drew a five franc piece from her purse and laid it
on the table. Martin, wondering, did the same. The Marchand de Bonheur
unbuttoned his frock coat and slipped the coins, with a professional
air, into his waistcoat pocket.

“Mr. Overshaw,” said he, “you must understand, as our charming friend
Corinna Hastings and indeed half the Quartier Latin understand, that for
such happiness as it may be my good fortune to provide I do not charge
one penny. But having to eke out a precarious livelihood, I make a fixed
charge of five francs for every consultation, no matter whether it be
for ten minutes or ten hours. And for the matter of that, ten hours is
not my limit. I am at your service for an indefinite period of time,
provided it be continuous.”

“That’s very good, indeed, of you,” said Martin. “I hope you’ll join
us,” he added, as the waiter approached with three coffee cups.

“No, I thank you. I have already had my after dinner coffee. But if I
might take the liberty of ordering something else——?”

“By all means,” said Martin hospitably. “What will you have? Cognac?
Liqueur? Whisky and soda?”

Fortinbras held up his hand—it was the hand of a comfortable, drowsy
prelate—and smiled. “I have not touched alcohol for many years. I find
it blunts the delicacy of perception which is essential to a Marchand de
Bonheur in the exercise of his calling. Auguste will give me a _syrop de
framboises à l’eau_.”

“_Bien, m’sieu_,” said Auguste.

“On the other hand, I shall smoke with pleasure one of your excellent
English cigarettes. Thanks. Allow me.”

With something of the grand manner he held a lighted match to Corinna’s
cigarette and to Martin’s. Then he blew it out and lit another for his
own.

“A superstition,” said he, by way of apology. “It arises out of the
Russian funeral ritual in which the three altar candles are lit by the
same taper. To apply the same method of illumination to three worldly
things like cigars or cigarettes is regarded as an act of impiety and
hence as unlucky. For two people to dip their hands together in the same
basin, without making the sign of the cross in the water, is unlucky on
account of the central incident of the Last Supper, and to spill the
salt as you are absent-mindedly doing, Corinna, is a violation of the
sacred symbol of sworn friendship.”

“That’s all very interesting,” said Corinna calmly. “But what are Martin
Overshaw and I to do to be happy?”

Fortinbras looked from one to the other with benevolent shrewdness and
inhaled a long puff of smoke.

“What about our young medical student friend, Camille Fargot?”

Corinna flushed red—as only pale blondes can flush. “What do you know
about Camille?” she demanded.

“Everything—and nothing. Come, come. It’s my business to keep a
paternal eye on you children. Where is he?”

“Who the deuce is Camille?” thought Martin.

“He’s at Bordeaux, safe in the arms of his ridiculous mother,” replied
Corinna tartly.

“Good, good,” said Fortinbras. “And you, Mr. Overshaw, where is the lady
on whom you have set your affections?”

Martin laughed frankly. “Heaven knows. There isn’t one. The _Princesse
lointaine_, perhaps, whom I’ve never seen.”

Fortinbras again looked from one to the other. “This complicates
matters,” said he. “On the other hand, perhaps, it simplifies them.
There being nothing common, however, to your respective roads to
happiness, each case must be dealt with separately. _Place aux
dames_—Corinna will first expose to me the sources of her divine
discontent. Proceed, Corinna.”

She drummed with her fingers on the table, and little wrinkles lined her
young forehead. Martin pushed back his chair.

“Hadn’t I better go for a walk until it is my turn to be interviewed?”

Corinna bade him not be silly. Whatever she had to say he was welcome to
hear. It would be better if he did hear it; then he might appreciate the
lesser misery of his own plight.

“I’m an utter, hopeless failure,” she cried with an air of defiance.

“Good,” said Fortinbras.

“I can’t paint worth a cent.”

“Good,” said Fortinbras.

“That old beast Delafosse says I’ll never learn to draw and I’m colour
blind. That’s a brutal way of putting it; but it’s more or less true.
Consequently I can’t earn my living by painting pictures. No one would
buy them.”

“Then they must be very bad indeed,” murmured Fortinbras.

“Well, that’s it,” said Corinna. “I’m done for. An old aunt died and
left me a legacy of four hundred pounds. I thought I could best use it
by coming to Paris to study art. I’ve been at it three years, and I’m as
clever as when I began. I have about twenty pounds left. When it’s gone
I shall have to go home to my smug and chuckling family. There are ten
of us. I’m the eldest and the youngest is three months old. Pretty fit I
should be after three years of Paris to go back. When I was at home
last, if ever I referred to an essential fact of physiological or social
existence, my good mother called me immodest and my sisters goggle-eyed
and breathless besought me in corners to tell them all about it. When I
tell them I know people who haven’t gone through the ceremony of
marriage they think I’m giving them a peep into some awful hell of
iniquity. It’s a fearful joy to them. Then mother says I’m corrupting
their young and innocent minds and father mentions me at Family prayers.
And the way they run after any young man that happens along is
sickening. I’m a prudish old maid compared with them. Have you ever seen
me running after men?”

“You are a modern Penthesilea,” said Fortinbras.

“Anyway, Wendlebury—that’s my home—would drive me mad. I’ll have to go
away and fend for myself. Father can’t give me an allowance. It’s as
much as he can do to pay his butcher’s bills. Besides, I’m not that
sort. What I do, I must do on my own. But I can’t do anything to get a
living. I can’t typewrite, I don’t know shorthand. I can scarcely sew a
button on a camisole, I’m not quite sure of my multiplication table, I
couldn’t add up a column of pounds, shillings and pence correctly to
save my life, I play the devil with an egg if I put it into a saucepan
and if I attempted to bath a baby I should drown it. I’m twenty-four
years of age and a helpless, useless failure.”

Fortinbras drank some of his raspberry syrup and water and lit another
cigarette.

“And you have still twenty pounds in your pocket?”

“Yes,” said Corinna, “and I shan’t go home until I’ve spent the last
penny. That’s why I’m in Paris, drinking its August dregs. I’ve already
bought a third class ticket to London—available for six months—so I
can get back any time without coming down on my people.”

“That act of pusillanimous prudence,” remarked Fortinbras, “seems to me
to be a flaw in an otherwise admirable scheme of immediate existence. If
the ravens fed an impossibly unhumorous, and probably unprepossessing,
disagreeable person like Elijah, surely there are doves who will
minister to the sustenance of an attractive and keen-witted young woman
like yourself. But that is a mere generalisation. I only wish you,” said
he, bending forward and paternally and delicately touching her hand, “I
only wish you to take heart of grace and not strangle yourself in your
exhaustively drawn up category of incompetence.”

The man’s manner was so sympathetic, his deep voice so persuasive, the
smile in his eyes so understanding, the massive, lined face so
illuminated by wise tenderness that his words fell like balm on her
rebellious spirit before their significance, or want of significance,
could be analysed by her intellect. The intensity of attitude and
feature with which her confession had been attended relaxed into girlish
ease.

She laughed somewhat self-consciously and took a cigarette from the
packet offered her by a silent and wondering Martin. She perked up her
shapely head and once more the cock-pheasant’s plume on her cheap straw
hat gave her a pleasant air of braggadocio. Martin noticed for the first
time that she had a little mutinous nose and a defiant lift of the chin
above a broad white throat. He found it difficult to harmonise her
appearance of confident efficiency with her lamentable avowal of
failure. Those blue eyes somewhat hard beneath the square brow ought to
have commanded success. Those strong nervous hands were of just the kind
to choke the great things out of life. He could not suddenly divest
himself of preconceived ideas. To the dull, unaspiring drudge, Corinna
Hastings leading the fabulous existence of the Paris studios had been
invested with such mystery as surrounded the goddesses of the Gaiety
Theatre and the Headmaster of Eton. . . .

Martin also reflected that in her litany of woe she had omitted all
reference to the medical student now in the arms of his ridiculous
mother. He began to feel mildly jealous of this Camille Fargot, who
assumed the shadow shape of a malignant influence. Yet she did not
appear to be the young woman to tolerate aggressive folly on the part of
a commonplace young man. Fortinbras himself had called her Penthesilea,
Queen of the Amazons. He was puzzled.

“What you say is very comforting and exhilarating, Fortinbras,” remarked
Corinna, “but can’t you let me have something practical?”

“All in good time, my dear,” replied Fortinbras serenely. “I have no
quack nostrums to hand over at a minute’s notice. Auguste——” he
summoned the waiter and addressed him in fluent French, marred by a
Britannic accent: “Give me another glass of this obscene though harmless
beverage and satisfy the needs of Monsieur and Mademoiselle, and after
that leave us in peace, and if any one seeks to penetrate into this
_salle à manger_, say that it is engaged by a Lodge of Freemasons. Here
is remuneration for your prospective zeal.”

With impressive flourish he deposited fifteen centimes in the palm of
Auguste, who bowed politely.

“_Merci, m’sieu_,” said he. “_Et monsieur_, dame——?”

He looked enquiringly at Martin and Martin looked enquiringly at
Corinna.

“I’m going to blow twenty pounds,” she replied. “I’ll have a _kummel
glacé_.”

“And I’ll have the same,” said Martin, “though I don’t in the least know
what it is.”

The waiter retired. Corinna leaned across the table.

“You’re thirty years of age and you’ve lived ten years in London and
have never seen kummel served with crushed ice and straws?”

“No,” replied Martin simply. “What is kummel?”

She regarded him in wonderment. “Have you ever heard of champagne?”

“More often than I’ve tasted it,” said Martin.

“This young man,” remarked Corinna, “has seen as much of life as a
squirrel in a cage. That may not be very polite, Martin—but you know
it’s true. Can you dance?”

“No,” said Martin.

“Have you ever fired off a gun?”

“I was once in the Cambridge University Rifle Corps,” said Martin.

“You used a rifle, not a gun,” cried Corinna. “Have you ever shot a
bird?”

“No,” said Martin.

“Or caught a fish?”

“No,” said Martin.

“Can you play cricket, golf, ride——?”

“A bicycle,” said Martin.

“That’s something, anyhow. What do you use it for?”

“To go backwards and forwards to my work,” said Martin.

“What do you do in the way of amusement?”

“Nothing,” said Martin, with a sigh.

“My good Fortinbras,” said Corinna, “you have your work cut out for
you.”

The waiter brought the drinks, and after enquiring whether they needed
all the electricity, turned out most of the lights.

Martin always remembered the scene: the little low-ceilinged room with
its grotesque decorations looming fantastic through the semi-darkness;
the noises and warm smells rising from the narrow street; the eyes of
the girl opposite raised somewhat mockingly to his, as straw in mouth
she bent her head over the iced kummel; the burly figure and benevolent
face of their queer companion who for five francs had offered to be the
arbiter of his destiny, and leaned forward, elbow on table and chin in
hand, serenely expectant to hear the inmost secrets of his life.

He felt tongue-tied and shy and sucking too nervously at his straw
choked himself with the strong liqueur. It was one thing to unburden
himself to Corinna, another to make coherent statement of his grievance
to a stranger.

“I am at your disposal, my dear Overshaw,” said the latter, kindly.
“From personal observation and from your answers to Corinna’s enfilade
of questions, I gather that you are not overwhelmed by any cataclysm of
disaster, but rather that yours is the more negative tragedy of a
starved soul—a poor, starved soul hungering for love and joy and the
fruitfulness of the earth and the bounty of spiritual things. Your
difficulty now is: How to say to this man, ‘Give me bread for my soul.’
Am I not right?”

A glimmer of irony in his smiling grey eyes or an inflection of it in
his persuasive voice would have destroyed the flattering effect of the
little speech. Martin had never taken his soul into account. The
diagnosis shed a new light on his state of being. The starvation of his
soul was certainly the root of the trouble; an infinitely more dignified
matter than mere discontent with one’s environment.

“Yes,” said he. “You’re right. I’ve had no chance of development. My own
fault perhaps. I’ve not been strong enough to battle against
circumstances. Circumstances have imprisoned me, as Corinna says, like a
squirrel in a cage, and I’ve spent my time in going round and round in
the profitless wheel.”

“And the nature of the wheel?” asked Fortinbras.

“Have you ever heard of Margett’s Universal College?”

“I have,” said Fortinbras. “It is one of the many mind-wrecking
institutions of which our beloved country is so proud.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” cried Martin. “I’ve been helping to
wreck minds there for the last ten years. I’ve taught French. Not the
French language; but examination French. When the son of a greengrocer
wants to get a boy-clerkship in the Civil Service, it’s essential that
he should know that _bal_, _cal_, _carnaval_, _pal_, _regal_, _chacal_
take an ‘s’ in the plural, in spite of the fact that millions of
Frenchmen go through their lives without once uttering the plural
words.”

“How came you to teach French?”

“My mother tongue—my mother was a Swiss.”

“And your father?”

“An English chaplain in Switzerland. You see it was like this——”

And so, started on his course, and helped here and there by a shrewd and
sympathetic question, Martin, the ingenuous, told his story, while
Corinna, slightly bored, having heard most of it already, occupied
herself by drawing a villainous portrait of him on the tablecloth. When
he mentioned details unknown to her she paused in her task and raised
her eyes. Like her own, his autobiography was a catalogue of
incompetence, but it held no record of frustrated ambitions—no record
of any ambitious desire whatever. It shewed the tame ass’s unreflecting
acquiescence in its lot of drudgery. There had been no passionate
craving for things of delight. Why cry for the moon? With a salary of a
hundred and thirty-five pounds a year out of which he must contribute to
the support of his widowed mother, a man can purchase for himself but
little splendour of existence, and Martin was not one of those to whom
splendour comes unbought. He had lived, semi-content, in a fog
splendour-obscuring, for the last ten years. But this evening the fog
had lifted. The glamour of Paris, even the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower
sarcastically mentioned by Corinna, had helped to dispel it. So had
Corinna’s sisterly interest in his dull affairs. And so, more than all,
had helped the self-analysis formulated under the compelling power of
the philanthropist with shiny coat-sleeves and frayed linen, at once
priest, lawyer and physician who had pocketed his five francs fee.

He talked long and earnestly; and the more he talked and the more
minutely he revealed the aridity of his young life, the stronger grew
within him a hitherto unknown spirit of revolt.

“That’s all,” he said at last, wiping a streaming brow.

“And very interesting indeed,” said Fortinbras.

“Isn’t it?” said Corinna. “And he never even kissed”—so complete had
been Martin’s apologia—“the landlady’s daughter who married the
plumber.” She challenged him with a glance. “I swear you didn’t.”

With a shy twist of his lips Martin confessed:

“Well—I did once.”

“Why not twice?” asked Corinna.

“Yes, why not?” asked Fortinbras, seeing Martin hesitate, and his smile
was archiepiscopal indulgence. “Why but one taste of ambrosial lips?”

Martin reddened beneath his olive skin. “I hardly like to say—it seems
so indelicate——”

“_Allons donc_” cried Corinna. “We’re in Paris, not Wendlebury.”

“We must get to the bottom of this, my dear Martin—it’s a privilege I
demand from my clients to address them by their Christian
names—otherwise how can I establish the necessary intimate _rapport_
between them and myself? So I repeat, my dear Martin, we must have the
reason for the rupture or the dissolution or the termination of what
seems to be the only romantic episode in your career. I’m not joking,”
Fortinbras added gravely, after a pause. “From the psychological point
of view, it is important that I should know.”

Martin looked appealingly from one to the other—from Fortinbras
massively serious to Corinna serenely mocking.

“A weeny unencouraged plumber?” she suggested.

He sat bolt upright and gasped. “Good God, no!” He flushed indignant.
“She was a most highly respectable girl. Nothing of that sort. I wish I
hadn’t mentioned the matter. It’s entirely unimportant.”

“If that is so,” said Corinna, “why didn’t you kiss the girl again?”

“Well, if you want to know,” replied Martin desperately, “I have a
constitutional horror of the smell of onions,” and mechanically he
sucked through his straw the tepid residue of melted ice in his glass.

Corinna threw herself back in her chair and laughed uncontrollably. It
was just the lunatic sort of thing that would happen to poor old Martin.
She knew her sex. Instantaneously she pictured in her mind the fluffy,
lower middle-class young person who set her cap at the gentleman with
the long Grecian nose, and she entered into her devastated frame of mind
when he wriggled awkwardly out of further osculatory invitations. And
the good, solid plumber, onion-loving soul, had carried her off, not
figuratively but literally under the nose of Martin.

“Oh, Martin, you’re too funny for words!” she cried.

Fortinbras smiled always benevolently. “If Cleopatra’s nose had been a
centimetre longer—I forget the exact classical epigram—the history of
the world would have been changed. In a minor degree—for the destiny of
an individual must, of course, be of less importance than the destiny of
mankind—had it not been for one spring onion, unconsidered fellow of
the robin and the burnished dove and the wanton lapwing, this young
man’s fancy would have been fettered in the thoughts of love. One spring
onion—and human destinies are juggled. Martin is still a soul-starved
bachelor, and—and—her name?”

“Gwendoline?”

“And Gwendoline is the buxom mother of five.”

“Six,” said Martin. “I can’t help knowing,” he explained, “since I still
lodge with her mother.”

Corinna turned her head sideways to scrutinise the drawing on the
tablecloth, and still scrutinising it, asked:

“And that is your one and only _affaire du cœur_?”

“I’m afraid the only one,” replied Martin shamefacedly. Even so mild a
man as he felt the disadvantage of not being able to hint to a woman
that he could talk, and he would, of chimes heard at midnight and of
broken hearts and other circumstances hedging round a devil of a fellow.
His one kiss seemed a very bread-and-buttery affair—to say nothing of
the mirth-provoking onion. And the emotion attending the approach to it
had been of a nature so tepid that disillusion caused scarcely a pang.
It had been better to pose as an out-and-out Sir Galahad, a type
comprehensible to women. As the hero of one invertebrate embrace he cut
a sorry figure.

“You are still young. The years and the women’s lips before you are
many,” said Fortinbras, laying a comforting touch on Martin’s shoulder.
“Opportunity makes the lover as it does the thief. And in the
bed-sitting-room in Hickney Heath where you have spent your young life
where has been the opportunity? It pleases our Paris-hardened young
friend to mock; but I see in you the making of a great lover, a Bertrand
d’Allamanon, a Chastelard, one who will count the world well lost for a
princess’s smile——”

Corinna interrupted. “What pernicious nonsense are you talking,
Fortinbras? You’ve got love on the brain to-night. Neither Martin nor I
are worrying our heads about it. Love be hanged! We’re each of us
worried to death over the problem of how to keep body and soul together
without going back to prison and you talk all this drivel about love—at
least not to me, but to Martin.”

“That qualification, my dear Corinna, upsets the logic of your admirable
tirade,” Fortinbras replied calmly, after drinking the remainder of his
syrup and soda water. “I speak of love to Martin because his soul is
starved, as I’ve already declared. I don’t speak of it to you, because
your soul is suffering from indigestion.”

“I’ll have another _kummel glacé_,” said Corinna. “It’s a stomachic.”
She reached for the bell-pull behind her chair—she had the corner seat.
Auguste appeared. Orders were repeated. “How you can drink all that
syrup without being sick I can’t understand,” she remarked.

“Omnicomprehension is not vouchsafed even to the very young and
innocent, my dear,” said Fortinbras.

Martin glanced across the table apprehensively. If ever young woman had
been set down that young woman was Corinna Hastings. He feared
explosion, annihilation of the down-setter. Nothing of the sort
happened. Corinna accepted the rebuff with the meekness of a school-girl
and sniffed when Fortinbras was not looking. Again Martin was puzzled,
unable to divest himself of his old conception of Corinna. She was
Corinna, chartered libertine of the land of Rodolfe, Marcel,
Schaunard—he had few impressions of the _Quartier Latin_ later than
Henri Murger—and her utterances no matter how illogical were derived
from godlike inspiration. He hung on her lips for some inspired and
vehement rejoinder to the rebuke of Fortinbras. When none came he
realised that in the seedily dressed and now profusely perspiring
_Marchand de Bonheur_ she had met an acknowledged master. Who Fortinbras
was, whence his origin, what his character and social status, how, save
by the precarious methods to which he had alluded, he earned his
livelihood, Martin had no idea; but he suddenly conceived an immense
respect for Fortinbras. The man hovered over both of them on a higher
plane of wisdom. From his kind eyes (to Martin’s simple fancy) beamed
uncanny power. He assumed the semblance of an odd sort of god indigenous
to this Paris wonderworld.

Fortinbras lit another of Martin’s Virginian cigarettes—the little tin
box lay open on the table—and leaned back in his chair.

“My young friends,” said he, “you have each put before me the
circumstances which have made you respectively despair of finding
happiness both in the immediate and the distant future. Now as Montaigne
says—an author whom I would recommend to you for the edification of
your happily remote middle-age, having myself found infinite consolation
in his sagacity—as Montaigne says: ‘Men are tormented by the ideas they
have concerning things, and not by the things themselves.’ The wise man
therefore—the general term, my dear Corinna, includes women—is he who
has learned to face things themselves after having dispelled the bogies
of his ideas concerning them. It is on this basis that I am about to
deliver the judgment for which I have duly received my fee of ten
francs.”

He moistened his lips with the pink syrup. For the picture you can
imagine a grey old lion eating ice-cream.

“You, Corinna,” he continued, “belong to the new race of women whose
claims on life far exceed their justification. You have as assets youth,
a modicum of beauty, a bright intelligence and a stiff little character.
But, as you rightly say, you are capable of nothing in the steep range
of human effort from painting a picture to washing a baby. Were you not
temperamentally puritanical and intellectually obsessed by the modern
notion of woman’s right to an independent existence, you would find a
means of realising the above-mentioned assets, as your sex has done
through the centuries. But in spite of amazonian trifling with
romantic-visaged and granite-headed medical students, you cling to the
irresponsibilities of a celibate career.”

“If he asked me, I’d marry a Turk to-morrow,” said Corinna.

“Don’t interrupt,” said Fortinbras. “You disturb the flow of my ideas. I
have no doubt that, in your desperate situation, you would promise to
marry a Turk; but your essential pusillanimity would make you wriggle
out of it at the last moment. You’re like ‘the poor cat in the adage.’”

“What cat?” asked Corinna.

“The one in Macbeth, Act i, Scene 3, a play by Shakespeare. ‘Letting “I
dare not” wait upon “I would,” like the poor cat i’ the adage.’ You
require development, my dear Corinna, out of the cat stage. You have had
your head choked with ideas about things in this soul-suffocating Paris,
and the ideas are tormenting you; but you’ve never been at grips with
things themselves. As for our excellent Martin, he has not even arrived
at the stage of the desirous cat.”

The smile that lit up his coarse, lined features, and the musical
suavity of his voice divested the words of offence. Martin, with a
laugh, assented to the proposition.

“He, too, needs development,” Fortinbras went on. “Or rather, not so
much development as a collection of soul-material from which development
may proceed. Your one accomplishment, I understand, is riding a bicycle.
Let us take that as the germ from which the tree of happiness may
spring. Do you bicycle, Corinna?”

“I can, of course. But I hate it.”

“You don’t,” replied Fortinbras quickly. “You hate your own idea of it.
You’ll begin your course of happiness by sweeping away all your ideas
concerning bicycling and coming to bicycling itself.”

“I never heard anything so idiotic,” declared Corinna.

“Doubtless,” smiled Fortinbras. “You haven’t heard everything. Go on
your knees and thank God for it. I repeat—or amplify my prescription.
Go forth both of you on bicycles into the wide world. They will not be
Wheels of Chance, but Wheels of Destiny. Go through the broad land of
France filling your souls with sunshine and freedom and your throats
with salutary and thirst-provoking dust. Have no care for the morrow and
look at the future through the golden haze of eventide.”

“There’s nothing I should like better,” said Martin, with a glance at
Corinna, “but I can’t afford it. I must get back to London to look out
for an engagement.”

Fortinbras mopped his brow with an over-fatigued pocket-handkerchief.

“What did you pay me five francs for? For the pleasure of hearing me
talk, or for the value of my counsel?”

“I must look at things practically,” said Martin.

“But, good God!” cried Fortinbras, with soft uplifted hands, “what is
there more practical, more commonplace, less romantic in the world than
riding a bicycle? You want to emerge from your Slough of Despond, don’t
you?”

“Of course,” said Martin.

“Then I say—get on a bicycle and ride out of it. Practical to the point
of pathos.”

Martin objected: “No one will pay me for careering through France on a
bicycle. I’ve got to live, and for the matter of fact, so has Corinna.”

“But, my dear young friend, she has twenty pounds. You, on your own
showing have forty. Sixty pounds between you. A fortune! You both are
tormented by the idea of what will happen when the Pactolus runs dry.
Banish that pestilential miasma from your minds. Go on the adventure.”

In poetic terms he set forth the delights of that admirable vagabondage.
His eloquence sent a thrill through Martin’s veins, causing his blood to
tingle. Before him new horizons broadened. He felt the necessity of the
immediate securing of an engagement grow less insistent. If he got home
with twenty pounds in his pocket, even fifteen, at a pinch ten, he could
manage to subsist until he found work. And perhaps this blandly
authoritative, though seedy angel really saw into the future. The
temptation fascinated him. He glanced again at Corinna, who sat demure
and silent, her chin propped on her fists, and his heart sank. The
proposition was absurd. How could he ride abroad, for an indefinite
number of days and nights with a young unmarried woman? Of himself he
had no fear. Undesirous cat though he was, sent forth on the journey
into the world to learn desire, he could not but remain a gentleman. In
his charge she would enjoy a sister’s sanctity. But she would never
consent. She could not. No matter how profound her belief in his
chivalry, her maiden modesty would revolt. Her reputation would be gone.
One whisper in Wendlebury of such gipsying and scandal with bared
scissor-points would arrest her on the station platform. And while these
thoughts agitated his mind, and Corinna kept her eyes always demure and
somewhat ironical on Fortinbras, the latter continued to talk.

“I’m not advising you,” said he, “to pedal away like little Pilgrims
into the Unknown. I propose for you an objective. In the little town of
Brantôme in the Dordogne, made illustrious by one of the quaintest of
French writers——”

“The Abbé Brantôme of ‘_La Vie des Dames Galantes_’?” asked Corinna.

Martin gasped. “You don’t know that book?”

“By heart,” she replied mischievously, in order to shock Martin. As a
matter of fact she had but turned over the pages of the immortal work
and laid it down, disconcerted both by the archaic French and the full
flavour of such an anecdote or two as she could understand.

“In the little town of Brantôme,” Fortinbras continued after a pause,
“you will find an hotel called the Hôtel des Grottes, kept by an
excellent and massive man by the name of Bigourdin, a poet and a
philosopher and a mighty maker of _pâté de foie gras_. A line from me
would put you on his lowest tariff, for he has a descending scale of
charges, one for motorists, another for commercial travellers and a
third for human beings.”

“It would be utterly delightful,” Martin interrupted, “if it were
possible.”

“Why shouldn’t it be possible?” asked Corinna with a calm glance.

“You and I—alone—the proprieties——” he stammered.

Again Corinna burst out laughing. “Is that what’s worrying you? My poor
Martin, you’re too comic. What are you afraid of? I promise you I’ll
respect maiden modesty. My word of honour.”

“It is entirely on your account. But if you don’t mind—” said Martin
politely.

“I assure you I don’t mind in the least,” replied Corinna with equal
politeness. “But supposing,” she turned to Fortinbras, “we do go on this
journey, what should we do when we got to the great Monsieur Bigourdin?”

“You would sun yourselves in his wisdom,” replied Fortinbras, “and
convey my love to my little daughter Félise.”

If Fortinbras had alluded to his possession of a steam-yacht Corinna
could not have been more astonished. To her he was merely the Marchand
de Bonheur, eccentric Bohemian, half charlatan, half good-fellow,
without private life or kindred. She sat bolt upright.

“You have a daughter?”

“Why not? Am I not a man? Haven’t I lived my life? Haven’t I had my
share of its joys and sorrows? Why should it surprise you that I have a
daughter?”

Corinna reddened. “You haven’t told me about her before.”

“When do I have the occasion, in this world of students, to speak of
things precious to me? I tell you now. I am sending you to her—she is
twenty—and to my excellent brother-in-law Bigourdin, because I think
you are good children, and I should like to give you a bit of my heart
for my ten francs.”

“Fortinbras,” said Corinna, with a quick outstretch of her arm, “I’m a
beast. Tell me, what is she like?”

“To me,” smiled Fortinbras, “she is like one of the wild flowers from
which Alpine honey is made. To other people she is doubtless a
well-mannered commonplace young person. You will see her and judge for
yourselves.”

“How far is it from Paris to Brantôme?” asked Martin.

“Roughly about five hundred kilometres—under three hundred miles. Take
your time. You have sixty pounds’ worth of sunny hours before you—and
there is much to be learned in three hundred miles of France. In a few
weeks’ time I will join you at Brantôme—journeying by train as befits
my soberer age—I go there a certain number of times a year to see
Félise. Then, if you will continue to favour me with your patronage, we
shall have another consultation.”

There was a brief silence. Fortinbras looked from one young face to the
other. Then he brought his hands down with a soft thump on the table.

“You hesitate?” he cried indignantly. “You’re afraid to take your poor,
little lives in your hands even for a few weeks?” He pushed back his
chair and rose and swept a banning gesture, “I have nothing more to do
with you. For profitless advice my conscience allows me to charge
nothing.” He tore open his frock coat and his fingers diving into his
waistcoat pocket brought forth and threw down the two five-franc pieces.
“Go your ways,” said he.

At this dramatic moment both the young people sprang protesting to their
feet.

“What are you talking about? We’re going to Brantôme,” cried Corinna,
gripping the lapels of his coat.

“Of course we are,” exclaimed Martin, scared at the prospect of losing
the inspired counsellor.

“Then why aren’t you more enthusiastic?” asked Fortinbras.

“But we are enthusiastic,” Corinna declared.

“We’ll start to-morrow,” said Martin.

“At six o’clock in the morning,” said Corinna.

“At five, if you like,” said Martin.

Fortinbras embraced them both in a capacious smile, as he deliberately
repocketed the coins.

“That is well, my children. But don’t do too many unaccustomed things at
once. In the Dordogne you can rise at five—with enjoyment and impunity.
In Paris, your meeting at that hour would be fraught with mutual
antipathy, and you would not find a shop open where you could hire or
buy your bicycles.”

“I’ve got one,” said Corinna.

“So have I,” said Martin; “but it’s in London.”

Fortinbras extracted from his person a dim, chainless watch.

“It is now a quarter past one. Time for honest folk to be abed. Meet me
here at eleven o’clock to-morrow, booted and spurred, with but a scrip
at the back of your bicycles, and I will hand you letters to Félise and
the poetic and philosophic Bigourdin, and now,” said he, “with your
permission, I will ring for Auguste.”

Auguste appeared and Martin, waving aside the protests of Corinna, paid
the modest bill. In the airless street Fortinbras bade them an
impressive good night and disappeared in the byways of the sultry city.
Martin accompanied Corinna to the gaunt neighbouring building wherein
her eyrie was situate. Both were tongue-tied, shy, embarrassed by the
prospect of the intimate adventure to which they had pledged themselves.
When the great door, swung open by the hidden concierge, at Corinna’s
ring, invited her entrance, they shook hands perfunctorily.

“At a quarter to eleven,” said Martin.

“I shall be ready,” said Corinna.




                              CHAPTER III


THE bicycle journey of two young people through a mere three hundred
miles of France is, on the face of it, an Odyssey of no importance. The
only interest that could attach itself to such a humdrum affair would
centre in the development of tender feelings reciprocated or otherwise
in the breasts of both or one of the young people. But when the two of
them proceed dustily and unemotionally along the endless, straight,
poplar-bordered roads, with the heart of each at the end of the day as
untroubled by the other as at the beginning, a detailed account of their
wanderings would resolve itself into a commonplace itinerary.

“My children,” said Fortinbras, when, after having lunched with them at
the Petit Cornichon and given them letters of introduction and his
blessing, he had accompanied them to the pavement whence they were
preparing to start, “I advise you, until you reach Brantôme to call
yourself brother and sister, so that your idyllic companionship shall
not be misinterpreted.”

“Pooh!”—or some such vocable of scorn—Corinna remarked. “We’re not in
narrow-minded England.”

“In narrow-minded England,” Fortinbras replied, “without a wedding ring,
and without the confessed brother-and-sisterly relation, inns would
close their virtuous doors against you. In France, where a pair of
lovers is universally regarded as an object of romantic interest,
innkeepers would confuse you with zealous attentions. Thus in either
country, though for opposite reasons, you would be bound to encounter
impossible embarrassment.”

“I don’t think there would be any danger of that,” laughed Corinna
lightly, “unless Martin went mad. But perhaps it would be just as well
to play the comedy. I’ll stick up my cheek to be kissed every night in
the presence of the landlady. ‘_Bon soir, mon frère._’—Do you think you
can go through the performance, Martin?”

Martin, very uncomfortable, already experiencing at the suggestion of
misconstrued relations, the embarrassment foreshadowed by Fortinbras,
flushed deeply and took refuge in an examination of his bicycle. The
celibate dreamer was shocked by her cool bravado. Since the episode of
Gwendoline he had lived remote from the opposite sex; the only woman he
had known intimately was his mother and from that knowledge he had
formed the profound conviction that women were entirely futile and
utterly holy. Corinna kept on knocking this conviction endwise. She made
hay, not to say chaos, with his theory of woman. He felt himself on the
verge of a fog-filled abysm of knowledge. There she stood, a foot or two
away—he scarce dared glance at her—erect, clear-eyed, the least futile
person in the world, treating a suggestion the most disconcerting and
appalling to maidenhood with the unholiest mockery, and coolly proposing
that, in order to give themselves an air of innocence, they should
contract the habit of a nightly embrace.

“I’ll do anything,” said he, “to prevent disagreeableness arising.”

Corinna laughed, and, after final farewells, they rode away down the
baking little street leaving Fortinbras watching them wistfully until
they had disappeared. And he remained a long time following in his
thoughts the pair whom he had despatched upon their unsentimental
journey. How young they were, how malleable, how agape for hope like
young thrushes for worms, how attractive in their respective ways, how
careless of sunstroke! If only he could have escaped with them from this
sweltering Paris to the cool shadow of the Dordogne rocks and the
welcome of a young girl’s eyes. What a hopeless mess and muddle was
life. He sighed and mopped his forehead, and then a hand touched his
arm. He turned and saw the careworn face of Madame Gaussart, the fat
wife of a neighbouring print-seller.

“Monsieur Fortinbras, it is only you in this city of misfortune that can
give me advice. My husband left me the day before yesterday and has not
returned. I am in despair. I have been weeping ever since. I weep
now——” she did, copiously regardless of the gaze of the street. “Tell
me what to do, my good Monsieur Fortinbras, you whom they call the
_Marchand de Bonheur_. See—I have your little honorarium.”

She held out the five-franc piece. Fortinbras slipped it into his
waistcoat pocket.

“At your service, madame,” said he, with a sigh. “Doubtless I shall be
able to restore to you a fallacious semblance of conjugal felicity.”

“I was sure of it,” said the lady already comforted. “If you would deign
to enter the shop, Monsieur.”

Fortinbras followed her, and for a while lost his envy of Martin and
Corinna in patient and ironic consideration of the naughtiness of
Monsieur Gaussart.

This first stage out of Paris was the only time when the wanderers
braved the midday heat of the golden August. They took counsel together
in an earwiggy arbour outside Versailles, where they quenched their
thirst with cider. They were in no hurry to reach their destination. A
few hours in the early morning—they could start at six—and an hour or
two in the cool of the evening would suffice. The remainder of the day
would be devoted to repose. . . .

“And churches and cathedrals,” added Martin.

“You have a frolicsome idea of a holiday jaunt,” said Corinna.

“What else can we do?”

“Eat lotus,” said Corinna. “Forget that there ever were such places as
Paris or London or Wendlebury.”

“I don’t think Chartres would remind you of one of them,” said Martin.
“I’ve dreamed of Chartres ever since I read ‘_La Cathédrale_’ by
Huysmans.”

“You’re what they call an earnest soul,” remarked Corinna. “All the way
here I’ve never stopped wondering why I’ve come with you on this insane
pilgrimage to nowhere.”

“I’ve been wondering the same myself,” said Martin.

As he had lain awake most of the night and therefore risen late, the
occupations of the morning involving the selection and hire of a
bicycle, consultation with the concierge of the Hôtel du Soleil et de
l’Ecosse with regard to luggage being forwarded, the changing of his
money into French banknotes and gold, and various small purchases, had
left him little time for reflection. It was only when he found himself
pedalling perspiringly by the side of this comparatively unknown and
startling young woman, who was to be his intimate companion for heaven
knew how long, that he began to think. _Qu’allait il faire dans cette
galère?_ It was comforting to know that Corinna asked herself the same
question.

“That old humbug Fortinbras must have put a spell upon us,” she
continued, without commenting on Martin’s lack of gallantry. “He sort of
envelops one in such a mist of words uttered in that musical voice of
his and he looks so inspired with benevolent wisdom that one loses one’s
common sense. The old wretch can persuade anybody to do anything. He
once inveigled a girl—an art student—into becoming a nun.”

Martin’s Protestant antagonism was aroused. He expressed himself
heatedly. He saw nothing but reprehensibility in the action of
Fortinbras. Corinna examined her well-trimmed fingernails.

“It was a question of Saint Clothilde—that I think was the order—or
Saint Lazare. Some girls are like that.”

“Saint Lazare?”

“Don’t you know anything?” she sighed. “What’s the good of being
decently epigrammatic? Saint Lazare is the final destination of a
certain temperament unsupported by good looks or money. It’s the woman’s
prison of Paris.”

“Oh!” said Martin.

“How he did it I don’t know, but he saved her body and soul. And now
she’s the happiest creature in the world. I had a letter from her only
the other day urging me to go over to Rome and take the vows——”

“I hope you’re not thinking of it,” said Martin.

“I’m in no danger of Saint Lazare,” replied Corinna drily.

There was a long silence. In the leafy arbour screened from the dust and
glare of the highway there prevailed a drowsy peace. Only one of the
dozen other green blistered wooden tables was occupied—and that by a
blue-bloused workman and his wife and baby, all temperately refreshing
themselves with harmless liquid, the last from nature’s fount itself.
The landlord, obese, unshaven and alpaca-jacketed, read the _Petit
Journal_ at the threshold of the café of which the arboured terrace was
but a summer adjunct. A mangy mongrel lying at his feet snapped
spasmodically at flies. A couple of tow-headed urchins hung by the
arched entrance, low-class Peris at the gates of a dilapidated Paradise.

“Who is Fortinbras?” Martin asked.

Corinna shrugged her dainty shoulders. She did not know. Rumour had
it—and for rumour she could not vouchsafe—that he was an English
solicitor struck off the rolls. With French law at any rate he was
familiar. He had the Code Napoléon at his finger-ends. In spite of the
sober black clothes and white tie of the French attorney which he
affected, he certainly possessed no French qualifications which would
have enabled him to set up a regular _cabinet d’avoué_ and earn a
professional livelihood. Nor did he presume to step within the _avoué’s_
jealously guarded sphere. But his opinion on legal points was so sound,
and his fee so moderate, that many consulted him in preference to an
orthodox practitioner. That was all that Corinna knew of him in his
legal aspect. The rest of his queer practice consisted in advising in
all manner of complications. He arbitrated in disputes between man and
man, woman and woman, lover and mistress, husband and wife, parent and
child. He diverted the debtor from the path to bankruptcy. He rescued
youths and maidens from disastrous nymphs and fauns. He hushed up
scandal. Meanwhile his private life and even his address remained
unknown. Twice a day he went the round of the cafés and restaurants of
the _quartier_, so that those in need of his assistance had but to wait
at their respective taverns in order to see him—for he appeared with
the inevitability of the sun in its course.

“There are all kinds of parasitical people,” said Corinna, “who try to
sponge on students for drinks and meals and money—but Fortinbras isn’t
that kind. Now and again, but not often, he will accept an invitation to
lunch or dinner—and then it’s always for the purpose of discussing
business. Whether it’s his cunning or his honesty I don’t know—but
nobody’s afraid of him. That’s his great asset. You’re absolutely
certain sure that he won’t stick you for anything. Consequently anybody
in trouble or difficulty goes to him confident that his five francs
consultation fee is the end of the financial side of the matter and that
he will concentrate his whole mind and soul on the case. He’s an odd
devil.”

“The most remarkable man I’ve ever met,” said Martin.

“You’ve not met many,” said Corinna.

“I don’t know——” replied Martin reflectively. “I once came across a
prize-fighter—a remarkable chap—in the bar-parlour of the pub at the
corner of our street who was afterwards hanged for murdering his wife,
and I once met a member of Parliament, another remarkable man—I forget
his name now—and then of course there was Cyrus Margett.”

“But none of them is in it with Fortinbras,” Corinna smiled with ironic
indulgence.

“None,” said Martin, “had his peculiar magnetic quality. Not even the
member of Parliament. But,” he continued after a pause, “is that all
that is known of him? He seems to be a very mysterious person.”

“I shouldn’t mind betting you,” said Corinna, “that you and I are the
only people in Paris who are aware of his daughter in Brantôme.”

“Why should he single us out for such a confidence?” asked Martin. “He
said last night that he was giving us a bit of his heart because we were
good children—it was quite touching—but why should we be the only ones
to have a bit of his heart?”

“Would you like to know?” asked Corinna, meeting his eyes full.

“I should.”

“He told me before you turned up at the Petit Cornichon, this morning,
that you interested him as a sort of celestial freak.”

“I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment or not,” replied
Martin, pausing in the act of rolling a cigarette. “It’s tantamount to
calling me an infernal ass.”

At this show of spirit the girl swiftly changed her tone.

“You may take it from me that Fortinbras doesn’t give a bit of his heart
to infernal asses. If I had gone to him, on my own, he would never—you
heard him—he would never have touched on ‘things precious to him.’ It’s
for your sake, not mine.”

“But why?”

“Because he’s fed up with the likes of me,” said Corinna, with sudden
bitterness. “There are hundreds and thousands of us.”

Martin knitted his brow. “I don’t understand.”

“Better not try,” she said. “Let us pay for the cider and get on.”

So they paid and went on and halted at the townlet of Rambouillet, where
as Monsieur and Mademoiselle Overshaw, they engaged rooms at the most
modest of terms. And to Martin’s infinite relief Corinna did not summon
him to kiss her cheek in the presence of the landlady, before they
retired for the night. He went to bed comforted by the thought that
Corinna’s bark was worse than her bite.

I have done my best to tell you that this was an unsentimental journey.

So day after day they sped their innocent course, resting by night at
tiny places where haughty automobiles halted not. They had but sixty
pounds to their joint fortune, and it behoved them not to dissipate it
in unwonted luxury. Through Chartres they went, and Corinna quite as
eagerly as Martin drank in deep draughts of its Gothic mystery and its
splendour of stained glass; through Châteaudun with its grim old castle;
through Vendôme with the flaming west front of its cathedral; through
Tours in the neighbourhood of which they lingered many days, seeing in
familiar intimacy things of which they had but dreamed before—Chinon,
Loches, Chenonceaux, Azay-le-Rideau, perhaps the most delicate of all
the châteaux of the Loire. And following the counsel of a sage
Fortinbras they went but a few kilometres out of their way and visited
Richelieu, the fascinating town known only to the wanderer, himself
judicious or judiciously advised, that was built by the great Cardinal
outside his palace gates for the accommodation of his court; and there
it remains now untouched by time, priceless jewel of the art of Louis
Treize, with its walls and gates and church and market square and
stately central thoroughfare of _hôtels_ for the nobles, each having its
mansard roof and _porte-cochère_ giving entrance to court and garden;
and there it remains dozing in prosperity, for around it spread the
vineyards which supply brandy to the wide, wide world.

It was here that Martin, sitting with Corinna on a blistered bench
beneath a plane tree in the little market-place, said for the first
time:

“I don’t seem to care whether I ever see England again.”

“What about getting another billet?” asked Corinna.

“England and billets are synonymous terms. The further I go the less
important does it appear that I should get one. At any rate the more
loathsome is the prospect of a return to slavery.”

“Don’t let us talk of it,” she said, fanning herself with her hat. “The
mere thought of going back turns the sun grey. Let us imagine we’re just
going on and on for ever and ever.”

“I’ve been doing so in a general way,” he replied. “I’ve been living in
a sort of intoxication; but now and then I wake up and have a lucid
interval. And then I feel that by not sitting on the doorstep of
scholastic agents I’m doing something wrong, something almost
immoral—and it gives me an unholy thrill of delight.”

“When I was a small child,” said Corinna, “I used to take the Ten
Commandments one by one and secretly break them, just to see what would
happen. Some I didn’t know how to break—the seventh for instance, which
worried me—and others referring to stealing and murder were rather too
stiff propositions. But I chipped out with a nail on a tile a little
graven image and I bowed down and worshipped it in great excitement; and
as father used to tell us that the third commandment included all kinds
of swearing, I used to bend over an old well we had in the garden and
whisper ‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn,’ until the awful joy of it made
my flesh creep. I think, Martin, you can’t be more than ten years old.”

“Why do you spoil a bit of sympathetic comprehension by that last
remark?” he asked.

“Why do you jib at truth?” she retorted.

“Truth?”

“Aren’t you like a child revelling in naughtiness—naughtiness just for
the sake of being naughty?”

“Perhaps I am,” said he. “But why do you mock at me for it?”

“I don’t think I’m mocking,” she answered more seriously. “When I said
you were only ten years old I meant to be rather affectionate. I seem to
be ever so old in experience, and you never to have grown up. You’re so
refreshing after all these people I’ve been mixed up with—mostly lots
younger really than you—who have plumbed the depths of human knowledge
and have fished up the dregs and holding them out in their hands say,
‘See what it all comes to!’ I’m dead sick of them. So to consort, as
I’ve been doing, with an ingenuous mind like yours, is a real pleasure.”

Martin rose from his seat and a tortoiseshell cat, the only other
denizen of the market-place, startled from intimate ablutions, gazed at
him, still poising a forward thrown hind leg.

“My dear Corinna,” said he, “I would beg you to believe that I’m not so
damned ingenuous as all that!”

For reply Corinna laughed out loud, whereupon the cat fled. She rose
too.

“Let us look at the church and cool this heat of controversy.”

So they visited the Louis XIII church, and continued their journey. And
the idle days passed and nothing happened of any importance. They talked
a vast deal and now and then wrangled. After his sturdy declaration at
Richelieu, Martin resented her gibes at his ingenuousness. He felt that
it was incumbent on him to play the man. At first Corinna had taken
command of their tour, ordaining routes and making contracts with
innkeepers. These functions he now usurped; the former to advantage, for
he discovered that Corinna’s splendid misreading of maps had led them
devious and unprofitable courses; the latter to the disgusted
remonstrance of Corinna, who found the charges preposterously increased.

“I don’t care,” said Martin. “I don’t mind your treating me as a
brother, but I’m not going to be treated as your little brother.”

In the freedom and adventure of their unremarkable pilgrimage, he had
begun to develop, to lose the fear of her ironical tongue, to crave some
sort of self-assertion, if not of self-expression. He also discovered in
her certain little feminine frailties which flatteringly aroused his
masculine sense of superiority. Once they were overtaken by a
thunderstorm and in the cowshed to which they had raced for shelter, she
sat fear-stricken, holding hands to ears at every clap, while Martin,
hands in pockets, stood serene at the doorway interested in the play of
the lightning. What was there to be afraid of? Far more dangerous to
cross London or Paris streets or to take a railway journey. Her
unreasoning terror was woman’s weakness, a mere matter of nerves. He
would be indulgent; so turning from the door, he put his water-proof
cape over her shoulders as she was feeling cold, and the humility with
which she accepted his services afforded him considerable gratification.
Of course, when the sun came out, she carried her head high and soon
found occasion for a gibe; but Martin rode on unheeding. These were
situations in which he was master.

Once, also, in order to avoid a drove of steers emerging from a
farm-yard gate, she had swerved violently into a ditch and twisted her
ankle. As she could neither walk nor ride, he picked her up in his arms.

“I’ll take you to the farm house.”

“You can’t possibly carry me,” she protested.

“I’ll soon show you,” said Martin, and he carried her. And although she
was none too light and his muscles strained beneath her weight, he
rejoiced in her surprised appreciation of his man’s strength.

But half way she railed, white lipped: “I suppose you’re quite certain
now you’re my big brother.”

“Perfectly certain,” said Martin.

And then he felt her grip around his neck relax and her body weigh dead
in his arms and he saw that she had fainted from the pain.

Leaving her in the care of the kind farm people, he went to retrieve the
abandoned bicycles and reflected on the occurrence. In the first place
he would not have lost his head on encountering a set of harmless
steers; secondly, had he accidentally twisted his ankle, Corinna could
not have carried him; thirdly he would not have fainted; fourthly,
mocking as her last words had been, she had confessed her inferiority;
all of which was most comforting to his self-esteem.

Then, some time afterwards, when the farmer put her into a broken-down
equipage covered with a vast hood and drawn by a gaunt horse, rustily
caparisoned, in order to drive her to the nearest inn some five
kilometres distant, Martin superintended the arrangements, leaving
Corinna not a word to say. He rode, a mounted constable, by her side,
and on arriving at the inn carried her up to her room and talked with
much authority.

Then, having passed through Poitiers and Ruffec, they came, three weeks
after their start from Paris, to Angoulême, daintiest of cities, perched
on its bastioned rocks above the Charente. And here, as it was the
penultimate stage of their journey, they sojourned a few days.

They stood on the shady rampart and gazed over the red-roofed houses
embowered in greenery at the great plain golden in harvest and drenched
in sunshine, and sighed.

“I dread Brantôme,” said Corinna. “It marks something definite. Hitherto
we have been going along vaguely, in a sort of stupefied dream. At
Brantôme we’ll have to think.”

“I’ve no doubt it will do us good,” said Martin.

“I fail to see it,” said Corinna. “We’ll just have the same old worry
over again.”

“I’m not so sure,” Martin answered. “In the first place we’re not quite
the same people as we were three weeks ago——”

“Rubbish,” said Corinna.

“I’m not the same person at any rate.”

She laughed. “Because you give yourself airs nowadays?”

“Even my giving myself airs,” he replied soberly, “denotes a change. But
it’s deeper than that—it’s difficult to explain. I feel I have a grip
on myself I hadn’t before,—and also an intensity of delight in things I
never had before. The first half hour or so of our rides in the early
dewy mornings, our rough _déjeuners_ outside the little cafés, the long,
drowsy afternoons under the trees, watching the lazy life of the
road—the wine wagons and the bullock carts and the sunburnt men and
women—and the brown, dusty children with their goats—and the quiet
evenings under the stars when we have either sat alone saying nothing or
else talked to the _patron_ of the _auberge_ and listened to his simple
philosophy of life. And then to sleep drunk with air and sunshine
between the clean coarse sheets—to sleep like a dog until the scurry of
the house wakes you at dawn—I don’t know,” he fetched up lamely. “It
has been a thrill, morning, noon and night—and my life before this was
remarkably devoid of thrills. Of course,” he added after a slight pause,
“you have had a good deal to do with it.”

“_Je te remercie infiniment, mon frère_,” said Corinna. “That is as much
as to say I’ve not been a too dull companion.”

“You’ve been a delightful companion,” he cried boyishly. “I had no idea
a girl could be so—so——” He sought for a word with his fingers.

Her eyes smiled on him and lips shewed ever so delicate a curl of irony.

“So what?”

“So companionable,” said he.

She laughed again. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

“So sensible,” said Martin.

“When a man calls a girl sensible, do you know what he means? He means
that she doesn’t expect him to fall in love with her. Now you haven’t
fallen in love with me, have you?”

Martin from his lolling position on the parapet sprang erect. “I should
never dream of such a thing!”

She laughed loud and grasped the lapels of his jacket. “Oh, Martin!” she
cried, “you’re a gem, a rare jewel. You haven’t changed one little bit.
And for Heaven’s sake don’t change!”

“If you mean that I haven’t turned from a gentleman into a cad, then I
haven’t changed,” said Martin freeing himself, “and I’m glad of it.”

She tossed her head and the laughter died from her face. “I don’t see
how you would be a cad to have fallen in love with a girl who is neither
unattractive nor a fool, and has been your sole companion from morning
to night for three weeks. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have
done it.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Martin. “I have a higher estimate of the
honour of my fellow-men.”

“If that’s your opinion of me——” she said, and turning swiftly walked
away. Martin overtook her.

“Do you want me to fall in love with you?” he asked.

She halted for a second and stamped her foot. “No. Ten thousand times
no. If you did I’d throw vitriol over you.”

She marched on. Martin followed in an obfuscated frame of mind. She led
the way round the ramparts and out into the narrow, cobble-paved streets
of the old town, past dilapidated glories of the Renaissance, where once
great nobles had entertained kings and now the proletariat hung laundry
to dry over royal salamanders and proud escutcheons, past the Maison de
Saint Simon, with its calm and time-mellowed ornament and exquisite
oriels, past things over which, but yesterday, but that morning, they
had lingered lovingly, into the Place du Mûrier. There she paused, as if
seeking her bearings.

“Where are you going?” asked Martin, somewhat breathlessly.

“To some place where I can be alone,” she flashed.

“Very well,” said he, and raised his cap and left her.

In a few seconds he heard her call.

“Martin!”

He turned. “Yes?”

“I’m anything you like to call me,” she said. “It’s not your fault. It’s
my temper. But you’ve got to learn it’s better not to turn women down
flat like that, even when they speak in jest.”

“I’m very sorry, Corinna,” he said, smiling gravely, “but when one jests
on such subjects I don’t know where I am.”

They crossed the square slowly, side by side.

“I suppose neither you nor anybody else could understand,” she said. “I
was angry with you, but if you had played the fool I should have been
angrier still.”

“Why?” he asked.

She looked straight ahead with a strained glance and for a minute or two
did not reply. At last:

“You remember Fortinbras mentioning the name of Camille Fargot?”

“Oh!” said Martin.

“That’s why,” said Corinna.

“Is he at Brantôme?” asked Martin, with brow perplexed by the memory of
the ridiculous mother.

“No, I wish to God he was.”

“Are you engaged?”

“In a sort of a way,” said Corinna, gloomily.

“I see,” said Martin.

“You don’t see a little bit in the world, she retorted with a sudden
laugh. “You’re utterly mystified.”

“I’m not,” he declared stoutly. “Why on earth shouldn’t you have a love
affair?”

“I thought you insinuated that none of your ‘fellow men’ would look at
me twice.”

He contracted his brows and regarded her steadily. “I’m beginning to get
tired of this argument,” said he.

Her eyes drooped first. “Perhaps you really have progressed a bit since
we started.”

“I was doing my best to tell you, when you switched off onto this idiot
circuit.”

Suddenly she put out her hand. “Don’t let us quarrel, Martin. What has
been joy and wonder to you has been merely an anodyne to me. I’m about
the most miserable girl in France.”

“I wish you had told me something of this before,” said Martin, “because
I’ve been feeling myself the happiest man. . . .”




                               CHAPTER IV


“THERE is six o’clock striking and those English have not yet arrived.”

Thus spake Gaspard-Marie Bigourdin, landlord of the Hôtel des Grottes, a
vast man clad in a brown holland suit and a soft straw hat with a
gigantic brim. So vast was he that his person overlapped in all
directions the Austrian bent-wood rocking-chair in which he was taking
the cool of the evening.

“They said they would come in time for dinner, _mon oncle_,” said
Félise.

She was a graceful slip of a girl, dark-eyed, refined of feature.
Fortinbras with paternal fondness, if you remember, had likened her to
the wild flowers from which Alpine honey was made. And indeed, she
suggested wild fragrance. Her brown hair was done up on the top of her
head and fastened by a comb like that of all the peasant girls of the
district; but she wore the blouse and stuff skirt of the well-to-do
bourgeoisie.

“Six o’clock is already time for dinner in Brantôme,” remarked Monsieur
Bigourdin.

“They are accustomed to the hours of London and Paris, where I’ve heard
they dine at eight or nine or any time that pleases them.”

“In London and Paris they get up at midday and go to bed at dawn. They
are coming here purposely to dis-habilitate themselves from the ways of
London and Paris. At least so your father gives me to understand. It is
a bad beginning.”

“I am longing to see them,” said Félise.

“Don’t you see enough English? Ten years ago an Englishman at Brantôme
was a curiosity. All the inhabitants, you among them, _ma petite_
Félise, used to run two kilometres to look at him. But now, with the
automobile, they are as familiar in the eyes of the good Brantômois as
truffles.”

By this simile Monsieur Bigourdin did not mean to convey the idea that
the twelve hundred inhabitants of Brantôme were all gastronomic
voluptuaries. It is true that Brantôme battens on _pâté de foie gras_;
but it is the essence of its existence, seeing that Brantôme makes it
and sells it and with pigs and dogs hunts the truffles without which
_pâté de foie gras_ would be a comestible of fat absurdity.

“But no English have been sent before by my father,” said Félise.

“That’s true,” replied Bigourdin, with a capacious smile, showing white
strong teeth.

“They are the first people—French or English, I shall have met who know
my father.”

“That’s true also,” said Bigourdin. “And they must be droll types like
your excellent father himself. _Tiens_, let me see again what he says
about them.” He searched his pockets, a process involving convulsions of
his frame which made the rocking-chair creak. “It must be in my black
jacket,” said he at last.

“I’ll get it,” said Félise, and went into the house.

Bigourdin rolled and lit a cigarette and gave himself up to comfortable
reflection. The Hôtel des Grottes was built on the slope of a rock and
the loggia or verandah on which Bigourdin was taking his ease, hung over
a miniature precipice. At the bottom ran the River Dronne encircling
most of the old-world town and crossed here and there by flashing little
bridges. Away to the northeast loomed the mountains of the Limousin
where the river has its source. The tiny place slumbered in the slanting
sunshine. The sight of Brantôme stretched out below him was inseparable
from Bigourdin’s earliest conception of the universe. In the Hôtel des
Grottes he had been born; there, save for a few years at Lyons whither
he had been sent by his mother in order to widen his views on hotel
keeping, he had spent all his life, and there he sincerely hoped to die
full of honour and good nourishment. Brantôme contented him. It belonged
to him. It was so diminutive and compact that he could take the whole of
it in at once. He was familiar with all the little tragedies and
comedies that enacted themselves beneath those red-tiled roofs. Did he
walk down the Rue de Périgueux his hand went to his hat as often as that
of the President of the Republic on his way to a review at Longchamps.
He was a man of substance and consideration, and he was just forty years
of age. And Félise adored him, and anticipated his commands.

She returned with the letter. He glanced through it, reading portions
aloud:

“I am sending you a young couple whom I have taken to my heart. They are
not relations, they are not married and they are not lovers. They are
Arcadians of the pavement, more innocent than doves, and of a ferocious
English morality. She is a painter without patrons, he a professor
without classes. They are also candidates for happiness performing their
novitiate. Later they will take the vows.”

“What does he mean? What vows?”

“Perhaps they are pious people and are going to enter the convent,”
Félise suggested.

“I can see your father—anti-clerical that he is—interesting himself in
little nuns and monks.”

“Yet he and Monsieur le Curé are good friends.”

“That is because Monsieur le Curé has much wisdom and no fear. He would
have tried to convert Voltaire himself. . . . Let us continue——”

“As they are poor and doing this out of obedience——”

“_Saprelotte!_” he laughed, “they seem to have taken the three vows
already!”

He read on:“—— they do not desire the royal suite in your Excelsior
Palace. Corinna Hastings has lived under the roofs in Paris, Martin
Overshaw over a baker’s shop in a vague quarter of London. All the
luxury they ask is to be allowed to wash themselves all over in cold
water once a day.”

“I was sure you had not written to my father about the bathroom,” said
Félise.

She was right. But the omission was odd. For Bigourdin took inordinate
pride in the newly installed bathroom and all the touring clubs of
Europe and Editors of Guide Books had heard of it and he had offered it
to the admiring inspection of half Brantôme. Monsieur le Maire himself
had visited it, and if he had only arrived girt with his tricolour sash,
Bigourdin would have jumped in and demanded an inaugural ceremony.

“I must have forgotten,” said Bigourdin. “But no matter. They can have
plenty of cold water. But if I am to feed them and lodge them and wash
them for the derisory price your father stipulates, they must learn that
six o’clock is the hour of table d’hôte at the Hôtel des Grottes. It is
only people in automobiles who can turn the place upside down, and then
they have to pay four francs for their dinner.”

He rose mountainously, and, standing, displayed the figure of a
vigorous, huge proportioned, upright man. On his face, large and ruddy,
a small black moustache struck a startling note. His eyes were brown and
kindly, his mouth too small and his chin had a deep cleft, which on a
creature of lesser scale would have been a pleasing dimple.

“_Allons dîner_,” said he.

In the patriarchal fashion, now unfortunately becoming obsolete,
Monsieur Bigourdin dined with his guests. The _salle-à-manger_—off the
loggia—was furnished with the long central table sacred to commercial
travellers, and with a few side tables for other visitors. At one of
these, in the corner between the service door and the dining-room door,
sat Monsieur Bigourdin and his niece. As they entered the room five
bagmen, with anticipatory napkins stuck cornerwise in their collars,
half rose from their chairs and bowed.

“_Bon soir, messieurs_,” said Bigourdin, and he passed with Félise to
his table.

Euphémie, the cook, fat and damp, entered with the soup tureen, followed
by a desperate-looking, crop-headed villain bearing plates. The latter,
who viewed half a mile off through a telescope might have passed for an
orthodox waiter, appeared, at close quarters, to be raimented in grease
and grime. He served the soup; first to the five commercial
travellers,—and then to Bigourdin and Félise. On Félise’s plate he left
a great thumb-mark. She looked at it with an expression of disgust.

“_Regarde, mon oncle._”

Bigourdin alluding to him as a sacred animal, asked what she could
expect. He was from Bourdeilles, a place of rocks some five miles
distant, condemned by Brantôme, chef-lieu du Canton. He summoned him.

“Polydore.”

“_Oui, monsieur._”

“You have made a mistake. You are no longer in the hands of the police.”

“_Monsieur veut dire——?_”

“I am not the Commissaire who desires to photograph your finger-prints.”

“Ah, pardon,” said Polydore, and with a soiled napkin he erased the
offending stain.

“_Sacré animal!_” repeated Bigourdin, attacking his soup. “I wonder why
I keep him.”

“I too,” said Félise.

“If his grandmother and my grandmother had not been foster-sisters——”
said Bigourdin, waving an indignant spoon.

“You would have kept him just because he is ugly,” smiled Félise. “You
would have found a reason.”

“One of these days I’ll throw him into the river,” Bigourdin declared.
“I am patient. I am slow to anger. But when I am roused I am like a
lion. Polydore,” said he serenely, as the dilapidated menial removed the
plates, “if you can’t keep your hands clean I’ll make you wear gloves.”

“People would laugh at me,” said Polydore.

“So much the better,” said Bigourdin.

The meal was nearly over when the expected guests were announced. Uncle
and niece slipped from the dining room into the little vestibule to
welcome them. An elderly man in a blouse, name Baptiste, was already
busying himself with their luggage—the knapsacks fastened to the back
of the bicycles.

“Mademoiselle, Monsieur,” said Bigourdin, “it is a great pleasure to me
to meet friends of my excellent brother-in-law. Allow me to present
Mademoiselle Félise Fortinbras” (he gave the French pronunciation), “my
niece. As dinner is not yet over and as you must be hungry, will you
give yourselves the trouble to enter the _salle-à-manger_.”

“I should like to have a wash first,” said Corinna.

Bigourdin glanced at Félise. They were beginning early.

“There is a bathroom upstairs fitted with every modern luxury.”

Corinna laughed. “I only want to tidy up a bit.”

“I will show you to your room,” said Félise, and conducted her up the
staircase beside the bureau.

“And monsieur?”

Martin went over to the little lavabo against the wall beside which hung
the usual damp towel.

“This will do quite well,” said he.

Bigourdin breathed again. The new arrivals were quite human; and they
spoke French perfectly. The men conversed a while until the two girls
descended. Bigourdin led his guests into the _salle-à-manger_ and
installed them at a table by one of the windows looking on the loggia.

“Like this,” said he, “you will be cool and also enjoy the view.”

“I think,” said Corinna, looking up at him, “you have the most delicious
little town I have seen in France.”

Bigourdin’s eyes beamed with gratification. He bowed and went back to
his unfinished meal.

“Behold over there,” said he to Félise, “a young girl of extraordinary
good sense. She is also extremely pretty; a combination which is rare in
women.”

“Yes, uncle,” said Félise demurely.

The five commercial travellers rose, and, bowing as they passed their
host, went out in search, after the manner of their kind, of coffee and
backgammon at the Café de l’Univers in the Rue de Périgueux. It is only
foreigners who linger over coffee, liqueurs and tobacco in the little
inns of France. Presently Félise went off to the bureau to make up the
day’s accounts, and Bigourdin, having smoked a thoughtful cigarette,
crossed over to Martin and Corinna. After the good hotel-keeper’s
enquiry as to their gastronomic satisfaction, he swept his hand through
his inch-high standing stubble of black hair, and addressed Martin.

“Monsieur Over—Oversh—forgive me if I cannot pronounce your name——”

“Overshaw,” said Martin distinctly.

“Auvershaud—Auverchat—_non—c’est bigrement difficile_.”

“Then call me Monsieur Martin, _à la française_.”

“And me, Mademoiselle Corinne,” laughed Corinna.

“_Voilà!_” cried Bigourdin, delighted. “Those are names familiar to
every Frenchman.” Then his brow clouded. “Well, Monsieur Martin, there
is something I would say to you. What profession does my good
brother-in-law exercise in Paris?”

Martin and Corinna exchanged glances.

“I scarcely know,” said Corinna.

“Nor I,” said Martin.

“It is on account of my niece, his daughter, that I ask. You permit me
to sit down for a moment?” He drew a chair. “You must understand at
once,” said he, “that I have nothing against Monsieur Fortinbras. I love
him like myself. But, on the other hand, I also love my little niece.
She is very simple, very innocent, and does not appreciate the
subtleties of the great world. She adores her father.”

“I can quite understand that,” said Martin, “and I am sure that he
adores her.”

“Precisely,” said Bigourdin. “That is why I would like you to have no
doubt as to the profession of my brother-in-law. You have never, by any
chance, Mademoiselle Corinne, heard him called ‘_Le Marchand de
Bonheur_’?”

“Never,” said Corinna, meeting his eyes.

“Never,” echoed Martin.

“Not even when he advised you to come here? It is for Félise that I
ask.”

“No,” said Corinna.

“Certainly not,” said Martin.

“But you have heard that he is an _avoué_?”

“An English solicitor practising in Paris. Of course,” said Martin.

“A very clever solicitor,” said Corinna.

Bigourdin smote his chest with his great hand. “I thank you with all my
heart for your understanding. You are the first persons she has met who
know her father—it is somewhat embarrassing, what I say—and she, in
her innocence, will ask you questions, which he did not foresee——”

“There will be no difficulty in answering them,” replied Martin.

“_Encore merci_,” said Bigourdin. “You must know that Félise came to us
at five years old, when my poor wife was living—she died ten years
ago—I am a widower. She is to me like my own daughter. Although,” he
added, with a smile and a touch of vanity, “I am not quite so old as
that. My sister, her mother, is older than I.”

“She is alive then?” asked Corinna.

“Certainly,” replied Bigourdin. “Did you not know that? But she has been
an invalid for many years. That is why Félise lives here instead of with
her parents. I hope, Mademoiselle, you and she will be good friends.”

“I am sure we shall,” replied Corinna.

A little while later the two wanderers sat over their coffee by the
balustrade of the covered loggia and looked out on the velvet night,
filled with contentment. They had reached their goal. Here they were to
stay until it pleased Fortinbras to come and direct them afresh.
Hitherto, their resting-places, mere stages on their journey, had lacked
the atmosphere of permanence. The still nights when they had talked
together, as now, beneath the stars, had throbbed with a certain fever,
the anticipation of the morrow’s dawn, the morrow’s adventures in
strange lands. But now they had come to their destined haven. Here they
would remain to-morrow, and the morrow after that, and for morrows
indefinite. A phase of their life had ended with curious suddenness.

As the intensity of silence falls on ears accustomed to the whirr of
machinery, so did an intensity of peace encompass their souls. And the
dim-lit valley itself brought solace. Not here stretched infinite
horizons such as those of the plains of La Beauce through which they had
passed, horizons whence sprang a whole hemisphere of stars, horizons
which embracing nothing set the heart aching for infinite things beyond,
horizons in the centre of which they stood specks of despair overwhelmed
by immensities. Here the comfortable land had taken them to its bosom.
Near enough to be felt, the vague bluish mass of the Limousin mountains
sweeping from north to east assured them of the calm protection of
eternal forces. Beyond them who need look or crave to look? To the
fevered spirit they brought in their mothering shelter all that was
needed by man for his happiness: fruitfulness of cornfields, mystery of
beech-woods faintly revealed by the rays of a young moon, a quiet town
for man’s untroubled habitation, guarded by its encircling river, rather
guessed than seen and betrayed only here and there by a streak of
quivering light. And as the distant glare of great cities—the lights of
London reflected in the heavens—in the days of wandering youths seeking
their fortunes, compelled them moth-like to the focus, so in its dreamy
microcosm did the lights of the little town, a thousand flickering
points from the outskirts and a line of long illumination marking the
main street athwart the dark mass of roofs and dissipating itself hazily
in midair, appeal to the imagination—set it wondering as to the myriad
joyous affairs of men.

In low voices they talked of Fortinbras. His spirit seemed to have
emerged from the welter of Paris into this pool of the world’s
tranquillity. In spite of his magnetic force his words had been but
words. What they were to meet at Brantôme they knew not. They scarce had
thought. What to them had been the landlord of a tiny provincial inn but
a good-natured common fellow unworthy of speculation? And what the
daughter of the seedy Paris Bohemian, snapper up of unconsidered
trifles, but a serving girl of no account, plain and redolent of the
scullery? Bigourdin’s courteous bearing and delicacy of speech had come
upon them as a surprise. So had the refinement of Félise. They had to
readjust their conception of Fortinbras. They were amazed, simple souls,
to find that he had ties in life so indubitably respectable. And he had
a wife, too, a chronic invalid, with whom he lived in the jealous
obscurity of Paris. It was pathetic. . . . They had obeyed him hardly
knowing why. At the back of their minds he had been but a charlatan of
peculiar originality—at the same time a being almost mythical, so
remote from them was his life. And now he became startlingly real. They
heard his voice soft and persuasive whispering by their side with a
touch of gentle mockery.

Then silence fell upon them; their minds drifted apart and they lost
themselves in their separate dreams.

At last, Polydore coming to remove the coffee tray and to enquire as to
their further wants, broke the spell. When he had gone, Corinna leaned
her elbow on the little iron table and asked in her direct fashion:

“What have you been thinking of, Martin?”

He drew his hand across his eyes, and it was a moment or two before he
answered.

“When I was in London,” said he, “I seem to have lived in a tiny
provincial town. Now that I come to a tiny provincial town I have an odd
feeling that the deep life of a great city is before me. That’s the best
I can do by way of explanation. Thoughts like that are a bit formless
and elusive, you know.”

“What do you think you’re going to find here?”

“I don’t know. Why not happiness in some form or other?”

“You expect a lot for five francs,” she laughed.

“And you?”

“I——?”

“Yes, what have you been thinking of?”

She pointed, and in the gloom he followed the direction of white-bloused
arm and white hand.

“Do you see that little house on the quay? The one with the lights and
the loggia. You can just get a glimpse of the interior. See? There’s a
picture and below a woman sitting at a piano. If you listen you can
catch the sound. It’s Schubert’s ‘Moment Musical.’ Well, I’ve been
wishing I were that woman with her life full of her home and husband and
children. Sheltered—protected—love all around her—nothing more to ask
of God. It was a beautiful dream.”

“You too,” said Martin, “feel about this place somewhat as I do.”

“I suppose it’s the night. It turns one into a sentimental lunatic.
Fancy living here for the rest of one’s days and concentrating one’s
soul on human stomachs.”

“What do you mean, Corinna?”

“Isn’t that what woman’s domestic life comes to? She must fill her
husband’s stomach properly or he’ll beat her or run off with somebody
else, and she must fill her babies’ stomachs properly or they’ll get
cramps and convulsions and bilious attacks and die. It was a beautiful
dream. But the reality would drive me stick, stark, staring mad.”

“My ideas of married life,” said Martin sagely, “are quite different.”

“Of course!” she cried. “You’re one of the creatures with the stomach.”

“I’ve never been aware of it,” said Martin.

“It strikes me you’re too good for this world,” said Corinna.

Martin rolled a cigarette from a brown packet of Maryland tobacco—his
supply of English ‘Woodbines’ had long since given out.

“I have my ideals as to love—and so forth,” said he.

“And so have I. ‘All for Love and the World Well Lost.’ That’s the title
of an old play, isn’t it? I can understand it. I would give my soul for
it. But it happens once in a blue moon. Meanwhile one has to live. And
connubiality and maternity in a little lost hole in Nowhere like this
aren’t life.”

“What the dickens is life?” asked Martin.

But her definition he did not hear, for the vast figure of Bigourdin
loomed in the doorway of the _salle-à-manger_.

“I wish you good night,” said he.

Martin rose and looked at his watch. “I think it’s time to go to bed.”

“So do I,” yawned Corinna.




                               CHAPTER V


THE first thing a cat does on taking up its quarters in a new home is to
make itself acquainted with its surroundings. It walks methodically with
uplifted tail and quivering nose from vast monument of sideboard to
commonplace of chair, from glittering palisade of fender to long lying
bastion of couch, creeps by defences of walls noting each comfortable
issue, prowls through lanes and squares innumerable formed by
intricacies of furniture; and having once gone through the grave
business, worries its head no more about topography and points of
interests, but settles down to serene enjoyment of such features of the
place as have appealed to its æsthetic or grosser instincts. In this
respect the average human is nearer a cat than he cares to realise. The
first hour on board a strange ship is generally devoted to an exhaustive
exploration never repeated during the rest of the voyage, and doubtless
a prisoner’s first act on being locked into his cell is to creep round
the confined space and familiarise himself with his depressing
installation.

Obeying this instinct common to cats and men, Martin and Corinna, as
soon as they had finished breakfast the next morning, wandered forth and
explored Brantôme. They visited the grey remains of the old abbey begun
by Charlemagne. But Villon writing in the 15th Century and asking “_Mais
où est le preux Charlemaigne?_” might have asked with equal sense of the
transitory nature of human things: “Where is the Abbey which the
knightly Charlemagne did piously build in Brantôme?” For the Normans
came and destroyed it and one eleventh-century tower protecting a
Romanesque Gothic church alone tells where the abbey stood. Strolling
down to the river level along the dusty, shady road, they came to the
terraced hill-side, past which the river once infinitely furious must
have torn its way. In the sheer rock were doors of human dwellings,
numbered sedately like the houses of a smug row. Above them, at the
height of a cottage roof, stretched a grassy plain, from which,
corresponding with each homestead, emerged the short stump of a chimney
emitting thin smoke from the hearth beneath. Before one of the open
doors they halted. Children were playing in the one room which made up
the entire habitation. They had the impression of a vague bed in the
gloom, a table, a chair or two, cooking utensils by the rude
chimney-piece, bunks fitted into the living rock at the sides. The
children might have been Peter Pan and Wendy and Michael and John and
the rest of the delectable company, and the chimney-stump above them
might have been replaced by Michael’s silk hat, and on the green sward
around it pirates and Red Indians might have fought undetected by the
happy denizens below.

Thus announced Corinna with lighter fancy. But Martin, serious exponent
of truth, explained that the monks, in the desolate times when their
Abbey was rebuilding had hewn out these abodes for cells and had dwelt
in them many many years; and to prove it, having conferred, before her
descent to breakfast, with the excellent Monsieur Bigourdin, he led her
to a neighbouring cave, called in the district, Les Grottes—Hence the
name of Bigourdin’s hotel—which the good monks, their pious aspiration
far exceeding their powers of artistic execution, had adorned with
grotesque and primitive carvings in bas-relief, representing the Last
Judgment and the Crucifixion.

They paused to admire the Renaissance Fontaine Médicis, set in startling
contrast against the rugged background of rock, with its graceful
balustrade and its medallion enclosing the bust of the worthy Pierre de
Bourdeille, Abbé de Brantôme, the immortal chronicler of horrific
scandals; and they crossed the Pont des Barris, and wandered by the
quays where men angled patiently for deriding fish, and women below at
the water’s edge beat their laundry with lusty arms; and so past the row
of dwellings old and new huddled together, a decaying thirteenth-century
house with its heavy corbellings and a bit of rounded turret lost in the
masonry jostling a perky modern café decked with iron balconies painted
green, until they came to the end of the bridge that commands the main
entrance to the tiny water-girt town. They plunged into it with
childlike curiosity. In the Rue de Périgueux they stood entranced before
the shop fronts of that wondrous thoroughfare alive with the traffic of
an occasional ox-cart, a rusty one-horse omnibus labelled “_Service de
Ville_” and some prehistoric automobile wheezing by, a clattering
impertinence. For there were shops in Brantôme of fair pretension—is it
not the _chef lieu du Canton_?—and you could buy _articles de Paris_ at
most three years old. And there was a Pharmacie Internationale, so
called because there you could obtain Pear’s soap and Eno’s Fruit salt;
and a draper’s where were exposed for sale frilleries which struck
Martin as marvellous, but at which Corinna curved a supercilious lip;
and a shop ambitiously blazoned behind whose plate-glass windows could
be seen a porcelain bath-tub and other adjuncts of the luxurious
bathroom, on one of which, sole occupant of the establishment, a little
pig-tailed girl was seated eating from a porringer on her knees; and
there were all kinds of other shops including one which sold cabbages
and salsifies and charcoal and petrol and picture postcards and rusty
iron and vintage eggs and guano and all manner of fantastic dirt. And
there was the Librairie de la Dordogne which smiled at you when you
asked for devotional pictures or tin-tacks, but gasped when you demanded
books. Martin and Corinna, however, demanded them with British
insensibility and marched away with an armful of cheap reprints of
French classics disinterred from a tomb beneath the counter. But before
they went, Martin asked:

“But have you nothing new? Nothing from Paris that has just appeared?”

“_Voici, monsieur_,” replied the elderly proprietress of the Library of
the Dordogne, plucking a volume from a speckled shelf at the back of the
shop. “_On trouve ça très joli._” And she handed him _Le Maître de
Forges_, by Georges Ohnet.

“But this, madam,” said Martin, examining the venerable unsold copy,
“was published in 1882.”

“I regret, monsieur,” said the lady, “we have nothing more recent.”

“I’ll buy it if it breaks me—as a curiosity,” cried Corinna, and she
counted out two francs, seventy-five centimes.

“Ninety-five,” said the bookseller—she was speckled and dusty and
colourless like the back of her library——”

“But in Paris——”

“In Paris it is different, mademoiselle. We are here _en province_.”

Corinna added the extra twopence and went out with Martin, grasping her
prize.

“This is the deliciousest place in the world,” she laughed. “Eighteen
eighty-two! Why, that’s years before I was born!”

“But what on earth are we going to do for books here?” Martin asked
anxiously.

“There is always the railway station,” said Corinna. “And if you kiss
the old lady at the bookstall nicely, she will get you anything you
want.”

“The ways of provincial France,” said Martin, “take a good deal of
finding out!”

                 *        *        *        *        *

Thus began their first day in Brantôme. It ended peacefully. Another day
passed and yet another and many more, and they lived in lotus land. Soon
after their arrival came their luggage from Paris, and they were enabled
to change the aspect of the road-worn vagabond for that of neat suburban
English folk and as such gained the approbation of the small community.
They had little else to do but continue to repeat their exploration. In
their unadventurous wanderings Félise sometimes accompanied them and
shyly spoke her halting English. To Corinna alone she could chatter with
quaint ungrammatical fluency; but in Martin’s presence she blushed
confusedly at every broken sentence. All her young life she had lived in
her mother’s land and spoken her mother’s tongue. She had a vague notion
that legally she was English, and she took mighty pride in it, but by
training and mental habit she was the little French bourgeoise, through
and through. With Martin alone, however, she abandoned all attempts at
English, and gradually her shyness disappeared. She gave the first signs
of confidence by speaking of her mother in Paris as of a dream woman of
wonderful excellencies.

“You see her often, mademoiselle?” Martin asked politely.

“Alas! no, Monsieur Martin.” She shook her head sadly and gazed into the
distance. They were idling on one of the bridges while Corinna a few
feet away made a rapid sketch.

“But your father?”

“Ah, yes. He comes four times a year. It is not that I do not love him.
_J’adore papa._ Every one does. You cannot help it. But it is not the
same thing. A mother——”

“I know, mademoiselle,” said Martin. “My mother died a few months ago.”

She looked at him with quick tenderness. “That must have caused you much
pain.”

“Yes, mademoiselle,” said Martin simply, and he smiled for the first
time into her eyes, realising quite suddenly that beneath them lay deep
wells of sympathy and understanding. “Perhaps one of these days you will
let me talk to you about her,” he added.

She flushed. “Why, yes. Talking relieves the heart.” She used the French
word “_soulager_”—that word of deep-mouthed comfort.

“It does. And your mother, Mademoiselle Félise?”

“She cannot walk,” she sighed. “All these years she has lain on her
bed—ever since I left her when I was quite little. So you see, she
cannot come to see me.”

“But you might go to Paris.”

“We do not travel much in Brantôme,” replied Félise.

“Then you have not seen her——”

“No. But I remember her. She was so beautiful and so tender—she had
chestnut hair. My father says she has not changed at all. And she writes
to me every week, Monsieur Martin. And there she lies day after day,
always suffering, but always sweet and patient and never complaining.
She is an angel.” After a little pause, she raised her face to him—“But
here am I talking of my mother, when you asked me to let you talk of
yours.”

So Martin then and on many occasions afterwards spoke to her of one that
was dead more intimately than he could speak to Corinna, who seemed
impatient of the expression of simple emotions. Corinna he would never
have allowed to see tears come into his eyes; but with Félise it did not
matter. Her own eyes filled too in sympathy. And this was the beginning
of a quiet understanding between them. Perhaps it might have been the
beginning of something deeper on Martin’s side had not Bigourdin taken
an early opportunity of expounding certain matrimonial schemes of his
own with regard to Félise. It had all been arranged, said he, many years
ago. His good neighbour, Monsieur Viriot, _marchand de vins en
gros_—oh, a man everything there was of the most solid, had an only
son; and he, Bigourdin, had an only niece for whom he had set apart a
substantial dowry. A hundred thousand francs. There were not many girls
in Brantôme who could hide as much as that in their bridal veils. It was
the most natural thing in the world that Lucien should marry
Félise—nay, more, an ordinance of the _bon Dieu_. Lucien had been
absent some time doing his military service. That would soon be over. He
would enter his father’s business. The formal demand in marriage would
be made and they would celebrate the _fiançailles_ before the end of the
year.

“Does Mademoiselle Félise care for Lucien?” asked Martin.

Bigourdin shrugged his mountainous shoulders.

“He does not displease her. What more do we want? She is a good little
girl, and knows that she can entrust her happiness to my hands. And
Lucien is a capital fellow. They will be very happy.”

Thus he warned a sensitive Martin off philandering paths, and, with his
French adroitness, separated youth and maiden as much as possible. And
this was not difficult. You see Félise acted as manageress in the Hôtel
des Grottes, and her activities were innumerable. There was the kitchen
to be ruled, an eye to be kept on the handle of the basket—if it danced
too much, according to the French phrase, the cook was exceeding her
commission of a sou in the franc; there were the bedrooms and clean dry
linen to be seen to, and the doings of Polydore, the unclean, and of
Baptiste, the haphazard, to be watched; there were daily bills to be
made out, accounts to be balanced, impatient bagmen to be cajoled or
rebuked; orders for _pâté de foie gras_ and truffles to be
despatched—the Hôtel des Grottes had a famous manufactory of these
delights and during autumn and winter supported a hive of workers and
the shelves in the cool store-house were filled with appetising jars;
and then the laundry and the mending and the polishing of the famous
bathroom—_ma foi_, there was enough to keep one small manageress busy.
Like a _bon hôtelier_, Bigourdin himself supervised all these important
matters, ordering and controlling, as an administrator, but Félise was
the executive. And like an obedient and happy little executive Félise
did not notice a subtle increase in her duties. Nor did Martin, honest
soul, in whose eyes a betrothed maiden was as sacred as a married woman,
remark any change in facilities of intercourse. For him she flashed, a
gracious figure, across the half real tapestry of his present life. A
kindly word, a smiling glance, on passing, sufficed for the maintenance
of his pleasant understanding with Félise. For feminine companionship of
a stimulating kind, there was always Corinna. For masculine society he
had Bigourdin and his cronies of the Café de l’Univers, to whom he was
introduced in his professorial dignity.

It was there, at the café table, in the midst of the notables of the
little town, that he learned many things either undreamed of or uncared
for during his narrow life at Margett’s Universal College. It startled
him to find himself in the company of men passionately patriotic.
Hitherto, as an Englishman living remote from Continental thought, he
had taken patriotism for granted; his interest in politics had been mild
and parochial; he had adopted a vague conservative outlook due, most
likely, to antipathy to his democratic Swiss relatives, who sent eight
pounds to the relief of his impoverished mother, and to a nervous
shrinking from democracy in general as represented by his pupils. But in
this backwater of the world he encountered a political spirit intensely
alive. Vital principles formed the subject of easy, yet stern
discussion. Beneath the calm of peaceful commerce and agriculture he
felt the pulse of France throbbing in fierce determination to maintain
her national existence. Every man had been a soldier; some of the elders
had fought in 1870, and those who had grown up sons were the fathers of
soldiers. Martin realised that whereas in England, in time of peace, the
private soldier was tolerated as a picturesque, good-natured,
harum-scarum sort of fellow, the _picu-piou_ in France was an object of
universal affection. The army was woven into the whole web of French
life; it permeated the whole of French thought; it coloured the whole of
French sentiment. It was not a machine of blood and iron, as in Germany,
but the soul sacrifice of a nation. “_Vive la France!_” meant “_Vive
l’armée!_” And that mere expression “_Vive la France!_”—how often had
he heard it during his short sojourn in the country. He cudgelled his
brains to remember when he had heard a corresponding cry in England. It
seemed to him that there was none. There was no need for one. England
would live as long as the sea girded her shores and Britannia ruled the
waves. We need not trouble our English heads any further. But in France
conditions are different. From the Vosges to the Bay of Biscay, from
Calais to the Mediterranean, every stroke on a Krupp anvil reverberated
through France.

“_Ça vient_—when no one knows,” said the comfortable citizens, “but it
is coming sooner or later, and then we shed the last drop of our blood.
We are prepared. We have learned our lesson. There will never be another
Sedan.”

They said it soberly, like men whose eyes were set on an implacable foe.
And Martin knew that through the length and breadth of the land
comfortable citizens held the same sober and stern discourse. Every inch
of French soil was dear to these men, and to guard it they would shed
the last drop of their blood.

Corinna informed of these conversations said lightly:

“You haven’t lived among them as long as I have. It’s just their Gallic
way of talking.”

But Martin knew better. His horizons were expanding. He began, too, to
conceive a curious love for a country so earnest, whose speech was the
first that he had spoken. He had a vague impression that he was learning
to live a corporate, instead of an individual life. When he tried to
interpret these feelings to Corinna she cried out upon him:

“To hear you talk one would think you hadn’t any English blood. Isn’t
England good enough for you?”

“It’s because I’m beginning to understand France that I’m beginning to
understand England,” he replied in his grave way.

“Like practising on the maid before you dare make love to the mistress.”

“Very possibly,” said he, digging the blunt end of his fork into the
coarse salt—they were at lunch. “To put it another way—if you learn
Latin you learn the structure of all languages.”

“What a regular schoolmaster’s simile,” she remarked, scornfully.

He flushed. “I’m no longer a schoolmaster,” said he.

“Since when?”

“Since I came here.”

“Do you mean to say you’re not going back to it?”

He paused before replying to the sudden question which accident had
occasioned. To himself he had put it many times of late, but hitherto
had evaded a definite answer. Now, with a thrill, he looked at her.

“Never,” said he.

She laid down her knife and fork and stared at him. Was he, after all,
taking this fool journey seriously? To her it had been a reckless
adventure, a stolen trip into lotus-land, with the knowledge of an
inevitable return to common earth eating into her heart. Even now she
dreaded to ask how much of her twenty pounds had been spent. But she
knew that the day of doom was approaching. She could not live without
money. Neither could he.

“What do you propose to do for a living?”

“God knows,” said he. “I don’t. Anyhow, the squirrel has escaped from
his cage, and he’s not going back to it.”

“What’s he going to do? Sit on a tree and eat nuts? Oh, my dear Martin!”

“There are worse fates,” he replied, answering her laughter with a
smile. “At any rate, he has God’s free universe all around him.”

“That’s all very well; but analogies are futile. You aren’t a squirrel
and you can’t live on acorns and east wind. You must live on bread and
beef. How are you going to get them?”

“I’ll get them somehow,” said he. “I’m waiting for Fortinbras.”

To this determination had he come after three weeks residence in
Brantôme. The poor-spirited drudge had drunk of the waters of life and
was a drudge no more. He had passed into another world. Far remote, as
down the clouded vista of long memory, he saw the bare, hopeless class
room and the pale, pinched faces of the students. All that belonged to a
vague past. It had no concern with the present or the future. How he had
arrived at this state of being he could not tell. The change had been
wrought little by little, day by day. The ten years of his servitude had
been blocked out. He had the thrilling sense of starting life afresh at
thirty, as he had started it, a boy of twenty. There was so much more in
the open world than he had dreamed of. If the worst came to the worst he
could go forth into it, knapsack on shoulders and seek his fortune; and
every step he took would carry him further from Margett’s Universal
College.

“When is that fraud of a _marchand de bonheur_ coming?” Corinna cried
impatiently.

She put the question to Bigourdin the next time she met him alone—which
was after the meal, on the _terrasse_. He could not tell. Perhaps
to-night, to-morrow, the week after next. Fortinbras came and went like
the wind, without warning. Did Mademoiselle Corinne desire his arrival
so much?

“I should like to see him here before I go.”

“Before you go? You are leaving us, Mademoiselle?”

She laughed at his look of dismay. “I can’t stay idling here for ever.”

“But you have been here no time at all,” said he. “Just a little bird
that comes and perches on this balustrade, looks this side and that side
out of its bright eyes and then flies away.”

“_Oui, c’est comme ça_,” said Corinna.

“_Voilà!_” He sighed and turned to throw his broad-brimmed hat on a
neighbouring table. “That’s the worst of our infamous trade of hotel
keeping. You meet sincere and candid souls whose friendship you crave,
but before you have time to win it, away they go like the little bird,
for ever and ever out of your life.”

“But you have won my friendship, Monsieur Bigourdin,” said Corinna, with
rising colour.

“You are very gracious, Mademoiselle Corinne. But why take it from me as
soon as it is given?”

“I don’t,” she retorted. “I shall always remember you and your
kindness.”

“_Aïe, aïe!_ You know our saying: _Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse_.
It is the way of the world, the way of humanity. We say that we will
remember—but other things come to dim memory, to blunt
sentiment—_enfin_, we forget, not because we want to, but because we
must.”

“If we must,” laughed Corinna, “you’ll forget our friendship too. So
we’ll be quits.”

“Never, mademoiselle,” he cried illogically. “Your friendship will
always be precious to me. You came into this dull house with your youth,
your freshness, your wit and your charm—different from the ordinary
hotel guest you have joined my little intimate family life—Félise, for
example adores you—were it not for her mother, you would be her ideal.
And I——”

“And you, Monsieur Bigourdin?”

Her voice had the flat sound of a wooden mallet striking a peg. The huge
man bowed with considerable dignity.

“I shall miss terribly all that you have brought into this house,
Mademoiselle.”

Corinna relaxed into a mocking smile.

“Fortinbras warned us that you were a poet, Monsieur Bigourdin.”

“Every honest man whose eyes can see the beautiful things of life must
be a poet of a kind. It is not necessary to scribble verses.”

“But do you? Do you write verse?”

“_Jamais de la vie_” he declared stoutly. “An _hôtelier_ like me count
syllables on his fingers? _Ah, non!_ I can make excellent pâté de foie
gras—no one better in Périgord—but I should make execrable verses.
_Ah, voyons donc!_”

He laughed lustily and Corinna laughed too; and Martin, appearing on the
verandah, asked and learned the reason of their mirth. After a word or
two their host left them fanning himself with his great hat.

“What on earth brought you here?” said Corinna. “I was having the
flirtation of my life.”




                               CHAPTER VI


A WEEK passed and Fortinbras did not come. Corinna wrote to him. He
replied:

“Have patience, cultivate Martin’s sense of humour and make Félise give
you lessons in domestic economy. The cook might instruct you in the
various processes whereby eggs are rendered edible and you might also
learn how to launder clothes without disaster to flesh or linen. I am
afraid you are wasting your time. Remember you’re not like Martin who
needs this rest to get his soul into proper condition. I will come
whither my heart draws me—for I yearn to see my little Félise—as soon
as I am allowed to do so by my manifold avocations and
responsibilities.”

Corinna, in a fury, handed the letter to Martin and asked him what he
thought of it. He replied that, in his opinion, Fortinbras gave
excellent advice. Corinna declared Fortinbras to be an overbearing and
sarcastic pig and rated Martin for standing by and seeing her insulted.

“You gave him five francs for putting you on the road to happiness,” he
replied. “He has done his best, and seems to keep on doing it—without
extra charge. I think you ought to be grateful. His suggestions are full
of sense.”

“Confound his suggestions,” cried Corinna.

“I think our friend Bigourdin would be pleased if you followed them.”

“I don’t see what our friend Bigourdin has to do with it.”

“He would give you all the help he could. A Frenchman likes a woman to
know how to do things.”

“I won’t wash clothes,” said Corinna defiantly.

“You might rise superior to a brand of soap,” retorted Martin.

She turned her back on him and went her way. His gross sense of humour
required no cultivation. It was a poisonous weed. And what did he mean
by dragging in Bigourdin? She would never speak to Martin again, after
his disgraceful innuendo. It took the flavour from the sympathetic
relations that had been set up between her host and herself during the
past week. A twinge of conscience exacerbated her anger against Martin.
She certainly had encouraged Bigourdin to fuller professions of
friendship than is usual between landlord and guest. The fresh flowers
he had laid by her plate at every meal she wore in her dress. Only the
night before she had ever so delicately hinted that Martin was capable
of visiting the Café de l’Univers without a bear-leader, and the huge
and poetical man had sat with her in the moonlight and in terms of
picturesque philosophy had exposed to her the barren loneliness of his
soul. She had enjoyed the evening prodigiously, and was looking forward
to other evenings equally exhilarating. Now Martin had spoiled it all.
She called Martin names that would have shocked Mrs. Hastings and caused
her father to mention her specially during family prayers.

Then she defended herself proudly. Who was there to talk to in that
Nowhere of a place? The conversation of Félise stimulated as much as
that of a ten-year-old child. Martin she had sucked dry as a bone during
their seven weeks companionship. He of course could hob-nob with men at
the café. He also had picked up a curious assortment of acquaintance,
male and female in the town, and had acquired a knack of conversing with
them. A day or two ago she had come upon him in one of the rock
dwellings discussing politics with a desperate villain who worked in the
freestone quarries, while the frowsy mistress of the house lavished on
him smiles and the horrible grey wine of the country which he drank out
of a bowl. She, Corinna, had no café; nor could she find anything in
common with desperadoes of quarrymen and their frowsy wives; to enter
their houses savoured of district visiting, a philanthropic practice
which she abhorred with all the abhorrence of a parson’s rebellious
daughter. Where was she to look for satisfying human intercourse? She
knew enough of the French middle-class manners and customs to be aware
that she might live in Brantôme a thousand years before one lady would
call on her—a mere question of social code as to which she had no cause
for resentment. But she craved the stimulus, the give-and-take of talk,
such as had been her daily food in Paris for the last three years. Huge,
not at all commonplace, but somewhat of an enigma, Bigourdin lumbered on
to her horizon. His first-hand knowledge of men and things was confined
to Brantôme and Lyons. But with that knowledge he had pierced deep and
wide. He had read little but astonishingly. He had a grasp of European,
even of English internal affairs that disconcerted Corinna, who airily
set out to expound to him the elements of world politics. Two phases of
French poetry formed an essential factor of his intellectual life—the
Fifteenth Century Amorists, and the later romanticists. He could quote
Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Théodore de Banville by the mile. When
stirred he had in his voice disquieting tones. He recited the “_Chanson
de Fortunio_” and the “_Chanson de Barberine_” in the moonlight, and
Corinna caught her breath and felt a shiver down her spine. It was a new
sensation for Corinna to feel shivers down her spine at the sound of a
man’s voice.

                 _Mais j’aime trop pour que je die_
                    _Qui j’ose aimer,_

                 _Et je veux mourir pour ma mie_
                    _Sans la nommer._

She went to bed with the words singing in her ears like music.

Altogether it was much more comforting to talk to Bigourdin than to take
lessons in household management from Félise.

At last the day came when she plucked up courage and demanded of Martin
an account of his stewardship. He tried to evade the task by flourishing
in her face a bundle of notes. They had heaps, said he, to go on with.
But Corinna pressed her enquiry with feminine insistence. Had he kept
any memoranda of expenditure? Of course methodical Martin had done so.
Where was it? Reluctantly he drew a soiled note book from his pocket and
side by side at a little table on the verandah, her fair hair brushing
his dark cheek, they added up the figures and apportioned and divided
and eventually struck the balance. Corinna was one franc seventy-five
centimes in Martin’s debt. She had not one penny in the world. She had
one franc seventy-five centimes less than nothing. She rose
white-lipped.

“You ought to have told me.”

“Why?” asked Martin. “There’s plenty of money in the common stock.”

“There never was any such thing as a common stock.”

“I thought there was,” said Martin. “I thought we had arranged it with
Fortinbras. Anyhow, there’s one now.”

“There isn’t,” she cried indignantly. “Do you suppose I’m going to live
on your money? What kind of a girl do you take me for?”

“An unconventional one,” said Martin.

“But not dishonourable. To assert my freedom and live by myself in Paris
and run about France alone with you may be unconventional. But for a
girl to accept support from a man when—when she gives him nothing in
return—is a different thing altogether.”

They argued for some time, and at the end of the argument neither was
convinced. She upbraided. Martin ought to have struck a daily balance.
He continued to put forward the plea of the common stock to which she
had apparently given her tacit agreement.

“Well, well,” said Martin at last, “there’s no dishonour in a loan. You
can give me an I.O.U. That’s a legal document.”

“But how do you suppose I am ever going to pay you?”

“That, my dear Corinna,” said he, “is a matter which doesn’t interest me
in the least.”

She turned on him furiously. “Do you know what you are? Would you like
me to tell you? You’re the most utterly selfish man in the wide, wide
world.”

She flung away through the empty _salle-à-manger_, and left Martin
questioning the eternal hills of the Limousin. “I offer,” said he, in
effect, “to share my last penny, in all honour and comradeship, with a
young person of the opposite sex whom I have always treated with the
utmost delicacy, who is absolutely nothing to me, who would scoff at the
idea of marrying me and whom I would no more think of marrying than a
Fifth of November box of fireworks, who has heaped on me all sorts of
contumelious epithets—I offer, I repeat, to divide my last crust with
her, and she calls me selfish. Eternal hills, resolve the problem.” But
the hills enfolded themselves majestically in their autumn purple and
deigned no answer to the little questionings of man.

Unsuccessful he strolled through the dining-room and vestibule and at
the hotel entrance came upon the ramshackle hotel omnibus and the grey,
raw-boned omnibus horse standing unattended and forlorn. To pass the
time the latter shivered occasionally in order to jingle the bells on
his collar and scatter the magenta fly-whisk hung between his eyes.
Martin went up and patted his soft muzzle and put to him the riddle. But
the old horse, who naturally thought that these overtures heralded a
supply of bodily sustenance, and, in good faith, had essayed an
expectant nibble, at last jerked his head indignantly and refused to
concern himself with such insane speculation. Martin was struck by the
indifferent attitude of hills and horses towards the queer vagaries of
the human female.

Then from the doorway sallied forth a flushed Corinna booted and spurred
for adventure. I need not tell you that a woman’s boots and spurs are on
her head and not on her feet. Corinna wore the little hat with the
defiant pheasant feather which she had not put on since her last night
in Paris. A spot of red burned angrily on each cheek. Martin accustomed
to ask: “Where are you going?” was on the point of putting the
mechanical question when he was checked by one of her hard glances.
Obviously she would have nothing to do with him. She passed him by and
walked down the hill at a brisk pace. Martin watched her retreating
figure until a turn in the road hid it from his view and then retiring
into the house, went up to his room and buried himself in Montaigne, to
which genial author, it may be remembered, he had been recommended by
Fortinbras.

They did not meet till dinner, when she greeted him, all smiles. She
apologised for wayward temper and graciously offered, should she need
money, to accept a small loan for a short period. What her errand had
been when she set forth in her defiant hat she did not inform him. He
shrewdly surmised she had gone to the _Postes et Télégraphes_ in the
town; but he was within a million miles of guessing that she had
despatched a telegram to Bordeaux.

The meal begun under these fair auspices was enlivened by a final act of
depravity on the part of the deboshed waiter, Polydore. He had of late
given more than usual dissatisfaction, to the point of being replaced by
the chambermaid and Félise when fashionable motordom halted at the Hôtel
des Grottes. Once Martin himself, beholding through the _terrasse_
doorway Félise struggling around a large party of belated and hungry
Americans, came to her assistance and lent an amused hand. The guests
taking him for a deputy landlord, explained their needs in bad French.
Félise thanked him in blushing confusion, while Bigourdin, as he had
done a hundred times before, gave a week’s notice to Polydore, who,
acting scullion, was breaking plates and dishes with drunken
persistency. And now the truth is out as regards Polydore. With the sins
of sloth, ignorance, and uncleanliness he combined the sin of
drunkenness. Polydore was nearly always fuddled. Yet because of the ties
of blood, the foster-sisterdom of respective grandmothers, Bigourdin had
submitted to his inefficiency. Once more he revoked the edict of
dismissal. Once more Polydore kept sober for a few days. Then once more
he backslided. And he backslided irretrievably this night at dinner.

All went fairly well at first. It was a slack night. Only three
_commis-voyageurs_ sat at the long table, and thus there were only seven
persons on whom to attend. It is true that his eye was somewhat glazed
and his hand somewhat unsteady; but under the awful searchlight of
Bigourdin’s glance, he nerved himself to his task. Soup and fish had
been served satisfactorily; then came a long, long wait. Presently
Polydore reeled in. As he passed by Bigourdin’s table he held up the
finger of a dirty hand bound with a dripping bloody rag.

“_Pardon, je me suis coupé le doigt_,” he announced thickly and made a
bee-line to Corinna, with the ostensible purpose of removing her plate.
But just as he reached her, the extra dram that he must have taken to
fortify himself against the shock of his wound, took full effect. He
staggered, and in order to save himself clutched wildly at Corinna,
leaving on her bare neck his disgusting sanguine imprint. She uttered a
sharp cry and simultaneously Bigourdin uttered a roar and, rushing
across the room, in a second had picked up the unhappy varlet in his
giant arms.

“_Ah, cochon!_”—he called him the most dreadful names, shaking him as
Alice shook the Red Queen. “_En voilà la fin!_ I will teach you to dare
to spread your infamous blood. I will break your bones. I will crush
your skull, so that you’ll never set foot here again. _Ah! triple
cochon!_”

A flaming picture of gigantic wrath, he swept with him to the door,
whence he hurled him bodily forth. There was a dull thud. And that, as
far as the three commercial travellers (standing agape with their
napkins at their throats), Corinna, Martin, Félise and Bigourdin were
concerned, was the end of Polydore. Bigourdin, with an agility
surprising in so huge a man, was in an instant by Corinna’s side with
finger bowl full of water and a clean napkin.

“Mademoiselle, that such a bestial personage should have dared to soil
your purity with his uncleanness makes me mad, makes me capable of
assassinating him. Permit me to remove his abominable contamination.”

“Let me do it, _mon oncle_,” said Félise, who had run across.

But Bigourdin waved her aside, and with reverent touch, as though she
were a goddess, he cleansed Corinna. She underwent the operation in her
cool way and when it was over smiled her thanks at Bigourdin.

“Mademoiselle Corinna,” he cried, “what can I say to you? What can I do
for you? How can I repair such an outrage as you have suffered in my
house? You only have to command and everything I have is yours.
Command—insist—ordain.” He spread his arms wide, an agony of appeal in
his eyes.

Martin, who had started to his feet, in order to save Corinna from the
grip of the intoxicated Polydore, but had been anticipated by the
impetuous rush of Bigourdin, gazed for a moment or two at his host and
then gasped, as his vision pierced into the huge man’s soul. This
perfervid declaration was not the good innkeeper’s apology for a
waiter’s disgusting behaviour. It was the blazing indignation of a real
man at the desecration inflicted by another on the body of the woman he
loved. A shiver of comprehension of things he had never comprehended
before swept through Martin from head to foot. He knew with absolute
knowledge that should she rise and, with a nod of her head, invite
Bigourdin to follow her to the verandah, she could be mistress absolute
of Bigourdin’s destiny. He held his breath, for the first time in his
dull life conscious of the meaning of love of women, conscious of
eternal drama. He looked at Corinna smiling with ironic curl of lip up
at the impassioned man. And he had an almost physical feeling within him
as though his heart sank like a stone. But a week ago she had declared,
with a vulgarity of which he had not thought her capable, that she had
had the flirtation of her life with Bigourdin. She must have known then,
she must know now that the man was in soul-strung earnest. What was her
attitude to the major things of Life? His brain worked swiftly. If, in
her middle-class English snobbery, she despised the French innkeeper,
why did she admit him to her social plane on which alone flirtation—he
had a sensitive gentleman’s horror of the word—was possible? If she
accepted him as a social equal, recognising in him, as he, Martin,
recognised, all that was vital in modern France—if she accepted him,
woman accepting man, why that infernal smile on her pretty face? I must
give you to understand that Martin knew nothing whatever about women.
His ignorance placed him in this dilemma. He watched Corinna’s lips
eager to hear what words would issue from them.

She said coolly: “So long as this really is the end of Polydore, honour
is satisfied.”

Bigourdin stiffened under her gaze, and collecting himself, bowed
formally.

“As to that, Mademoiselle,” said he, “I give you my absolute assurance.”
He turned to the commercial travellers. “Messieurs, I ask your pardon.
You will not have to wait any longer. _Viens, Félise._”

And landlord and niece took Polydore’s place for the rest of the meal.

“Bigourdin’s a splendid fellow,” said Martin.

Elbow on table she held a morsel of bread to her lips. “He waits so
well, doesn’t he?” she said.

He shrugged his shoulders. What was the use of arguing with a being with
totally different standards and conception of values? Some little wisdom
he was beginning to acquire. He spent the evening at the Café de
Périgueux with Bigourdin, who, with an unwonted cloud on his brow,
abused the Government in _atrabiliar_ terms.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The next morning Corinna, attired in her daintiest, wandered off to
sketch lonely and demure. At _déjeuner_ she made a pretence of eating
and entertained Martin with uninteresting and (to him) unintelligible
criticism of Parisian actors. Bigourdin passed a moment or two of
professional commonplace at the table and retired. An inexperienced
young woman of the town, with the chambermaid’s assistance, replaced the
villain of last night’s tragedy. Corinna continued her hectic
conversation and took little account of Martin’s casual remarks. A mind
even less subtle than her companion’s would have assigned some nervous
disturbance as a reason for such feverish behaviour. But of what nature
the disturbance? Vaguely he associated it with the Sundayfied raiment.
Could it be that she intended, without drum or trumpet, to fly from
Brantôme?

“By the way, Martin,” she said suddenly, when the last wizened grape had
been eaten, “have you ever taken those snapshots of the Château at
Bourdeilles?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” said he.

“You promised to get them for me.”

“I’ll go over with my camera one of these days,” said Martin.

“That means _aux Kalendes Grecques_. Why not this beautiful afternoon?”

“If you’ll come with me.”

“I’ve rather a headache—or I would,” said Corinna. “As it is, I think
I’ll have to lie down. But you go. It would do you good.”

“Aha!” thought Martin astutely, “she wants to get rid of me, so that she
can escape by the afternoon train to Paris.” Aloud he said, “I’ll go
to-morrow.”

“Why not to-day?”

“I don’t feel like it,” said he.

Not for the first time she struck an obstinate seam in Martin. He turned
a deaf ear both to her cajolings and her reproaches. To some degree he
felt himself responsible for Corinna, as a man must do who acts as
escort or what you will to an attractive and penniless young woman. If
she had decided to rush home to England, it was certainly his duty to
make commodious arrangements for her journey.

“I’m going to loaf about to-day,” he announced.

“Like the selfish pig you always are,” said Corinna.

“_Comme tu veux_,” said Martin cheerfully.

“Can’t you see I want you to go away for the afternoon?” said Corinna
angrily.

“Any idiot could see that,” replied Martin.

“Then why don’t you?”

“I want to keep an eye on you.”

She flushed scarlet and rose from the table. “All right. Spy as much as
you like. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Once more she left him with a dramatic whirl of skirts. The procedure
having become monotonous impressed Martin less than on previous
occasions. He even smiled at the conscious smile of sagacity. There was
something up, he reflected, with Corinna, or he would eat his hat. She
contemplated some idiotic action. Of that there could be no doubt. It
behoved him, as the only protector she had in the world, to mount guard.
He mounted guard, therefore, over cigarette and coffee in the vestibule
of the hotel, and for some time held entertaining converse with
Bigourdin on the decadence of Germanic culture, and while Martin was
expounding the futile vulgarity of the spectacle of Sumurum which, on
one of his rare visits to places of amusement, he had witnessed in
London, the word of Corinna’s enigma was suddenly and dustily flashed
upon him.

From a dusty two-seater car that drew up noisily at the door, sprang a
dusty youth with a reddish face and a little black moustache.

“Is Mademoiselle Hastings in the hotel?” he asked.

“Yes, monsieur,” said Bigourdin.

“Will you kindly let her know that I am here—Monsieur Camille Fargot?”

“Monsieur Fargot,” repeated Bigourdin.

“Mademoiselle Hastings expects me,” said the young man.

“_Bien, monsieur_,” said Bigourdin. He retired, his duty as a good
innkeeper compelling him.

Martin, comfortable in his cane chair, lit another cigarette and with
dispassionate criticism inspected Monsieur Camille Fargot, who stood in
the doorway, his back to the vestibule, frowning resentfully on the
little car.

This then was the word of Corinna’s enigma. To summon him by telegraph
had been the object of her sortie in the hat with the pheasant’s plume.
To welcome him had been the reason of her festive garb. In order to hold
unembarrassed converse she had tried to send Martin away to photograph
Bourdeilles. This then was the famous student in medicine who was
supposed to have won Corinna’s heart. Martin who had of late added
mightily to his collection of remarkable men thought him as commonplace
a young student as he had encountered since the far off days of
Margett’s Universal College. He seemed an indeterminate, fretful person,
the kind of male over whom Corinna in her domineering way would gallop
and re-gallop until she had trampled the breath out of him. Being a
kindly soul, he began to feel sorry for Camille Fargot. He was tempted
to go up to the young fellow, lay a hand on his shoulder and say: “If
you want to lead a happy married life, my dear chap, drive straight back
to Bordeaux and marry somebody else.” By doing so, he would indubitably
contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human
beings and would rank among the philanthropists of his generation. But
Martin still retained much of his timidity and he also had a comradely
feeling towards Corinna. If she regarded this dusty and undistinguished
young gentleman as the rock of her salvation, who was he, powerless
himself to indicate any other rock of any kind, to offer objection?

So realising the absurdity of standing on guard against so insignificant
a danger as Monsieur Camille Fargot, student in medicine, and not
desiring to disconcert Corinna by his presence should she descend to the
vestibule to meet her lover, he courteously begged pardon of the
frowning young man who blocked the doorway, and, passing by him, walked
meditatively down the road.




                              CHAPTER VII


WHEN Martin returned to the hotel a couple of hours later, he found that
Monsieur Camille Fargot had departed, and that Corinna had entrenched
herself in her room. On the wane of the afternoon she sent word to any
whom it might concern that, not being hungry, she would not come down
for dinner. To Félise, anxious concerning her health, she denied access.
Offers of comforting nourishment on a tray made on the outer side of the
closed door she curtly declined. Mystery enveloped the visit of Camille
Fargot.

Martin learned from a perturbed Bigourdin that she had descended
immediately after he had left the vestibule and had led Fargot at once
into the _Salon de Lecture_, a moth-eaten and fusty cubby-hole in which
commercial travellers who found morbid pleasure in the early stages of
asphyxiation sometimes wrote their letters. There they had remained for
some time, at the end of which Monsieur Fargot—“_il avait l’air
hébété_,” according to Baptiste, a witness of his exit—had issued forth
alone and jumped into his car and sped away, presumably to Bordeaux.
After a moment or two Mademoiselle Corinne, in her turn, had emerged
from the _Salon de Lecture_ and looking very haughty with her pretty
head in the air—(again Baptiste)—had mounted to her apartment.

Those were the bare facts. Bigourdin narrated them simply, in order to
account for Corinna’s non-appearance at dinner. With admirable taste he
forbore to question Martin as to the relations between the lady and her
visitor. Nor did Martin enlighten him. An art-student in Paris like
Corinna must necessarily have a host of friends. What more natural than
that one, finding himself in her neighbourhood, should make a passing
call. Such was the tacit convention between Martin and Bigourdin. But
the breast of each harboured the conviction that the visit had not been
a success of cordiality. Bigourdin exhibited brighter spirits that night
at the Café de l’Univers. He played his game of backgammon with Monsieur
le Maire and beat him exultantly. Around him the coterie cursed the
Germans for forcing the three years’ service on France. He paused, arm
uplifted in the act of throwing the dice.

“Never mind. They seek it—they will get it. _Vous l’avez voulu, Georges
Dandin._ The _bon Dieu_ is on our side, just as He is on mine in this
battle here. _Vlan!_”

The dice rattled out of the box and they showed the number that declared
him the winner. A great shout arose. The honest burgesses cried miracle.
_Voyons_, it was a sign from heaven to France. “_In hoc signo vinces!_”
cried a professor at the _Ecole Normale_, and the sober company had
another round of bocks to celebrate the augury.

Martin and Bigourdin walked home through the narrow, silent streets and
over the bridges. There was a high wind sharpened by a breath of autumn
which ruffled the dim surface of the water; and overhead a rack of cloud
scudded athwart the stars. A light or two far up the gloomy scaur shewed
the Hôtel des Grottes. Bigourdin waved his hand in the darkness.

“It is beautiful, all this.”

Martin assented and buttoned up his overcoat.

“It is beautiful to me,” said Bigourdin, “because it is my own country.
I was born and bred here and my forefathers before me. It is part of me
like my legs and my arms. I don’t say that I am beautiful myself,” he
added, with a laugh, his French wit seeing whither logic would lead him.
“But you understand.”

“Yes,” said Martin. “I can understand in a way. But I have no little
corner of a country that I can call my own. I’m not the son of any
soil.”

“Périgord is very fruitful and motherly. She will adopt you,” laughed
Bigourdin.

“But I am English of the English,” replied Martin. “Périgord would only
adopt a Frenchman.”

“I have heard it said and I believe it to be true,” said Bigourdin,
“that every English artist has two countries, his own and France. And it
is the artist who expresses the national feeling and not the university
professors and philosophers; and all true men have in them something of
the artistic, something which responds to the artistic appeal—I don’t
know if I make myself clear, Monsieur Martin—but you must confess that
all the outside inspiration you get in England in your art and your
literature is Latin. I say ‘outside,’ for naturally you draw from your
own noble wells; but for nearly a generation the _fin esprit anglais_,
in all its delicacy and all its subtlety and all its humanity is in
every way sympathetic with the _fin esprit français_. Is not that true?”

“Now I come to think of it,” said Martin, “I suppose it is. I represent
the more or less educated middle-class Englishman, and, so far as I am
aware of any influence on my life, everything outside of England that
has moved me has been French. As far as I know, Germany has not produced
one great work of art or literature during the last forty years.”

“_Voilà!_” cried Bigourdin, “how could a pig of a country like that
produce works of art? I haven’t been to Berlin. But I have seen
photographs of the Allée des Victoires. _Mon cher_, it is terrible. It
is sculpture hewn out by orders of the drill sergeant’s cane. _Ah,
cochon de pays!_ But you others, you English—at last, after our hundred
years of peace, you realise how bound you are to France. You
realise—all the noble souls among you—that your language is half
Latin, that for a thousand years, even before the Norman conquest, all
your culture, all the sympathies of your poetry and your art are
Roman—and Greek—_enfin_ are Latin. Your wonderful
cathedrals—Gothic—do you get them from Teutonic barbarism? No. You get
them from the Comacine masters—the little band of Latin spiritualists
on the shores of Lake Como. I am an ignorant man, Monsieur Martin, but I
have read a little and I have much time to think and—_voilà_—those are
my conclusions. In the great war that will come——”

“It can’t come in our time,” said Martin.

“No? It will come in our time. And sooner than you expect. But when it
does come, all that is noble and spiritual in England will be
passionately French in its sympathies. _Tiens, mon ami_—” he planted
himself at the corner of the dark uphill road that led to the hotel, and
brought his great hands down on Martin’s shoulders. “You do not yet
understand. You are a wonderful race, you English. But if you were pure
Frisians, like the German, you would not be where you are. Nor would you
be if you were pure Latins. What has made you invincible is the
interfusion since a thousand years of all that is best in Frisian and
Latin. You emerged English after Chaucer—Saxon bone and Latin spirit.
That is why, my friend, you hate all that is German. That is why you
love now all that is French. And that is why we, _nous autres Français_,
feel at last that England understands us and is with us.”

Having thus analysed the psychology of the Entente Cordiale in terms
which proceeding from the lips of a small English innkeeper would have
astounded Martin, Bigourdin released him and together they mounted
homewards.

“I was forgetting,” said he, as he bade Martin good-night. “All of what
I said was to prove that if you were in need of a foster-mother,
Périgord will take you to her bosom.”

“I’ll think of it,” smiled Martin.

He thought of it for five minutes after he had gone to bed and then fell
fast asleep.

Early in the morning he was awakened by a great thundering at his door.
Convinced of catastrophe, he leaped to his feet and opened. On the
threshold the urbane figure of Fortinbras confronted him.

“You?” cried Martin.

“Even I. Having embraced Félise, breakfasted, washed and viewed Brantôme
proceeding to its daily labours, I thought it high time to arouse you
from your unlarklike slumbers.”

Saying this he passed Martin and drew aside the curtains so that the
morning light flooded the room. He was still attired in his sober black
with the _avoué’s_ white tie which bore the traces of an all-night
journey. Then he sat down on the bed, while Martin, in pyjamas and
bare-foot, took up an irresolute position on the cold boards.

“I generally get up a bit later,” said Martin with an air of apology.

“So I gather from my excellent brother-in-law. Well,” said Fortinbras,
“how are you faring in Arcadia?”

“Capitally,” replied Martin. “I’ve never felt so fit in my life. But I’m
jolly glad you’ve come.”

“You want another consultation? I am ready to give you one. The usual
fee, of course. Oh, not now!” As Martin turned to the dressing table
where lay a small heap of money, he raised a soft, arresting hand. “The
hour is too early for business even in France. I have no doubt Corinna
is equally anxious to consult me. How is she?”

“Much the same as usual,” said Martin.

“By which you would imply that she belongs to the present stubborn and
stiff-necked generation of young Englishwomen. I hope you haven’t
suffered unduly.”

“I? Oh, Lord, no!” Martin replied, with a laugh. “Corinna goes her way
and I go mine. Occasionally when there’s only one way to go—well, it
isn’t hers.”

“You’ve put your foot down.”

“At any rate Corinna hasn’t put her foot down on me. I think,” said
Martin, rubbing his thinly clad sides meditatively, “my journey with
Corinna has not been without profit to myself. I’ve made a discovery.”

He paused.

“My dear young friend,” said Fortinbras, “let me hear it.”

“I’ve found out that I needn’t be trampled on unless I like.”

Fortinbras passed his hand over his broad forehead and his silver mane
and regarded the young man acutely. Whatever possibilities he might have
seen of a romantic attachment between the pair of derelicts no longer
existed. Martin had taken cool measure of Corinna and was not the least
in love with her. The Dealer in Happiness smiled in his benevolent way.

“Although in your present ruffled and unshorn state you’re not looking
your best, you’re a different man from my client of two months ago.”

“Thanks to your advice,” said Martin, “my three weeks’ journey put me
into gorgeous health and here I’ve been living in clover.”

“And the environment does not seem to be unfavourable to moral and
intellectual development.”

“That’s Bigourdin and his friends,” cried Martin. “He is a splendid
fellow, a liberal education.”

“He’s an apostle of sanity,” replied Fortinbras with an approving nod.
“Meanwhile sanity would not recommend your standing about in this chilly
air with nothing on. I will converse with you while you dress.”

“I’ll have my tub at once,” said Martin.

He disappeared into the famous bathroom and after a few moments returned
and made his toilet while he gossiped with Fortinbras of the things he
had learned at the Café de l’Univers.

“It’s a funny thing,” said he, “but I can’t make Corinna see it.”

“She’s Parisianised,” replied Fortinbras. “In Paris we see things in
false perspective. All the little finnicky people of the hour, artists,
writers, politicians are so close to us that they loom up like
mountains. You learn more of France in a week at Brantôme than in a year
at Paris, because here there’s nothing to confuse your sense of values.
Happy young man to live in Brantôme!”

He sighed and, seeing that Martin was ready, rose and accompanied him
downstairs. Félise, fresh and dainty, with heightened colour and
gladness in her eyes due to the arrival of the adored father, poured out
Martin’s coffee. They were old-fashioned in the Hôtel des Grottes, and
drank coffee out of generous bowls without handles, beside which, on the
plate, rested great spoons for such sops of bread as might be thrown
therein.

“It is as you like it?” she asked in her pretty, clipped English.

“It’s always the best coffee I have ever drunk,” smiled Martin. He
looked up at Fortinbras lounging in the wooden chair usually occupied by
Corinna. “Do you know, Mr. Fortinbras, that Mademoiselle Félise has so
spoilt me with food and drink that I shall never be able to face an
English lodging-house meal again?”

Fortinbras passed his arm round his daughter’s waist and drew her to him
affectionately.

“She would spoil me too, if she had the chance. It is astonishing what
capability there is in this little body.”

Félise, yielding to the caress, touched her father’s hair. “It’s like
_mamman_, when she was young, _n’est-ce pas_?” She spoke in French which
came more readily.

“Yes,” said Fortinbras, in a deep voice. “Just like your mother.”

“I try to resemble her. _Tu sais_, every time I feel I am lazy or
missing my duties, I think of _mamman_, and I say, ‘No, I will not be
unworthy of her.’ And so that gives me courage.”

“I’ve heard so much of Mrs. Fortinbras,” said Martin, “that I seem to
know her intimately.”

A smile of great tenderness and sadness crept into Fortinbras’s eyes as
he turned them on his daughter.

“It is good that you still think and speak so much of her. Ideals keep
the soul winged for flight. If it flies away into the empyrean and comes
to grief like Icarus and his later fellow pioneers in aviation, at least
it has done something.”

He released her and she sped away on her duties. Presently she returned
with a scared face.

“Monsieur Martin, what has happened? Here is Corinna going to leave us
this morning.”

“Corinna going? Does she know I’m here?” asked Fortinbras in wonderment.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. I did not dream that she was up—she
generally rises so late. But she has told Baptiste to take down her
boxes for the omnibus to catch the early train for Paris. _Mon Dieu_,
what has happened to drive her away?”

“Perhaps the visit yesterday of Monsieur Camille Fargot,” said Martin.

“Eh?” said Fortinbras sharply. Then turning to Félise. “Go, my dear, and
lay my humble homage at the feet of Mademoiselle Corinna and say that as
I have travelled for nearly a day and a night in order to see her, I
crave her courtesy so far as to defer her departure until I can have
speech with her. You can also tell Baptiste that I’ll break his neck if
he touches those boxes. The omnibus might also anticipate its usual hour
of starting.”

Félise departed. Fortinbras lit a cigarette, and holding it between his
fingers, frowned at it.

“Camille Fargot? What was that spawn of nothingness doing here?”

“I fancy she sent for him,” said Martin. “I suppose I had better tell
you all about it. I haven’t as yet—because it was none of my business.”

“Proceed,” said Fortinbras, and Martin told him of the famous
balance-striking and of Corinna’s subsequent behaviour, including last
night’s retirement into solitude after her mysterious interview with the
spawn of nothingness.

“Good,” said Fortinbras, when Martin had finished. “Very good. And what
had my excellent brother-in-law to say to it?”

“Your excellent brother-in-law,” replied Martin, with a smile, “seems to
be a very delicate-minded gentleman.”

Fortinbras did not press the subject. Waiting for Corinna, they talked
of casual things. Martin, now a creature of health and appetite,
devoured innumerable rolls and absorbed many bowls of coffee, to the
outspoken admiration of Fortinbras. But still Corinna did not come. Then
Martin filled a pipe of caporal and, smoking it with gusto, told
Fortinbras more of what he had learned at the Café de l’Univers. He
expressed his wonder at the people’s lack of enthusiasm for their
political leaders.

“The adventurer politician is the curse of this country,” said
Fortinbras. “He insinuates himself into every government. He is out for
plunder and his hand is at the throat of patriotic ministers, and he
strangles France, while into his pockets through devious channels
filters a fine stream of German gold.”

“I can’t believe it,” cried Martin.

“Oh! He isn’t a traitor in the sense of being suborned by a foreign
Power. He is far too subtle. But he knows what policy will affect the
world’s exchanges to his profit; and that policy he advocates.”

“A gangrene in the body politic,” said Martin.

Fortinbras nodded assent. “It will only be the sword of war that will
cut it out.”

On this, in marched Corinna dressed for travel, with a little
embroidered bag slung over her arm. She crossed the room, her head up,
her chin in the air, defiant as usual, and shook hands with Fortinbras.

“I’ve come as you asked,” she said. “But let us be quick with the
talking, as I’ve got to catch a train.”

“Sit down,” said Fortinbras, setting a chair for her.

She obeyed and there the three of them were sitting once more round a
table in an empty dining room. But this time it was a cloudy morning in
early November, in the heart of France, the distant mountains across the
town half-veiled in mist, and a fine rain falling. Gusts of raw air came
in through the open terrace window at the end of the room.

“So, my dear Corinna,” said Fortinbras, “you have not waited for the
second consultation which was part of our programme.”

“That’s your fault, not mine,” said Corinna. “I expected you weeks ago.”

“Doubtless. But your expectation was no reason for my coming weeks ago.
My undertaking, however, was a reason for your continuing to expect me
and being certain that sooner or later I should come.”

“All right,” said Corinna. “This is mere talk. What do you want with
me?”

“To ask you, my dear Corinna,” replied Fortinbras, in his persuasive
tones, “why you have disregarded my advice?”

“And what was your advice?”

“To do nothing headstrong, violent and lunatic until we met again.”

“You should have come sooner. I find I am living now on Martin’s charity
and the time has come to put all this rubbish aside and go home to my
people with my tail between my legs. It’s vastly pleasant, I assure
you.”

“Oh, young woman of little faith!—Why did you not put your trust in me,
instead of in callow medical students with ridiculous mothers?”

Corinna flushed crimson and her eyes hardened in anger. “I suppose every
gossiping tongue in this horrid little hotel has been wagging. That’s
why I’m going off now, so that they can wag in my absence.”

“But my dear Penthesilea,” said Fortinbras soothingly, “why get so
angry? Every living soul in this horrid hotel is on your side. They
would give their eyes and ears to help you and sympathise with you and
shew you that they love you.”

“I don’t want their sympathy,” said Corinna stubbornly.

“Or any human expression of affection or regret? You want just to pay
your bill like any young woman in an automobile who has put up for the
night and go your way?”

“No. I don’t. But I’ve been damnably treated and I want to get away back
to England.”

“Who has treated you damnably here?” asked Fortinbras.

“Don’t be idiotic,” cried Corinna. “Everybody here has been simply
angelic to me—even Martin.”

“On the whole I think I’ve behaved fairly decently since we started out
together,” Martin observed.

“At any rate you act according to the instincts of a gentleman,” she
admitted.

Fortinbras leaned back in his chair and drew a breath of relief.

“I’m glad to perceive that this hurried departure is not an elopement.”

“Elopement!” she echoed. “Do you think I’d——”

Fortinbras checked her with his uplifted hand. “Sh! Would you like me to
tell you in a few words everything that has happened?” He bent his
intellectual brow upon her and held her with his patient, tired eyes.
“Being at the end of your resources, not desiring to share in the
vagabond’s pool with Martin, and losing faith in my professional pledge,
you bethink you of the young popinjay with whom, in your independent
English innocence, but to the scandal of his French relatives, you have
flaunted it in the restaurants and theatres of Paris. _Il vous a conté
fleurette._ He has made his little love to you. All honour and no blame
to him. At his age”—he bowed—“I would have done the same. You
correspond on the sentimental plane. But in all his correspondence you
will find not one declaration in form.”

Corinna mechanically peeled off her gloves. Fortinbras drew a whiff of
his cigarette. He continued:—

“You think of him as a possible husband: I am frank—it is my profession
to be so. But your heart,”—he pointed dramatically to her bosom—“has
never had a flutter. You don’t deny it. Good. In your extremity, as you
think, you send him an urgent telegram, such as no man of human feeling
could disregard. He borrows his cousin’s husband’s motor-car and obeys
your summons. You interview him in yonder little fly-blown, suffocating
salon. You put your case before him—with no matter what feminine
delicacy. He perceives that he is confronted with a claim for a demand
in marriage. He draws back. He cannot by means of any quirk or quibble
of French law marry you without his parent’s consent. This they would
never give, having their own well-matured and irrefragable plans.
Marriage is as impossible as immediate canonization. ‘But,’ says he, ‘we
are both young. We love each other, we shall both be in the _quartier_
for time indefinite’—time is never definite, thank God, to youth—‘Why
should we not set up housekeeping together? I have enough for both—and
let the future take care of itself.’”

Corinna rose and looked at him haggardly and clutched him by the
shoulder.

“How, in the name of God, do you know that? Who told you? Who overheard
that little beast propose that I should go and live with him as his
mistress?”

Fortinbras patted the white-knuckled hand and smiled, as he looked up
into her tense face. “Do you suppose, my dear child, that I have been
the father confessor of half the _Rive Gauche_ for twenty years without
knowing something of the ways of the _Rive Gauche_? without knowing
something, not exactly of international, but say of multi-national codes
of social observance, morality, honour, and so forth, and how they
clash, correspond and interact? I know the two international
forces—yours and Camille Fargot’s, converging on the matrimonial
point—and with simple certainty I tell you the resultant. It’s like a
schoolboy’s exercise in mathematics.”

She freed herself and sat down again dejectedly. Everything had happened
as Fortinbras declared. His only omission, to repair which she had not
given him time, was the scene of flaming indignation incident to Camille
Fargot’s dismissal. And his psychology was correct. The young man’s
charming love-making had flattered her, had indeed awakened foolish
hopes; but she had never cared a button for him. Now she loathed him
with a devastating hate. She thrummed with her fingers on the table.

“What is there left for me to do?”

“Ah, now,” said Fortinbras genially, “we’re talking sense. Now we come
to our famous second professional consultation.”

“Go ahead then,” said Corinna.

“I mentioned the word ‘professional,’” Fortinbras remarked.

Martin laughed and put a ten-franc piece into the soft open palm.

“I’ll pay for both,” said he.

“It’s like having your fortune told at a fair,” said Corinna. “But hurry
up!” she glanced at her watch. “As it is, I shan’t have time to pay my
bill. Will you see after it?” she drew from her bag one of the borrowed
notes and threw it across to Martin. “Well, I am all attention. I can
give you three minutes.”

But just then a familiar sound of scrunching wheels came through the
open doors of the vestibule and dining-room. She started.

“That’s the omnibus going.”

“The omnibus gone,” said Fortinbras.

“I’ll miss my train.”

“You will,” said Fortinbras.

“My luggage has gone with it.”

“It has not,” said Fortinbras. “I gave instructions that it should not
be brought down.”

Corinna gasped. “Of all the cool impertinence——!” She looked at her
watch again. “And the beastly thing has started long before its time!”

“At my request,” said Fortinbras. “And now, as there is no possibility
of your getting away from Brantôme for several hours, perhaps you might,
with profit, abandon your attitude of indignation and listen to the
voice of reason.”

“By the way,” said Martin, “have you had your _petit déjeuner_?”

“No,” said Corinna sullenly.

“Good God!” cried Fortinbras, holding up his hands, “and they let women
run about loose!”




                              CHAPTER VIII


CORINNA fortified by urgently summoned nourishment lit a cigarette and
sarcastically announced her readiness to listen to the oracle. The
oracle bowed with his customary benevolence and spoke for a considerable
time in florid though unambiguous terms. To say that Corinna was
surprised by the proposal which he set before her would inadequately
express her indignant stupefaction. She sat angry, with reddened
cheek-bones and tightly screwed lips, perfectly silent, letting the
wretched man complete his amazing pronouncement before she should
annihilate him. He was still pronouncing, however, when Bigourdin
appeared at the door. Fortinbras broke off in the middle of a sentence
and called him into the room.

“My good Gaspard,” said he, in French, for Bigourdin knew little
English, “I am suggesting to mademoiselle a scheme for her perfect
happiness of which I have reason to know you will approve. Sit down and
join our conclave.”

“I approve of everything in advance,” said the huge man, with a smile.

“Then I suppose you’re aware of this delicious scheme?” she asked.

“Not at all,” said he; “but I have boundless confidence in my
brother-in-law.”

“His idea is that I should enter your employment as a kind of forewoman
in your _fabrique_.”

“But that is famous!” exclaimed Bigourdin, with a sparkle in his eyes.
“It could only enter into that wise head yonder. The trade is getting
beyond Félise and myself. Sooner or later I must get some one, a woman,
to take charge of the manufacturing department. I have told Daniel my
difficulties and he comes now with this magnificent solution. _Car c’est
vraiment magnifique._” He beamed all over his honest face.

“You would have to learn the business from the beginning,” said
Fortinbras quickly. “That would be easy, as you would have willing
instructors, and as you are not deficient in ordinary intelligence. You
would rise every day in self-esteem and dignity and at last find
yourself of use in the social organism.”

“You propose then,” said Corinna, restraining the annihilatory outburst
owing to Bigourdin’s presence and shaking with suppressed wrath, “you
propose then that I should spend the life that God has given me in
making _pâté de foie gras_.”

“Better that than spend it in making bad pictures or a fool of
yourself.”

“I’ve given up painting,” Corinna replied, “and every woman makes a fool
of herself. Hence the perpetuation of the human species.”

“In your case, my dear Corinna,” said Fortinbras, “that would be
commendable folly.”

“You are insulting,” she cried, her cheeks aflame.

“_Tiens, tiens!_” said Bigourdin, laying his great hand on his
brother-in-law’s arm.

But Fortinbras stroked back his white mane and regarded them both with
leonine serenity.

“To meet a cynical gibe with a retort implying that marriage and
motherhood are woman’s commendable lot cannot be regarded as an insult.”

Corinna scoffed: “How do you manage to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Talk like that.”

“By means of an education not entirely rudimentary,” replied Fortinbras
in his blandest tone. “In the meanwhile you haven’t replied to my
suggestion. Once you said you would like to take life by the throat and
choke something big out of it. You still want to do it—but you can’t.
You know you can’t, my dear Corinna. Even the people that can perform
this garrotting feat squeeze precious little happiness out of it.
Happiness comes to mortals through the most subtle channels. I suggest
it might come to you through the liver of an overfed goose.”

At Corinna’s outburst, Bigourdin’s sunny face had clouded over.
“Mademoiselle Corinna,” said he earnestly, “if you would deign to accept
such a position, which after all has in it nothing dishonourable, I
assure you from my heart that you would be treated with all esteem and
loyalty.”

The man’s perfect courtesy disarmed her. Of course she was still
indignant with Fortinbras. That she, Corinna Hastings, last type of
emancipated English womanhood, bent on the expression of a highly
important self, should calmly be counselled to bury herself in a stuffy
little French town and become a sort of housekeeper in a shabby little
French hotel. The suggestion was preposterous, an outrage to the
highly-important self, reckoning it a thing of no account. Why not turn
her into a chambermaid or a goose-herd at once? The contemptuous
assumption fired her wrath. She was furious with Fortinbras. But
Bigourdin, who treated the subject from the point of view of one who
asked a favour, deserved a civil answer.

“Monsieur Bigourdin,” she said with a becoming air of dignity tempered
by a pitying smile, “I know that you are everything that is kind, and I
thank you most sincerely for your offer, but for private reasons it is
one that I cannot accept. You must forgive me if I return to England,
where my duty calls me.”

“Your duty—to whom?” asked Fortinbras.

She petrified him with a glance. “To myself,” she replied.

“In that case there’s nothing more to be said,” remarked Bigourdin
dismally.

“There’s everything to be said,” declared Fortinbras. “But it’s not
worth while saying it.”

Corinna rose and gathered up her gloves. “I’m glad you realise the
fact.”

Bigourdin rose too and detained her for a second. “If you would do me
the honour of accepting our hospitality for just a day or
two”—delicately he included Félise as hostess—“perhaps you might be
induced to reconsider your decision.”

But she was not be moved—even by Martin who, having smoked the pipe of
discreet silence during the discussion, begged her to postpone her
departure.

“Anyhow, wait,” said he, “until our good counsellor tells us what he
proposes to do for me. As we started in together, it’s only fair.”

“Yes,” said Corinna. “Let us hear. What _ordonnance de bonheur_ have you
for Martin?”

“Are you very anxious to know?” asked Fortinbras.

“Naturally,” said Martin, and he added hastily in English, being
somewhat shy of revealing himself to Bigourdin: “Corinna can tell you
that I’ve been loyal to you all through. I’ve had a sort of blind
confidence in you. I’ve chucked everything. But I’m nearly at the end of
the financial tether, and something must happen.”

“_Sans doute_,” said Fortinbras. So as to bring Bigourdin into range
again, he continued in French. “To tell you what is going to happen is
one of the reasons why I am here.”

“Well, tell us,” said Corinna, “I can’t stand here all day.”

“Won’t you sit down, mademoiselle?” said Bigourdin.

Corinna took her vacated chair.

“Aren’t you ever going to begin?”

“I had prepared,” replied Fortinbras benevolently, “an exhaustive
analysis of our young friend’s financial, moral and spiritual state of
being. But, as you appear to be impatient, I will forego the pleasure of
imparting to you this salutary instruction. So perhaps it is better that
I should come to the point at once. He is practically penniless. He has
abandoned all ideas of returning to his soul-stifling profession. But he
must, in the commonplace way of mortals, earn his living. His soul has
had a complete rest for three months. It is time now that it should be
stimulated to effort that shall result in consequences more glorious
than the poor human phenomenon that is, I can predict. My prescription
of happiness, as you, Corinna, have so admirably put it, is that Martin
shall take the place of the unclean Polydore, who, I understand, has
recently been ejected with ignominy from this establishment.”

His small audience gasped in three separate and particular fashions.

“_Mon vieux, c’est idiot!_” cried Bigourdin.

“What a career,” cried Corinna, with a laugh.

“I never thought of that,” said Martin, thumping the table.

Fortinbras rubbed his soft hands together. “I don’t deal in the
obvious.”

“_Mon vieux_, you are laughing at us,” said Bigourdin. “Monsieur Martin,
a gentleman, a scholar, a professor——!”

“A speck of human dust in search of a soul,” said Fortinbras.

“Which he’s going to find among dirty plates and dishes,” scoffed
Corinna.

“In the eyes of the Distributing Department of the Soul Office of
Olympus, where every little clerk is a Deuce of a High God, the clatter
of plates and dishes is as important as the clash of armies.”

Corinna looked at Bigourdin. “He’s raving mad,” she said.

Fortinbras rose unruffled and laid a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “My
excellent friend and disciple,” said he, “let us leave the company of
these obscurantists, and seek enlightenment in the fresh air of heaven.”

Whereupon he led the young man to the terrace and walked up and down
discoursing with philosophical plausibility while his white hair caught
by the gusty breeze streamed behind like a shaggy meteor.

Bigourdin, who had remained standing, sat down again and said
apologetically:

“My brother-in-law is an oddity.”

“I believe you,” assented Corinna.

There was a short silence. Corinna felt that the time had come for a
dignified retirement. But whither repair at this unconscionably early
hour? The hotel resembled now a railway station at which she was doomed
to wait interminably, and one spot seemed as good as another. So she did
not move.

“You have decided then to leave us, Mademoiselle Corinna?” said
Bigourdin at last.

“I must.”

“Is there no means by which I could persuade you to stay? I desire
enormously that you should stay.”

Her glance met his and lowered. The tone of his voice thrilled her
absurdly. She had at once an impulse to laugh and a queer triumphant
little flutter of the heart.

“To make _pâté de foie gras_? You must have unwarrantable faith in me.”

“Perhaps, in the end,” said he soberly, “it might amuse you to make
_pâté de foie gras_. Who knows? All things are possible.” He paused for
a moment, then bent forward, elbow on table and chin in hand. “This is
but a little hotel in a little town, but in it one might find
tranquillity and happiness—_enfin_, the significance of things,—of
human things. For I believe that where human beings live and love and
suffer and strive, there is an eternal significance beneath the
commonplace, and if we grasp it, it leads us to the root of life, which
is happiness. Don’t you think so, mademoiselle?”

“I suppose you’re right,” she admitted dubiously, never having taken the
trouble to look at existence from the subjective standpoint. Her
attitude was instinctively objective.

“I thank you, mademoiselle,” said he. “I said that because I want to put
something before you. And it is not very easy. I repeat—this is but a
little hotel in a little town. I too am but a man of the people,
Mademoiselle; but this hotel—my father added to it and transformed it,
but it is the same property—this hotel has been handed down from father
to son for a hundred years. My great-grandfather, a simple peasant, rose
to be _Général de Brigade_ in the _Grand Armée_ of Napoléon. After
Waterloo, he would accept no favour from the Bourbons, and retired to
Brantôme, the home of his race, and with his little economies he bought
the Hôtel des Grottes, at which he had worked years before as a little
_va-nu-pieds_, turnspit, holder of horses—_que sais-je, moi_? Those
were days, mademoiselle, of many revolutions of fortune.”

“And all that means——?” asked Corinna, impressed, in spite of English
prejudice, by the simple yet not inglorious ancestry of the huge
innkeeper.

“It means, mademoiselle,” said Bigourdin, “that I wish to present myself
to you as an honest man. But as I am of no credit, myself, I would like
to expose to you the honour of my family. My great-grandfather, as I
have said, was _Général de Brigade_ in the _Grande Armée_. My
grandfather, _simple soldat_, fought side by side with the English in
the Crimea. My father, Sergeant of Artillery, lost a leg and an arm in
the War of 1870. My younger brother was killed in Morocco. For me, I
have done my _service militaire_. _Ou fait ce qu’on peut._ It is chance
that I am forty years of age and live in obscurity. But my name is known
and respected in all Périgord, mademoiselle——”

“And again—all that means?”

“That if a _petit hôtelier_ like me ventures to lay a proposition at the
feet of a _jeune fille de famille_ like yourself—the _petit hôtelier_
wishes to assure her of the perfect _honorabilité_ of his family. In
short, Mademoiselle Corinne, I love you very sincerely. I can make no
phrases, for when I say I love you, it comes from the innermost depths
of my being. I am a simple man,” he continued very earnestly, and with
an air of hope, as Corinna flashed out no repulse, but sat sphinx-like,
looking away from him across the room, “a very simple man; but my heart
is loyal. Such as I am, Mademoiselle Corinne—and you have had an
opportunity of judging—I have the honour to ask you if you will be my
wife.”

Corinne knew enough of France to realise that all this was amazing. The
average Frenchman, whom Bigourdin represented, is passionate but not
romantic. If he sets his heart on a woman, be she the angel-eyed spouse
of another respectable citizen or the tawdry and naughty little
figurante in a provincial company, he does his honest (or dishonest)
best to get her. _C’est l’amour_, and there’s an end to it. But he
envisages marriage from a totally different angle. Far be it from me to
say that he does not entertain very sincere and tender sentiments
towards the young lady he proposes to marry. But he only proposes to
marry a young lady who can put a certain capital into the business
partnership which is an essential feature of marriage. If he is
attracted towards a damsel of pleasing ways but devoid of capital, he
either behaves like the appalling Monsieur Camille Fargot, or puts his
common sense, like a non-conducting material, between them, and in all
simplicity, doesn’t fall in love with her. But here was a manifestation
of freakishness. Here was Bigourdin, man of substance, who could have
gone to any one of twenty families of substance in Périgord and chosen
from it an impeccable and well-dowered bride—here he was snapping his
fingers at French bourgeois tradition—than which there is nothing more
sacrosanct—putting his common sense into his cap and throwing it over
the windmills, and acting in a manner which King Cophetua himself, had
he been a Frenchman, would have condemned as either unconventional or
insane.

Corinna’s English upper middle-class pride had revolted at the
suggestion that she should become an employee in a little bourgeois inn;
but her knowledge of French provincial life painfully quickened by her
experience of yesterday assured her that she was the recipient of the
greatest honour that lies in the power of a French citizen to offer. An
English innkeeper daring to propose marriage she would have scorched
with blazing indignation, and the bewildered wretch would have gone away
wondering how he had mistaken for an angel such a Catherine-wheel of a
woman. But against Bigourdin, son of other traditions so secure in his
integrity, so delicate in his approach, so intensely sincere in his
appeal, she could find within her not a spark of anger. All conditions
were different. The plane of their relations was different. She would
never have confessed to a flirtation with an English innkeeper. Besides,
she had a really friendly feeling for Bigourdin, something of
admiration. He was so big, so simple, so genuine, so intelligent. In
spite of Martin’s complaint that she could not realise the spirit of
modern France, her shrewd observation had missed little of the moral and
spiritual phenomena of Brantôme. She was well aware that Bigourdin,
_petit hôtelier_ that he was, stood for many noble ideals outside her
own narrow horizon. She respected him; she also derived feminine
pleasure from his small mouth and the colour of his eyes. But the
possibility of marrying him had never entered her head. She had not the
remotest intention of marrying him now. The proposal was grotesque. As
soon as she got clear of the place she would throw back her head and
roar with laughter at it; a gleeful little devil was already dancing at
the back of her brain. For the moment, however, she did not laugh: on
the contrary a queer thrill again ran through her body, and she felt a
difficulty in looking him in the face. After having thrown herself at a
man’s head yesterday only to be spurned, her outraged spirit found
solace in having to-day another man suppliant at her feet. Of his
sincerity there could be no possible question. This big, good man loved
her. For all her independent ways and rackety student experiences, no
man before had come to her with the loyalty of deep love in his eyes, no
man had asked her to be his wife. Absurd as it all was, she felt its
flattering deliciousness in every fibre of her being.

“_Eh bien_, Mademoiselle Corinne, what do you answer?” asked Bigourdin,
after a breathless silence during which, with head bent forward over the
table, she had been nervously fiddling with her gloves.

“You are very kind, Monsieur Bigourdin. I never thought you felt like
that towards me,” she said falteringly, like any well-brought-up
school-girl. “You should have told me.”

“To have expressed my feelings before, Mademoiselle, would have been to
take advantage of your position under my roof.”

Suddenly there came an unprecedented welling of tears in her eyes, and a
lump in her throat. She sprang to her feet and with rare impulsiveness
thrust out her hand.

“Monsieur Bigourdin, you are the best man I have ever met. I am your
friend, your very great friend. But I can’t marry you. It is
impossible.”

He rose too, holding her and put the eternal question.

“But why?”

“You deserve a wife who loves you. I don’t love you. I never could love
you”—and then from the infinite spaces of loneliness there spread about
her soul a frozen desolation, and she stood as one blasted by Polar
wind—“I shall never love a man all my life long. I am not made like
that.”

And she seemed to shrivel in his grasp and, flitting between the
snow-clad tables like a wraith, was gone.

“_Bigre!_” said Bigourdin, sitting down again.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Soon afterwards, Fortinbras and Martin, coming in from the terrace,
found him sprawling over the table a monumental mass of dejection. But,
full of their own conceits, they did not divine his misery. Fortinbras
smote him friendly wise on his broad back and aroused him from lethargy.

“It is all arranged, _mon vieux_ Gaspard,” he cried heartily. “I have
been pouring into awakening ears all the divine distillations of my
philosophy. I have initiated him into mysteries. He is a neophyte of
whom I am proud.”

Bigourdin, in no mood for allusive hyperbole, shook himself like a great
dog.

“What kind of imbecility are you talking?”

“The late Polydore——” Fortinbras began.

“Ah! Finish with it, I beg you,” interrupted Bigourdin, with an unusual
air of impatience.

“It isn’t a joke, I assure you,” said Martin. “I have come to the end of
my resources. I must work. You will, sooner or later have to fill the
place of Polydore. Give me the wages of Polydore and I am ready to fill
it. I could not be more incapable, and perhaps I am a little more
intelligent.”

“It is serious?”

“As serious as can be.”

Bigourdin passed his hand over his face. “I went to sleep last night in
a commonplace world, I wake up this morning to a fantastic universe in
which I seem to be a leaf, like those outside”—he threw a dramatic
arm—“driven by the wind. I don’t know whether I am on my head or my
heels. Arrange things as seems best to you.”

“You accept me then as waiter in the Hôtel des Grottes?”

“_Mon cher_,” said Bigourdin, “in the state of upheaval in which I find
myself I accept everything.”

The upheaval or rather overthrow—for he used the word
“_bouleversement_”—of the big man was evident. He sat the dejected
picture of defeat. No man in the throes of sea-sickness ever cared less
what happened to him. Fortinbras looked at him shrewdly and his thick
lips formed themselves into a noiseless whistle. Then he exchanged a
glance with Martin, who suddenly conjectured the reason of Bigourdin’s
depression.

“She ought to be spanked,” said he in English.

Fortinbras beamed on him. “You do owe something to me, don’t you?”

“A lot,” said Martin.

Félise, her face full of affairs of high importance ran into the
_salle-à-manger_.

“_Mon Oncle_, le Père Didier sends word that he has decided not to kill
his calf till next week. What shall we do?”

“We’ll eat asparagus,” Bigourdin replied and lumbered out into the
November drizzle.

Three pairs of wondering eyes sought among themselves a solution of this
enigmatic utterance.

“_Mais qu’est-ce que cela veut dire?_” cried Félise, with pretty mouth
agape.

“It means, my child,” said Fortinbras, “that your uncle, with a
philosopher’s survey of the destiny of the brute creation, refuses to be
moved either to ecstatic happiness or to ignoble anger by the
information that the life of the obscure progeny of a bull and a cow has
been spared for seven days. For myself I am glad. So is our
tender-hearted Martin. So are you. The calf has before him a crowded
week of frisky life. Send word to Père Didier that we are delighted to
hear of his decision and ask him to crown the calf with flowers and send
him along to-day for afternoon tea.”

He smiled and waved a dismissing hand. Félise, laughing, kissed him on
the forehead and tripped away, having little time to spare for
pleasantry.

The two men smoked in silence for some time. At last Fortinbras,
throwing the butt end of his cigarette into Corinna’s coffee-bowl, rose,
stretched himself and yawned heartily.

“Having now accomplished my benevolent purpose,” said he, “I shall
retire and take some well-earned repose. In the meanwhile, Monsieur
Polydore Martin, you had better enter upon your new duties.”

So Martin, after he had procured a tray and an apron from the pantry,
took off his coat, turned up his shirt-sleeves and set to work to clear
away the breakfast things.




                               CHAPTER IX


BEHOLD Martin, the professor, transformed into the perfect
waiter—perfect, at least, in zeal, manner and habiliment. His dress
suit, of ardent cut but practically unworn, gave the _salle-à-manger_ an
air of startling refinement and prosperity. At first Bigourdin,
embarrassed by the shifting of the relative position, had deprecated
this outer symbol of servitude. A man could wait in a lounge suit just
as well as in a tail-coat—a proposition which Fortinbras vehemently
controverted. He read his perplexed brother-in-law a lecture on the
psychology of clothes. They had a spiritual significance, bringing
subjective and objective into harmony. A judge could not devote his
whole essence to the administration of justice if he were conscious of
being invested in the glittering guise of a harlequin. If Martin wore
the tweeds of the tourist he would feel inharmonious with his true
waiter-self, and therefore could not wait with the perfect waiter’s
spiritual deftness. Besides, he had not counselled his disciple to wait
as an amateur. The way of the amateur was perdition. No, when Martin
threw his napkin under his left arm, he should flick a bit of his heart
into its folds, like a true professional.

“Arrange it as you like,” said the weary Bigourdin.

Fortinbras arranged and Martin became outwardly the perfect waiter. Of
the craft itself he had much to learn, chiefly under the guidance of
Bigourdin and sometimes under the shy instruction of Félise. Its many
calls on intelligence and bodily skill surprised him. To balance a
piled-up tray on one bent-back hand required the art of a juggler. He
practised for days with a trayful of bricks before he trusted himself
with plates and dishes. By means of this exercise his arm became
muscular. He discovered that the long, grave step of the
professor—especially when he bore a load of eatables—did not make for
the perfect waiter’s celerity. He acquired the gentle arts of salad
making and folding napkins into fantastic shapes. Never handy with his
fingers, and, like most temperate young men in London lodgings,
unaccustomed to the corkscrew, he found the clean prestidigitation of
cork-drawing a difficult accomplishment. But he triumphed eventually in
this as in all other branches of his new industry. And he liked it. It
amused and interested him. It was work of which he could see the result.
The tables set before the meal bore testimony to his handicraft. Never
had plate been so polished, cutlery so lustrous, glass so transparent in
the hundred years history of the Hôtel des Grottes. And when the guests
assembled it was a delight to serve them according to organised scheme
and disarm criticism by demonstration of his efficiency. He rose early
and went to bed late, tired as a draught-dog and slept the happy sleep
of the contented human.

Bigourdin praised him, but shrugged his shoulders.

“What you are doing it for, _mon ami_, I can’t imagine.”

“For the good of my soul,” laughed Martin, “and in order to attain
happiness.”

“Our good friends the English are a wonderful race,” said Bigourdin,
“and I admire them enormously, but there’s not one of them who isn’t a
little bit mad.”

To the coterie of the Café de l’Univers, however, he gave a different
explanation altogether of Professor Martin’s descent in the social
scale. The Professor, said he, had abandoned the _professoriat_ for the
more lucrative paths of commerce and had decided to open a hotel in
England, where every one knew the hotels were villainous and provided
nothing for their clients but overdone bacon and eggs and raw
beef-steaks. The Professor, more enlightened than his compatriots, was
apprenticing himself to the business in the orthodox Continental
fashion. As the substantial Gaspard Bigourdin himself, son of the late
equally substantially, although one-armed and one-legged Armédée
Bigourdin, had, to the common knowledge of Brantôme, served as scullion,
waiter, _sous-chef de cuisine_, _sous-maître d’hôtel_, and bookkeeper at
various hotels in Lyons, in order to become the _bon hôtelier_ that he
was, his announcement caused no sensation whatever. The professor of the
_Ecole Normale_ bewailed his own chill academic lot and proclaimed
Monsieur Martin an exceedingly lucky fellow.

“But, _mon cher patron_, it isn’t true what you have said at the Café de
l’Univers,” protested Martin, when Bigourdin told him of the
explanation.

Bigourdin waved his great arm. “How am I to know it isn’t true? How am I
to get into the English minds of you and my _farceur_ of a
brother-in-law so as to discover why you arrive as an honoured guest at
my hotel and then in the wink of an eye become the waiter of the
establishment? What am I to say to our friends? They wouldn’t care a
hang (_ils se ficheraient pas mal_) for your soul. If you are to
continue to mix with them on terms of equality they must have an
explanation, _nom de Dieu_, which they can understand.”

“I never dreamed,” said Martin, “of entering the circle at the Café
again.”

“_Mais, j’y ai pensé, moi, animal!_” cried Bigourdin. “Because you have
the fantasy of becoming my waiter, are you any less the same human being
I had the pleasure of introducing to my friends?”

And then, perhaps for the first time, Martin appreciated his employer’s
fine kindness and essential loyalty. It would have been quite easy for
the innkeeper to dismiss his waiter from the consideration of the
hierarchy of Brantôme as a mad Englishman, an adventurer, not a
professor at all, but a broken-down teacher of languages giving private
lessons—an odd-job instructor who finds no respect in highly
centralised, bureaucratic France; but the easy way was not the way of
Gaspard Bigourdin. So Martin, driven by _force majeure_, lent himself to
the pious fraud and, when the evening’s work was done, divested himself
of his sable panoply of waiterdom and once more took his place in the
reserved cosy corner of the Café de l’Univers.

The agreeable acidity in his life which he missed when Corinna,
graciously dignified, had steamed off by the night train, he soon
discovered in the pursuit of his new avocation. Euphémie, the cook,
whose surreptitious habits of uncleanliness carefully hidden from
Félise, but unavoidably patent to an agonised Martin, supplied as much
sourness as his system required. She would not take him seriously and
declared her antipathy to _un monsieur_ in her kitchen. To bring about
an _entente cordiale_ was for Martin an education in diplomacy. The
irritability of a bilious commercial traveller, poisoned by infected
nourishment at his last house of entertainment—the reason invariably
given for digestive misadventure—so that his stomach was dislocated,
often vented itself on the waiter serving an irreproachable repast at
the Hôtel des Grottes. The professional swallowing of outraged feelings
also gave a sub-acid flavour to existence. Motorists on the other hand,
struck by his spruceness and polite demeanour, administered pleasant
tonic in the form of praise. They also bestowed handsome tips.

These caused him some misgiving. A gentleman could be a waiter or
anything you pleased, so long as it was honest, and remain a gentleman:
but could he take tips? Or rather, having taken tips, was it consonant
with his gentility to retain them? Would it not be nobler to hand them
over to Baptiste or Euphémie? Bigourdin, appealed to, decided that it
would be magnificent but would inevitably disorganise these excellent
domestics. Martin suggested the _Assistance Publique_ or the church
poor-box.

“I thought,” said Bigourdin, “you became a waiter in order to earn your
living?”

“That is so,” replied Martin.

“Then,” said Bigourdin, “earn it like a waiter. Suppose I were the
manager of a Grand Hotel and gave you nothing at all—as it is your
salary is not that of a prince—how would you live? You are a servant of
the public. The public pays you for your services. Why should you be too
proud to accept payment?”

“But a tip’s a tip,” Martin objected.

“It is good money,” said Bigourdin. “Keep your fine five-franc pieces in
your pocket and _elles feront des petits_, and in course of time you
will build with them an hotel on the Côte d’Azur.”

In a letter to Corinna, Martin mentioned the disquieting problem.
Chafing in her crowded vicarage home she offered little comfort. She
made the sweeping statement that whether he kept his tips or not, the
whole business was revolting. He wrote to Fortinbras. The Dealer in
Happiness replied on a postcard: “Will you never learn that a sense of
humour is the beginning and end of philosophy?”

After which, Martin, having schooled himself to the acceptance of
_pourboires_, learned to pocket them with a professional air and ended
by regarding them as part of the scheme of the universe. As the heavens
rained water on the thirsty fields, so did clients shower silver coins
on hungry waiters. How far, as yet, it was good for his soul he could
not determine. At any rate, in his mild, unambitious way, he attained
the lower rungs of happiness. I do not wish it to be understood that if
he had entered as a stranger, say, the employment of the excellent
proprietor of the excellent Hôtel de Commerce at Périgueux, he would
have found the same contentment of body and spirit. The alleviations of
the Hôtel des Grottes would have been missing. His employer, while
acknowledging his efficiency still regarded him as an eccentric
professor, and apart from business relations treated him as friend and
comrade. The notables of the town accepted him as an equal. To the
cave-dwellers and others of the proletariat with whom he had formed
casual acquaintance, he was still “Monsieur Martin,” greeted with the
same shade of courteous deference as before, although the whole
population of Brantôme knew of his social metamorphosis. Wherever he
went, in his walks abroad, he met the genial smile and raised hat. He
contrasted it all with the dour unwelcome of the North London streets.
There he had always felt lost, a drab human item of no account. Here he
had an identity, pleasantly proclaimed. So would a sensitive
long-sentence Convict, B 2278, coming into the world of remembering men,
rejoice that he was no longer a number, but that intensely individual
entity Bill Smith, recognised as a lover of steak-and-kidney pudding. As
a matter of fact, he seldom heard his surname. The refusal of
Bigourdin’s organs of speech to grapple with the Saxon “Overshaw” has
already been remarked upon. From the very first Bigourdin decreed that
he should be “Monsieur Martin”—Martin pronounced French fashion—and as
“Monsieur Martin” he introduced him to the Café de l’Univers, and
“Monsieur Martin” he was to all Brantôme. But of what importance is a
surname, when you are intimately known by your Christian name to all of
your acquaintance? Who in the world save his mother and the Hastings
family had for dreary ages past called him “Martin”? Now he was
“Martin”—or “Monsieur Martin”—a designation which agreeably combined
familiarity with respect—to all who mattered in Périgord. It must be
remembered that it was an article of faith among the good Brantômois
that, in Périgord, only Brantôme mattered.

“You people are far too good to me,” he remarked one day to Bigourdin.
“It is a large-hearted country.”

“Did I not say, my friend,” replied Bigourdin, “that Périgord would take
you to her bosom?”

And then there was Félise, who in her capacity of task-mistress called
him peremptorily “Martin”; but out of official hours nearly always
prefixed the “Monsieur.” She created an atmosphere of grace around the
plates and dishes, her encouraging word sang for long afterwards in his
ears. With a tact only to be found in democratic France she combined the
authority of the superior with the intellectual inferior’s respect.
Apparently she concerned herself little about his change of profession.
Her father, the all-wise and all-perfect, had ordained it; her uncle,
wise and perfect, had acquiesced; Martin, peculiarly wise and almost
perfect, had accepted it with enthusiasm. Who was she to question the
doings of inscrutable men?

They met perforce more often than during his guesthood, and, their
common interests being multiplied, their relations became more familiar.
They had reached now the period of the year’s stress, that of the great
_foie gras_ making when fatted geese were slain and the masses of
swollen liver were extracted and the huge baskets of black warty
truffles were brought in from the beech forests where they had been
hunted for by pigs and dogs. Martin, like every one else in the
household, devoted all his spare moments to helping in the steaming
kitchen supervised by a special chef, and in the long, clean-smelling
work-room where rows of white-aproned girls prepared and packed the
delectable compound. Here Bigourdin presided in brow-knit majesty and
Félise bustled a smiling second in command.

“It is well to learn everything,” she said to Martin. “Who knows when
you may be glad to have been taught how to make _pâté de foie gras_?”

So Martin, though such a course was not contemplated in his agreement
with the Hôtel des Grottes, received much instruction from her in the
delicate craft, which was very pleasant indeed. And the girls looked on
at the lessons after the way of their kind and exchanged glances one
with another, and every one, save perhaps Bigourdin, who had not yet
recovered his serenity overclouded by Corinna’s rejection of his suit,
was exceedingly contented.

And then, lo and behold, into this terrestrial paradise strayed the
wandering feet of Lucien Viriot.

Not that Lucien was unexpected. His father, Monsieur Viriot, _marchand
de vins en gros_, and one of the famous circle at the Café de l’Univers,
had for the past month or two nightly proclaimed the approaching release
of the young man from military service. Martin had heard him. Bigourdin
on their walks home together had dilated on the heaven-decreed union of
the two young people and the loneliness of his lot. Where would he find,
at least, such a _ménagère_ as Félise?

“It’s a pity Corinna hadn’t any sense,” said Martin on one of these
occasions.

Bigourdin heaved a mighty sigh. “Ah, _mon vieux_!” said he by way of
answer. The sigh and the “Ah, _mon vieux_!” were eloquent of shattered
ideals.

“There is always Madame Thuillier who used to help me when Félise was
little,” he continued after a while, meditatively. “She has experience,
but she is as ugly as a monkey, the poor woman!”

Whereupon he sighed again, leaving Martin in doubt as to the exact
position he intended the ill-favoured lady to occupy in his household.

Anyhow, Martin was forewarned of the ex-warrior’s advent. So was Félise.
“But I cannot leave you, _mon oncle_,” she cried in dismay. “What would
become of you? Who would mend your linen? What would become of the
hotel? What would become of the fabrique?”

“Bah!” said he, snapping his fingers at such insignificant
considerations. “There is always the _brave_ Madame Thuillier.”

“But I thought you detested her—as much as you can detest anybody.”

“You are mistaken, _mon enfant_,” replied Bigourdin. “I have a great
regard for her. She has striking qualities. She is a woman of ripe age
and much common sense.”

Which shows how double-tongued men may be.

“_C’est une vieille pimbèche!_” cried Félise.

“_Tais-toi_,” said Bigourdin severely. For a “_vieille pimbèche_” means,
at the very least, a horrid old tabby with her claws out.

“I won’t be silent,” laughed Félise rebelliously. “_C’est une vieille
pimbèche_, and I’m not going to leave you to her. I don’t want to leave
you. I don’t want to marry.”

“That is what all little girls say,” replied Bigourdin. “But when you
see Lucien return, _joli garçon_, holding his head in the air like a
brave little soldier of France, and looking at you out of his honest
eyes, you will no longer tell me, ‘_Je ne veux pas me marier, mon
oncle_.’”

She laughed at his outrageous mimicry of a modest little girl’s accent.

“It’s true all the same,” she retorted. “I don’t want to marry anybody,
and Lucien after having seen all the pretty girls of Paris won’t want to
marry me.”

“If he doesn’t——!” cried Bigourdin threateningly. “If he dares——!”

“Well, what then?” asked Félise.

“I’ll have a serious conversation with his father,” declared Bigourdin.

Thus both Martin and Félise, as I have said, were forewarned. Yet
neither took much notice of the warning. Martin had been aware, all
along, of the destiny decreed for her by the omnipotent Triumvirate
consisting of her uncle, the bon Dieu and Monsieur Viriot, and,
regarding her as being sealed to another, had walked with Martin-like
circumspection (subject, in days not long since past, for Corinna’s
raillery) along the borderline of the forbidden land of tenderness. But
this judicious and conscientious skirting had its charm. I would have
you again realise that the eternal feminine had entered his life only in
the guise: first, of the kissed damsel who married the onion-loving
plumber; secondly, of Corinna, by whose “Bo!” he had been vastly
terrified until he had taken successfully to saying “Bo!” himself, a
process destructive of romantic regard; and thirdly, of Félise, a
creature—he always remembered Fortinbras’s prejudiced
description—“like one of the wild flowers from which Alpine honey is
made,” and compact of notable, gentle and adorable qualities. Naturally,
of the three, he preferred Félise. Félise, for her part, like the well
brought up damsel of the French bourgeoisie, never allowed her eyelids
to register the flutterings of the heart which the mild young
Englishman’s society set in action. She scarcely admitted the
flutterings to herself. Possibly, if he had been smitten with a fine
frenzy of love-making, she would have been shocked. But as he shewed
respectful gratification at being allowed to consort with her and
gratitude for her little bits of sympathetic understanding, and as she
found she could talk with him more spontaneously than with any other
young man she had ever met, she sought rather than avoided the many
daily opportunities for pleasant intercourse. And there was not the
least harm in it; and the bogey of a Lucien (whom she had liked well
enough, years ago in a childish way) was still hundreds of miles from
Brantôme. In fact they entered upon as pretty a Daphnis and Chloe idyll
as ever was enacted by a pair of innocents.

Then, one fine day, as I have stated, in swaggered Lucien Viriot,
ex-cuirassier, and spoiled the whole thing.

His actual hour of swaggering into Martin’s ken was unexpected—by
Martin, at any rate. He was playing backgammon with the Professor of the
_Ecole Normale_ in the midst of elders discussing high matters of local
politics, when all of a sudden an uproar arose among these grave and
reverend seniors, clapping of hands and rattling on tables, and Martin,
looking up from his throw of the dice, perceived the stout,
square-headed, close-cropped Monsieur Viriot, _marchand de vins en
gros_, his eyes sparkling and his cheeks flushed above his white
moustache and imperial, advancing from the café door, accompanied by his
square-headed, close-cropped, sturdy, smiling, swaggeringly-sheepish,
youthful replica. And when they reached the group, the young man bowed
punctiliously before grasping each outstretched hand; and every one
called him “_mon brave_” to which he replied “_bien aimable_”; and
Monsieur Viriot presented him formally—“_mon his qui vient de terminer
son service militaire_”—to Monsieur Beuzot, _Professor à l’Ecole
Normale_, a newcomer to Brantôme, and to Monsieur Martin, _ancien
professeur anglais_. Whereupon Monsieur Lucien Viriot declared himself
enchanted at meeting the two learned gentlemen, and the two learned
gentlemen reciprocated the emotion of enchantment. Then amid scuffling
of chairs and eager help of waiters, room was made for Monsieur Viriot
and Monsieur Lucien; and the proprietor of the café, Monsieur Cazensac,
swarthy, portly and heavy-jowled, a Gascon from Agen, who, if the truth
were known took the good, easy folk of Périgord under his protection,
came up from behind the high bottle-armamented counter, where Madame
Cazensac, fat and fair, prodigally beamed on the chance of a ray
reaching the hero of the moment—which happened indeed before Cazensac
could get in a word, and brought Lucien to his feet in a splendid spread
of homage to the lady—Monsieur Cazensac, I say, came up and grasped
Lucien by the hand and welcomed him back to the home of his fathers. He
turned to Monsieur Viriot.

“Monsieur orders——?”

“_Du vin de champagne._”

Happy land of provincial France where you order champagne as you order
brandy and soda and are contented when you get it. There is no worry
about brand or vintage or whether the wine is _brut_ or _extra-sec_. You
just tell the good landlord to bring you champagne and he produces the
sweet, sticky, frothy, genuine stuff, and if you are a Frenchman, you
are perfectly delighted. It is champagne, the wine of feasts, the wine
of ceremony, the wine of ladies, the wine of toasts—_Je lève mon
verre_. If the uplifted glass is not beaded with bubbles winking at the
brim, what virtue is there in the uplifting? It is all a symbolical
matter of sparkle. . . . So, at the Café de l’Univers, Monsieur Cazensac
disappeared portentously, and a few moments later re-appeared ever so
much more portentously, followed by two waiters, one bringing the
foot-high sacred glasses, the other the uncorked bottles labelled for
all who wished to know what they were drinking: “Grand Champagne d’Ay,”
with the vine-proprietor’s name inconspicuously printed in the
right-hand bottom corner. All, including Monsieur Cazensac, clinked
foaming glasses with Lucien, and, after they had sipped in his honour,
they sipped again to the cries of “_Vive l’Armée_” and “_Vive la
France_,” whereupon they all settled down comfortably again to the
enjoyment of replenished goblets of the effervescing syrup.

Martin looked with some envy at the young man who sat flushed with his
ovation and twisted his black moustache to the true cuirassier’s angle,
yet bore himself modestly among his elders. Willing and gay of heart he
had given the years of his youth to the service of his country; when the
great struggle should come—and all agreed it was near—he would be one
of the first to be summoned to defend her liberty, and willing and gay
of heart he would ride to his death. And now, in the meanwhile, he had
returned to the little square hole in France that had been ordained for
him (little square peg) before he was born, and was to be reserved for
him as long as his life should last. And Martin looked again at the
chosen child of destiny, and this time with admiration, for he knew him
to be a man; a man of the solid French stock that makes France
unshakable, of the stock that in peace may be miserly of its pence, but
in war is lavish of its blood. “I am not that young fellow’s equal,”
thought Martin humbly; and he felt glad that he had not betrayed
Bigourdin’s trust with regard to Félise. What kind of a wretch would he
have been to set himself up as a rival to Lucien Viriot? Bigourdin had
been right in proclaiming the marriage as arranged by the bon Dieu. He
loved Félise—who knowing her did not? But he loved her in brotherly
fashion and could reconcile it to his heart to bestow her on one so
worthy. And all this without taking into account the sentiments of
Félise. Her heart, in military phrase, was a _ville ouverte_. Lucien had
but to march in and take it.

After a while Lucien, having looked about the café, rose and went from
table to table where sat those citizens who, by reason of lowlier social
status or personal idiosyncrasies, had not been admitted into the Inner
Coterie of Notables, and greeted old acquaintances. Monsieur Viriot then
caught Martin’s eye and lifted his glass again.

“_A votre santé_, Monsieur Martin.”

Martin bowed. “_A la vôtre, monsieur!_”

“I hope that you and my son will be good friends. It is important that
the youth of our two countries, so friendly, so intimately bound, should
learn to know and appreciate each other; especially when one of them,
like yourself, has the power of translating England into terms of
France.”

And with the courteous simplicity of a grey, square-headed,
close-cropped _marchand de vins en gros_, he lifted his glass again.

“_A l’Entente Cordiale._”

When Lucien returned to the circle, his father re-introduced him to
Martin.

“In fact,” he concluded, “here is an Englishman who not only speaks
French like you and me, but eats truffles and talks the idiom of the
quarrymen and is qualifying himself to be a good Périgordin.”

It was charmingly said. The company hummed approval.

“_C’est bien vrai_,” said Bigourdin.

Lucien again bowed. He would do himself the honour of presenting himself
at monsieur’s hotel. Monsieur was doubtless staying at the Hôtel des
Grottes.

“Monsieur Bigourdin has taken me as a waiter into his service,” replied
Martin.

“_Ah! Tant mieux!_” exclaimed Lucien, as if the announcement were the
most ordinary one in the world, and shook hands with him heartily.

“Like that, as my father says, one becomes a good Périgordin.”

So Martin went home and contentedly to bed. Again a little corner of the
earth that he might call his own was offered him in this new land so
courteous to, yet so sensitively aloof from the casual Englishman, but
on the other hand, so generous and hospitable to the Englishman into
whom the spirit of France had entered. Was there here, thought he, the
little round hole which he, little round peg, after thirty years of
square-holed discomfort, had been pre-ordained to fill? The thought
soothed him.

He woke up in the night, worried by some confused dream. In his head
stuck the Latin tag: _Ubi bene ibi patria_. He kicked indignantly
against the aphorism. It was the infamous philosophy of the Epicurean
opportunist. If he had been comfortable in Germany would he regard
Germany as his fatherland? A million times no. When you wake up at four
o’clock in the morning to a soul-stirring proposition, you think in
terms of millions. He was English of the English. His Swiss motherdom
was but an accident of begetting. He was of his father’s race.
Switzerland did not exist in his being as a national influence. English,
narrowly, stupidly, proudly, he was and English he would remain to the
end of time. To denaturalise himself and become a Frenchman—still less
a mere Périgordin—was abhorrent. But to remain an Englishman, and as an
Englishman—an obscure and menial Englishman—to be given the freedom of
a province of old France was an honour of which any man breathing the
breath of life might be justly proud. I can, thought he, in the intense,
lunatic clarity of four o’clock in the morning, show France what England
stands for. I have a chance of one in a million. I am an Englishman
given a home in the France that I am learning to love and to understand,
I am a hyphen between the two nations.

Having settled that, he turned over, tucked the bed-clothes well round
his shoulders and went soundly to sleep again.




                               CHAPTER X


A FEW evenings afterwards Bigourdin gave a dinner of ceremony to the
Viriots—and a dinner of ceremony in provincial France is a very
ceremonious and elaborate affair. All day long there had been anxious
preparations. Félise abandoning the _fabrique_, toiled assiduously with
Euphémie, while Bigourdin, expert chef like all good hotel-keepers,
controlled everything with his master touch. The crazily ceremonious
hour of seven-thirty was fixed upon; not only on account of its
ceremoniousness, but because by that time the commercial travellers
would have finished their meal and melted away. The long middle table
was replaced by a round table prodigally adorned with flowers and four
broad tricolour ribbons, each like the sash of Monsieur le Maire,
radiating from under a central silver épergne laden with fruit of which
a pineapple was the crown. A bewildering number of glasses of different
shapes stood at each place, to be filled each kind in its separate order
with the wine ordained for each separate course. Martin rehearsed the
wine service over and over again with a solemn Bigourdin. As a
lieutenant he had the _plongeur_ (or washer-up of glass and crockery)
from the Café de l’Univers, an earnest neophyte tense with the
excitement of practising a higher branch of his profession.

Hosts and guests were ceremoniously attired; Bigourdin and the elder
Viriot suffocated in tightly buttoned frock-coats of venerable and
painful fit; Lucien, more dashing, wore a morning coat (last cry of Bond
Street) acquired recently from the “High Life” emporium in Paris; all
three men retained yellow dogskin gloves until they sat down to table.
Madame Viriot, stout and placid, appeared in her black silk dress and an
old lace collar and her very best hat with her very best black ostrich
feather secured by the old rose-diamond buckle, famous throughout the
valley of the Dordogne, which had belonged to her
great-great-grandmother; and, lastly, Félise wore a high-necked simple
frock of dazzling whiteness which might have shewn up her delicate dark
colouring had not her cheeks been inordinately pale.

Bigourdin had Madame Viriot on his right, Monsieur Viriot on his left,
and Félise sat between Monsieur Viriot and Lucien. Every one was most
ceremoniously polite. It was “_mon cher_ Viriot,” and “_mon cher_
Bigourdin,” and the formal “_vous_” instead of the “_mon vieux_” and the
“_tu_” of the café and of ordinary life; also, “_chère madame_,” and
“Monsieur Lucien” and “_ma nièce_.” And although from childhood Félise
and Lucien had called each other by their Christian names, it was now
“monsieur” and “mademoiselle” between them. You see, marriage is in
France a deuce of a ceremony which begins months before anybody dreams
of setting the wedding bells a-ringing. This dinner of ceremony was the
first scene of the first act of the elaborate drama which would end on
the curtain being run down to the aforesaid wedding-bells. Really, when
one goes into the question, and considers all the barbed wire
entanglements that French law and custom interpose between two young
people who desire to become man and wife, one not only wonders how any
human pair can go through the ordeal and ever marry at all, but is
profoundly convinced that France is the most moral country on the face
of the globe. As a matter of fact, it is.

It was a long meal of many courses. Martin, aided by the _plongeur_,
acquitted himself heroically. Manners professional and individual, and
also the strain of service prevented him from attending to the
conversation. But what he could not avoid overhearing did not impress
him with its brilliance. It was a self-conscious little company. It
threw about statistics as to the state of the truffle crop; it listened
to Lucien’s modest anecdotes of his military career; it decided that
Parisians were greatly to be pitied in that fate compelled them to live
in Paris instead of Brantôme. Even the flush of good cheer failed to
inspire it with heartiness. For this perhaps the scared unresponsiveness
of one of the chief personages was responsible.

“Are you fond of dogs, mademoiselle?” asked Lucien, valiant in small
talk.

“_Oui, monsieur_,” replied Félise.

“Have you any now, mademoiselle?”

“_Non, monsieur_,” replied Félise.

“The beautiful poodle that was so clever is dead, I believe,” remarked
Madame Viriot in support of her son.

“_Oui, madame_,” replied Félise.

However alluring to the young Frenchman about to marry may be timid
innocence with downcast eyes, yet, when it is to such a degree
monosyllabic, conversation does not sparkle. Martin, accustomed to her
tongue wagging charmingly, wondered at her silence. What more attractive
companion could she desire than the _beau sabreur_ by her side? And she
ate next to nothing. When she was about to decline a _bécasse au fumet_,
as to the success of which Euphémie’s heart was beating like a
sledge-hammer, he whispered in her ear,

“Just a little bit. Do.”

And as she helped herself, he saw the colour mount to her neck. He felt
quite pleased at having prevailed on her to take nourishment.

What happened after the meal in the private salon, where Félise,
according to sacred rite, served coffee and liqueurs, Martin did not
know. He was too busy with Euphémie and the chambermaid and Baptiste and
the _plongeur_ in cleaning up after the banquet. Besides, as the waiter
of the establishment, what should he have been doing in that ceremonious
gathering?

When the work was finished and a concluding orgy on broken meats and
half emptied bottles had been temperately concluded, and Euphémie for
the hundredth time had been informed of the exact appreciation which
each particular dish had received from Monsieur and Madame
Viriot—“young people, you see,” she explained, “have their own affairs
and they see everything rose-coloured, and you could give them boiled
horse-liver and they wouldn’t know the difference between that and
_ris-de-veau à l’Impériale_; it doesn’t matter what you put into the
stomachs of children; but with old, serious folks, it is very important.
I made the stomach of Monsieur Viriot the central idea of my dinner—I
have known the stomach of Monsieur Viriot for twenty years—also that of
Madame, for old ladies, _voyez-vous_, know more than you think”—and
when the weary and zealous servants had gone their separate ways, Martin
locked up, and, escaping from the generous atmosphere of the kitchen,
entered the dimly lit vestibule with the idea of smoking a quiet
cigarette before going to bed. There he found Bigourdin, sprawling his
great bulk over the cane-seated couch.

“Did things go all right?” he asked.

“Wonderfully. Everybody dined well. They can go to the _ban_ and
_arrière-ban_ of their friends and relations and say that there is not
such a _cuisine_ in Périgord as at the Hôtel des Grottes. And the
service was excellent. Not the smallest hitch. I congratulate you and
thank you, _mon ami_. But _ouf_!”—he took a great breath of relief—“I
am glad it is over. I was not built for the formalities of society. _Ça
vous fatigue!_”

“It’s also fatiguing from the waiter’s point of view,” laughed Martin.

“But it is all necessary when one has a young girl to marry. The father
and mother of the young man expect it. It is very complicated. Soon
there will be the formal demand in marriage. They will wear
gloves—_c’est idiot_—but what would you have? It is the custom. And
then there will be a dinner of ceremony at the Viriots’. He has some
Chambertin in his cellar, my old friend Viriot—ah, _mon petit_
Martin!”—he blew a kiss to the purple goddess beloved of Bacchus and by
him melted into each cobwebbed bottle—“It is the only thing that
reconciles me to it. Truth to say, one dines abominably at the Viriots.
If he does not produce some of that Chambertin, I withdraw the dowry of
Félise.”

“It’s all arranged then?” Martin asked.

“All what?”

“The marriage.”

“Without doubt.”

“Then Monsieur Lucien has been accepted by Mademoiselle Félise? I mean,
he has proposed to her, as we English say?”

“_Mais non!_” cried Bigourdin, with a shocked air. “Lucien is a
correctly brought up young man and would not offend the proprieties in
that matter. It is not the affair of Lucien and Félise, it is the affair
of the two families, the parents; and for Félise I am _in loco
parentis_. Propose to Félise! What are you talking about?”

“It all interests me so much,” replied Martin. “In England we manage
differently. When a man wants to marry a girl, he asks her, and when
they have fixed up everything between themselves, they go and announce
the fact to their families.”

To which Bigourdin made the amazing answer:

“_C’est le phlègme britannique!_”

British phlegm! When a man takes his own unphlegmatic way with a maid!
Martin could find no adequate retort. He was knocked into a cocked hat.
He threw away his cigarette and, being very tired, half stifled a yawn.
Bigourdin responded mightily and rose to his feet.

“_Allons dodo_,” said he. “All this has been terribly fatiguing.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

So fatiguing had it all been that Félise, for the first time since the
chicken-pox and measles of childhood, remained in her bed the next day.
Euphémie, her personal attendant, found her in the morning a wan ghost
with a splitting headache, and forbade her to rise. She filled her up
with _tilleul_, the decoction of lime-leaves which in French households
is the panacea for all ills, and, good and comfortable gossip, extolled,
in Gallic hyperbole, the dazzling qualities of Monsieur Lucien. At last,
fever-eyed and desperate, Félise sat up in bed and pointed to the door.

“_Ma bonne Euphémie, laisse-moi tranquille! Va-t’en! Fich’-moi la
paix!_”

Euphémie gaped in bewilderment. It was as though a dove had screamed:

“Leave me alone! Go away! Go to Blazes!”

“_Ah, la! la! ma pauvre petite!_” Euphémie knew not what she was saying,
but she went. She went to Bigourdin and told him that mademoiselle was
in delirium, she had brain-fever, and if he wanted to save her reason,
he must send at once for the doctor. The doctor came, diagnosed a chill
on the vaguest of symptoms, and ordered _soupe à l’huile_. This invalid
fare is a thin vegetable soup with a layer of salad oil floating on the
top with the object of making the liquid slip gratefully down the
gullet: the French gullet, be it understood. Félise, in spite of her
lifelong French training, had so much of England lingering in her
œsophagus, that it abhorred _soupe à l’huile_. The good doctor’s advice
failed. She fasted in bed all day, declaring that, headache apart, she
was perfectly well, and the following morning, a wraith of herself,
arose and went about her ordinary avocations.

“But what is the matter with her?” asked Bigourdin of Martin. “Nothing
could have disagreed with her at that abominable dinner, because she
didn’t eat anything.”

As Martin could throw no light on the sudden malady of Félise, Bigourdin
lit a cigarette and inhaled a huge puff.

“It needs a woman, _voyez-vous_, to look after a young girl. Men are no
good. There are a heap of secrets——” With his arms he indicated Mount
Blanc piled on Mount Everest. “I shall be glad when she is well and duly
married. Perhaps the approaching betrothal affects her. Women have
nerves like that. She is anxious to know the result of the negotiations.
At the present moment the Viriots are free to make or make not their
demand. It would be good to reassure her a little. What do you think?”

Martin gave utterance to the profound apophthegm: “There is nothing so
upsetting as uncertainty.”

“That is my idea!” cried Bigourdin. “Pardon me for consulting you on
these details so intimate and a little sacred. But you have a clear
intelligence and a loyal heart.”

So it came to pass that, after _déjeuner_, Bigourdin took Félise into
their own primly and plushily furnished salon, and, like an amiable bull
in a boudoir, proceeded to smash up the whole of her universe.

“There is no doubt,” he proclaimed, “Monsieur and Madame Viriot have
dreamed of it for ten years. I give you a dowry—there is no merit in
it, because I love you like my own daughter—but I give you a dowry such
as there are not many in Périgord. Lucien loves you. He is _bon garçon_.
It has never entered his head to think of another woman for his wife. It
is all arranged. In two or three days—you must allow for the
_convenances_—Monsieur Viriot and Lucien will call on me. So, my dear
little angel, do not be afraid.”

Félise had listened to this, white-faced and hollow-eyed. “But I don’t
want to marry Lucien, _mon oncle_!”

“_Comment?_ You don’t want to marry Lucien?”

“No, _mon oncle_.”

“But——” He swept the air with a protesting gesture.

“I have already told you so,” said Félise.

“But, _ma chère petite_, that wasn’t serious. It was because you had
some stupid and beautiful idea of not deserting me. That is all
imbecile. Young people must marry, _sacrebleu_! so that the race is
perpetuated, and fathers and mothers and uncles don’t count.”

“But what has that to do with it, _mon oncle_?” protested Félise. “I
find Lucien very charming; but I don’t love him. If I loved him, I would
marry him. But as I don’t love him, I can’t marry him.”

“But marry him and you will love him,” cried Bigourdin, as millions of
French fathers and uncles have cried for the last three or four hundred
years. “It is very simple. What more do you want than a gallant fellow
like Lucien?”

Then, of course, she broke down, and began to cry. Bigourdin, unused to
feminine tears, tried to clutch his hair. If it had been longer than
half an inch of upstanding bristle, he would have torn it.

“You don’t understand, _mon oncle_,” she sobbed, with bowed head. “It is
only my mother who can advise me. I must see my mother.”

Bigourdin put his arm round the girl’s slender shoulders. “Your mother,
my poor Félise, sees nobody.”

She raised her head and flashed out: “She sees my father. She lives with
him in the same house. Why shouldn’t she see me?”

“_Tiens, tiens_, my little Félise,” said Bigourdin soothingly. “There is
no need for you to consult your mother. Both your father and your mother
have a long while ago decided that you should marry Lucien. Do you think
I would take a step of which they did not approve?”

“A long while ago is not to-day,” sobbed Félise. “I want to talk to my
mother.”

Bigourdin walked across the salon, with his back to her, and snapped his
fingers in peculiar agitation, and muttered below his breath: “_Nom de
Dieu, de nom de Dieu, de nom de Dieu!_” Kindest-hearted of mortals
though he was, he resented the bottom being knocked out of his scheme of
social existence. For years he had looked forward to this alliance with
the Viriots. Personally he had nothing to gain: on the contrary, he
stood to lose the services of Félise and a hundred thousand francs. But
he had set his heart on it, and so had the Viriots. To go to them and
say, “My niece refuses to marry your son,” would be a slash of the whip
across their faces. His failure to bring up a young girl in the proper
sentiments would be a disgrace to him in the eyes of the community. He
felt hurt, too, because he no longer sufficed her; she wanted her
mother; and it was out of the question that she should go to her mother.
No wonder he swore to himself softly.

“But, _mon Dieu_,” said he, turning round. “What have you against
Lucien?”

Whereupon they went over all the argument again. She did not love
Lucien. She didn’t want to marry Lucien. She would not marry a man she
did not love.

“Then you will die an old maid,” said Bigourdin. “An old maid,
_figure-toi_! It would be terrible!”

Félise sniffed at such terrors. Bigourdin, in desperation, asked what he
was to tell the Viriots. “The truth,” said Félise. But what was the
truth?

“Tell me, my little Félise,” said he, gently, “there is, by chance, no
one else?”

Then Félise waxed indignant and routed the unhappy man. She gave him to
understand that she was a _jeune fille bien élevée_ and was not in the
habit of behaving like a kitchenmaid. It was cruel and insulting to
accuse her of clandestine love-affairs. And Bigourdin, bound by his
honourable conventions, knew that she was justified in her resentment.
Again he plucked at his bristles, scared by the spectacle of outraged
maidenhood. The tender-eyed dove had become a flashing little eagle. A
wilier man than he might have suspected the over-protesting damsel.
Woman-like, she pressed her advantage.

“_Mon oncle_, I love you with all my heart, but you are a man and you
don’t understand.”

“That is absolutely true,” said he.

“So you see there is only one person I can explain it to, and that is my
mother.”

Thus she completed the vicious little circle. And again the helpless
Bigourdin walked across the salon and turned his back on her and
muttered the incantation which brings relief to distracted man. But this
time she went up to him and put an arm round his great body and laid her
face against his sleeve.

“_Tu sais, je suis bien malheureuse._”

It was a knife stuck in the honest fellow’s heart. He caught her to him
and in his turn protested vehemently. He would not allow her to be
unhappy. He would cut off his head rather than allow her to be unhappy.
He would do anything—his French caution forbade an offer to send the
Viriots packing—anything in reason to bring the colour back to her
white cheeks.

Suddenly he had an inspiration which glowed all over his broad face and
caused him to hold her out at arms’ length and laugh joyously.

“You can’t see your mother—but there is your good Aunt Clothilde. She
will be a second mother to you. A woman so pious and so sympathetic. You
will be able to tell her all your troubles. She has married a regiment
of daughters. What she doesn’t know of young girls isn’t worth knowing.
You are tired, you are ill. You need a change, a little holiday. Go and
spend a month with her, and when you come back we’ll see what can be
done with regard to Lucien. I’ll write to her now.”

And without waiting to hear her demure “_Bien, mon oncle_,” he escaped
to the _bureau_ where he should find the writing materials which did not
profane the sacred primness of the salon, and plunged into
correspondence. Félise, left alone, pondered for a moment or two, with
faint wrinkling of her smooth forehead, and then, sketching a gesture of
fatalistic resignation, went off to the kitchen, where a great special
boiling of goose livers was in progress. On the way she met Martin
carrying a load of porcelain pots. But she passed him by coldly; and for
the rest of the day she scarcely threw at him a couple of words.

Meanwhile Bigourdin beamed over the letter to his elder sister
Clothilde, a comfortable and almost opulent widow who lived at Chartres.
They had not met for a dozen years, it is true, and she had only once
seen Félise; but the sense of the family is very strong in France,
especially where marriage alliances are concerned, and he had no doubt
that she would telegraph, as requested, and authorise him to entrust
Félise to her keeping. Verily it had been an inspiration. It was a
solution of difficulties. The Viriots had given signs of an almost
indecent hurry, which naturally had scared Félise. A month was a long
time. Clothilde was a woman of experience, tact and good sense. She
would know how to bring Félise to a reasonable state of mind. If she did
not succeed—well—he was not the man to force his little Félise into a
distasteful marriage. In any case he had a month’s respite.

Having stated his case at length, he went out into the town to post such
an important letter at the central _Postes et Télégraphes_, and on the
way back, looked in at the shop of the very respectable Madame Chauvet,
who, with her two elderly daughters, sold crucifixes and rosaries and
books of devotion and candles and all that would supply the devout needs
of the religious population. And after a prolonged and courtly
conversation, he induced Madame Chauvet, in consideration of their old
friendship, her expenses and an honorarium of twenty francs, to
undertake the safe convoy of Félise from Brantôme to the house of Madame
Robineau, her Aunt Clothilde, at Chartres.




                               CHAPTER XI


MADAME ROBINEAU was tall, angular, thin-lipped and devout, and so far as
she indulged in social intercourse, loved to mingle with other angular,
thin-lipped and devout ladies who belonged to the same lay sisterhood.
She dressed in unrelieved black and always wore on her bosom a bronze
cross of threatening magnitude. She prayed in the Cathedral at
inconvenient hours, and fasted as rigorously as her Confessor, Monsieur
l’Abbé Duloup, himself. Monsieur l’Abbé regarded her as one of the most
pious women in Chartres. No doubt she was.

But Félise, although a good Catholic in her very simple way, and anxious
to win favour by observance of the rules of the solitary household, was
wicked enough to wish that her aunt were not quite so pious. In
religious matters a wide latitudinarianism prevailed at the Hôtel des
Grottes. There, with a serene conscience, one could eat meat on Fridays
and crack a mild joke at the expense of the good Saint Peter. But
neither forbidden flesh nor jocularity on any subject, let alone on a
saint’s minor foibles, mitigated the austerities of the perky,
wind-swept little house at Chartres. No wonder, thought Félise, Aunt
Clothilde had married off a regiment of daughters—four to be exact; it
had been an easy matter; she herself would have married any caricature
of a man rather than spend her life in an atmosphere so rarefied and so
depressing. She pitied her cousins, although, according to her Aunt
Clothilde’s pragmatical account, they were all doing splendidly and had
innumerable babies. By the end of the first week of her visit, she
consolidated an intense dislike to Chartres and everything in it,
especially the Cathedral. Now, it may be thought that any one who can
shake the fist of disapprobation at the Cathedral of Chartres, is beyond
the pale of human sympathy. But when you are dragged relentlessly
thither in the icy dark of every winter morning, and the bitter gloom of
every winter evening, to say nothing of sporadic attendances during the
daytime, you may be pardoned if your æsthetic perceptions are obscured
by the sense of outrage inflicted on your personal comfort. To many
generations of men the Cathedral has been a symbol of glories,
revelations and eternities. In such slanting shafts of light, mystically
hued, the Grail might have been made manifest, the Sacred Dove might
have glided down to the Head of the Holy One. . . . But what need to
tell of its spiritual wonders and of its mystery, the heart of which it
is given to every suffering man to pluck out according to his own soul’s
needs? It was a little tragedy that to poor Félise the Cathedral
symbolised nothing but an overwhelming tyranny. She hated every stone of
it, as much as she hated every shiny plank and every polished chair in
her aunt’s frigid salon. Even the streets of Chartres repelled her by
their bleakness. They lacked the smiling homeliness of Brantôme; and the
whole place was flatter than the Sahara. She sighed for the rocks and
hills of Périgord.

She also ate the unaccustomed bread of idleness. Had her aunt permitted,
she would delightedly have helped with the house-work. But Madame
Robineau, widow of a dealer in grain who, before his death, had retired
on a comfortable fortune, lived, according to her lights, at her ease,
her wants being scrupulously administered to by a cook and a maid. There
was no place in the domestic machine for Félise. Her aunt passed long
chilly hours over ecclesiastical embroidery, sitting bolt upright in her
chair with a _chaufferette_ beneath her feet. Félise, unaccustomed
needlewoman, passed longer and chillier hours (having no _chaufferette_)
either playing with a grey ascetic cat or reading aloud _La Croix_, the
only newspaper allowed to cross the threshold of the house. Now and
again, Madame Robineau would drop her thin hands into her lap and regard
her disapprovingly. One day she said, interrupting the reading,

“My poor child, how your education has been neglected. You scarcely know
how to hold a needle, you can’t read aloud without making faults, and
you are ignorant of the elements of our holy religion.”

“My Aunt,” Félise replied, “I know how to manage an hotel.”

“That would be of little use to your husband.”

Félise winced at the unhappy word.

“I am never going to marry, _ma tante_,” she said.

“You surely do not expect to be admitted into a convent?”

“Heaven forbid!” cried Félise.

“Heaven would forbid,” said Madame Robineau severely, “seeing that you
have not the vocation. But the _jeune fille bien élevée_”—in the mouth
of her Aunt Clothilde the familiar phrase assumed a detestable
significance, implying, to Félise’s mind, a pallid young creature from
whom all blood and laughter had been driven by undesirable virtues—“the
_jeune fille bien élevée_ has only two careers offered to her—the
convent or marriage. For you, my dear child, it is marriage.”

“Well,” said Félise, with a smile, preparing, to resume the article in
the newspaper over which she had stumbled, “perhaps the beautiful prince
will come along one of these days.”

But Madame Robineau rebuked her for vain imaginings.

“It is true, what I said, that your education has been neglected. A
young girl’s duty is not to look for princes, but to accept the husband
chosen by the wisdom of her family.”

“_Ma tante_,” said Félise demurely, after a pause during which her aunt
took up her work again. “If you would teach me how to embroider, perhaps
I might learn to be useful in my future home.”

From this and many other conversations, Félise began to be aware of the
subtle strategy of Bigourdin. On the plea of providing her with
pro-maternal consolation, he had delivered her into the hands of the
enemy. This became abundantly clear as the days went on. Aunt Clothilde,
incited thereto by her uncle, was opening a deadly campaign in favour of
Lucien Viriot. Now, the cathedral, though paralysing, could be borne for
a season, and so could the blight that pervaded the house; but the
campaign was intolerable. If she could have resented the action of one
so beloved as Bigourdin, she would have resented his sending her to her
Aunt Clothilde. Under the chaperonage of the respectable Madame Chauvet
she had fallen into a pretty trap. She had found none of the promised
sympathy. Aunt Clothilde, although receiving her with the affectionate
hospitality due to a sister’s child, had from the first interview frozen
the genial current of her little soul. The great bronze cross in itself
repelled her. If it had been a nice, gentle little cross, rising and
falling on a motherly bosom, it would have worked its all-human,
adorable influence. But this was a harsh, aggressive,
come-and-be-crucified sort of cross, with no suggestion of pity or
understanding. The sallow, austere face above it might have easily been
twisted into such a cross. It conveyed no invitation to the sufferer to
pour out her troubles. Uncle Bigourdin was wrong again. Rather would
Félise have poured out her troubles into the portentous ear of the
Suisse at the Cathedral.

Her aunt and herself met nowhere on common ground. They were for ever at
variance. Madame Robineau spoke disparagingly of the English, because
they were Protestants and therefore heretics.

“But I am English, and I am not a heretic,” cried Félise.

“You are not English,” replied her aunt, “because you have a French
mother and have been brought up in France. And as for not being a
heretic, I am not so sure. Monsieur l’Abbé Duloup thinks you must have
been brought up among Freemasons.”

“_Ah non, par exemple!_” exclaimed Félise indignantly. For, in the eyes
of the Church, French Freemasons are dreadful folk, capable of anything
sacrilegious, from denying the miracle of Saint Januarius to slitting
the Pope’s weasand. So—“_Ah! non par exemple!_” cried Félise.

Freemasons, indeed! Her Uncle Gaspard, it is true, did not attend church
regularly—but yes, he did attend regularly—he went once a year, every
Easter Sunday, and he was the best of friends with Monsieur le Curé of
their Paroisse. And as for herself, Monsieur le Curé, who looked like a
venerable saint in the holy pictures, had always a smile and a _ma chère
enfant_ for her whenever they met. She was on excellent terms with
Monsieur le Curé; he would no more have dreamed of associating her with
Freemasons than of accusing her of being in league with devils.

He was a good, common-sensical old curé, like thousands of the secular
clergy in France, and knew how to leave well alone. Questioned by the
ecclesiastically environed Abbé Duloup as to the spiritual state of
Félise, he would indubitably have answered with serene conviction:—

“If a soul so pure and so candid, which I have watched from childhood,
is not acceptable to the _bon Dieu_, then I know no more about the _bon
Dieu_ than I know about the Emperor of Patagonia.”

But Félise, disliking the Abbé Duloup and many of his works, felt a
delicacy in dragging her own curé into the argument and contented
herself with protesting against the charge of heresy. As a matter of
fact, she proclaimed her Uncle Gaspard was not a Freemason. He held in
abhorrence all secret political societies as being subversive of the
State. No one should attack her Uncle Gaspard, although he had betrayed
her so shabbily.

In vain she sought some link with her aunt. Even Mimi, the lean old cat,
did not form a bond of union. As a vagrant kitten it had been welcomed
years ago by the late good-natured Robineau, and the widow tolerated its
continued presence with Christian resignation. Félise took the unloved
beast to her heart. From Aunt Clothilde’s caustic remarks she gathered
that her four cousins, of whose exemplary acceptance of husbands she had
heard so much, had eyed Mimi with the coldness of their mother. She
began to thank Providence that she did not resemble her cousins, which
was reprehensible; and now and then manifested a lack of interest in
their impeccable doings, which was more reprehensible still, and thus
stirred up against her the maternal instincts of Madame Robineau.

Relations grew strained. Aunt Clothilde spoke to her with sharp
impatience. From her recalcitrance in the matter of Lucien she deduced
every fault conceivable. For the first time in her life Félise dwelt in
an atmosphere where love was not. She longed for home. She longed
especially for her father and his wise tenderness. Because she longed so
greatly she could not write to him as a father should be written to; and
the many-paged letters into which, at night, she put all her aching
little heart, in the morning she blushed at the thought of sending. In
spite of his lapse from grace she could not be so disloyal to the
beloved Uncle Gaspard. Nor could she distress her suffering angel mother
by her incoherent account of things. If only she could see her!

At last, one dreary afternoon, Madame Robineau opened an attack in
force.

“Put down that cat. I have to talk to you.”

Félise obeyed and Aunt Clothilde talked. The more she talked, the more
stubborn front did Félise oppose. Madame Robineau lost her temper. Her
thin lips twitched.

“I order you,” she said, “to marry Lucien Viriot.”

“I am sorry to say anything to vex you, _ma tante_,” replied Félise
valiantly; “but you have not the power.”

“And I suppose your uncle has not the power to command you?”

“In matters like that, no, _ma tante_,” said Félise.

Aunt Clothilde rose from her straight-backed chair and shook a long,
threatening finger. The nail at the end was also long and not very
clean. Félise often wondered whether her aunt abhorred a nail-brush by
way of mortification.

“When one considers all the benefits my brother has heaped on your
head,” she cried in a rasping voice, “you are nothing else than a little
monster of ingratitude!”

Félise flared up. She did not lack spirit.

“It is false,” she cried. “I adore my Uncle Gaspard. I would give him my
life. I am not ungrateful. It is worse than false.”

“It is true,” retorted Madame Robineau. “Otherwise you would not refuse
him the desire of his heart. Without him you would have not a rag to
your back, or a shoe to your foot, and no more religion than a heathen.
It is to him you owe everything—everything. Without him you would be in
the gutter where he fished you from.”

She ended on a shrill note. Félise, very pale, faced her passionately,
with a new light in her mild eyes.

“What do you mean? The gutter? My father——?”

“Bah! Your father! Your vagabond, ne’er-do-weel scamp of a father! He’s
a scandal to the family, your father. He should never have been born.”

The girl reeled. It was a foul bludgeon blow. Madame Robineau, with
quick realisation of folly, checked further utterance and allowed
Félise, white, quivering and vanquished, but carrying her little head
fiercely in the air, to retire from the scene with all the honours of
war.

Madame Robineau was sorry. She had lost both temper and dignity. Her
next confession would be an unpleasant matter. Possibly, however, the
Abbé Duloup would understand and guess the provocation. She shrugged her
lean shoulders. It was good sometimes for hoity-toity damsels to learn
humility. So she sat down again, pursing her lips, and continued her
embroidered stole until it was the hour of vespers. Contrary to custom,
she did not summon Félise to accompany her to the Cathedral. An hour or
two of solitude, she thought, not unkindly, would bring her to a more
reasonable frame of mind. She went out alone.

When she returned she found that Félise had left the house.

                 *        *        *        *        *

It was a very scared young person that presented herself at the
_guichet_ at the railway station and asked for a second class ticket to
Paris. She had never travelled alone in her life before. Even on her
rare visits to the metropolis of Périgueux, in whose vast emporium of
fashion she clothed herself, she was attended by Euphémie or the
chambermaid. She felt lost, a tiny, helpless creature, in the great,
high station in which an engine letting off steam produced a bewildering
uproar. How much she paid for her ticket, thrifty and practised
housekeeper that she was, she did not know. She clutched the change from
a hundred franc note which, a present from her uncle before leaving
Brantôme, she had preserved intact, and scuttled like a little brown
rabbit to the door of the _salle d’attente_.

“_Le train de Paris? A quatre heures cinquante_,” said the official at
the door, as though this palpitating adventure were the commonplace of
every minute.

“And that will be?” she gasped.

He cocked an eye at the clock. “In half an hour.”

A train was on the point of starting. There was a scuttle for seats. She
felt sure it was the Paris train. From it emanated the magic influence
of the great city whither she was bound. A questioned porter informed
her it was going in the opposite direction. The Paris express left at
four-fifty. The train steamed out. It seemed to Félise as though she had
lost a friend. She looked round helplessly, and seeing a fat peasant
woman sitting on a bench, surrounded by bundles and children, she ran to
her side for protection. It is the unknown that frightens. In the Hôtel
des Grottes she commanded men with the serenity of a Queen Elizabeth,
and as for commercial travellers and other male visitors, she took no
more account of them than of the geese that she plucked. And the
terrifying Aunt Clothilde had terrified in vain. But here, in this cold,
glass-roofed, steel-strutted, screeching, ghostly inferno of a place,
with men prowling about like roaring lions seeking probably whom they
might devour, conditions were terrifyingly unfamiliar.

Yet she did not care. Under the blasphemous roof of her Aunt Clothilde
she could not have remained. For, in verity, blasphemy had been spoken.
Her father was loved and honoured by all the world; by her mother, by
Uncle Gaspard, by Corinna, by Martin. And she herself—did she not know
her father? Was there ever a man like him? The insulting words rang
through her brain. She would have confronted terrors a million fold more
grisly than these in order to escape from the blasphemer, whom she could
never forgive—no, not for all the curés and abbés in Christendom. An
intense little soul was that of Félise Fortinbras. It swept her
irresistibly out of the unhallowed villa, with a handbag containing a
nightgown, a toothbrush and a faded little photograph of her father and
mother standing side by side in wedding garb, on the way to the dread,
fascinating whirlpool of Paris, where dwelt the worshipped gods of her
idolatry. And, as she sat in the comforting lee of the fat and unafraid
peasant woman and her bundles and her children, she took herself to task
for cowardice.

The journey, under two hours, was but a trifle. Had it been to Brantôme,
an all-night affair, she might have had reason for quailing. But to
Paris it was practically but a step. . . . The Abbé Duloup spoke of
going to Paris as her uncle spoke of going to Périgueux. Yet her heart
thudded violently during the interminable half hour. And there was the
grim possibility of the appearance of a pursuing Aunt Clothilde. She
kept a fearful eye upon the doorway of the _salle d’attente_.

At last the train rushed in, and there was clangour of luggage trucks
and clamour of raucous voices announcing the train for Paris; and a flow
of waiting people, among whom was her neighbour with her varied
impedimenta, swept across the lines and scaled the heights of the
carriages. By luck, in front of Félise loomed a compartment showing
second class on the door panel and “_Dames seules_” on the window. She
clambered in and sank into a seat. Who her lonely lady fellow-travellers
were she could not afterwards remember; for she kept her eyes closed,
absorbed in the adventure that still lay before her. Yet it was
comforting to feel that as long as the train went on she was safe in
this feminine sanctuary, free from depredations of marauding males.

Paris. One of the ladies, seeing that she was about to remain in the
carriage, jerked the information over a descending shoulder. Félise
followed and stood for a moment more confused than ever in the blue
glare and ant-hill hurry of the Gare de Montparnasse. A whole town
seemed to have emerged from the train and to stream like a rout of
refugees flying from disaster, men, women and children, laden with
luggage, towards the barrier. Carried along, she arrived there at
length, gave up her ticket, and, issuing from the station, found herself
in a narrow street, at the end of which, still following the throng, she
came to a thundering thoroughfare. Never, in all her imaginings of
Paris, had she pictured such a soul-stunning phantasmagoria of flashing
light and flashing movement. There were millions of faces passing her by
on the pavement, in the illuminated interiors of omnibuses, in the
dimmed recesses of taxi-autos, on waggons, on carts, on bicycles;
millions in gaily lit cafés; before her dazzled eyes millions seemed to
be reflected even in the quivering, lucent air. She stood at the corner
of the Place de Rennes and the Boulevard de Montparnasse paralysed with
fear, clutching her handbag tight to her side. In that perilous street
thousands of thieves must jostle her. She could not move a step,
overwhelmed by the immensity of Paris. A good-natured sergent de ville,
possibly the father of pretty daughters, noticed her agonised distress.
It was not his business to perform unsolicited deeds of knight errantry;
but having nothing else to do for the moment, he caught her eye and
beamed paternal encouragement. Now a sergent de ville is a _sergent de
ville_ (recognisable by his uniform) all France over. Félise held Père
Chavrol, who exercised that function at Brantôme, in high esteem. This
policeman had a fat, dark, grinning, scrubbily-moustached face which
resembled that of Père Chavrol. She took her courage and her handbag in
both hands.

“Monsieur,” she said, “can you direct me to the Rue Maugrabine?”

He couldn’t. He did not know that street. In what _quartier_ was it?
Félise was ignorant.

“_C’est là où demeure mon père_,” she added. “_C’est Monsieur
Fortinbras. Tout le monde le connaît à Paris._”

But alas! the sergent de ville had never heard of the illustrious
Fortinbras: which was strange, seeing that all Brantôme knew him,
although he did not live there.

“What then shall I do, Monsieur,” asked Félise, “to get to my father?”

The sergent de ville pushed his képi to the back of his head and
cogitated. Then, with uplifted hand, he halted a crawling fiacre. Rue de
Maugrabine? Of course the glazed-hatted, muffled-up driver knew it.
Somewhere between the Rue de la Roquette and the Avenue de la
République. The sergent de ville smiled vaingloriously. It was only _ces
vieux collignons_, old drivers of fiacres, that knew their Paris, he
explained. The chauffeur of a taxi-auto would have been ignorant of the
whereabouts of the Arc de Triomphe. He advised her to engage the
omniscient cabman. The Rue Maugrabine was infinitely distant, on the
other side of the river. Félise suggested that a cab would cost
enormously. In Brantôme legends were still current of scandalous
exactions levied by Paris cabmen on provincials. The driver twisted his
head affably and hoarsely murmured that it would not cost a fortune.
Perhaps two francs, two francs fifty, with a little _pourboire_. He did
not know. The amount would be registered. The sergent de ville pointed
out the taximeter.

“Be not afraid, Mademoiselle. Enter. What number?”

“Number 29.”

He opened the door of the stuffy little brougham. Félise held out her
hand as she would have held it out to Père Chavrol, and thanked him as
though he had preserved her from legions of dragons. The last she saw of
him as she drove off was in the act of majestically sweeping back a
group of idlers who had halted to witness the touching farewell.

The old cab jolted and swerved through blazing vistas of unimagined
thoroughfares; over bridges spanning mysterious stretches of dark waters
and connecting looming masses of gigantic buildings; and through more
streets garish with light and apparent revelry. Realisation of its glory
came with a little sob of joy. She was in Paris, the Wonderland of Paris
transcending all her dreams. Brantôme and Chartres seemed afar off. She
had the sensation of a butterfly escaping from the chrysalis. She had
been a butterfly for ages. What unremembered kind of state had been her
grub condition? Thrills of excitement swept her little body. She was
throbbingly happy. And at the end of the magic journey she would meet
her father, marvel among men, and her mother, the strange, sweet,
mystical being, the enchanted princess of her childish visions, the
warm, spiritual, all understanding, all embracing woman of her maiden
longings.

The streets grew narrower, less important. They were passing through the
poor neighbourhood east of the Place de la Bastille. Fairyland suffered
a sinister touch. Slight fears again assailed her. Some of the streets
appeared dark and suspect. Evil-looking folk haunted the pavements. She
wondered, with a catch of the breath, whither she was being driven. At
last the cab swung into a street, darker, more suspect, more ill-odoured
than any, and stopped before a large open doorway. She peered through
the window. Above the door she could just discern the white figures “29”
on the blue plaque. Her rosy dreams melted into night, her heart sank.
She alighted.

“This is really 29 Rue Maugrabine?”

“_Bien sûr, mademoiselle._”

She had forgotten to look at the taximeter, but taking three francs from
her purse, she asked the driver if that was enough. He thanked her with
raised hat for munificence, and, whipping up his old horse, drove off.

Félise entered a smelly little paved courtyard and gazed about her
helplessly. She had imagined such another decent little house as her
aunt’s, at which a ring at the front door would ensure immediate
admittance. In this extraordinary dank well she felt more lost than
ever. Paris was a bewildering mystery. A child emerged from some dark
cavern.

“Can you tell me where Monsieur Fortinbras lives?”

The child advised her to ask the concierge, and pointed to the iron
bell-pull. Félise rang. The frowsy concierge gave the directions.

“_Au quatrième au coin, à gauche._”

Félise entered the corner cavern and came on an evil-smelling stone
staircase, lit here and there by naked gas-jets which blackened the
walls at intervals. The cold gathered round her heart. On the second
landing some noisy, ill-dressed men clattered past her and caused her to
shrink back with fear. She mounted the interminable stairs. Here and
there an open door revealed a squalid interior. The rosy dream became a
nightmare. She had made some horrible blunder. It was impossible that
her father should live here. But the concierge had confirmed the
address. On the fourth floor she paused; then, as directed, turned down
a small, ill-lit passage to the left. On a door facing her at the end,
she noticed the gleam of a card. She approached. It bore the printed
legend,

    “Daniel Fortinbras,
      _Ancien Avoué de Londres,_
        _Agent de Famille, &c, &c._”

And written in pencil was the direction: “_Sonnez, S. V. P._”

The sight reassured and comforted her. Behind this thin barrier dwelt
those dearest to her on earth, the dimly remembered saintly mother, the
wise and tender father. She forgot the squalor of the environment. It
was merely a feature of Paris mighty and inscrutable, so different from
Brantôme. She felt a little throb of pride in her daring, in her
achievement. Without guidance—ungenerously she took no account of the
sergent de ville, the cabman and the concierge—she had travelled from
Chartres to this inmost heart of Paris. She had accomplished her
stupendous adventure. . . . The card invited her to ring. Above it hung
a bit of wood attached in the middle to a length of twine. She pulled
and an answering clang was heard from within the apartment. Her whole
being vibrated.

After a moment’s waiting, the door was flung open by a coarse,
red-faced, slatternly woman standing in a poverty-stricken little
vestibule. She looked at the girl with curiously glazed eyes and
slightly swayed as she put up a hand to dishevelled hair.

“_Vous désirez?_”

“Monsieur Fortinbras,” gasped Félise, scared by the abominable
apparition.

“Monsieur Fortinbras?” She mimicked the girl’s clear accent.

“_Oui, madame_,” replied Félise.

Whereupon the woman withered her with a sudden volley of drunken abuse.
She knew how Fortinbras occupied himself all day long. She did not
complain. But when the _gonzesses_ of the _rive gauche_ had the
indecency to come to his house, she would very soon put them across her
knee and teach them manners. This is but a paraphrase of what fell upon
Félise’s terror-stricken ears. It fell like an avalanche; but it did not
last long, for suddenly came a voice well known but pitched in an
unfamiliar key of anger:

“_Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?_”

And Fortinbras appeared.

As he caught sight of his daughter’s white face, he clapped his hands to
his head and reeled back, horror in his eyes. Then:

“_Tais-toi!_” he thundered, and seizing the woman masterfully by the
arms, he pushed her into some inner room, leaving Félise shaking on the
threshold. In a moment or two he re-appeared, caught overcoat and old
silk hat from a peg, and motioning Félise back, marched out of his home
and slammed the door behind him. Father and daughter were now in the
neutral ground at the end of the dim, malodorous passage.

“What in the name of God are you doing here, Félise?”

“I came to see my mother.”

The fleshy, benign face of the man fell into the sags of old age. His
lower lip hung loose. His mild blue eyes, lamping out from beneath noble
brows, stared agony.

“Your mother?”

“Yes. Where is she?”

He drew a deep breath. “Your mother—well—she is in a nursing home,
dear. No one, not even I, can see her.” He took her by the arm and
hurried her to the staircase. “Come, come, dear, we must get away from
this. You understand. I did not tell you your mother was so ill, for
fear of making you unhappy.”

“But that dreadful woman, father?” she cried. And the Alpine flower from
which honey is made looked like a poor little frost-bitten lily of the
valley. She faced him on the landing.

“That woman—that——” he waved an arm. “That,” said he, quoting
bitterly, “is a woman of no importance.”

“Ah!” cried Félise.

With some of the elemental grossnesses of life she was acquainted. You
cannot manage a hotel in France which is a free, non-Puritanical
country, and remain in imbecile ignorance. She was shocked to the depths
of her being.

“Come,” said Fortinbras with outstretched hand. But she shrank from him.
“Come!” he commanded. “There’s no time to lose. We must get out of
this.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To the Gare de Montparnasse. You must return at once to Chartres.”

“I will never enter the house of Aunt Clothilde again,” said Félise.

“But what has happened? My God! what has happened?” he asked, as they
hurried down the stairs.

Breathlessly, brokenly, she told him. In the courtyard he paused, put
his hand to his head.

“But what can I do with you? My God! what can I do with you in this
dreadful city?”

“Isn’t there a hotel in Paris?” she asked, coldly.

He laughed in a mirthless way. “There are many. There are the Ritz and
the Meurice and the Elysée Palace. Yes—there are hotels enough!”

“I have plenty of money,” she said.

“No, no, my child,” said he. “Not an hotel. I should go mad. I have an
idea. Come.”

They had just reached the evil pavement of the Rue Maugrabine, when
Cécile Fortinbras, sister of the excellent Gaspard Bigourdin and the
pious Clothilde Robineau, and mother of Félise, recovered from the
stupor to which the unprecedented fury of her husband had reduced her,
and reeled drunkenly to the flat door.

“_Je vais arracher les yeux à cette putain-là!_”

She started to tear the hussy’s eyes out; but by the time she had
accomplished the difficult descent and had expounded her grievances to
an unsympathetic concierge, a motor omnibus was conveying father and
daughter silent and anguished to the other side of the River Seine.




                              CHAPTER XII


THE huge door on the Boulevard Saint Germain swung open at Fortinbras’s
ring and admitted them to a warm, marble-floored vestibule adorned with
rugs, palms and a cast or two of statuary. Facing them, in its cage of
handsome wrought iron-work, stood the lift. All indicated a life so far
apart from that of the Rue Maugrabine that Félise, in spite of the
despair and disillusion that benumbed her soul, uttered an exclamation
of surprise.

“Who lives here?”

“Lucilla Merriton, an American girl. Pray God she is in,” replied
Fortinbras, opening the lift gate. “We can but see.”

He pressed the second-floor button and the lift shot up. On the landing
were the same tokens of luxury. A neat maid answered the door.
Mademoiselle Merriton was at home, but she had just begun dinner.
Fortinbras drew a card from a shabby pocketbook.

“Tell Mademoiselle that the matter is urgent.”

The maid retired, leaving them in a small lobby beyond which was a hall
lit by cunningly subdued lights, and containing (to Félise’s
unsophisticated vision) a museum of costly and beautiful objects.
Strange skins of beasts lay on the polished floor, old Spanish chests in
glowing crimson girt with steel, queer chairs with straight, tall backs,
such as she had seen in the sacristies of old churches in the Dordogne,
and richly carved tables were ranged against the walls, and above them
hung paintings of old masters, such as she was wont to call “holy
pictures,” in gilt frames. From the soft mystery of a corner gleamed a
marble copy of the Venus de’ Medici, which, from Félise’s point of view,
was not holy at all. Yet the sense of beauty and comfort pervading the
place, appealed to her senses. She stood on the threshold looking round
wonderingly, when a door opened, and, in a sudden shaft of light,
appeared a tall, slim figure which advanced with outstretched hand.
Félise shrank behind her father.

“Why, Fortinbras, what good wind has brought you?” The lady spoke in a
rich and somewhat lazy contralto. “Excuse that celestial idiot of a
Céleste for leaving you standing here in the cold. Come right in.”

She led the way into the hall, and then became aware of Félise and
flashed a glance of enquiry.

“This is my little daughter, Lucilla.”

“Why? Not Félise?” she gave her both hands in a graceful gesture. “I’m
so glad to see you. I’ve heard all about you from Corinna Hastings. I
put her up for the night on her way back to London, you know. Now
why”—still holding Félise’s hands—“have you kept her from us all this
time, Fortinbras? I don’t like you at all.”

“Paris,” said Fortinbras, “isn’t good for little girls who live in the
heart of France.”

“But surely the heart of France is Paris!” cried Lucilla Merriton.

“Paris, my dear Lucilla,” replied Fortinbras gravely, “may be the liver,
the spleen, the pancreas—whatever giblets you please of France; but it
is not its heart.”

Lucilla laughed; and when she laughed she had a way of throwing up her
head which accentuated the graceful setting of her neck. Her thick brown
hair brushed back, ever so little suggestive of the Pompadour, from her
straight forehead, aided the unconscious charm of the habit.

“We won’t argue the point. You’ve brought Félise here because you want
me to look after her. How did I guess? My dear man, I’ve lived
twenty-seven years in this ingenuous universe. How babes unborn don’t
spot its transparent simplicity I never could imagine. You haven’t
dined.”

“I have,” said Fortinbras, “but Félise hasn’t.”

“You shall dine again. It’s the first time you have condescended to
visit me, and I exact the penalty.”

She went to the open door whence she had issued.

“Céleste!”—the maid appeared—“Monsieur and Mademoiselle are dining
with me and Mademoiselle is staying the night. See she has all she
wants. _Allez vite._ Go, my dear, with Céleste, and be quick, for
dinner’s getting cold.”

And when Félise, subdued by her charming masterfulness, had retired in
the wake of the maid, Miss Merriton turned on Fortinbras.

“Now, what’s the trouble?”

In a few words he told her what was meet for a stranger to know.

“So she ran away and came to you for protection and you can’t put her
up? Is that right?”

“The perch of an old vulture like myself,” said he, “is no fit place for
my daughter.”

Lucilla nodded. “That’s all right. But, say—you don’t approve of this
mediæval sort of marriage business, do you?”

“I retain my English views. I shall explain them to my brother-in-law
and forbid the alliance. Besides, the excellent Bigourdin is the last
man in the world to force her into a distasteful marriage. Reassure her
on that point. She can go back to Brantôme with a quiet mind.”

“Will you remain in Paris with a mind equally serene?” Lucilla asked,
her deep grey eyes examining his face, which he had vainly endeavoured
to compose into its habitual aspect of detached benevolence. He met her
glance.

“The derelict,” said he, “is a thing of no account. But it is better
that it should not lie in the course of the young and living ship.”

Lucilla put her hands behind her back and sat on the corner of an old
Venetian table. And she still looked at him, profoundly interested. Here
was a Fortinbras she had never met before, a broken man, far removed
from the shrewd and unctuous _marchand de bonheur_ of the Latin Quarter
with his rolling periods and opportunist philosophy.

“There’s something behind all this,” she remarked. “If I’m to be any
good, I ought to know.”

He recovered a little and smiled. “Your perspicacity does credit to your
country,” said he. “Also to your sex. There is much behind it. An
unbridgeable gulf of human sorrow. Remember that, should my little girl
be led away—which I very much doubt—to talk to you of most unhappy
things. She only came to the edge of the gulf half an hour ago. The
marriage matter is but a thistledown of care.”

“I more or less see,” said Lucilla. “The vulture’s perch overhangs the
gulf. Right. Now what do you want me to do?”

“Just keep her until I can find a way to send her back to Brantôme.”

Lucilla raised a hand, and reflected for a few seconds. Then she said:
“I’ll run her down there myself in the car.”

“That is most kind of you,” replied Fortinbras, “but Brantôme is not
Versailles. It is nearly three hundred miles away.”

“Well? What of that? I suppose I can commandeer enough gasoline in
France to take me three hundred miles. Besides, I am due the end of next
week, anyway, to stay with some friends at Cap Martin, before going to
Egypt. I’ll start a day or two earlier and drop Félise on my way. Will
that suit you?”

“But, again, Brantôme is not on your direct route to Monte Carlo,” he
objected.

She slid to her feet and laughed. “Do you want me to be a young mother
to your little girl, or don’t you?”

“I do,” said he.

“Then don’t conjure up lions in the path. See here,” she touched his
sleeve. “You were a good friend to me once when I had that poor little
fool Effie James on my hands—I shouldn’t have pulled her through
without you—and you wouldn’t accept more than your ridiculous fee—and
now I’ve got a chance of shewing you how much I appreciate what you did.
I don’t know what the trouble is, and now I don’t want to know. But
you’re my friend, and so is your daughter.”

Fortinbras smiled sadly. “It is you that are the _marchand de bonheur_.
You remove an awful load from my mind.” He took his old silk hat from
the console where he had deposited it, and held out his hand. “The old
vulture won’t stop to dinner. He must be flying. Give my love, my
devoted love to Félise.”

And with an abruptness which she could not reconcile with his usual
suave formality of manner, he turned swiftly and walked through the
lobby and disappeared. His leave-taking almost resembled the flight he
spoke of.

The wealthy, comely, even-balanced American girl looked blankly at the
flat door and wondered, conscious of tragedy. What was the gulf of which
he spoke? She knew little about the man. . . . Two years before a girl
from Cheyenne, Wyoming, who had brought her letters of introduction,
came to terrible grief. There was blackmail at her throat. Somebody
suggested Fortinbras as counsellor. She, Lucilla, consulted him. He
succeeded in sending a damsel foolish, reprehensible and frightened, but
intact in reputation and pocket, back to her friends in Cheyenne. His
fees for so doing amounted to twenty francs. For two years therefore,
she had passed the time of day friendliwise with Fortinbras whenever she
met him; but until her fellow-student, Corinna Hastings, sought her
hospitality on the way back to England, and told her of Brantôme and
Félise, she had regarded him merely as one of the strange, sweet
monsters, devoid of domestic attributes, even of a private life, that
Paris, city of portents and prodigies, had a monopoly in producing.
. . . And now she had come upon just a flabby, elderly man, piteously
anxious to avert some sordid misery from his own flesh and blood. She
sighed, turned and saw Félise in charge of Céleste.

“Come, you must be famished.” She put her arm round the girl’s waist and
led her into the dining-room. “Your father couldn’t stay. But he told me
to give you his love and to regard myself as a sort of young mother to
you.”

Félise murmured a shy acknowledgement. She was too much dazed for
coherent thoughts or speech. The discovery of the conditions in which
her father lived, and the sudden withering of her faith in him, had
almost immediately been followed by her transference into this warm
wonder-house of luxury owned and ruled by this queenly young woman, so
exquisite in her simple marvel of a dress. The soft lights, the
pictures, the elusive reflections from polished wood, the gleam of heavy
silver and cut glass, the bowl of orchids on the table, the delicate
napery—she had never dreamed of such though she held herself to be a
judge of table-linen—the hundred adjuncts of a wealthy woman’s dining
room, all filled her with a sense of the unreal, and at the same time
raised her poor fallen father in her estimation by investing him with
the character of a magician. Dainty food was placed before her, but she
could scarcely eat. Lucilla, to put her more at her ease, talked of
Corinna and of Brantôme which she was dying to visit and of the quaint
Englishman, she had forgotten his name, who had become a waiter. How was
he getting on?

“Monsieur Martin? Very well, thank you.”

She put down the glass of wine which she was about to raise to her lips.
For nearly an hour she had not thought of Martin. She felt sundered from
him by many seas and continents. Since seeing him through what scorching
adventures had she not passed? She had changed. The world had changed.
Nothing would ever be the same again. Tears came into her eyes. Lucilla,
observing them, smiled.

“You like Monsieur Martin?”

“Everybody likes him; he is so gentle,” said Félise.

“But is that what women look for in a man?” asked Lucilla. “Doesn’t she
want some one strong to lean on? Something to appeal to the imagination?
Something more _panache_?”

Félise thought of Lucien Viriot and his cavalry plume and shivered. No.
She did not want _panache_. Martin’s quiet, simple ways, she knew not
why, were worth all the clanking of all the sabres in the world put
together.

“That depends on temperament, mademoiselle,” said Félise, in French.

Lucilla laughingly exclaimed: “You dear little mouse. I suppose a
tom-cat frightens you to death.”

But Félise was only listening with her outer ears. “I am very fond of
cats,” she replied simply.

Whereupon Lucilla laughed again with quick understanding.

“I have a half-grown Persian kitten,” she said, “rather a beauty.
Céleste, _apportez-moi le shah de Perse_. That’s my little joke.”

“_C’est un calembour_,” said Félise, with a smile.

“Of course it is. It’s real smart of you to see it. I call him
Padishah.”

Céleste brought a grey woolly mass of felinity from a basket in a dim
corner and handed it to Félise. The beast purred and stretched
contentedly in her arms.

“Oh, what a dear!” she cried. “What a fluffy little dear! For the last
week or two,” she found herself saying, “my only friend has been a cat.”

“What kind of a cat?” asked Lucilla.

“Oh, not one like this. It was a thin old tabby.” And under the
influence of the soft baby thing on her bosom and the kind eyes of her
young hostess, the shyness melted from her, and she told of Mimi, and
Aunt Clothilde, and the abhorred cathedral and the terrors of her flight
to Paris.

She had come, more or less, to an end, when Céleste brought in a
Pekinese spaniel, and set him down on the hearthrug to a plate of minced
raw beef, which he proceeded to devour with lightning gluttony. Having
licked the polished plate from hearthrug to clattering parquet and
licked it underneath in the hope of a grain of nourishment having melted
through, he arched his tail above his back and composing his miniature
leonine features, regarded his mistress with his soul in his eyes, as
who should say: “Now, having tasted, when shall I truly dine?” But
Lucilla sent him to his chair, where he assumed an attitude of polite
surprise; and she explained to Félise, captivated by his doggy
winsomeness, that she called him “Gaby,” which was short for
Heliogabalus, the voluptuary; which allusion Félise, not being familiar
with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, did not understand. But,
when Lucilla, breaking through rules of discipline, caught up the tawny
little aristocrat and apostrophized him as “the noseless blunder,”
Félise laughed heartily, thinking it very funny, and, holding the kitten
in her left arm, took him from Lucilla with her right, and covered the
tiny hedonist with caresses.

When the meal was over, Lucilla took her, still embracing kitten and
dog, into the studio—the wealthy feminine amateur’s studio—a room with
polished floors and costly rugs and divans and tapestries and an easel
or two and a great wood fire blazing up an imitation Renaissance
chimney-piece. And Lucilla talked not only as though she had known
Félise all her life, but as though Félise was the most fascinating
little girl she had ever met. And it was all more Wonderland for Félise.
And so it continued during the short evening; for Lucilla, seeing that
she was tired, ordered the removal to their respective padded baskets of
dog and cat, both of which Félise had retained in her embrace, and sent
her to bed early; and it continued during the process of undressing amid
the beautiful trifles wherewith she performed her toilette; and after
she had put on the filmy, gossamer garment adorned with embroidered
miracles that Céleste had laid out for her; and after she had sunk
asleep in the fragrant linen of the warm nest. But in the middle of the
night she awoke and saw the face of the dreadful woman in the Rue
Maugrabine and heard the voice of her Aunt Clothilde speaking blasphemy
against her father, and then she upbraided herself for being led away by
the enchantment of the Wonder-house, and breaking down, sobbed for her
lost illusions until the dawn.

In the meanwhile a heart-broken man sat in a sordid room toiling dully
at the task of translating French commercial papers into English, by
which means he added a little to his precarious income, while on the
other side of the partition his wife slept drunkenly. That had been his
domestic life, good God! he reflected, for more years than he cared to
number. But up to then Félise had been kept in ignorance. Now the veil
had been lifted. She had, indeed, retained the mother of her dreams, but
at what a cost to him! Would it not have been better to tell her the
truth? He stared at the type-written words until they were hidden by a
mist of tears. He had lost all that made life sweet for him—the love of
Félise.

He bowed his head in his hands. Judgment had at last descended on him
for the sins of his youth; for he had erred grievously. All the misery
he had endured since then had been but a preparation for the blow that
had now fallen. It would be easy to go to her to-morrow and say: “I
deceived you last night. The woman you saw was your mother.” But he knew
he would never be able to say it. He must pay the great penalty.

He paid it the next day when he called humbly to see her. She received
him dutifully and gave him her cheek to kiss, but he felt her shrink
from him and read the anguished condemnation in her eyes. He saw, too,
for he was quick at such things, how her glance took in, for the first
time in her life, his worn black clothes, his frayed linen, his genteel
shabbiness, a grotesque contrast to the air of wealth in which she found
herself. And he knew that she had no mean thoughts but was pierced to
the heart by the discovery; for she turned her head aside and bit her
lip, so that he should not guess.

“I should like to tell you what I have done,” said he, after some
desultory and embarrassed talk about Lucilla. “I have telegraphed to
Chartres and Brantôme to say that you are safe and sound, and I have
written to your Uncle Gaspard about Lucien Viriot. You will never hear
of the matter again, unless your Aunt Clothilde goes to Brantôme, which
I very much doubt.”

“Thank you, father,” said Félise, and the commonplace words sounded cold
in her ears. She was delivered, she knew, from the nightmare of the past
few weeks; but she found little joy in her freedom. Then she asked:

“Have you told Uncle Gaspard why I ran away from Aunt Clothilde?”

“Enough, dear, for him to understand. He will ask you no questions, so
you needn’t tell him anything.”

“Won’t that be ungrateful? I have treated him ungratefully enough
already.”

Fortinbras stretched out his hand to lay it caressingly on her head, as
he had done all her life, but, remembering, withdrew it, with a sigh.

“Your uncle is the best and truest man I have ever met,” said he. “And
he loves you dearly and you love him—and with love ingratitude can’t
exist. Tell him whatever you find in your heart. But there is one thing
you need never tell him—what you saw in the Rue Maugrabine last night.
I have done so already. In this way there will be nothing secret between
you.”

She sat with tense young face, looking at her hands. Again she saw the
squalid virago. She would see her till her dying day. To no one on earth
could she speak of her.

Fortinbras rose, kissed her on the forehead and went forth to his day’s
work of dealing out happiness to a clamouring world.




                              CHAPTER XIII


LUCILLA MERRITON had much money, a kind heart and a pretty little talent
in painting. The last secured her admittance to the circle of
art-students round about the Rue Bonaparte, the second made her popular
among them and the money enabled her to obey any reasonable dictate of
the kind heart aforesaid. When those who were her intimates, mainly
hard-working and none too opulent English girls, took her to task for
her luxurious way of living, and pointed out that it was not in keeping
with the Spartan, makeshift traditions of the Latin Quarter, and that it
differentiated her too much from her fellows, she replied, with the
frankness of her country, first, that she saw no sense in pretending to
be other than she was, second, that in the atmosphere of luxury to which
she had been born, she was herself, for whatever that self was worth;
and thirdly, that any masquerading as a liver of the simple life would
choke all the agreeable qualities out of her. When, looking round her
amateur studio, they objected that she did not take her art seriously,
she cordially agreed.

“I take what you call my art,” she would say, “just as it suits me. I
can command too many things in the world for me to sacrifice them to the
mediocre result I can get out of a paint-brush and a bit of canvas. I
shall never need paint for money, and if I did I’m sure I shouldn’t earn
any. But I love painting for its own sake, and I have enough talent to
make it worth while to have good instruction in technique, so that my
pictures shall more or less satisfy myself and not set my friends’ teeth
on edge. And that’s why I’m here.”

She was a wealthy vagabond of independent fortune inherited from her
mother long since deceased, with no living ties save her father, a
railway director in America, now married to a young wife, a school-mate
of her own, whom, since her childhood, she had peculiarly abhorred. But
in the world, which lay wide open to her, _videlicet_ the civilised
nations of the two hemispheres, she had innumerable friends. No human
will pretended to control her actions. She was as free to live in
Rosario as in Buda-Pesth; in Nairobi as in Nijni Novgorod. For the last
two or three years she had elected to establish her headquarters in
Paris and study painting. But why the latter process should involve a
hard bed in a shabby room and dreadful meals at the Petit Cornichon, she
could never understand. Occasionally, on days of stress at the
_atélier_, she did lunch at the Petit Cornichon. It was convenient, and,
as she was young and thirsty for real draughts of life, the chatter and
hubbub of insensate ambitions afforded her both interest and amusement;
but she found the food execrable and the universal custom of cleaning
knife, fork, spoon and plate before using them exceedingly disgusting.
Yet, being a lady born and bred, she performed the objectionable rite in
the most gracious way in the world; and when it came to comradeship,
then her democratic traditions asserted themselves. Her student friends
ranged the social gamut. If the wearer were a living spirit, she
regarded broken boots and threadbare garments merely as an immaterial
accident of fortune, like a broken nose or an amputated limb. The flat
on the Boulevard St. Germain was the haven of many a hungry girl and
boy. And they found their way thither (as far as Lucilla was concerned)
not because they were hungry, but because that which lay deep in their
souls had won her accurate recognition.

By way of digression, an essential difference in point of view between
English and Americans may here be noted. If an Englishman has reason to
admire a tinker and make friends with him, he will leave his own
respectable sphere and enter that of the tinker, and, in some humble
haunt of tinkerdom, where he can remain incognito, will commune with his
crony over pots of abominable and digestion-racking ale. The instinct of
the American, in sworn brotherhood with a tinker, is, on the other hand,
to lift the tinker to his own habitation of delight. He will desire to
take him into a saloon which he himself frequents, fill him up with
champagne and provide him with the best, biggest and strongest cigar
that money can buy. In both cases appear the special defects of national
qualities. The Englishman goes to the tinker’s boozing ken (thereby,
incidentally, putting the tinker at his ease) because he would be
ashamed of being seen by any of his own clan in a tinker’s company. The
American does not care a hang for being seen with the tinker; he wants
to give his friend a good time; but, incidentally, he has no intuitive
regard for the tinker’s feelings, predilections and timidities.

From which disquisition it may be understood how Lucilla played Lady
Bountiful without the slightest consciousness of doing so. She played it
so well, with regard to Félise, as to make that young woman in the
course of a day or two her slave and worshipper. She shewed her the
sights of Paris, Versailles, the Galeries de Lafayette, the Tomb of
Napoleon, Poiret’s, the Salon d’Hiver, the Panthéon and Cartier’s in the
Rue de la Paix. With the aid of pins and scissors and Céleste, she also
attired her in an evening frock and under the nominal protection of an
agreeable young compatriot from the Embassy took her to dine at the Café
de Paris and then to the Théâtre du Gymnase. A great, soft-cushioned,
smooth, noiseless car carried them luxuriously through the infinite
streets; and when they were at home it seemed to await them night and
day by the kerb of the Boulevard Saint Germain. Lucilla set the head of
the little country mouse awhirl with sensations. Félise revered her as a
goddess, and whispered in awe the Christian name which she was commanded
to use.

                 *        *        *        *        *

A breathless damsel, with a jumble of conflicting scraps of terror and
delight instead of a mind, her arms full of an adored Persian kitten and
an adoring Pekinese spaniel, after a couple of days’ flashing course
through France, was brought in the gathering dusk, with a triumphant
sweep up the hill, to the familiar front door of the Hôtel des Grottes.
Baptiste, green-aproned, gaped as he saw her, and, scuttling indoors,
shouted at the top of his voice:

“_Monsieur, monsieur, c’est mademoiselle!_”

In an instant, Bigourdin lumbered out at full speed. He almost lifted
her from the car, scattering outraged kitten and offended dog, hid her
in his vast embrace and hugged her and kissed her and held her out at
arm’s length and laughed and hugged her again. There was no doubt of the
prodigal’s welcome. She laughed and sobbed and hugged the great man in
return. And then he recovered himself and became the _bon hôtelier_ and
assisted Lucilla to alight, while Félise greeted a smiling Martin and
suffered the embrace of Euphémie, panting from the kitchen.

“If mademoiselle will give herself the trouble of following me——” said
Bigourdin, and led the way up the stairs, followed by Lucilla and
Céleste, guardian of the jewel case. He threw open the door of the
_chambre d’honneur_, a double-windowed room, above the terrace,
overlooking the town and the distant mountains of the Limousin, and
shewed her with pride a tiny salon adjoining, the only private
sitting-room in the hotel, crossed the corridor and flung to view the
famous bathroom, disclosed next door a room for the maid, and swept her
back to the bedroom, where a pine-cone fire was blazing fragrantly.

“_Voilà, mademoiselle_,” said he. “_Tout à votre disposition._”

“I think it is absolutely charming,” cried Lucilla. She looked round.
“Oh! what lovely things you have!”

Bigourdin beamed and made a little bow. He took inordinate pride in his
_chambre d’honneur_ in which he had stored the gems of the Empire
furniture acquired by his great-grandfather, the luckless Général de
Brigade. The instantaneous appreciation of a casual glance enchanted
him.

“I hope, mademoiselle,” said he, in his courteous way, “you will do
Félise and myself the honour of being our guest as long as you deign to
stay at Brantôme.”

Lucilla met his bright eyes. “That’s delightful of you,” she laughed.
“But I’m not one solitary person, I’m a caravan. There’s me and the maid
and the chauffeur and the car and the dog and the cat.”

“The hotel is very little, mademoiselle,” replied Bigourdin, “but our
hearts are big enough to entertain them.”

Nothing more, or, at least, nothing more by way of protest, was to be
said. Lucilla put out her hand in her free, generous gesture.

“Monsieur Bigourdin, I accept with pleasure your delightful
hospitality.”

“_Je vous remercie infiniment, mademoiselle_,” said Bigourdin.

He went downstairs in a flutter of excitement. Not for four generations,
so far as he was aware, had such an event occurred in the Hôtel des
Grottes. Members of the family, of course, had stayed there without
charge. Once, towards the end of the Second Empire, a Minister of the
Interior had occupied the _chambre d’honneur_, and had gone away without
paying his bill; but that remained a bad black debt in the books of the
hotel. Never had a stranger been an honoured guest. He had offered the
position, it is true, to Corinna; but then he was in love with Corinna,
which makes all the difference. The French are not instinctively
hospitable; when they are seized, however, by the impulse of
hospitality, all that they have is yours, down to the last crust in the
larder; but they are fully conscious of their own generosity, they feel
the tremendousness of the spiritual wave. So Bigourdin, kindest-hearted
of men, lumbered downstairs aglow with a sense of altruistic adventure.
In the vestibule he met Félise who had lingered there in order to obtain
from Martin a _compte rendu_ of the household and the neighbourhood.
Things had gone none too well—Monsieur Peyrian, one of their regular
commercial travellers, having discovered a black-beetle in his bread,
had gone to the Hôtel du Cygne. The baker had indignantly repudiated the
black-beetle, his own black-beetles being apparently of an entirely
different species. Another baker had been appointed, whose only defect
was his inability to bake bread. The _brave_ Madame Thuillier, who had
been called in to superintend the factory, had quarrelled, after two
days, with everybody, and had gone off in dudgeon because she did not
eat at the _patron’s_ table. Then they had lost two of their best hands,
one a young married woman who was reluctantly compelled to add to the
population of France, and the other a girl who was discharged for laying
false information against the very respectable and much married
Baptiste, saying that he had pinched her. The old Mère Maquoise,
_marchande de quatre saisons_, who was reputed to have known Général
Bigourdin, was dead, and one of the hotel omnibus horses had come down
on its knees.

Félise, forgetful of the Maison de Blanc and Nôtre Dame, wrung her
hands. She had descended from fairyland into life’s dear and important
realities.

“It’s desolating, what you tell me,” she cried.

“And all because you went away and left us,” said Martin.

“She is not going to leave us again!” cried Bigourdin, swooping down on
her and carrying her off.

In the prim little salon he hugged her again and said gripping her
hands:

“It appears you have greatly suffered, my poor little Félise. But why
didn’t you tell me from the first that you were unhappy with your Aunt
Clothilde? I did not know she had turned into such a _vieille pimbèche_.
She has written. And I have answered. Ah! I tell you, I have answered!
You need never again have any fear of your Aunt Clothilde. I hope I am a
Christian. But I hope too that I shall always differ from her in my
ideas of Christianity. _Mais tout ça est fini—bel et bien fini._ We
have to talk of ourselves. I have been a miserable man since you have
been away, _ma petite_ Félise. I tell you that in all frankness.
Everything has been at sixes and sevens. I can’t do without my little
_ménagère_. And you shall never marry anybody, even the President of the
Republic, unless you want to. _Foi de Bigourdin! Voilà!_”

Félise cried a little. “_Tu es trop bon pour moi, mon oncle._”

“_Allons donc!_ I seem to have been an old bear. Yet, in truth, I am
harmless as a sheep. But have confidence in me, and in my very dear
friend, your father—there are many things you cannot understand—and
things will arrange themselves quite happily. You love me just a little
bit, don’t you?”

She flung her arms round the huge man’s neck.

“_Je t’adore, mon petit oncle_,” she cried.

Ten minutes afterwards, with bunch of keys slung at her waist, she was
busy restoring to order the chaos of the interregnum. Terrible things
had happened during the absence of the feminine eye. Even Martin shared
the universal reprimand. For Félise, manageress of hotel, and Félise,
storm-tossed little human soul, were two entirely different entities.

“My dear Martin, how could you and my uncle pass these napkins from that
infamous old thief of a laundress. They are black!”

And ruthlessly she flicked a napkin folded mitre-wise from the centre
table before the eyes of the folder and revealed its dingy turpitude.

“It is well that I am back,” she declared.

“It is indeed, Mademoiselle Félise,” said Martin.

She gave him a swift little glance out of the tail of her eye, before
she sped away, and the corners of her lips drooped as though in
disappointment. Then perhaps reflecting that she had been addressing the
waiter and not the man, her face cleared. At all events he had taken her
rating in good part.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Dinner had already begun and the hungry commercials, napkins at neck,
were finishing their soup lustily, when Lucilla entered the dining room.
The open Medici collar to a grey velvet dress shewed the graceful
setting of her neck and harmonised with the brown hair brushed up from
the forehead. She advanced smiling and stately, giving the impression of
the perfect product of a new civilisation. Martin, who had but seen her
for a few seconds in the dusk confusedly clad in furs, stood
spell-bound, a pile of used soup-plates in his hands. Never had so
radiant an apparition swum before his gaze. Bigourdin, dining as usual
with Félise, rose immediately and conducted his guest to the little
table by the terrace where once Martin and Corinna had sat. It was
specially adorned with tawny chrysanthemums.

“I fell dreaming before the fire in the midst of your wonderful,
old-world things, and had to hurry into my clothes, and so I’m late,”
she apologised.

“If only you found all you needed, mademoiselle——” said Bigourdin
anxiously. “It is the provinces and not Paris.”

She assured him that Félise had seen to every conceivable want and he
left her to her meal. Martin delivered his soup-plates into the arms of
the chambermaid and hovered over Lucilla with the menu card.

“Will mademoiselle take the dinner?” he asked in French.

She regarded him calmly and humorously and nodded. He became aware that
her eyes were of a deep, deep grey, full of light. He found it difficult
not to keep on looking at them. Breaking away, however, he fetched her
soup and went off to attend to the others. At every pause by her table
he noted some new and incomparable attribute. When bending over the
platter from which she helped herself, he saw that her hands were
beautifully shaped, plump, with long thin fingers and with delicate
markings of veins beneath the white skin. An upward glance caught more
blue veins on the temples. Another time he was struck by the supple
grace of her movements. There were infinite gleams in her splendid hair.
The faintest suggestion of perfume arose from her garments. She declined
the vegetable course and, declining, looked up at him and smiled. He
thought he had never seen a brow so noble, a nose so exquisitely cut,
lips so kind and mocking. Her face was that of a Romney duchess into
which the thought and spiritual freedom of the twentieth century had
entered. As he sped about the service, thrusting dishes beneath bearded
or blue, ill-shaven chins, her face floated before his eyes; every now
and then he stole a distant glance at it, and longed for the happy
though transient moment when he should come close to it again.

While he was clearing her table for dessert she said:

“Why do you speak French to me, when you know I’m an American?”

“It is the custom of the house when a guest speaks such excellent French
as mademoiselle.”

“That’s very kind of you,” she said in English; “but it seems rather
ridiculous for an American and an Englishman to converse in a foreign
language.”

“How do you know I am English, mademoiselle?” he asked, his heart
a-flutter at the unexpected interchange of words.

She laughed. “I have eyes. Besides, I know all about you—first from our
friend Corinna Hastings, and lately from my little hostess over the
way.”

He flushed, charmed by the deep music of her voice and delighted at
being recognised by her not only as an individual (for she radiated an
attraction which had caused him to hate the conventional impersonality
of waiterdom) but as a member more or less of her own social class. He
paused, plate of crumbs in one hand and napkin in the other.

“Do you know Corinna Hastings?”

“Evidently. How else could she have told me of your romantic doings?”
she replied laughingly, and Martin flushed deeper, conscious of an idiot
question.

He set the apples and little white grapes before her. “I ought to have
asked you,” said he, “how Miss Hastings came to talk to you about me?”

“She came on the train from Brantôme and rang my bell in Paris. She kept
me up talking till four o’clock in the morning—not of you all the time.
Don’t imagine it. You were just interestingly incidental.”

“_Garçon_,” cried a voice from the centre table.

“_Bien, m’sieur._”

Martin tucked his napkin under his arm and turned away, followed by
Lucilla’s humorous glance.

“_L’addition!_”

“_Bien, m’sieur._”

He became the perfect waiter again, and brought the bill to the
commercial traveller who had merely come in for dinner. The latter paid
in even money, rose noisily—he was a stout, important, red-faced
man—and, fumbling in several pockets rendered difficult of access by
adiposity and good cheer, at last produced four coppers which he
deposited with a base, metallic chink in Martin’s palm.

“_Merci, m’sieur. Bon soir, m’sieur_,” said the perfect waiter. But he
would have given much to be able to dispose of the horrible coins
otherwise than by thrusting them in his trouser pocket, to be able, for
instance, to hurl them at the triple sausage neck of the departing
donor; for he knew the starry, humorous eyes of the divinity were fixed
on him. He felt hot and clammy and did not dare look round. And the
hideous thought flashed through his mind: “Will she offer me a tip when
she leaves?”

He busied himself furiously with his service, and, in a few moments, was
relieved to see her ceremoniously conducted by Bigourdin and Félise from
the _salle-à-manger_. On the threshold Bigourdin paused and called him.

“You will serve coffee and liqueurs in the _petit salon_, and if you go
to the Café de l’Univers, you will kindly make my excuses to our
friends.”

To enter the primly and plushily furnished salon, bearing the tray, and
to set out the cups and glasses and bottles was an ordeal which he went
through with the automatic rigidity of a highly trained London footman,
looking neither to right nor left. He had a vague impression of a
queenly figure reclining comfortably in an arm chair, haloed by a little
cloud of cigarette smoke. He retired, finished his work in the pantry,
swallowed a little food, changed his things and went out.

Instinct led him along the quays and through the narrow, old-world
streets to the patch of yellow light before the Café de l’Univers. But
there he halted, suddenly disinclined to enter. Something new and
amazing had come into his life—he could not yet tell what—discordant
with the commonplace of the familiar company. He looked through the
space left between the edge of the blind and the jamb of the window and
saw Beuzot, the professor at the Ecole Normale, playing backgammon with
Monsieur Callot, the postmaster; and a couple of places away from them
was visible the square-headed old Monsieur Viriot, smiting his left palm
with his right fist. The excellent old man always did that when he
inveighed against the government. To-night Martin cared little about the
Government of the French Republic; still less for backgammon. He had a
nostalgia for unknown things and an absurd impulse to walk abroad to
find them beneath the moon and stars. Obeying the impulse, he retraced
his steps along the quays and struck the main-road past the habitations
of the rock dwellers. He walked for a couple of miles between rocks
casting jagged shadows and a calm, misty plain without finding anything,
until, following a laborious, zig-zag course, a dissolute quarryman of
his acquaintance in incapable charge of a girl child of five, lurched
into him and laid the clutch of a drowning mariner upon his shoulder.

“Monsieur Martin,” said he. “It is the good God who has sent you.”

“Boucabeille,” said Martin—for that was the name of the miscreant—“you
ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“You need not tell me, Monsieur Martin,” replied Boucabeille.

As the child was crying bitterly and the father was self-reproachful—he
had taken the _mioche_ to see her aunt, and coming back had met some
friends who had enticed him into the Café of the Mère Diridieu, where
they had given him some poisoned, leg-dislocating alcohol—Martin took
the child in his arms, and trudged back to the rock-dwellings where the
drunkard lived. On the way Boucabeille, relieved of paternal
responsibility, the tired child now snuggling sleepily and comfortably
against Martin’s neck, grew confidential and confessed, with sly
enjoyment, that he had already well watered his throttle before he
started. The man, he declared, with the luminousness of an apostle, who
did not get drunk occasionally was an imbecile denying himself the
pleasures of the Other Life. Martin recognised in Boucabeille a
transcendentalist, no matter how muddle-headed. The sober clod did not
know adventures. He did not know happiness. The path of the drunkard,
Boucabeille explained, was strewn with joy.

The anxious wife who met them at the door called Martin a saint from
heaven and her husband a stream of unmentionable things. He staggered
under the outburst and laid his hand again on Martin’s shoulder.

“Monsieur Martin, I have committed a fault. I take you to witness”—his
wife paused in her invective to hear the penitent—“if I was more drunk
I wouldn’t pay attention to anything she says. I have committed a fault.
I haven’t got drunk enough.”

“_Sale cochon!_” cried the lady, and Martin left them, meditating on the
philosophy of drunkenness. _Quo me rapis Bacche, plenum tui?_ To what
godlike adventure? But the magic word was _plenum_—right full to the
lips. No half-and-half measures for Bacchus. Apparently Boucabeille had
failed in his adventure and had missed happiness by a gill. Browning’s
lines about the little more and the little less came into his head, and
he laughed. Both the poet and the muddle-headed quarryman were right.
Adventures not brought through to the end must be dismal fiasco. . . .
His mind wandered a little. His shoulder was ever such a trifle stiff
from carrying the child; but he missed the warmth of her grateful little
body, and the trusting clasp of her tiny arms. It had been an
insignificant adventure, an adventure, so to speak, in miniature; but it
had been complete, rounded off, perfect. The proof lay in the glow of
satisfaction at the thing accomplished. Materially, there was nothing to
complain about. But from a philosophic standpoint the satisfaction was
not absolute. For the absolute is finality, and there is no finality in
mundane things. From a thing so finite as human joy eternal law decreed
the evolution of the germs of fresh desires. There had been a strange
sweetness in the clasp of those tiny arms. How much sweeter to a man
would be the clasp, if the arms were his own flesh and blood? Martin was
shocked by the suspicion that things were not going right with him as a
human being.

The pleasant mass of the Hôtel des Grottes looming dimly white against
its black background came into view. The lights in an uncurtained and
unshuttered window, above the terrace, were visible. A figure passed
rapidly across the room and sent drunkards and adventures and
curly-headed five-year-olds packing from his mind. But he averted his
eyes and walked on and came to the Pont de Dronne, and then halted to
light a cigarette. The frosty silence of sharp moonlight hung over the
town. The silver shimmer reflected from reaches of water and from slated
roofs invested it with unspeakable beauty and peace. A little cold
caressing wind came from the distant mountains, seen in soft outline.
Near black shelves of rock and dark mysteries of forest and masses of
houses beyond the bridge-end closed other horizons. He remembered his
first impression of Brantôme, when he had sat with Corinna on the
terrace, a mothering shelter from all fierce and cruel things.

“And yet,” thought he, as he puffed his cigarette smoke in the clear
air, “beyond this little spot lies a world of unceasing endeavour and
throbbing pulses and women of disturbing beauty. Such a woman on her
meteoric passage from one sphere of glory to another has flashed before
my eyes to-night. Why am I here pursuing an avocation, which, though
honest, is none the less greasy and obscure?”

Unable to solve the enigma, he sighed and threw his cigarette, which had
gone out during his meditation, into the river. A patter of quick
footsteps at the approach of the bridge caused him to turn his head, and
he saw emerge from the gloom into the moonlight a tall, fur-clad figure
advancing towards him. She gave him a swift look of recognition.

“Monsieur Martin——”

He raised his cap. “Good evening, Miss Merriton.”

She halted. “My good host and hostess are gone to bed. I couldn’t sit by
my window and sentimentalise through the glass; so I came out.”

“It’s a fine night,” said Martin.

“It is. But not one to hang about on a windy bridge. Come for a little
walk, if you have time, and protect me against the dangers of Brantôme.”

Go for a walk with her? Defend her from dangers? Verily he would go
through the universe with her! His heart thumped. It was in his whirling
brain to cry: “Come and ride with me throughout the world and the more
dragons I can meet and slay in your service, the more worthy shall I be
to kiss the hem of your sacred grey velvet dinner-gown.” But from his
fundamental, sober, commonsense he replied:

“The only dangers of Brantôme at this time of night are prudish eyes and
scandalous tongues.”

She drew a little breath. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s frank and
sensible. I’m always forgetting that France isn’t New York, or Paris for
the matter of that, where one can do as one likes. I don’t know
Provincial France a little bit, but I suppose, for red-hot gossip, it
isn’t far behind a pretty little New England village. Still, can’t we
get out of range, somehow, of the eyes? That road over there”—she waved
a hand in the direction of the silent high-road, which Martin had lately
travelled—“doesn’t seem to be encumbered with the scandal-mongers of
Brantôme.”

He laughed. “Will you try it?”

She nodded assent.

They set forth briskly. The glimpse into her nature delighted him. She
appreciated at once the motive of his warning, but was serenely
determined to have her own way.

“We were just beginning an interesting little talk when you were called
off,” she remarked.

Martin felt himself grow red, remembering the tightly pocketed bagman
who took the stage while he searched for eleemosynary sous.

“My profession has its drawbacks,” said he.

“So has every profession. I’ve got a friend in America—I have met him
two or three times—who is conductor on the Twentieth Century Express
between New York and Chicago. He’s by way of being an astronomer, and
the great drawback of his profession is that he has no time to sit on
top of a mountain and look at stars. The drawback of yours is that you
can’t carry on pleasant conversations whenever you like. But the
profession’s all right, unless you’re ashamed of it.”

“But why should I be ashamed of it?” asked Martin.

“I don’t know. Why should you? My father, who was the son of a New
England parson——”

“My father was a parson,” said Martin.

“Was he? Well, that’s good. We both come of a God-fearing stock, which
is something in these days. Anyway, my father, in order to get through
college, waited on the men in Hall at Harvard, and was a summer waiter
at a hotel in the Adirondacks. Of course there are some Americans who
would like it to be thought that their ancestors brought over the family
estates with them in the _Mayflower_. But we’re not like that. Say,” she
said, after a few steps through the sweet keenness of the moonlit night.
“Have you heard lately from Corinna?”

He had not. In her last letter to him she had announced her departure
from the constricting family circle of Wendlebury. She was going to
London.

“Where she would have a chance of self-development,” said Lucilla, with
a laugh.

“How did you know that?” Martin asked in simple surprise, for those had
been almost Corinna’s own words.

“What else would she go to London for?”

“I don’t know,” said Martin. “She did not tell me.”

They did not discuss Corinna further. But Martin felt that his companion
had formulated his own diagnosis of Corinna’s abiding defect: her
suspicion that the cosmic scheme centred round the evolution of Corinna
Hastings. In a very subtle way the divinity had established implied
understandings between them. They were of much the same parentage. In
her own family the napkin had played no ignoble part. They were at one
in their little confidential estimate of their common friend. And when
she threw back her adorable head and drew a deep breath and said: “It’s
just lovely here,” he felt deliciously near her. Deliciously and
dangerously. A little later, as they came upon the rock dwellings, she
laid a fleeting, but thrilling touch on his arm.

“What in the world are those houses?”

He told her. He described the lives of the inhabitants. He described, on
the way back, for the rocks marked the limit of their stroll, his
adventure with Boucabeille. Ordinarily shy, and if not tongue-tied, at
least unimaginative in speech, he now found vivid words and picturesque
images, his soul set upon repaying her, in some manner for her gracious
comradeship. Her smiles, her interest, her quick sympathy, the
occasional brush of her furs against his body, as she leaned to listen,
intoxicated him. He spoke of France, the land of his adoption, and the
spiritual France that no series of hazardous governments could impair,
with rhapsodical enthusiasm. She declared, in her rich, deep voice, as
though carried away by him:

“I love to hear you say such things. It is splendid to get to the soul
of a people.”

Her tone implied admiration of achievement. He laughed rather foolishly,
in besotted happiness. They had reached the steep road leading to the
Hôtel des Grottes. She threw a hand to the moonlit bridge, where they
had met.

“Were you thinking of all that when I dragged you off?”

He laughed again. “No,” he confessed. “I was wondering what on earth I
was doing there.”

“I think,” said she softly, “you have just given me the _mot de
l’enigme_.”

In the vestibule they came across Bigourdin, cigarette in mouth,
sprawling as might have been expected, on the cane-bottomed couch. He
was always the last to retire, a fact which the blissful Martin had
forgotten. Lucilla sailed up, radiant in her furs, the flush of exercise
on her cheeks visible even under the dim electric light. Bigourdin
raised his ponderous bulk.

“I found Monsieur Martin outside,” she said, “and I commandeered him as
an escort round the neighbourhood. He couldn’t refuse. I hope I haven’t
done wrong.”

“Martin knows more about Brantôme,” replied Bigourdin courteously, “than
most of the Brantômois themselves.”

Céleste appeared from the gloom of the stairs. Lucilla, after an idle
word or two, retired. Bigourdin closed and bolted the front door. To do
that he would trust nobody, not even Martin. Having completed the
operation, he advanced slowly towards his employé.

“Did you go to the café to-night?”

“No,” replied Martin. “I was walking with mademoiselle, who, as she may
have told you, is a friend of Mademoiselle Corinna.”

“Yes, yes, she told me that,” said Bigourdin. “There is no need of
explanations, _mon ami_. But I am glad you did not go to the café. I
ought to have warned you. We must be very discreet towards the Viriots.
There is no longer any marriage. Félise doesn’t want it. Her father has
formally forbidden it. I have no desire to make anybody unhappy. But
there it is. _Foutu, le mariage._ And I haven’t said anything as yet to
the Viriots. And, again, I can’t say anything to Monsieur Viriot, until
he says something to me. _Voilà la situation. Cest d’une délicatesse
extraordinaire._”

He passed his hand over his head and tried to grip the half-inch
stubble.

“I tell you this, _mon cher_ Martin, because you know the intimate
affairs of the family. So”—he shook an impressive finger—“act towards
the Viriots, father and son, as if you knew nothing, nothing at all.
_Laissez-moi faire._”

Martin pledged the discretion of the statues in the old Alhambra tale.
What did the extraordinary delicacy of the situation between Bigourdin
and the Viriots matter to him? When he reached his room, he laughed
aloud, oblivious of Bigourdin, the Viriots and poor little Félise who
(though he knew it not) lay achingly awake.

At last a woman, a splendid wonder of a woman, a woman with the
resplendent dignity of the King’s daughter of the fairy tales, with the
bewilderment of beauty of face and of form and of voice like the cooing
of a dove, with the delicate warm sympathy of sheer woman, had come into
his life.

The usually methodical Martin threw his shirt and trousers across the
room and walked about like a lunatic in his under things, until a sneeze
brought him to the consciousness of wintry cold.

The only satisfying sanction of romance is its charm of intimate
commonplace.




                              CHAPTER XIV


THEY had further talk together the next afternoon. A lost remnant of
golden autumn freakishly returned to warm the December air. The end of
the terrace caught a flood of sunshine wherein Lucilla, wrapped in furs
and rugs and seated in one of the bent-wood rocking-chairs brought out
from winter quarters for the occasion, had established herself with a
book. The little dog’s head appeared from under the rug, his strange
Mongolian eyes staring unsympathetically at a draughty world. Martin
sauntered out to breathe the beauty of the hour, which was that of his
freedom. He explained the fact when she informed him that Félise and
Bigourdin had both left her a few minutes before in order to return to
their duties. Martin being free, she commanded him to stay and entertain
her.

“If I were a good American,” she said, “I should be racing about in the
car doing the sights of the neighbourhood; but to sit lazily in the sun
is too great a temptation. Besides,” she added, “I have explored the
town this morning. I went round with Monsieur Bigourdin.”

“He is very proud of Brantôme,” said Martin.

She dismissed Brantôme. “I have lost my heart to him. He is so big and
comfortable and honest, and he talks history like a poetical professor
with the manners of an Embassy attaché. He’s unique among landlords.”

“I love Bigourdin,” said Martin, “but the type is not uncommon in these
old inns of France—especially those which have belonged to the same
family for generations. There is the proprietor of the Hôtel du Commerce
at Périgueux, for instance, who makes _pâté de foie gras_, just like
Bigourdin, and is a well-known authority on the prehistoric antiquities
of the Dordogne. He once went to London, for a day; and what do you
think was his object? To inspect the collection of flint instruments at
the Guildhall Museum. He told me so himself.”

“That’s all very interesting,” said Lucilla, “but I’m sure he’s nothing
like Bigourdin. He can’t be. And his hotel can’t be like this. It’s the
queerest hotel I’ve ever struck. It’s run by such unimaginable people. I
think I’ve lost my heart to all of you. There’s Bigourdin, there’s
Félise, the dearest and most delicate little soul in the world, the
daughter of a remarkable mystery of a man, there are Baptiste and
Euphémie and Marie, the chambermaid, who seem to exude desire to fold me
to their bosoms whenever I meet them, and there is yourself, an English
University man, an exceedingly competent waiter and a perfectly
agreeable companion.”

The divinity crowned with a little sealskin motoring toque which left
unhidden the fascination of her up-brushed hair, cooed on deliciously.
The knees of Martin, leaning against the parapet, became as water. He
had a crazy desire to kneel at her feet on the concrete floor of the
terrace. Then he noticed that between her feet and the cold concrete
floor there was no protecting footstool. He fetched one from the dining
room and had the felicity of placing it for her and readjusting the
rugs.

“I suppose you’re not going to be a waiter here all your life,” she
said.

He signified that the hypothesis was correct.

“What are you going to do?”

It was in his awakened imagination to say:

“Follow you to the ends of the earth,” but common sense replied that he
did not know. He had made no plans. She suggested that he might travel
about the wide world. He breathed an inward sigh. Why not the starry
firmament? Why not, rainbow-winged and golden spear in hand, swoop, a
bright Archangel, from planet to planet?

“You ought to see Egypt,” she said, “and feel what a speck of time you
are when the centuries look down on you. It’s wholesome. I’m going early
in the New Year. I go there and try to paint the desert; and then I sit
down and cry—which is wholesome too—for me.”

Before Martin’s inner vision floated a blurred picture of camels and
pyramids and sand and oleographic sunsets. He said, infatuated: “I would
give my soul to go to Egypt.”

“Egypt is well worth a soul,” she laughed.

Words and reply were driven from his head by the sight of a great
splotch of grease on the leg of his trousers. A dress suit worn daily
for two or three months in pursuit of a waiter’s avocation, does not
look its best in stark sunlight. Self-conscious, he crossed his legs, as
he leaned against the parapet, in order to hide the splotch. Then he
noticed that one of the studs of his shirt had escaped from the frayed
and blackened buttonhole. Again he felt her humorous eyes upon him. For
a few moments he dared not meet them. When he did look up he found them
fixed caressingly on the Pekinese spaniel, which had slipped upon its
back in the hope of a rubbed stomach, and was waving feathery paws in
pursuit of her finger. A moment’s reflection brought heart of grace.
Greasy suit and untidy stud-hole must have been obvious to her from his
first appearance on the terrace—indeed they must have been obvious
while he had waited on her at déjeuner. Her invitation to converse was
proof that she disregarded outer trappings, that she recognised the man
beneath the soup-stained raiment. He uncrossed his legs and stood
upright. Then he remembered her remark.

“The question is,” said he, “whether my soul would fetch enough to
provide me with a ticket to Egypt.”

She smiled lazily. The sunlight being full on her face, he noticed that
her eyelashes were brown. Wondrous discovery!

“Anyhow,” she replied, “where there’s a soul, there’s a way.”

She took a cigarette from a gold case that lay on the little iron table
beside her. Martin sprang forward with a match. She thanked him
graciously.

“It isn’t money that does the real things,” she said, after a few
meditative puffs. “To hear an American say so must sound strange to your
English ears. You believe, I know, that Americans make money an Almighty
God that can work any miracles over man and natural forces that you
please. But it isn’t so. The miracles, such as they are, that America
has performed, have been due to the naked human soul. Money has come as
an accident or an accretion and has helped things along. We have a
saying which you may have heard: ‘Money talks.’ That’s just it. It
talks. But the soul has had to act first. Money had nothing to do with
American Independence. It was the soul of George Washington. It wasn’t
money that invented the phonograph. It was the soul of the train newsboy
Edison. It wasn’t money that brought into being the original Cornelius
Vanderbilt. It was the soul of the old ferryman that divined the power
of steam both on sea and land a hundred years ago, and accidentally or
incidentally or logically or what you please, founded the Vanderbilt
fortune. I could go on for ever with instances from my own
country—instances that every school-child knows. In the eyes of the
world the Almighty Dollar may seem to rule America —but every thinking
American knows in his heart of hearts that the Almighty Dollar is but an
accidental symbol of the Almighty soul of man. And it’s the soul that
we’re proud of and that keeps the nation together. All this more or less
was at the back of my mind when I said where there’s a soul there’s a
way.”

As this little speech progressed her face lost its expression of serene
and humorous contentment with the world, and grew eager and her eyes
shone and her voice quickened. He regarded her as some fainéant Homeric
warrior might have regarded the goddess who had descended cloud-haste
from Olympus to exhort him to noble deeds. The exhortation fluttered
both pride and pulses. He saw in her a woman capable of great things and
she had appealed to him as a man also capable.

“You have pointed me out the way to Egypt,” he said.

“I’m glad,” said Lucilla. “Look me up when you get there,” she added
with a smile. “It seems a big place, but it isn’t. Cairo, Luxor,
Assouan—and at any rate the Semiramis Hotel at Cairo.”

And then she began to talk of that wonderful land, of the mystery of the
desert, the inscrutable gods of granite and Karnac brooding over the
ghost of Thebes. She spoke from wide knowledge and sympathy. An allusion
here and there indicated how true a touch she had on far divergent
aspects of life. Apart from her radiant adorableness which held him
captive, she possessed a mind which stimulated his own so long lain
sluggish. He had not met before the highly educated woman of the world.
Instinctively he contrasted her with Corinna, who in the first days of
their pilgrimage had dazzled him with her attainments. She had a quick
intelligence, but in any matter of knowledge was soon out of her depth;
yet she exhibited singular adroitness in regaining the shallows where
she found safety in abiding. Lucilla, on the other hand, swam serenely
out into deep blue water. From every point of view she was a goddess of
bewildering attributes.

After a while she shivered slightly. The sun had disappeared behind a
corner of the hotel. Greyness overspread the terrace. The glory of the
short winter afternoon had departed. She rose, Heliogabalus, also
shivering, under her arm. Martin held the rugs.

“I wonder,” said she, “whether you could possibly send up some tea to my
quaint little salon. Perhaps you might induce Félise to join me.”

That was all the talk he had with her. In the evening the arrival of an
English motor party kept him busy, both during dinner and afterwards;
for not only did they desire coffee and liqueurs served in the
vestibule, but they gave indications to his experienced judgment of
requiring relays of whiskies and sodas until bedtime. Again he did not
visit the Café de l’Univers.

The next morning she started for the Riviera. She was proceeding thither
via Toulouse, Carcassonne, Narbonne and the coast. To Martin’s
astonishment Félise was accompanying her, on a visit for ten days or a
fortnight to the South. It appeared that the matter had been arranged
late the previous evening. Lucilla had made the proposal, swept away
difficulty after difficulty with her air of a smiling, but irresistible
providence and left Bigourdin and Félise not a leg save sheer
churlishness to stand on. Clothes? She had ten times the amount she
needed. The perils of the lonely and tedious return train journey? Never
could Félise accomplish it. Bigourdin turned up an _Indicateur des
Chemins de Fer_. There were changes, there were waits. Communications
were arranged, with diabolical cunning, not to correspond. Perhaps it
was to confound the Germans in case of invasion. As far as he could make
out it would take seventy-four hours, forty-three minutes to get from
Monte Carlo to Brantôme. It was far simpler to go from Paris to Moscow,
which as every one knew was the end of the world. Félise would starve.
Félise would perish of cold. Félise would get the wrong train and find
herself at Copenhagen or Amsterdam or Naples, where she wouldn’t be able
to speak the language. Lucilla laughed. There was such a thing as
L’Agence Cook which moulded the _Indicateur des Chemins de Fer_ to its
will. She would engage a man from Cook’s before whose brass-buttoned
coat and a gold-lettered cap band the Indicateur would fall to pieces,
to transfer Félise personally, by easy stages, from house to house.
Félise had pleaded her uncle’s need. Lucilla, in the most charming way
imaginable, had deprecated as impossible any such colossal selfishness
on the part of Monsieur Bigourdin. Overawed by the Olympian he had
peremptorily ordered Félise to retire and pack her trunk. Then, obeying
the dictates of his sound sense he had asked Lucilla what object she had
in her magnificent invitation. His little girl, said he, would acquire a
taste for celestial things which never afterwards would she be in a
position to gratify. To which, Lucilla:

“How do you know she won’t be able to gratify them? A girl of her
beauty, charm and character, together with a little knowledge of the
world of men, women and things, is in a position to command whatever she
chooses. She has the beauty, charm and character and I want to add the
little knowledge. I want to see a lovely human flower expand”—she had a
graceful trick of restrained gesture which impressed Bigourdin. “I want
to give a bruised little girl whom I’ve taken to my heart a good time.
For myself, it’s some sort of way of finding a sanction for my otherwise
useless existence.”

And Bigourdin clutching at his bristles had plucked forth no adequately
inspired reply. The will of the New World had triumphed over that of the
Old.

All the staff of the hotel witnessed the departure.

“Monsieur Martin,” said Félise in French, about to step into the great
car, a medley, to her mind, of fur rugs and dark golden dogs and grey
cats and maids and chauffeurs and innumerable articles of luggage, “I
have scarcely had two words with you. I no longer know where I have my
head. But look after my uncle and see that the laundress does not return
the table-linen black.”

“_Bien_, Mademoiselle Félise,” said Martin.

Lucilla, pink and white and leopard-coated, shook hands with Bigourdin,
thanked him for his hospitality and reassured him as to the perfect
safety of Félise. She stepped into the car. Martin arranged the rugs and
closed the door. She held out her hand to him.

“We meet in Egypt,” she said in a low voice. As the car drove off, she
turned round and blew a gracious kiss to the little group.

“_Voilà une petite sorcière d’Américaine_,” said Bigourdin. “Pif! Paf!
and away goes Félise on her broomstick.”

Martin stood shocked at hearing his Divinity maligned as a witch.

“Here am I,” continued Bigourdin, “between pretty sheets. I have no
longer a housekeeper, seeing that Madame Thuillier rendered herself
unbearable. However”—he shrugged his shoulders resignedly—“we must get
on by ourselves as best we can. The trip will be good for the health of
Félise. It will also improve her mind. She will stay in many hotels and
observe their organisation.”

From the moment that Martin returned to his duties he felt unusual lack
of zeal in their performance. Deprived of the Celestial Presence the
Hôtel des Grottes seemed to be stricken with a blight The rooms had
grown smaller and barer, the furniture more common, and the terrace
stretched outside a bleak concrete wilderness. Often he stood on the
bridge and repeated the question of the memorable evening. What was he
doing there when the wide world was illuminated by a radiant woman?
Suddenly Bigourdin, Félise, the circle of the Café de l’Univers became
alien in speech and point of view. He upbraided himself for base
ingratitude. He realised, more from casual talk with Bigourdin, than
from sense of something wanting, the truth of Félise’s last remark. In
the usual intimate order of things she would have related her
experiences of Chartres and Paris in which he would have manifested a
more than brotherly interest. During her previous absence he had thought
much of Félise and had anticipated her return with a throb of the heart.
The dismissal of Lucien Viriot, much as he admired the gallant
ex-cuirassier, pleased him mightily. He had shared Bigourdin’s
excitement over the escape from Chartres, over Fortinbras’s prohibition
of the marriage, over her return in motoring state. When she had freed
herself from Bigourdin’s embrace, and turned to greet him, the clasp of
her two little hands and the sight of her eager little face had thrilled
him. He had told her, as though she belonged to him, of the things he
knew she was dying to hear. . . . And then the figure of the American
girl with her stately witchery had walked through the door of the
_salle-à-manger_ into his life.

The days went on dully, shortening and darkening as they neared
Christmas. Félise wrote letters to her uncle, artlessly filled with the
magic of the South. Two letters from Lucilla Merriton decreed extension
of her guest’s visit. Bigourdin began to lose his genial view of
existence. He talked gloomily of France’s unreadiness for war. There
were thieves and traitors in the Cabinet. Whole Army Corps were
notoriously deficient in equipment and transport. It was enough, he
declared, to make a patriotic Frenchman commit protesting suicide in the
lobby of the Chamber of Deputies. And what news had Martin received of
Mademoiselle Corinna? Martin knew little save that she was engaged in
some mysterious work in London.

“But what is she doing?” cried Bigourdin, at last.

“I haven’t the remotest idea,” replied Martin.

“_Dites donc, mon ami_,” said Bigourdin, the gloom of anxiety deepening
on his brow. “You do not think, by any chance”—he hesitated before
breathing the terrible surmise—“you do not think she has made herself a
suffragette?”

“How can I tell?” replied Martin. “With Corinna all things are
possible.”

“Except to take command of the Hôtel des Grottes,” said Bigourdin, and
he sighed vastly.

One evening he said: “My good friend Martin, I am feeling upset. Instead
of going to the Café de l’Univers, let us have a glass of the _vieille
fine du Brigadier_ in the _petit salon_ where I have ordered Marie to
make a good fire.”

The old Liqueur Brandy of the Brigadier was literally, from the market
standpoint, worth its weight in gold. In the seventies Bigourdin’s
father, during the course of reparations, had discovered, in a blocked
and forgotten cellar, three almost evaporated casks bearing the
inscription just decipherable beneath the mildew in Brigadier General
Bigourdin’s old war-dog handwriting: “Cognac. 1812.” His grandson, who
had lost a leg and an arm in 1870, knew what was due to the brandy of
the _Grande Armée_. Instead of filling up the casks with newer brandy
and selling the result at extravagant prices, he reverently bottled the
remaining contents of the three casks and on each bottle stuck a printed
label setting forth the great history of the brandy, and stored the lot
in a dry bin which he charged his son to venerate as one of the sacred
depositaries of France in the family of Bigourdin.

Now in any first-class restaurant in Paris, Monte Carlo, Aix-les-Bains,
you can get Napoleon Brandy. The bottle sealed with the still
mind-stirring initial “N” on the neck, is uncorked solemnly before you
by the silver-chained functionary. It is majestic liquid. But not a drop
of the distillation of the Napoleonic grape is there. The casks once
containing it have been filled and refilled for a hundred years. For
brandy unlike port does not mature in bottle. The best 1812 brandy
bottled that year would be to-day the same as it was then. But if it has
remained for over sixty years in cask, you shall have a precious fluid
such as it is given to few kings or even emperors to taste. I doubt
whether there are a hundred gallons of it in the wide, wide world.

The proposal to open a bottle of the Old Brandy of the Brigadier
portended a state of affairs so momentous that Martin gaped at the back
of Bigourdin on his way to the cellar. On the occasion of what high
solemnity the last had been uncorked, Martin did not know: certainly not
on the occasion of the dinner of ceremony to the Viriots, in spite of
the fact that the father of the prospective bridegroom was _marchand de
vins en gros_ and was expected by Bigourdin to produce at the return
dinner some of his famous Chambertin.

“Come,” said Bigourdin, cobwebbed bottle in hand, and Martin followed
him into the prim little salon. From a cupboard whose glass doors were
veiled with green-pleated silk, he produced two mighty quart goblets
which he set down on a small table, and into each poured about a
sherry-glass of the precious brandy.

“Like this,” he explained, “we do not lose the perfume.”

Martin sipped; it was soft like wine and the delicate flavour lingered
deliciously on tongue and palate.

“I like to think,” said Bigourdin, “that it contains the soul of the
_Grande Armée_.”

They sat in stiff arm chairs covered in stamped velvet, one on each side
of the wood fire.

“My friend,” said Bigourdin, lighting a cigarette, “I am not as
contented with the world as perhaps I ought to be. I had an interview
with Monsieur Viriot to-day which distressed me a great deal. The two
families have been friends and the Viriots have supplied us with wine on
an honourable understanding for generations. But the understanding was
purely mercantile and did not involve the sacrifice of a virgin. _Le
Père_ Viriot seems to think that it did. I exposed to him the
disinclination of Félise, and the impossibility of obtaining that which
is necessary, according to the law, the consent of her parents. He threw
the parents to the four winds of heaven. He conducted himself like a man
bereft of reason. Always beware of the obstinacy of a flat-headed man.”

“What was the result of the interview?” asked Martin.

“We quarrelled for good and all. We quitted each other as enemies. He
sent round his clerk this afternoon with his account, and I paid it in
cash down to the last centime. And now I shall have to go to the Maison
Prunier of Périgueux, who are incapable of any honourable understanding
and will try to supply me with abominable beverages which will poison
and destroy my clientèle.”

Recklessly he finished his brandy and poured himself out another
portion. Then he passed the bottle to Martin.

“_Sers-toi_,” said he, using for the first time the familiar second
person singular. Martin was startled, but said nothing. Then he
remembered that Bigourdin, contrary to his usual abstemious habits, had
been supplied at dinner with a cradled quart of old Corton which awakens
generosity of sentiment towards their fellows in the hearts of men.

“_Mon brave_,” he remarked, after a pause, “my heart is full of problems
which I cannot resolve and I have no one to turn to but yourself.”

“I appreciate your saying so very much,” replied Martin; “but why not
consult our wise and experienced friend Fortinbras?”

“_Voilà_,” cried Bigourdin, waving a great hand. “It is he who sets me
the greatest problem of all. Why do you think I have let Félise go away
with that pretty whirlwind of an American?” Martin stiffened, not
knowing whether this was a disparagement of Lucilla; but Bigourdin,
heedless, continued: “It is because she is very unhappy, and it is out
of human power to give her consolation. You are a gentleman and a man of
honour. I will repose in you a sacred confidence. But that which I am
going to tell you, you will swear never to reveal to a living soul.”

Martin gave his word. Bigourdin, without touching on long-past sorrows,
described the visit of Félise to the Rue Maugrabine.

“It was my sister,” said he, “for years sunk in the degradation of
drunkenness—so rare among Frenchwomen—it is madness, _que veux-tu_?
Often she has gone away to be cured, with no effect. I have urged my
brother-in-law to put her away permanently in a _maison de santé_; but
he has not been willing. It was he, he maintains, who in far-off,
unhappy days, when, _pauvre garçon_, he lifted his elbow too often
himself, gave her the taste for alcohol. For that reason he treats her
with consideration and even tenderness. _Cest beau._ And he himself, you
must have remarked, has not drunk anything but water for many years.”

“Of course,” said Martin, and his mind went back to his first meeting
with Fortinbras in the lonely Petit Cornichon, when the latter imbibed
such prodigious quantities of raspberry syrup and water. It seemed very
long ago. Bigourdin went on talking.

“And so,” said he, at last, “you see the unhappy situation which
Fortinbras, like a true Don Quixote, has arranged between himself and
Félise. She retains the sacred ideal of her mother, but holds in horror,
very naturally, the father whom she has always adored. It is a bleeding
wound in her innocent little soul. What can I do?”

Martin was deeply moved by the pitifulness of the tale. Poor little
Félise, how much she must have suffered.

“Would it not be better,” said he, “to sacrifice a phantom mother—for
that’s what it comes to—for the sake of a living father?”

Bigourdin agreed, but Fortinbras expressly forbade such a disclosure. In
this he sympathised with Fortinbras, although the mother was his own
flesh and blood. Truly he had not been lucky in sisters—one a _bigote_
and the other an _alcoolique_. He expressed sombre views as to the
family of which he was the sole male survivor. Seeing that his wife had
given him no children, and that he had not the heart to marry one of the
damsels of the neighbourhood, he bewailed the end of the good old name
of Bigourdin. But perhaps it were best. For who could tell, if he begat
a couple of children, whether one would not be afflicted with alcoholic,
and the other with religious mania? To beget brave children for France,
a man, _nom de Dieu_! must put forth all the splendour and audacity of
his soul. How could he do so, when the only woman who could conjure up
within him the said splendour and audacity would have nothing to do with
him? To fall in love with a woman was a droll affair. But if you loved
her, you loved her, however little she responded. It was a species of
malady which must be supported with courageous resignation. He sighed
and poured out a third glass of the brandy of the Brigadier. Martin did
likewise, thinking of the woman whose white fingers held the working of
the splendour and audacity of the soul of Martin Overshaw. He felt drawn
into brotherly sympathy with Bigourdin; but, for the life of him, he
could not see how anybody could be dependent for soul provisions of
splendour and audacity upon Corinna Hastings. The humbly aspiring fellow
moved him to patronising pity.

Martin strove to comfort him with specious words of hope. But
Bigourdin’s mental condition was that of a man to whom wallowing in
despair alone brings consolation. He had been suffering from a gathering
avalanche of misfortunes. First had come his rejection, followed by the
unsatisfied longing of the devout lover. It cannot be denied, however,
that he had borne himself gallantly. Then the fading of his dream of the
Viriot alliance had filled him with dismay. Félise’s adventure in the
Rue Maugrabine and its resulting situation had caused him sleepless
nights. Lucilla Merriton had taken him up between her fingers and
twiddled him round, thereby depriving him of volition, and having put
him down in a state of bewilderment, had carried off Félise. And to-day,
last accretion that set the avalanche rolling, his old friend Viriot had
called him a breaker of honourable understandings and had sent a clerk
with his bill. The avalanche swept him into the Slough of Despond,
wherein he lay solacing himself with hopeless imaginings and the old
brandy of the Brigadier. But human instinct made him beckon to Martin,
call him “_tu_” and bid him to keep an eye on the quagmire and stretch
out a helping hand. He also had in view a subtle and daring scheme.

“_Mon brave ami_,” said he, “when I die”—his broad face assumed an
expression of infinite woe and he spoke as though he were seventy—“what
will become of the Hôtel des Grottes? Félise will benefit principally,
_bien entendu_, by my will; but she will marry one of these days and
will follow her husband, who probably will not want to concern himself
with hotel keeping.” He glanced shrewdly at Martin, who regarded him
with unmoved placidity. “To think that the hotel will be sold and all
its honourable traditions changed would break my heart. I should not
like to die without any solution of continuity.”

“But, my dear Bigourdin,” said Martin, “what are you thinking of? You’re
a young man. You’re not stricken with a fatal malady. You’re not going
to die. You have twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years before you in the
course of which all kinds of things may happen.”

Bigourdin leant forward and stretched out his great arm across the
fireplace until his fingers touched Martin’s knee.

“Do you know what is going to happen? War is going to happen. Next
year—the year after—five years hence—_que sais-je, moi?_—but it has
to come. All these pacifists and anti-militarists are either imbeciles
or traitors—those that are not dreaming mad-house dreams of the
millennium are filling their pockets—of the latter there are some in
high places. There is going to be war, I tell you, and many people are
going to die. And when the bugle sounds I put on my old uniform and
march to the cannon’s mouth like my fathers before me. And why shouldn’t
I die, like my brother in Morocco? Tell me that?”

In spite of his intimacy with the sturdy thought of provincial France,
Martin could not realise how the vague imminence of war could affect so
closely the personal life of an individual Frenchman.

“No matter,” said Bigourdin, after a short discussion. “I have to die
some day. It was not to argue about the probable date of my decease that
I have asked you to honour me with this special conversation. I have
expressed to you quite frankly the motives which actuate me at the
present moment. I have done so in order that you may understand why I
desire to make you a business proposition.”

“A business proposition?” echoed Martin.

“_Oui, mon ami._”

He replenished Martin’s enormous beaker and his own and gave the toast.

“_A l’Entente Cordiale_—between our nations and between our two
selves.”

Lest the uninitiated may regard this sitting as a dram drinking orgy, it
must be borne in mind that in such brandy as that of the Brigadier,
strength has melted into the gracious mellowness of old age. The fiery
spirit that the _cantinière_ or the _vivandière_ of 1812 served out of
her little waist-slung barrel to the warriors of the _Grande Armée_, was
now but a fragrant memory of battles long ago.

“A business proposition,” repeated Bigourdin, and forthwith began to
develop it. It was the very simplest business proposition in the world.
Why should not Martin invest all or part of his little heritage in the
century-old and indubitably flourishing business of the Hôtel des
Grottes, and become a partner with Bigourdin? Lawyers would arrange the
business details. In this way, whether Bigourdin met with a gory death
within the next two or three years or a peaceful one a quarter of a
century hence, he would be reassured that there would be no solution of
continuity in the honourable tradition of the Hôtel des Grottes.

It was then that Martin fully understood the solemnity of the
occasion—the _petit salon_ with fire specially lit, the Brigadier
brandy, the preparatory revelation of the soul-state of Bigourdin. The
unexpectedness of the suggestion, however, dazed him. He said politely:

“My dear friend, your proposal that I should associate myself with you
in this business is a personal compliment, which I shall never cease to
appreciate. But——”

“But what?”

“I must think over it.”

“Naturally,” said Bigourdin. “One would be a linnet or a butterfly
instead of a man if one took a step like that without thinking. But at
least the idea is not disagreeable to you.”

“Of course not,” replied Martin. “The only question is how should I get
the money?”

“Your little heritage, _parbleu_.”

“But that is in Consols—_rentes anglaises_, and I only get my dividends
twice a year.”

“You could sell out to-morrow or the next day and get the whole in bank
notes or golden sovereigns.”

“I suppose I could,” said Martin. Not till then had he realised the
simple fact that if he chose he could walk about with a sack of a
thousand sovereigns over his shoulder. He had taken it in an
unspeculative way for granted that the capital remained locked up behind
impassable doors in the Bank of England. Instinct, however, restrained
him from confessing to Bigourdin such innocence in business affairs.

“If I did not think it would be as safe here as in the hands of the
British Government, I would not make the suggestion.”

Martin started upright in his chair.

“My dear friend, I know that,” he cried ingenuously, horrified lest he
should be thought to suspect Bigourdin’s good faith.

“And you would no longer wear that costume.” Bigourdin smiled and waved
a hand towards the dress-suit.

“Which is beginning to show signs of wear,” said Martin.

He glanced down and caught sight of the offending splotch of grease. The
quick association of ideas caused a vision of Lucilla to pass before his
eyes. He heard her rich, deep voice: “We meet in Egypt.” But how the
deuce could they meet in Egypt or in any other Lucilla-lit spot on the
earth if he started inn-keeping with Bigourdin, and tied himself down
for life to Brantôme? A chill ran down his spine.

“_Eh, bien?_” said Bigourdin, recalling him to the _petit salon_.

Martin had an inspiration of despair. “I should like,” said he, “to talk
the matter over with Fortinbras.”

“It is what I should advise,” said Bigourdin heartily. “You can go to
Paris whenever you like. And now _n’en parlons plus_. I feel much
happier than at the beginning of the evening. It is the brandy of the
brave old Brigadier. Let us empty the bottle and drink to the repose of
his soul. He would ask nothing better.”




                               CHAPTER XV


THE days went on, and nothing more was said of the proposal, it being
understood that, as soon as Félise had wrought order out of chaos for a
second time, Martin should consult with Fortinbras, his bankers, his
solicitors and other eminent advisers. They resumed their evening visits
to the Café de l’Univers, where Bigourdin and Monsieur Viriot sat as far
apart as was consonant with membership of the circle. On meeting they
saluted each other with elaborate politeness and addressed each other as
“Monsieur” when occasion required interchange of speech. Every one knew
what had happened, and, as every one was determined that the strained
relations between them should not interfere with his own personal
comfort, nobody cared. The same games were played, the same arguments
developed. A favourite theme was the probable action of the Socialists
on the outbreak of war. Some held, Monsieur Viriot among them, that they
would refuse to take up arms and would spread counsels of ignominy among
the people. The Professor at the Ecole Normale, allowed to express
latitudinarian views on account of his philosophic position, was of
opinion that the only safeguard against a European war lay in the
solidarity of the International Socialist Brotherhood.

“The Prussian drill-sergeant,” said the Mayor, “will soon see that there
is no solidarity as far as Germany is concerned.”

“We have no drill-sergeants. The _sous-officier_ is under the officer
who is under the general who is bought by the men we are so besotted as
to put into power to play into the hands of the enemy. Our Socialists
will cleave to their infamous principles.” Thus declared Monsieur
Viriot, who was a reactionary republican and regarded Socialism and
Radicalism and Anti-clericalism as punishments inflicted by an outraged
Heaven on a stiff-necked generation. “The Socialist will betray us,” he
cried.

“Monsieur,” replied Bigourdin loftily, “you are wrong to accuse the
loyalty of your compatriots. I am not a socialist. I, as every one
knows, hold their mischievous ideas in detestation. But I have faith in
the human soul. There’s not a Socialist, not an Anarchist, not even an
Apache, who, when the German cannon sounds in his ears, will not rush to
shed his blood in the defence of the sacred soil of France.”

“Bravo!” cried one.

“_C’est bien dit!_” cried another.

“After all, the soil is in the blood,” said a third.

Monsieur Cazensac, the landlord, who stood listening, said with a
certain Gascon mordancy:

“Scratch even a Minister and you will find a Frenchman.”

And so the discussion—and who shall say it was a profitless one?—went
on evening after evening, as it had gone on, in some sort of fashion
conditioned by circumstances for over forty years.

On Christmas Eve came Félise, convoyed as far as Périgueux, where
Bigourdin met her train, by the promised man from Cook’s. It was a
changed little Félise, flushed with health and armoured in
sophistication that greeted Martin. Her first preoccupation was no
longer the disasters that might have occurred under helpless male rule
during her absence.

“I’ve had the time of my life,” she asserted with a curious lazy accent.
“It would take weeks to tell you. Monte Carlo is too heavenly for words.
Lucilla committed perjury and swore I was over twenty-one and got me
into the rooms and into the Sports Club, and what do you think? I won a
thousand francs,” she tapped her bosom. “I have it here in good French
money.”

Martin stared. The face was the face of Félise, but the voice was the
voice of Lucilla. The English too of Félise was no longer her pretty
halting speech, but fluent, as though, by her frequentation of
English-speaking folk, all the old vocabulary of childhood had returned,
together with sundry accretions. She rattled off a succinct account of
the loveliness of the Azure Coast, with its flowers and seas and
sunshine, the motor drives she had taken, the lunches, dinners and
suppers she had eaten, the people she had met. Lucilla seemed to have
friends everywhere, mainly English and American. They had seldom been
alone. Félise had lived all the time in a social whirl.

“You will find Brantôme very dull now, Félise,” said Martin.

She laughed. “If you think my head’s turned, you’re mistaken. It’s a
little head more solid than that.” Then, growing serious—“What I have
seen and heard yonder, in a different sort of world, will enable me to
form a truer judgment of things in Brantôme.”

Bigourdin came near the truth when he remarked later with a smile and a
sigh:

“Here is our little girl transformed, in a twinkling, into a woman. She
has acquired the art of hiding her troubles and of mocking at her tears.
She will tell me henceforward only what it pleases her that I should
know.”

Félise took up her duties cheerfully, performing them with the same
thoroughness as before, but with a certain new and sedate authority. Her
pretty assumption of dignified command had given place to calm
assertion. Euphémie and Baptiste accustomed to girlish rebukes and
rejoinders grumbled at the new phase. When Félise cut short the hitherto
wonted argument by a: “_Ma bonne Euphémie_, the way it is to be done is
the way I want it done,” and marched off like a duchess unperturbed,
Euphémie shook her head and wondered whether she were still in the same
situation. In her attitude towards Martin, she became more formal as a
mistress and more superficial as friend. She had caught the trick of
easy talk, which might have disconcerted him had the world been the same
as it was before the advent of Lucilla. But the world had changed. He
lived in Brantôme an automatic existence, his body there, his spirit far
away. His mind dwelt little on any possible deepening or hardening in
the character of Félise. So her altered attitude, though he could not
help noticing it, caused him no disturbance. He thought casually:
“Compared with the men she has met in the great world, I am but a person
of mediocre interest.”

The New Year came in, heralded by snow and ice all over Europe. Beneath
the steel-blue sky Brantôme looked pinched with cold. The hotel was
almost empty, and Martin found it hard to occupy long hours of chilly
idleness otherwise than by dreaming of Lucilla and palms and sunshine.
Lucilla of course was always under the palms and the palms were in the
sunshine; and he was talking to Lucilla, alone with her in the
immensities of the desert. When he had dreamed long enough he shivered,
for the Hôtel des Grottes still depended for warmth on wood fires and
there was no central heating and the bath in the famous bathroom
received hot water through a gas geyser. And then he wondered whether
the time had not come for him to make his momentous journey to Paris.

“I’ve had a letter from Miss Merriton,” said Félise one day, “she asks
for news of you and sends you her kind regards.”

Martin, who, in shirt-sleeves and apron, was laying tables in the
_salle-à-manger_, flushed at his goddess’s message.

“It’s very good of her to remember me.”

“Oh, she remembers you right enough,” said Félise.

That meant that his goddess must have spoken of him, not only once but
on various occasions. She had carried him so far in her thoughts as to
be interested in his doings. Did her words imply a veiled query as to
his journey into Egypt? A lover reads an infinity of significance in his
mistress’s most casual utterance, but blandly fails to interpret the
obvious tone in which the woman with whom he is not in love makes an
acid remark.

“Where is Miss Merriton now?” he asked.

She informed him coldly—not at all with the air of the wild flowers
from which Alpine honey is made—that Lucilla was sailing next week for
Alexandria. “And,” said she, “as I am a sort of messenger, what reply
shall I make?”

Martin, who had developed a lover’s cunning, answered: “Give her my
respectful greetings and say that I am very well.” No form of words
could be less compromising.

That same evening, on their cold way back from the Café de l’Univers,
Bigourdin said, using as he had done since the night of the intimate
conversation the “_tu_” of familiarity:

“Now that Félise has returned, and all goes on wheels and business is
slack, don’t you think it is a good opportunity for you to go to Paris
for your holiday and your consultations?”

“I will go the day after to-morrow,” replied Martin.

“Have you told Félise of your proposed journey?”

“Not yet,” said Martin.

“_C’est bien._ When you tell her, say it is for the sake of a change,
your health, your little affairs, what you will. It is better that she
should not know of our scheme until it is all arranged.”

“I think that would be wiser,” said Martin.

“In the event of your accepting my proposition,” said Bigourdin, after a
pause, “have you ever thought of the possibility of becoming a
naturalised Frenchman? Like that, perhaps, business might roll more
smoothly. We have already spoken, you and I, of your becoming a good
Périgordin.”

Martin, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched so as to obtain
ear-shelter beneath the upturned collar of his great coat, was silent
for a few moments. Then—

“Nationality is a strange thing,” said he. “The more I live in France,
the more proud I am of being an Englishman.”

Bigourdin sprang a pace apart, wounded to the quick. “_Mais non par
exemple!_ You of all men,” and it was the “vous” of formality, “ought
not to say that.”

“_Mais que tu es bête!_ You misunderstand me. You don’t let me proceed,”
cried Martin, halting before him in the semi-darkness of the quay. “In
France I have learned the meaning of the word patriotism. I have been
surrounded here with the love of country, and I have reflected. This
impulse is so strong in all French hearts, ought it not to be as strong
in the heart of an Englishman? France has taught me the finest of
lessons. I am as loyal a Frenchman as any of our friends at the Café de
l’Univers, but—” adapting a vague reminiscence of the lyric to
Lucasta—“I should not love France so much, if I did not love England
more.”

“_Mon brave ami!_” cried Bigourdin, holding out both hands, in a
Frenchman’s instinctive response to a noble sentiment adequately
expressed, “Pardon me. Let us say no more about it. The true Englishman
who loves France is a better friend to us than the Englishman who has
lost his love for England.”

Martin went to bed in a somewhat tortured frame of mind. He was very
simple, very honest, very conscientious. It was true that the flame of
French patriotism had kindled the fire of English patriotism within him.
It was true that he had learned to love this sober, intense, kindly land
of France. It was true that here was a generous bosom of France willing
to enfold him, an alien, like one of her own sons. But it was equally
true that in his ears rang a clarion call sounded not by mother England,
not by foster-mother France, but by _une petite sorcière Américaine_, a
fair witch neither of England nor of France, but from beyond the
estranging seas. And the day after to-morrow he was journeying to Paris
to take the advice of Fortinbras, _Marchand de Bonheur_. What would the
dealer in happiness decide? To wait until some turn of Fortune’s wheel
should change his career and set him free to wander forth across the
world, or to invest his all in an inglorious though comfortable future?
Either way there would be heart-racking.

But Bigourdin, as he secured the Hôtel des Grottes with locks and bolts,
whistled “_Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre_,” a sign of his being pleased
with existence. He had no doubt of Fortinbras’s decision. Fortinbras had
practically given it in a letter he had received that afternoon. For he
had told Fortinbras his proposal, which was based on the certainty of a
marriage between Félise and Martin, as soon as the latter should find
himself in a position that would warrant a declaration up to now
impossible to a man of delicate honour. “They think I am an old mole,”
he had written, “but for certain things I have the eyes of a hawk. Why
did Félise suddenly refuse Lucien Viriot? Why has Martin during her last
absence been in a state of depression lamentable to behold? And now that
Félise has returned, changed from a young girl into that thing of
mystery, a woman, why are their relations once so fraternal marked by an
exquisite politeness? And why must Martin travel painful hours in a
train in order to consult the father of Félise? Tell me all that! When
it comes to real diplomacy, _mon vieux_ Daniel, trust the solid head of
Gaspard Bigourdin.”

Which excerpt affords a glimpse into the workings of a subtle yet
ingenuous mind. He hummed “_Malbrouck s’en var-t-en guerre_” as he went
upstairs. The little American witch never crossed his thoughts, nor did
a possible application of the line “_Ne sais quand reviendra_.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

The High Gods hold this world in an uncertain balance; and, whenever
they decree to turn things topsy-turvy, they have only to flick it the
myriadth part of a millimetre. The very next day they gave it such a
flick, and it was Bigourdin and not Martin who went to Paris.

“_Ma petite_ Félise,” said Bigourdin the next day, “I have received this
morning from Paris a telegram despatched last night summoning me thither
on urgent business. I may be away three or four days, during which I
have arranged for the excellent Madame Chauvet who devoted such maternal
care to you on the journey to Chartres to stay here _pour les
convenances_.”

The subtle diplomatist smiled; so that when she questioned him as to the
nature of this urgent business and he replied that it was a worrying
matter of lawyers and stockbrokers, she accepted the explanation. But to
Martin—

“_Mon pauvre ami_,” said he, with woe-begone face, “it is the mother of
Félise. She is dying. A syncope. We must not let Félise know or she
would insist on accompanying me, which would be impossible.”

Martin took a detached view of the situation.

“Why?” he asked. “She is a woman now and able to accept her share in the
tragedy of life with courage and with reason. Why not let her go and
learn the truth?”

Bigourdin waved a gesture of despair. “I detest like you this deception.
Lying is as foreign to my character as to yours. But _que veux-tu_? In
the tragedy of my brother-in-law there is something at once infinitely
piteous and sublime. In a matter like this the commands of a father are
sacred. Ah, my poor Cécile!” said he, passing a great hand swiftly
across his eyes. “Twenty years ago, what a pretty girl she was! Of a
character somewhat difficult and bizarre. But I loved her more than my
sister Clothilde, who had all the virtues of the _petite rosaire_.” He
fetched a deep sigh. “One is bound to believe in the eternal wisdom of
the All-Powerful. There is nothing between that and the lunatic caprice
of an almighty mad goat. That is why I hold to Christianity and embark
on this terrible journey with fortitude and resignation.”

He held out his packet of _Bastos_ to Martin. They lit cigarettes. To
give this confidential information he had drawn Martin into the murky
little _bureau_ whose window looked upon the sad grey vestibule.

“I am sorry,” he said, “that your holiday has to be postponed. But it
will only be for a few days. In the meantime I leave Félise in the loyal
care of yourself and the good Madame Chauvet.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

Bigourdin went to Paris and deposited his valise at a little hotel in a
little street off the Boulevard Sébastopol, where generations of
Bigourdins had stayed, perhaps even the famous Brigadier General
himself; where the proposed entertainment of an Englishman would have
caused the host as much consternation as that of a giraffe; where the
beds were spotless, the _cuisine_ irreproachable and other arrangements
of a beloved and venerable antiquity. Here the good Périgordin found a
home from his home in Périgord. The last thing a solid and virtuous
citizen of central France desires to do in Paris is to Parisianise
himself. The solid and virtuous inhabitants of Périgord went to the
Hôtel de la Dordogne which flourishes now and feeds its customers as
succulently as it did a hundred years ago.

Having deposited his valise at this historic hostelry, Bigourdin
proceeded to the Rue Maugrabine. He had never been there before, and his
heart sank, as the heart of Félise had sunk, when he mounted the grimy,
icy stairs and sought the home of Fortinbras. His sister Clothilde,
severe in awful mourning, admitted him, encaged him in a ghostly embrace
and conducted him into the poverty-stricken living room where
Fortinbras, in rusty black and dingy white tie, stood waiting to receive
him.

“Unfortunately, my dear Gaspard,” said Fortinbras, “you are not in
time.”

He opened the flimsy door set in the paper-covered match-board
partition. Bigourdin entered the bedroom and there, with blinds drawn
and candles burning at head and feet lay all that remained of Cécile
Fortinbras. He returned soon afterwards drying his eyes, for memories of
childhood had brought tears. He wrung Fortinbras by the hand.

“Here, _mon vieux_ Daniel, is the very sad end of a life that was
somewhat tragic; but you can console yourself with the thought of your
long devotion and tenderness.”

Clothilde Robineau tossed her head and sniffed:

“I don’t see around me much evidence of those two qualities.”

“Your reproaches, Clothilde,” said Fortinbras, “are as just as Gaspard’s
consolation is generous.”

“I am glad you acknowledge, at last, that it was you who dragged my
unfortunate sister down to this misery.”

Fortinbras made no reply. Lives like his one must understand and pardon
as Bigourdin had done. Nothing that he could say could mitigate the
animosity of Clothilde which he had originally incurred by marrying her
sister. She would be moved by no pleading that it was his wife’s
extravagance and intemperance that had urged him to the mad tampering
with other people’s money (money honestly repaid, but all the same
diverted wrongly for a time) which had caused him to be struck off the
roll of solicitors and to leave England a disgraced man. She would have
retorted that had he not been addicted to _boissons alcooliques_, a term
which in France always means fiery spirits, and had he not led the life
of the theatre and the restaurant, Cécile would have been sober and
thrifty like herself and Gaspard. And Fortinbras would have beat his
breast saying “Mea culpa.” He might have pleaded the after years of
ceaseless struggle. But to what end? As soon as his wife was laid
beneath the ground, Clothilde would gather together her skirts and pass
for ever out of his life. Bigourdin knew of his remorse, his home of
unending horror, his efforts ever frustrated, the weight at his feet
that not only prevented him from rising, but dragged him gradually down,
down, down.

But even Bigourdin, who had not been to Paris for ten years, had not
appreciated till now the depths of poverty into which Fortinbras and his
sister had sunk. His last visit to them had been painful. A drunken,
dishevelled hostess, especially when she is your own sister, does not
make for charm. But they lived in a reputable apartment at Auteuil, and
there was a good carpet on the floor of the salon and chairs and tables
such as are found in Christian dwellings, and on the mantelpiece stood
the ormolu clock, and on the walls hung the pictures which had once
adorned their home in London. How had they come down to this? He
shivered, cold and ill at ease.

“As you must be hungry after your long journey, Gaspard,” said Madame
Robineau, “I should advise you to go out to a restaurant. The cuisine of
the _femme de journée_ I do not recommend. For me, I must keep watch,
and it being Friday I fast as usual.”

Fortinbras made no pretence at hospitality. Had he been able to set
forth a banquet, he felt that every morsel would have been turned into
stone by the basilisk eyes of Clothilde. Both men rose simultaneously,
glad to be free. They went out, took an omnibus haphazard and eventually
entered a restaurant in the neighbourhood of the Tour Saint-Jacques.

“_Mon vieux_ Daniel,” said Bigourdin, as soon as they were seated. “Tell
me frankly, for I don’t understand. How comes it that you are in these
dreadful straits?”

Fortinbras smiled sadly.

“One earns little by translating from French into English and still less
by dispensing happiness to youth.”

“But——” Bigourdin hesitated. “But you have had other resources—not
much certainly, but still something.”

“What do you mean?” asked Fortinbras. “You know that in five years
Cécile scattered her own dowry to the winds and left me at the edge of a
whirlpool of debt. All of my own I could scrape together and borrow I
threw in to save myself from prison. She had no heritage from her
father. On what else can we have lived save on my precarious earnings?”

Bigourdin, both elbows on the table, plucked at his upstanding bristles
and gazed intently at Fortinbras.

“Ever since the great misfortune, when you returned to France, Cécile
has had her own income.”

“You are dreaming, Gaspard. From what source could she obtain an
income?”

“From me, _parbleu_!” cried Bigourdin. “I always thought my father’s
will was unjust. Cécile should have had her share. When I thought she
needed assistance, I arranged with my lawyer, Maître Dupuy, 33 Rue des
Augustins, Paris, to allow her five thousand francs a year in monthly
instalments, and I know—_sacre bleu!_—that it has been paid.”

Fortinbras also put his elbows on the table, and the two men looked
close into each other’s faces.

“I know absolutely nothing about it. Cécile has not had one penny that I
have not given to her.”

“It is horrible to speak like this,” said Bigourdin. “But one cannot
drink to excess without spending much money. Where did she get it?”

“There are alcohols unknown to the Hôtel des Grottes, which it takes
little money to buy. To get that little she has pawned the sheets off
the bed.”

“_Nom de Dieu!_” said Bigourdin.

It was a miserable meal, ending almost in silence. When it was over they
called at the cabinet of Maître Dupuy. They found everything in order.
Every month for years past Madame Fortinbras had received the sum of
four hundred and sixteen francs, sixty-five centimes. She had come
personally for the money. Maître Dupuy remembered his first interview
with Madame. She had expressly forbidden him to send the money to the
house lest it should fall into the hands of her husband. He infinitely
regretted to make such a statement in the presence of Monsieur, but
those were the facts.

“All this is evidence in favour of what I told you,” said Fortinbras.

“I never doubted you!” cried Bigourdin, “and this is proof. But what can
she have done with all that money?”

It was a mystery. They went back to the Rue Maugrabine. On the way
Fortinbras asked:

“Why have you never told me what you were doing?”

“I took it for granted that you knew, and that, _par délicatesse_, the
subject was not to be mentioned between us.”

“And Clothilde?”

But Bigourdin was one of those who kept the left hand in ignorance of
the generous actions of the right. He threw out his great arms, to the
disturbance of pedestrian traffic.

“Tell Clothilde? What do you take me for?”

A day or two of continuous strain and hopelessness, and then under the
auspices of the _Pompes Funèbres_ and the clergy of the parish, the poor
body of Cécile Fortinbras was laid to rest. Not till then did any one
send word to Félise. Even Madame Robineau agreed that it was best she
should not know. As she had left Chartres, self-willed and ungovernable,
so, on the receipt of the news of her mother’s death, might she leave
Brantôme. Her appearance amid these squalid happenings would be
_inconvenable_.

“I have no reason to love Félise,” she added. “But she is a young girl
of our family, and it is not correct that she should see such things.”

When the train carrying Madame Robineau back to Chartres steamed out of
the Gare Montparnasse, both men drew a breath of relief.

“_Mon ami_,” said Bigourdin. “The Bible taught the Church the beautiful
history of Jesus Christ. The Church told a Bishop. The Bishop told a
priest. The priest told the wife of the sub-prefect. The wife of the
sub-prefect told the wife of the mayor. The wife of the mayor told the
elderly, unmarried sister of the corn-chandler, and the unmarried sister
of the corn-chandler told Clothilde. And that’s all she (Clothilde)
knows about Christianity. Still,” he added, in his judicious way, “she
is a woman of remarkable virtue. She has a strong sense of duty. Without
a particle of love animating her heart, she has just spent three days
and nights without sleep, food or fresh air. It’s fine, all the same.”

“I am not ungrateful,” said Fortinbras.

They entered a café for the sake of shelter from the bitter January
wind, and they talked, as they had done lately, of many intimate things;
of the past, of Martin, of the immediate future. Fortinbras would not
accompany Bigourdin to Brantôme. His presence would only add poignancy
to the grief of Félise. It was more impossible now than ever to
undeceive her, as one could not speak ill of the dead. No; he would
remain in Paris, where he had much to do. First he must move from the
Rue Maugrabine. The place would be haunted. Besides, what did one old
vagabond want with two rooms and a kitchen? He would sell his few
belongings, and take a furnished room somewhere among the
chimney-pots. . . . Bigourdin lifted his _petit verre_ of Armagnac, and
forgetting all about it, put it down again.

“What I am going to tell you,” said he, “may seem cynical, but it is
only common sense. Do not leave the Rue Maugrabine without having
searched every corner, every box, every garment, every piece of
furniture.”

“Search?—what for?”

“The little economies of Cécile,” said Bigourdin.

Fortinbras put up a protesting hand. Instinct revolted. “Impossible!” he
declared.

Bigourdin persisted. “Although you have lived long in the country and
been married to a Frenchwoman, you do not know, like myself who have it
in my veins, of what the peasant blood of France is capable where money
is concerned. It is impossible on your own showing, that Cécile should
have spent five thousand francs a year. You have seen for yourself that
she received the money. What has she done with it?” He leaned across the
table and with great forefinger tapped the shoulder of Fortinbras. “She
has hoarded it. It is there in the Rue Maugrabine.”

Fortinbras shook his leonine head. “It was absurd. In the olden days,
when she had money, had she not scattered it recklessly?” Bigourdin
agreed.

“But then,” said he, “you struck misfortune, poverty. Did you not
observe a change in her habits, and in her character? Of course, we have
often spoken of it. It was the outer trappings of the bourgeois that had
disappeared and the _paysanne_ asserted herself. For many years my
father supported my mother’s mother, a peasant from La Beauce who gave
out that she was penniless. When she died they accidentally found the
mattress of her bed stuffed with a little fortune. The blood of
Grandmère Tidier ran in the veins of Cécile. And Cécile like all the
family knew of the fortune of Grandmère Tidier.”

All that in Fortinbras was half-forgotten, buried beneath the rubbish
heap of years, again protested: his gently nurtured childhood, his
smooth English home, his impeccable Anglo-Indian father, Major-General
Fortinbras, who had all the servants in morning and evening for family
prayers and read the lessons in the little village church on Sundays,
his school-days—Winchester, with its noble traditions—all, as we
English understand it, that goes to the making of an honourable
gentleman. If Pactolus, dammed by his wife, poured through the kitchen
taps, he would not turn them.

“It is I then that will do it,” said Bigourdin. “I am not Anti-Semite in
any way; but to present a Jew dealer, who is already very well off, with
many thousands of francs is the act of an imbecile.”

He tossed off his glass of Armagnac, beckoned the waiter, threw down the
coins for payment and rose.

“_Allons!_” said he.

Fortinbras, exhausted in mind and soul, followed him. An auto-taxi took
them to the Rue Maugrabine. The desolate and haggard _femme de journée_
was restoring the house of death to some sort of aimless order.
Bigourdin put a ten-franc piece into her hand.

“That is for you. Come back in two hours’ time.”

The woman went. The two men were left alone in the wretched little room,
whose poverty stared from its cracked and faded wall paper, from its
bare floor, from the greasy plush couch with one maimed leg stuck in an
old salmon tin.

Fortinbras threw himself with familiar recklessness on the latter
article of furniture and covered his eyes with his hand.

“A quarter of a century is a long time, my dear Gaspard,” said he. “A
quarter of a century’s daily and nightly intimate associations with
another human being leaves a deep imprint in one’s soul. I have been
very unhappy, it is true. But I have never been so unhappy and so
hopeless as I am now. Let me be for a little. My head is stupefied.”

“_Mon pauvre vieux_,” said Bigourdin, very gently. He glanced around and
seeing a blanket, which Clothilde had used during her vigil, neatly
folded by the _femme de Journée_ and laid upon a wooden chair, he threw
it over the recumbent Fortinbras. “_Mon pauvre vieux_, you are
exhausted. Stay there and go to sleep.”

The very weary man closed his eyes. Two hours later, the _femme de
journée_ appeared. Bigourdin, with his finger to his lips, pointed to
the sleeper and told her to come in the morning. It was then six o’clock
in the afternoon. Bigourdin wrapped in whatever coverings he could find,
dozed in a ricketty armchair for many hours, until Fortinbras awoke with
a start

“I must have fallen asleep,” he said. “I’m very sorry. What is the
time?”

Bigourdin pulled out his watch.

“Midnight,” said he.

Fortinbras rose, passed both hands over his white flowing hair.

“I too, like Clothilde, haven’t slept for two or three nights. Sleep
came upon me all of a sudden, let me see——” he touched his broad
forehead—“you brought me back here for some purpose.”

“I did,” said Bigourdin. “Come and see.”

He took the lamp from the table and led his brother-in-law into the
bedroom.

“I told you so,” said he, pointing to the bed.

The upper ticking had been ripped clean away. And there, in the
horsehair, on the side where Cécile had slept, were five or six odd
little nests. And each nest was stuffed tight with banknotes and gold.

                 *        *        *        *        *

“It’s all yours,” said Fortinbras.

Bigourdin, swinging arms like a windmill, swept imbeciles like
Fortinbras to the thirty-two points of the compass.

“It is the property of Cécile. I have nothing to do with it. I am a man
of honour, not a scoundrel. It belonged to Cécile. It now belongs to
you.”

They argued for a long time until sheer hunger sent them forth. And over
supper in a little restaurant of the quarter, they argued, until at last
Bigourdin, very wearied, retired to the Hôtel de la Dordogne, and
Fortinbras returned to the Rue Maugrabine, to find himself the unwilling
possessor of about two thousand pounds.




                              CHAPTER XVI


THE interest which Félise manifested in Madame Chauvet’s conversation
surprised that simple-minded lady. Madame Chauvet fully realised her
responsibilities. She performed her dragonly duties with the
conscientiousness of a French mother who had (and was likely to have to
the end of the chapter) marriageable daughters. But commerce is
commerce, and the young girl engaged in commercial management in her own
house has, in France, owing to the scope required by her activities, far
more freedom than her school contemporary who leads a purely domestic
life: a fact recognised by the excellent Madame Chauvet as duly
established in the social scheme. She was ready to allow Félise all the
necessary latitude. Félise claimed scarcely any. She kept the good
Madame Chauvet perpetually pinned to her skirts. She had not a
confidential word to say to Martin.

Now Madame Chauvet liked Martin, as did every one in Brantôme. He was
courteous, he was modest, he was sympathetic. Whatever he did was marked
by an air of good-breeding which the French are very quick to notice.
Whether he handed her the stewed veal or listened to the latest phase of
her chronic phlebitis, Madame Chauvet always felt herself in the
presence of what she termed, _une âme d’élite_—a picked and chosen
soul; he was also as gentle as a sheep. Why, therefore, Félise, in her
daily intercourse with Martin, should insist on her waving the banner of
the proprieties over their heads, was more than the good lady could
understand. Félise was more royalist than the King, more timid than a
nunnery, more white-wax and rose-leaves than her favourite author,
Monsieur Réné Bazin, had ever dared to portray as human. If Martin had
been six foot of thews and muscles, with conquering moustaches, and bold
and alluring eyes, she would not have hesitated to protect Félise with
her Frenchwoman’s little plump body and unshakable courage. But why all
this precaution against the mild, grey-eyed, sallow-faced Martin, _doux
comme un mouton_? And why this display of daughterly affection suddenly
awakened after fifteen years’ tepid acquaintance? Even Martin,
unconscious of offence, wondered at such prim behaviour. The fact
remained, however, that she scarcely spoke to him during the greater
part of Bigourdin’s absence.

But when the news came that her mother was dead and laid to rest, and
she had recovered from the first overwhelming shock, she dropped all
outer trappings of manner and became once more the old Félise. Madame
Chauvet, knowing nothing of the dream-mother, offered her unintelligent
consolation. She turned instinctively to Martin, in whom she had
confided. Martin was moved by her grief and did his best to sympathise;
but he wished whole-heartedly that Bigourdin had not told him the
embarrassing truth. Here was the poor girl weeping her eyes out over a
dead angel whom he knew to be nothing of the kind. He upbraided himself
for a sacrilegious hypocrite when he suggested that they would meet in
Heaven. She withdrew, however, apparently consoled.

A few hours later, she came to him again—in the vestibule. She had
dried her eyes and she wore the air of one who has accepted sorrow and
bravely faced an unalterable situation. She showed also a puzzled little
knitting of the brows.

“Tell me truly, Martin,” she said. “Did my uncle, before he left, give
you the real reason of his going to Paris?”

Challenged, Martin could not lie. “Yes. Your mother was very ill. But he
commanded me not to tell you, in order to save you suffering. He didn’t
know. She might recover, in which case all would have been well.”

“So you, too, were dragged into this strange plot, to keep me away from
my mother.”

“I’ve never heard of one, Félise,” answered Martin, this time with
conscience-smiting mendacity, “and my part has been quite innocent.”

“There has been a plot of some kind,” said Félise, breaking into the
more familiar French. “My uncle, my father, my Aunt Clothilde have been
in it. And now you—under my uncle’s orders. There has been a mystery
about my mother which I have never been able to understand—like the
mystery of the Trinity or the Holy Sacraments. And to-day I understand
still less. I have not seen my mother since I was five years old. She
has not written to me for many years, although I have written regularly.
Did she get my letters? These are questions I have been asking myself
the last few hours. Why did my father not allow me to see her in the
hospital in Paris? Why did my Aunt Clothilde always turn the mention of
her name aside and would tell me nothing about her? And now, when she
died, why did they not telegraph for me to go to Paris, so as to look
for one last time on her face? They knew all that was in my heart. What
have they all been hiding from me?”

“My poor Félise,” said Martin, “how can I tell?”

And how could he, seeing that he was bound in honour to keep her in
ignorance?

“Sometimes I think she may have had some dreadful disease that ravaged
her dear features, and they wished to spare me the knowledge. But my
father has always drawn me the picture of her lying beautiful as she
always was upon the bed she could not leave.”

“Whatever it was,” said Martin, “you may be sure that those who love you
acted for the best.”

“That is all very well for a child; but not for a grown woman. And it is
not as though I have not shown myself capable of serious
responsibilities. It is heart-rending,” she added after a little pause,
“to look into the eyes of those one loves and see in them something
hidden.”

Sitting there sideways on the couch by Martin’s side, her girlish figure
bent forward and her hands nervously clasped on her knee, the oval of
her pretty face lengthened despondently, her dark eyes fixed upon him in
reproachful appeal, she looked at once so pathetic and so winning that
for the moment he forgot the glory of Lucilla and longed to comfort her.
He laid his hand on her white knuckles.

“I would give anything,” said he——

She loosened her clasp, thus eluding his touch, and moved a little
aside. Madame Chauvet appeared from the kitchen passage, bearing a
steaming cup.

“_Ma pauvre petite_,” she said, “I have brought you a cup of camomile
tea. Drink it. It calms the nerves.”

Martin rose and the good lady took his seat and discoursed picturesquely
upon her mother’s last illness, death and funeral, until Félise,
notwithstanding the calming properties of the camomile tea, burst into
tears and fled to her room.

“Poor little girl,” said Madame Chauvet, sympathetically. “I cried just
like that. I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

The next day Bigourdin returned. He walked about expanding his chest
with great draughts of air like the good provincial who had suffocated
in the capital. He railed at the atmosphere, the fever, the
cold-heartedness of Paris.

“One is much better here,” said he. “And we have made much further
progress in civilisation. Even the Hôtel de la Dordogne has not yet a
bathroom.”

He was closeted long with Félise, and afterwards came to Martin, great
wrinkles of perturbation marking his forehead.

“She has been asking me questions which it has taken all my tact and
diplomacy to answer. _Mon Dieu, que j’ai menti!_ But I have convinced
her that all we have done with regard to her mother has been right. I
will tell you what I have said.”

“You had better not,” replied Martin, anxious to have no more
embarrassing confidences; “the less I know, the simpler it is for me to
plead ignorance when Félise questions me—not to say the more truthful.”

“You are right,” said Bigourdin. “_Magna est veritas et prœvalebit._”
And as Martin, not catching the phrase as pronounced in continental
fashion, looked puzzled, he repeated it. “It’s Latin,” he added. “Why
should I not quote it? I have received a good education.”

Now about this time a gracious imp of meddlesomeness alighted on
Lucilla’s shoulder and whispered into her ear. She arose from a sea of
delicate raiment and tissue paper whose transference by Céleste into
ugly trunks she and Heliogabalus were idly superintending, and, sitting
down at the writing-desk of her hotel bedroom, scribbled a short letter.
If she had blown the imp away, as she might easily have done, for such
imps are irresponsible dragon-fly kind of creatures, Martin might
possibly have foregone his consultation with Fortinbras and remained at
Brantôme. Félise having once restored him to the position he occupied in
her confidence, allowed him to remain there. In his thoughts she assumed
a new significance. He realised, in his blundering masculine way, that
she was many-sided, complex, mysterious; at one turn, simple and
caressive as a child, at another passionate in her affections, at yet
another calm and self-reliant; altogether that she had a strangely sweet
and strong personality. For the first time, the alliance so subtly
planned by Bigourdin, entered his head. If Bigourdin thought him worthy
to be his partner and carry on the historic traditions of the Hôtel des
Grottes, surely he would look with approval on his carrying them on in
conjunction with the most beloved member of his family. And Félise?
There his inexperience came to a stone wall. He was modest. He did not
in the least assume as a possibility that she might have already given
him her heart. But he reflected that, after all, in the way of nature,
maidens did marry unattractive and undeserving men; that except for an
unaccountable phase of coldness, she had always bestowed on him a
friendly regard which, if courteously fostered, might develop into an
affection warranting on her part a marriage with so unattractive and
undeserving a man as himself. And Bigourdin, great, splendid-hearted
fellow, claimed him, and this warm Périgord, this land of plenty and fat
things, claimed him. Here lay his destiny. Why not blot out, with the
blackest curtain of will, the refulgent figure that was making his life
a torture and a dream?

And then came the imp-inspired letter.

    Dear Mr. Overshaw, I am starting for Egypt to-morrow. I hope you
    will redeem your promise.

    With kind regards,

                                            Yours sincerely,
                                                 Lucilla Merriton.

Paralysed then were the promptings towards sluggish plentitude and tepid
matrimonial comfort. Love summoned him to fantastic adventure. For a
while he lost mental balance. He decided to put himself in the hands of
Fortinbras. He would abide loyally by his decision. Under his auspices
he had already made one successful bid for happiness. By dismissing
Margett’s Universal College to the limbo of irretrievable things,
according to the Dealer’s instructions, had he not tasted during the
past five months hundreds of the once forbidden delights of life? Was he
the same man who in apologetic trepidation had written to Corinna in
August? His blind faith in Fortinbras was intensified by knowledge of
the suffering whereby the Dealer in Happiness had acquired wisdom. East
or West, whichever way Fortinbras pointed, he would go.

Thus in some measure he salved his conscience when he left Brantôme.
Bigourdin expected him back at the end of his fortnight’s holiday. So
did Félise. She packed him a little basket of food and wine, and with a
smile bade him hasten back. She did not question the purport of his
journey. He needed a change, a peep into the great world of Paris and
London.

“If you have a quarter the good time I had, I envy you,” she said.

And Bigourdin, with a grip of the hand and a knowing smile, as they
parted, whispered: “I will give that old dress suit to Anatole, the
_plongeur_ at the Café de l’Univers. He will be enchanted.”

The train steamed out of the station carrying a traitorous, double-dyed
villain. It arrived at Paris carrying a sleepless, anxious-eyed young
man throbbing with suspense. He drove to the Hôtel du Soleil et de
l’Ecosse.

“Ah! Monsieur has returned,” said the fat and greasy Bocardon as he
entered.

“Evidently,” replied Martin, who now had no timidities in the presence
of hotel managers and was not impressed by the professional facial
memory. Was he not himself on the verge of becoming a French innkeeper?
He presented a business card of the Hôtel des Grottes mysteriously
inscribed by Bigourdin, and demanded a good room. The beady black eyes
of the Provençal regarded him shrewdly.

“Some months ago you were a professor.”

“It is always permissible for an honest man to change his vocation,”
said Martin.

“That is very true,” said Bocardon. “I myself made my studies as a
veterinary surgeon, but as I am one of those unfortunates whom horses
always kick and dogs always bite, I entered the service of my brother,
Emile Bocardon, who keeps an hotel at Nîmes.”

“The Hôtel de la Curatterie,” said Martin.

“You know it?” cried Bocardon, joyously.

“Not personally. But it is familiar to every _commis-voyageur_ in
France.”

His professional knowledge at once gained him the esteem and confidence
of Monsieur Bocardon and a magnificent chamber at a minimum tariff.
After he had eaten and sent a message to Fortinbras at the new address
given him by Bigourdin, he went out into the crisp, exhilarating air,
with Paris and all the universe before him.

                 *        *        *        *        *

In the queer profession into which he had drifted, Heaven knows how, of
giving intimate counsel not only to the students, but (as his reputation
spread) to the small shopkeepers and work-people of the _rive gauche_,
at his invariable fee of five francs per consultation, Fortinbras had
been able to take a detached view of human problems. In their solution
he could forget the ever frightening problem of his own existence, and
find a subdued delight. Only in the case of Corinna and Martin had he
posed otherwise than as an impersonal intelligence. As an experiment he
had brought them into touch with his own personal concerns. And now
there was the devil to pay.

For consider. Here he was prepared to deal out advice to Martin
according to the conspiracy into which he had entered with Bigourdin.
Martin was to purchase an interest in the Hôtel des Grottes and
(although he knew it not) marry Félise. There could not have been a
closer family arrangement.

When Fortinbras rose from the frosty _terrasse_ of the Café Cardinal, at
the corner of the Rue Richelieu and the Boulevard des Italiens, their
appointed rendezvous, and greeted Martin, there was something more than
benevolence in his smile, something paternal in his handshake. They
entered the Café-Restaurant and sat down at one of the tables not yet
laid for _déjeuner_, for it was only eleven o’clock. Fortinbras, attired
in his customary black, looked more trim, more prosperous. Collar, cuffs
and tie were of an impeccable whiteness. The silk hat which he hung with
scrupulous care on the peg against the wall, was startlingly new. He
looked like a disguised cardinal in easy circumstances. He made bland
enquiries as to the health of the good folks at Brantôme, and ordered an
_apéritif_ for Martin and black-currant syrup and water for himself.
Then Martin said:

“I have come from Brantôme to consult you on a matter of the utmost
importance—to myself, of course. It’s a question of my whole future.”

He laid a five-franc piece on the table. Fortinbras pushed the coin
back.

“My dear boy, this is a family affair. I know all about it. For you I’m
no longer the _Marchand de Bonheur_.”

“If you’re not,” said Martin, “I don’t know what the devil I shall do.”
And, with his finger, he flicked the coin midway between them.

“My dear fellow,” said Fortinbras, flicking the coin an inch towards
Martin, “if you so desire it, I will deal with you in my professional
capacity. But as in the case of the solicitor or the doctor it would be
unprofessional to accept fees for the settlement of his own family
affairs, so, in this matter, I am unable to accept a fee from you.
Bigourdin, whose character you have had an intimate opportunity of
judging, has offered you a share in his business. As a lawyer and a man
of the world, I say unhesitatingly, ‘Accept it,’ As long as Brantôme
lasts—and there are no signs of it perishing,—commercial travellers
and tourists will visit it and go to the Hôtel des Grottes. And as long
as European civilisation lasts, it will demand the gastronomic
delicacies of truffles, _pâté de foie gras_, Périgord pie, stuffed
quails and compôte of currants which now find their way from the
_fabrique_ of the hotel to Calcutta, Moscow, San Francisco, Bayswater
and Buenos Ayres. As a _marchand de bonheur_, as you are pleased to call
me, I also unhesitatingly affirm that in your acceptance you will find
true happiness.”

He sipped his cassis and water, and leaned back on the plush-covered
seat. Martin pushed the five-franc piece three or four inches towards
Fortinbras.

“It isn’t such a simple, straightforward matter as you seem to imagine,”
said Martin. “Otherwise I should have closed with Bigourdin’s generous
offer straight away. I’m not a fool. And I’m devotedly attached to
Bigourdin, who, for no reason that I can see, save his own goodness of
heart, has treated me like a brother. I haven’t come to consult you as a
man of business at all. And as for conscientious scruples about
Bigourdin being a relative of yours, please put them away.” He pushed
the coin another inch. “It is solely as _marchand de bonheur_, in the
greatest crisis of my life, when I’m torn to pieces by all sorts of
conflicting emotions, that I want to consult you. There are
complications you know nothing about.”

“Complications?” Fortinbras stretched out a benign hand. “Is it possible
that there is some little—what shall we say?—sentiment?” He smiled,
seeing the young man’s love for Félise barring his candid way. “You can
be frank with me.”

“It’s a damned sight more than sentiment,” cried Martin with
unprecedented explosiveness. “Read this.”

He dragged from his pocket a dirty, creased and crumpled letter and
threw it across the table. Fortinbras adjusted his glasses and read the
imp-inspired message. He took off his glasses and handed back the
letter. His face became impassive and he regarded Martin with
expressionless, tired, blue eyes.

“Your promise. What was that?”

“To go to Egypt.”

“Why should you go to Egypt to meet Lucille Merriton?”

Martin threw up both hands in a wide gesture. “Can’t you see? I’m mad to
go to Egypt, or Cape Horn, or Hell, to meet her. But I’ve enough sanity
left to come here and consult you.”

Fortinbras regarded him fixedly, and nodded his head reflectively many
times; and without taking his eyes off him, reached out his hand for the
five-franc piece which he slipped into his waistcoat pocket.

“That puts,” said he, “an entirely different complexion on the matter.”




                              CHAPTER XVII


THE astute conspiracy had tumbled to ruins, the keystone, Félise, being
knocked out. It was no longer a family affair. Fortinbras listened to
the young man’s statement of his case with professional detachment. His
practised wit questioned. Martin replied until he had laid bare his
candid and intoxicated soul. At last Fortinbras, with a wave of his
plump hand, and with his benevolent smile, said:—

“Let us now adjourn from labour to refreshment. I will give myself a
luxury I have not enjoyed for many a year. I will entertain a guest. You
shall lunch with me. When our spirits are fortified and our judgments
mellowed by generous food, we shall adjourn from refreshment to labour.
Sometimes you can put a five-franc piece into the slot and pull out an
opinion. Sometimes you can’t. Let us go to another table.”

They lunched. Fortinbras talked of men and things and books. He played
the perfect host until the first cigarette had been smoked. Then he lay
back in the upholstered seat against the wall and looked into vacancy,
his face a mask. Martin, sitting by his side, dared not disturb him. He
felt like one in the awe-inspiring presence of an oracle. Presently the
oracle stirred, shifted his position and resumed human semblance, the
smile reappearing in his eyes and at the corners of his pursy mouth.

“My dear Martin,” said he, one elbow on the table and the hand caressing
his white hair, “I have now fully considered the question, and see
distinctly your path to happiness. As my good old friend Montaigne
says—an author I once advised you to cultivate——”

“I’ve done so,” said Martin.

Fortinbras beamed. “There is none richer in humanity. In his words, I
say ‘The wisdom of my instruction consists in liberty and naked truth,’
I take the human soul as it is and seek to strip it free from shackles
and disguises. I strip yours from the shackles of gross material welfare
and the travesty of content. I see it ardent in the pursuit, perhaps of
the unattainable, but at any rate in the pursuit of splendour, which is
a splendid thing for the soul. Liberty and naked truth are the only
watchwords. Sell out some of your capital, equip yourself in lordly
raiment, go to Egypt and give your soul a chance.”

“I needn’t tell you,” said Martin, after a pause, “that I was hoping you
would give me this advice. It seems all crazy. But still——” he lit a
cigarette, which during Fortinbras’s discourse he had been holding in
his fingers. “Well—there it is. I don’t seem to care a hang what
happens to me afterwards.”

“From my professional point of view,” said Fortinbras, “that is an ideal
state of mind.”

“All the same, I can’t help feeling a brute. What the devil can I say to
Bigourdin?”

“You can leave that to me,” replied Fortinbras. “He is aware that you
are a client of mine and not only honour me with your confidence, but
are willing to be guided by my counsel. If you will accept my society, I
will accompany you to the Land of the Pharaohs——”

“What?” cried Martin, taken aback. “You? Good God! Of course,” he added,
after recovery, “I should love you to come.”

“As I was saying,” Fortinbras continued, “I will accompany you, take
upon my shoulders your responsibilities with regard to Bigourdin, and,
for my own private satisfaction, realise the dream of my life which is
to go up to the Sphinx and say, ‘Now, my dear creature, confidentially
as between Augur and Augur, what the deuce is it all about?’”

Later, when Martin had accustomed himself to the amazing proposal, they
discussed ways and means.

“You,” said Fortinbras, “in order to drink the deep draughts essential
to your evolution, must peacock it with the best. You must dwell in
palaces and drive in chariots. I, on the other hand, journeying as a
philosopher, need but a palm-tree’s shade, a handful of dates and a cup
of water. I shall therefore not be of your revellings. But I shall
always be near at hand, a sort of private djinn, always at your
distinguished service.”

“It’s most delightful and generous of you to put it that way,” laughed
Martin, “but for the life of me I can’t see why you should do it.”

Fortinbras replied simply: “I’m a very weary man, my dear boy, and my
heart needs a holiday. That is why I grasp this opportunity of going
into the sunshine. As to my offer of counsel, that is a matter which it
would be futile to discuss.”

His last words were flavoured with mystery. As far as Martin was
concerned, Fortinbras was free to go whithersoever he pleased. But why
this solicitude as to his welfare, this self-made Slave of the Lamp
obligation? Soon he gave up the riddle. Too many exciting thoughts swept
his brain.

Until it was written, the letter to Bigourdin weighed on his mind. The
problem confronting him was to explain his refusal without reference to
Lucilla. To Fortinbras, keeper of his conscience, he could avow his
splendid lunacy and be understood. To Bigourdin his English reserve
forbade his writing himself down an ass and saying: “The greasy waiter
cannot accept partnership with you, as he must follow to the ends of the
earth the radiant lady to whom he handed the mutton cutlets.” The more
he tried the less could he do it. He sat up all night over the letter.
It contained all the heart of him that was left for the Hôtel des
Grottes and Brantôme and Périgord; but—well—he had arranged to abide
by Fortinbras’s decision. Fortinbras had advised him to see more of the
world before definitely settling his life. With a disingenuousness which
stabbed his conscience, he threw the responsibility on Fortinbras.
Fortinbras was carrying him to Egypt on an attempt to solve the riddle
of the Sphinx. Bigourdin knew the utter faith he had in Fortinbras. He
sent his affectionate regards to everybody—and to Félise. It was the
most dreadful, heart-tearing letter he had ever had to write.

Meanwhile, Fortinbras, betraying, for the first time in his life,
professional secrecy, revealed the whole matter to Bigourdin in an
illuminating document. And Bigourdin, reading it, and comparing it with
Martin’s letter, said “_Bigre!_” and “_Sacrebleu!_” and “_Nom de Dieu de
nom de Dieu!_” and all sorts of other things. At first he frowned
incredulously. But on every re-perusal of the letter the frown grew
fainter, until, after the fifth, the placid smile of faith overspread
his broad countenance. But Félise, who was only told that Martin was not
returning but had gone to Egypt with her father, grew white and
thin-lipped, and hated the day she had met Lucilla Merriton and all the
days she had spent with Lucilla Merriton, and, in a passion of tears,
heaped together everything that Lucilla Merriton had ever given her,
gowns and furs and underlinen and trinkets, in a big trunk which she
stowed away in an attic. And the _plongeur_ from the Café de l’Univers
was appointed waiter in Martin’s stead and strutted about proudly in
Martin’s cast-off raiment. He was perhaps the most care-free person in
the Hôtel des Grottes.

Martin went on a flying visit to London, and, on the advice of
Fortinbras, put up at the Savoy.

“Accustom yourself to lordliness,” the latter had counselled. “You can’t
conquer Egypt with the self-effacing humility of the servitor. By
rubbing shoulders with the wealthy, you will acquire that suspicion of
arrogance—the whiff of garlic in the salad—in which your present
demeanour is so sadly lacking. You will also learn by observation the
correct wear in socks and ties, and otherwise steep yourself in the
study of indispensable vanities.”

Martin studied conscientiously, and when he had satisfactorily arranged
his financial affairs, including the opening of a banking account with
Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son, visited tailors and haberdashers and hatters
and bootmakers, ordering all the things he had seen worn by the opulent
youth of the Savoy Hotel. If he had stolen the money to pay for them, or
if he had intended to depart with them without paying, he could not have
experienced a more terrifying joy. Like a woman clothes-starved for
years, who has been given the run of London shops, Martin ran
sartorially mad. He saw suitings, hosiery, shoes, with Lucilla’s eye. He
bought himself a tie-pin, a thing which he had never possessed nor
dreamed of possessing in his life before; and, observing that an
exquisite young Lothario upon whom he resolved to model himself did not
appear with the same tie-pin on two consecutive days, he went out and
bought another. Modesty and instinctive breeding saved him from making
himself a harlequin.

In the midst of these preoccupations, he called, by arrangement, on
Corinna. She was living with another girl on the fifth floor of a
liftless block of flats in Wandsworth. The living room held two fairly
comfortably. Three sat at somewhat close quarters. So when Martin
arrived, the third, Corinna’s mate, after a perfunctory introduction,
disappeared into a sort of cupboard that served her as a bedroom.

Corinna looked thin and ill and drawn, and her blouse gaped at the back,
and her fair hair exhibited the ropiness of neglect. The furniture of
the room was of elementary flimsiness. Loose newspapers, pamphlets,
handbills, made it as untidy as Corinna’s hair. As soon as they were
alone, Martin glanced from her to her surroundings and then back again
to her.

“My dear Corinna,” said he, putting hat, stick and gloves on a bamboo
table, “what on earth are you doing with yourself?”

She looked at him defiantly, with a touch of haggardness.

“I am devoting myself to the Cause.”

Martin wrinkled a puzzled brow. “What cause?”

“For a woman there is only one,” said Corinna.

“Oh!” said Martin. “May I sit down?”

“Please do.”

She poked a tiny fire in a diminutive tiled grate, while he selected the
most solid of the bamboo chairs. She sat on a stool on the hearthrug.

“I suppose you’re anti-suffrage like any other bigoted reactionary,” she
said.

Martin replied truly: “I haven’t worried about it one way or the other.”

She turned on him swiftly. “Then you’re worse than a downright opponent.
It’s just the contemptuous apathy of men like you that drive us mad.”

She entered upon a long and nervous tirade, trotting out the old
arguments, using the stock phrases, parroting a hundred platform
speeches. And all the time, though appearing to attack, she was on the
defensive, defiant, desperate. Martin regarded her with a shocked
expression. Her thin blonde beauty was being pinched into shrewishness.

“But, my dear Corinna,” said he. “I’ve come to see you, as an old
friend. I just want to know how you’re getting on. What’s the good of a
political argument between us two? You may be wrong or you may be right.
I haven’t studied the question. Let us drop it from a contentious point
of view. Let us meet humanly. Or if you like, let us tell each other the
outside things that have happened to us. You haven’t even asked me why
I’m here. You haven’t asked after Félise, or Fortinbras, or Bigourdin.”
He waxed warm. “I’ve just come from Brantôme. Surely you must have some
grateful memories of the folks there. They treated you splendidly.
Surely you must still take some interest in them.”

Corinna supported herself on an outspread hand on the hearthrug.

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?” She held him with her pained
blue eyes. “I don’t take an interest in any damned thing in God’s
universe.”

“May I smoke?” said Martin. He lit a cigarette, after having offered her
his case which she waved aside impatiently.

“If that is so,” said he, “what in the world is the meaning of all the
stuff you have just been talking?”

“I thought you had the sense to have learned something about me. How
otherwise am I to earn my living? We’ve gone over the ground a hundred
times. This is a way, anyhow, and it’s exciting. It keeps one from
thinking of anything else. I’ve been to prison.”

Martin gasped, asked her if she had hunger-struck.

“I tried, but I hadn’t the pluck or the hysteria. Isabel Banditch can do
it.” She lowered her voice and waved towards her concealed companion. “I
can’t. She believes in the whole thing. The vote will bring along the
millennium. Once we have the power, men are going to be as good as
little cherubs terminating in wings round their necks. Drink will
disappear. Wives shall be like the fruitful soda-water siphon on the
sideboard, and there will be no more struggle for existence and no more
wars. Oh! the earth is going to be a devil of a place when we’ve
finished with it.”

“Do you talk like this to Miss Banditch?” asked Martin.

She smiled for the first time, and shook her head.

“On the whole you’re rather a commonplace person, Martin,” she replied,
“but you have one remarkable quality. You always seem to compel me to
tell you the truth. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is just to puzzle you
and annoy you and hurt you.”

“Why should you want to hurt me?”

She shrugged her shoulders, and sat with her hands clasping her knees.
“Well—for one thing, you were my intimate companion for three months
and never for a single second did you think of making love to me. For
all the impression I made on you I might have been your austere maiden
aunt. Sometimes I’ve wanted to take you between my teeth and shake you
as a terrier shakes a rat. Instead, like an ass, I’ve told you the
blatant truth.”

“That’s interesting,” said Martin, calmly. “But you seem to want to hurt
everybody—those who don’t fall in love with you and those who do. You
hurt our poor old Bigourdin and he hasn’t got over it.”

Corinna looked into the diminutive fire. “I suppose you think I was a
fool.”

“I can’t believe it matters to you what I think,” said Martin, his
vanity smarting at being lashed for a Joseph Andrews.

“It doesn’t. But you think me a fool all the same. I’ll go on telling
you the truth”—she flashed a glance at him. “Bigourdin’s a million
times too good for me. I should have led him a beast of a life. He has
had a lucky escape. You can tell him that when you go back.”

“I’m not going back.”

“What?” she said with a start.

He repeated his statement and smiled amiably.

“Fed up with being a waiter? I’ve wondered how long you could stick it.
What are you going to do now? As a polite hostess, I suppose I should
have asked that when you first came into the room.”

“I did expect something of the sort,” Martin confessed, “until you
declared you didn’t take an interest in any damned thing.”

Then they both laughed. Corinna stretched out a hand. “Forgive me,” she
said. “I’ve been standing nearly all day in front of the tube station,
dressed in a green, mauve and white sandwich-board and selling
newspapers, and I’m dog-tired and miserable. I would ask you to have
some tea, but that would only bring out Isabel, who would talk our heads
off. Why have you left Brantôme?”

He told her of Bigourdin’s proposal and of Fortinbras’s counsel; but he
made no reference to the flashing of the divine Lucilla across his path.
Once he had confessed to her the kiss of the onion-eating damsel who had
married the plumber. She had jested but understood. His romantic
knight-errant passion for Lucilla was stars above her comprehension.
When he mentioned the fact of the death of Mrs. Fortinbras, Corinna
softened.

“Poor little Félise! It must have been a great sorrow to her. I’ll write
to her. She’s a dear little girl.” She paused for a few moments. “Now,
look here, Martin,” she said, seizing a fragile poker and smiting a
black lump of coal the size of a potato, “it strikes me that as fools
we’re very much in the same box. We’ve both thrown over a feather-bed
existence. I’ve refused to marry Bigourdin and incidentally to run the
Hôtel des Grottes, and you have refused to run the Hôtel des Grottes and
incidentally marry Félise.”

“There was never any question of my marrying Félise,” cried Martin
hotly.

She scrambled to her feet and flung an impatient arm.

“You make me tired. Have you a grain of sense in your head or an ounce
of blood in your body?”

Martin also rose. “And you?” he countered. “What have you?”

“Neither,” said Corinna.

“In that case,” said Martin, gathering up hat, stick and gloves, “I
don’t see why we should continue a futile conversation.”

He devoid of sense and blood! He who had probed the soul of Félise and
found there virgin indifference! He who had flung aside a gross
temptation. He who was consumed with a burning passion for an
incomparable goddess! A chasm thousands of miles wide yawned between him
and Corinna. In the same box, indeed! He quivered with indignation. She
regarded him curiously, through narrowed eyes.

“I do believe,” she said slowly, “that I’ve knocked some sparks out of
you at last.”

“You would knock sparks out of a putty dog,” Martin retorted wrathfully.

She took hat and stick away from him and laid them on the bamboo table.
“Don’t let us quarrel,” she said more graciously. “Sit down again and
finish your story. You said something about Egypt and Fortinbras going
with you. Why Egypt?”

“Why not?” asked Martin.

“I suppose Fortinbras pointed a prophetic finger. ‘There lies the road
to happiness.’ But what is he doing there himself?”

“He is going to talk to the Sphinx,” said Martin.

“And when you’ve spent all your capital in riotous living, what are you
going to do?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said he.

“Well, it’s your business, not mine,” said Corinna. “You’re lucky to be
able to get out of this beastly climate. I wish I could.”

They talked for a while the generalities of travel. Then he asked her to
dine with him and go to a theatre. This brought her back to herself. She
couldn’t. She had no time. All her evenings were taken up with meetings
which she had to attend. And she hadn’t an evening gown fit to wear.

“I would rather die than appear in a blouse and skirt in the stalls of a
theatre.”

“We can go to the pit or upper circle,” said Martin, who had never sat
in the stalls in his life.

But she declined. The prodigal in the pit was too ludicrous. No. She was
conscientious. She had adopted martyrdom as a profession; she was paid
for being a martyr; and to martyrdom, so long as it didn’t include
voluntary starvation, she would stick until she could find a pleasanter
and more lucrative means of livelihood.

“It’s all very well for you to talk like that,” said Martin in his sober
way, “but how can you call yourself conscientious when you take these
people’s money without believing in their cause?”

“Who told you I didn’t believe in it?” she cried. “Do you know what it
means to be an utterly useless woman? I do. I’m one. It is to prevent
replicas of myself in the next generation that I get up at a public
meeting and bleat out ‘Votes for Women,’ and get ignominiously chucked.
Can’t you see?”

“No,” said Martin. “Your attitude is too Laodicean.”

“What?” snapped Corinna.

“It’s somewhere in the Bible. The Laodiceans were people who blew both
hot and cold.”

“My father found scriptural terms for me much more picturesque than
that,” said Corinna, with a laugh.

A door opened and the frozen, blue-nosed head of Miss Banditch appeared.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Corinna, but are we never going to have
tea?”

Corinna apologised. Tea was prepared. Miss Banditch talked on the One
and Only Topic. Martin listened politely. During a pause, while he stood
offering a cup for Corinna to fill for the second time, she remarked
casually:

“By the way, you met Miss Merriton, didn’t you?”

The question was like a knock on the head. He nearly dropped the cup.

“Miss Merriton?”

“She’s a friend of mine. I had a note from her at Christmas to say that
she had been to Brantôme and made your acquaintance, and had carried off
Félise to the south of France. Why haven’t you told me about her?”

Under her calm, smiling gaze he felt himself grow hot and red and angry.
He fenced.

“You must remember my position in Brantôme.”

She poured the milk into his cup. “She said she was going to Egypt.
Sugar?”

Miss Banditch resumed her argument. The remainder of the visit was
intolerable. As soon as he could swallow his tea, he took his leave.
Corinna followed him into the tiny passage by the flat-door.

“My dear old Martin,” she said, impulsively throwing an arm round him
and gripping his shoulder. “I’m a beast, and a brute, and I hate
everybody and everything in this infernal world. But I do wish you the
very best of good luck.”

She opened the door and with both hands thrust him gently forth; then
quickly she closed the door all but a few inches behind him, and through
the slit she cried:

“Give my love to Lucilla!”

The door banged, and Martin descended the five flights of stairs, lost
in the maze of the Eternal Feminine.




                             CHAPTER XVIII


CAIRO station. An illumination of livid blue. A horde of brown-legged
turbaned figures wearing red jerseys on which flaunted in white the
names of hotels, and reconstructing Babel. An urbane official, lifting a
gold-banded cap in the middle of a small oasis of silence and inviting
Martin in the name of the Semiramis Hotel, to surrender luggage and all
other cares to his keeping, and to follow the stream through the exit to
the hotel motor. A phantasmagoria of East and West rendered more
fantastic by the shadows cast by the high arc-lamps. He had lost sight
of Fortinbras, who bag in hand—his impedimenta being of the
scantiest—had disappeared in quest of the palm-tree against whose trunk
he presumably was to pass the night. Martin emerged from the station,
entered the automobile, one of a long row, and waited with his fellow
passengers until the roof was stacked with luggage. Then the drive
through European streets suggestive of Paris and the sudden halt at the
hotel. A dazzling vision of a lounge, a swift upward journey in a lift
worked by a Nubian gorgeous in scarlet and gold, a walk down a corridor,
a door flung open, and Martin found himself in his bedroom. An Arab
brought hot water and retired.

Martin opened the shutters of the window and looked out. It was hard
moonlight. Beneath him shimmered a broad ribbon of water, against which
were silhouetted outlandish masts and spars of craft moored against the
embankment. The dark mass on the further shore seemed to be pleasant
woods. The water could be nothing else than the Nile; the sacred river;
the first river in which he had taken a romantic interest, on account of
Moses and the Ark and Pharaoh’s daughter; the mighty river which is the
very life of a vast country; the most famous river in the world. He
regarded it with a curious mixture of awe and disappointment. On his
right it was crossed by a bridge dotted with the slowly moving lamps of
carts and now and then flashing with the headlights of a motor-car. It
was not unlike any ordinary river—the Thames, the Seine, the Rhone at
Geneva. He had imagined it broad as the Amazon.

Yet it was wonderful; the historic water, the moonlight, the clear
Egyptian air in which floated a vague perfume of spice, the dimly seen
long-robed figures seated on a bench by the parapet on the other side of
the road, whose guttural talk rose like a proclamation of the Orient. He
leaned out over the iron railing. On his left stood out dreamily defined
against the sky two shadowy little triangles. He wondered what they
could be. Suddenly came the shock of certainty. They were the Pyramids.
He rubbed his eyes and looked again. A thrill ran over his skin. He had
not counted on being brought up bang, as it were, against them. He had
imagined that one journeyed for half a day on a camel through a
trackless desert in order to visit these wonders of the world: but here
he was staring at them from the hotel-window of a luxurious capital. He
stared at them for a long time. Yes: there was the Nile; there were the
Pyramids; and, after a knock at the door, there was his luggage. He
became conscious of hunger; also of Lucilla more splendid than moonlit
Nile and Pyramids and all the splendours of Egypt put together.
Hunger—it was half-past nine and he had eaten nothing since lunch on
ship-board—counselled speedy ablutions and a descent in quest of food.
Lucilla ordained correctitude of vesture. His first evening on board
ship had taught him that dinner jacket suit and black tie were the only
wear. He changed and went downstairs.

A chasseur informed him that Miss Merriton was staying in the hotel, but
that she had gone to the dance at the Savoy. When would she be back? The
chasseur, a child rendered old by accumulated knowledge of trivial fact,
replied that Cairo was very gay this season, that dances went on till
the morning hours, and insinuated that Miss Merriton was as gay as
anybody. Martin walked through the lounge into the restaurant and
supped. He supped exceedingly well. Bearing in mind Fortinbras’s counsel
of lordliness and the ways of lordly motorists passing through Brantôme,
he ordered a pint of champagne. He was served by an impeccable waiter
with lilac revers and brass buttons to his coat. He noted the livery
with a professional eye. The restaurant was comparatively empty. Only at
one table sat a party of correctly dressed men and women. A few others
were occupied by his travelling companions, still in the garb of travel.
Martin mellowed by the champagne, adjusted his black tie and preened his
white shirt front, in the hope that the tweed-clad newcomers would see
him and marvel and learn from him, Martin Overshaw, obscure and ignorant
adventurer, what was required by English decorum. After his meal he sat
in the lounge and ordered Turkish coffee, liqueur brandy and cigarettes.
And so, luxuriously housed, clothed and fed, he entered on the newest
phase of his new life.

Six months ago he had considered his sportive ride through France with
Corinna a thrilling adventure. He smiled at his simplicity. An
adventure, that tame jog-trot tour! As comparable to this as his then
companion to the radiant lady of his present quest. Now, indeed, he had
burned his boats, thrown his cap over the windmills, cast his frock to
the nettles. The reckless folly of it all had kept his veins a-tingle,
his head awhirl. At every moment during the past fortnight something
amazingly new had flashed into his horizon. The very sleeping-berth in
the train de luxe had been a fresh experience. So too was the awakening
to the warmth and sunshine of Marseilles. Save for a crowded hour of
inglorious life (he was a poor sailor) now and then on cross-channel
boats he had never set foot on a ship. He wandered about the ocean-going
liner with a child’s delight. Fortune favoured him with a spell of blue
weather. He scoffed at sea-sickness. The meals characterised by many
passengers as abominable, he devoured as though they were Lucullian
feasts. He made acquaintance with folks going not only to Egypt, but to
Peshawar and Mandalay and Singapore and other places with haunting
names. Some shocked him by calling them God-forsaken holes and cursing
their luck. Others, mainly women, going thither for the first time
shared his emotions. . . . He was surprised at the ease with which he
fell into casual talk with strangers. Sometimes a child was a means of
introduction to its mother. Sometimes a woman in the next deck-chair
would open a conversation. Sometimes Fortinbras chatting with a knot of
people would catch him as he passed and present him blandly.

Among the minor things that gave him cause for wonder was the swift
popularity of his companion. No longer did his costume stamp Fortinbras
as a man apart from the laity. He wore the easy tweeds and soft felt hat
of a score of other elderly gentlemen on board: even the gold
watch-chain, which he had redeemed after a long, long sojourn at the
Mount of Piety. But this very commonplace of his attire brought into
relief the nobility of his appearance. His massive face lined with care,
his broad brow, his prominent light blue kindly eyes, his pursy and
benevolent mouth, his magnificent Abbé Liszt shock of white hair, now
carefully tended, his impressive air of dignity—all marked him as a
personage of distinction. He aroused the idle curiosity of the idle
voyagers. Husbands were bidden by wives to talk to him and see what he
was like. Husbands obeyed, as is the human though
marriage-vow-subversive way of husbands, and meekly returned with
information. A capital fellow; most interesting chap; English of course;
very courtly old bird; like so-and-so who was Ambassador; old school;
knows everything; talks like a book. Quoth any one of the wives, her
woman’s mind intent on the particular. “But who _is_ he?” The careless
husband, his masculine mind merely concerned with the general, did not
know. He had not thought of asking. How could he ask? And what did it
matter? The wife sighed. “Bring him along and I will soon find out.”
Fortinbras at fit opportunity was brought along. The lady unconsciously
surrendered to his spell—one has not practised as a _marchand de
bonheur_ for nothing. “Now I know all about him,” said any one of the
wives to any one of the husbands. “Why are men so stupid? He is an old
Winchester boy. He is a retired philosopher and he lives in France.”
That was all she learned about Fortinbras; but Fortinbras in that trial
interview learned everything about the lady serenely unconscious of
intimate avowal.

“My young friend,” said he to Martin, “the secret of social influence is
to present yourself to each individual rather as a sympathetic
intelligence, than as a forceful personality. The patient takes no
interest in the morbid symptoms of his physician: but every patient is
eager to discuss his symptoms with the kindly physician who will listen
to them free, gratis and for nothing. By adopting this attitude I can
evoke from one the dramatic ambitions of her secret heart, from another
the history of her children’s ailments and the recipe for the family
cough-cure, from a third the moving story of strained relations with his
parents because he desired to marry his uncle’s typist, the elderly
crown and glory of her sex, and from a fourth an intricate account of a
peculiarly shady deal in lard.”

“That sounds all right,” said Martin; “but in order to get people to
talk to you—say in the four cases you have mentioned, you must know
something about the theatre, bronchitis, love and the lard-trade.”

Said Fortinbras, touching the young man’s shoulder:

“The experienced altruist with an eye to his own advantage knows
something about everything.”

Martin, following the precepts of his Mentor, practised the arts of
fence, parrying the thrusts of personal questions on the part of his
opponent and riposting with such questions on his own.

“It is necessary,” said the sage. “What are you among these respectable
Britons of substance, but an adventurer? Put yourself at the mercy of
one of these old warriors with grey motor-veils and steel knitting
needles and she will pluck out the heart of your mystery in a jiffy and
throw it on the deck for all to feed on.”

Thus the voyage—incidentally was it not to Cythæra?—transcended all
his dreams of social amenity. It was a long protracted party in which he
lost his shyness, finding frank welcome on all sides. To the man of
thirty who had been deprived, all his man’s life, of the commonplace
general intercourse with his kind, this daily talk with a girl here, a
young married woman there, an old lady somewhere else, and all sorts and
conditions of men in the smoking room and on deck, was nothing less than
a kind of social debauch, intoxicating him, keeping him blissfully awake
of nights in his upper berth, while Fortinbras snored below. Then soon
after daybreak, to mount to the wet, sunlit deck after his cold,
sea-water bath; perhaps to meet a hardy and healthy English girl, fresh
as the Ægean morning; to tramp up and down with her for development of
appetite, talking of nothing but the glitter of the sea, the stuffiness
of cabins, the dishes they each would choose for breakfast; to descend
into the warm, comforting smell of the dining-saloon; to fall
voraciously on porridge and eggs and kidneys and marmalade; to go on
deck again knowing that in a couple of hours’ time stewards would come
to him fainting from hunger with bowls of chicken broth, that in an hour
or two afterwards there would be lunch to be selected from a menu a foot
long in close print, and so on during the golden and esurient day; to
meet Fortinbras, late and luxurious riser; to bask for an hour, like a
plum, in the sunshine of his wisdom; to continue the debauch of the day
before; to sight great sailing vessels with bellying canvas, resplendent
majesty of past centuries, or, on the other hand, the grey grim blocks
of battleships; to pass the sloping shores of historic islands—Crete,
home of the Minotaur, whose inhabitants—(Cretans are liars. Cretans are
men. Therefore all men are liars)—had furnished the stock example of
fallacy in the Syllogism; to watch the green wake cleaving the dark-blue
sea; to make his way up and down decks, through the steerage, and stand
in the bows, swept by the exhilarating air, with the pulse racking sense
that he was speeding to the lodestar of his one desire—to find wildness
of delight in these commonplaces of travel; to live as he lived, to
vibrate as he vibrated with every nerve from dawn to dawn, to be drunk
with the sheer ecstasy of existence, so that the past becomes a black
abyss, and the future an amethystine haze glorified by the Sons of the
Morning singing for joy, is given but to few, is given to none but poor,
starved souls, is given to none of the poor, starved souls but those
whom the high Gods in obedience to their throw of the dice happen to
select.

Martin sitting in a deep armchair in the Semiramis Hotel dreamed of all
these things, unconscious of the flight of time. Suddenly he became
aware that he was the only occupant of the lounge, all the other folk
having returned soberly to their rooms. Already a few early arrivals
from the Savoy dance passed across the outer hall on their way to the
lift. Drowsy with happiness he went to bed. To-morrow, Lucilla.

                 *        *        *        *        *

He became aware of her standing by the bureau licking a stamp to put on
a letter. She wore a white coat and skirt and a straw hat with cherries
on it. He could not see her face, but he guessed the blue veins on the
uplifted, ungloved hand that held the stamp. On his approach, she turned
and uttered a little laughing gasp of recognition, stuck the stamp on
hastily and stretched out her hand.

“Why,” she cried, “it’s you! You really have come!”

“Did you think I would break my promise?” he asked, his eyes drinking in
her beauty.

“I didn’t know how seriously you regarded it.”

“I’ve thought of nothing but Egypt, since I said you had pointed out the
way,” he replied. “You commanded. I obeyed.”

She caught up her long parasol and gloves that lay on the ledge of the
bureau. “If everybody did everything I told them,” she laughed, “I
should have my hands full. They don’t, as a general rule, but when they
do I take it as a compliment. It makes me feel good to see you. When did
you come?”

She put him through a short catechism. What boat? What kind of voyage?
Where was he staying? . . . Finally:

“Do you know many people in Cairo?”

“Not a soul,” said Martin.

With both arms behind her back, she rested lightly on the parasol, and
beamed graciously.

“I know millions,” she said, not without a touch of exaggeration which
pleased him. “Would you like to trust yourself to me, put yourself
entirely in my hands?”

“I could dream of nothing more enchanting,” replied Martin. “But——”

“But——?”

“I don’t want to make myself an infliction.”

“You’re going to be a delight. You know in the cinematograph how an
invisible pencil writes things on the sheet—or how a message is stamped
out on the tape, and you look and wonder what’s coming next. Well, I
want to see how this country is going to be stamped letter by letter on
your virgin mind. It’s a thing I’ve been longing for—to show somebody
with sense like yourself, Egypt of the Pharaohs and Egypt of the
English. How long can you stay?”

“Indefinitely,” said Martin. “I have no plans.”

“From here you might go to Honolulu or Rangoon?”

“Or Greenland or Cape Horn,” said Martin.

She nodded smiling approval. “That is what I call a free and enlightened
Citizen of the World. Let us sit down. I’m waiting for my friend, Mrs.
Dangerfield of Philadelphia. Her husband’s here too. You will like them.
I generally travel round with somebody, just for the sake of a
table-companion. I’m silly enough to feel a fool eating alone every day
in a restaurant.”

He drew a wicker chair for her and sat beside her. She deposited parasol
and gloves on the little round table, and swept him with a quizzical
glance from his well-fitting brown shoes to his trim black hair.

“May I without impertinence compliment you on your colour-scheme?”

His olive cheek flushed like a girl’s. He had devoted an hour’s
concentrated thought to it before he rose. How should he appear in the
presence of the divinity? He had decided on grey flannels, grey shirt,
purple socks and tie. He wondered whether she guessed the part she had
played in his anxious selection. Remembering the splotch of grease, he
said:

“I hadn’t much choice of clothes when you last saw me.”

She laughed. “Tell me all about Brantôme. How is my dear little friend
Félise?”

He gave her discreet news. “And the incomparable Fortinbras?”

“You’ll doubtless soon be able to judge for yourself. He’s here.”

“In Cairo? You don’t say!”

Mingled with her expression of surprise was a little perplexity of the
brow, as though, seeing the Fortinbras of the Petit Cornichon, she
wondered what on earth she could do with him.

“He came with me,” said Martin.

“Is he staying in this hotel?”

“No,” said Martin.

Her brow grew smooth again. “How did he manage to get all this way? Has
he retired from business?”

“I don’t think so. He needed a holiday. You see he came into a little
money on the death of his wife.”

“His wife dead?” Lucilla queried. “Félise’s mother? I didn’t know.
Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t written to me for such a long time. I
think there must be some queer story connected with that mother,” she
added shrewdly. “Anyway, Fortinbras can’t be broken-hearted, or he
wouldn’t come on a jaunt to Egypt.”

Too well-bred to examine Martin on his friend’s private affairs, she
changed the talk in her quick, imperious way. Martin sat like a man
bewitched, fascinated by her remembered beauties—the lazy music of her
voice, her mobile lips, her brown eyelashes. . . . His heart beat at the
realisation of so many dreams. He listened, his brain scarcely following
what she said; that she spoke with the tongue of an angel was enough.

Presently a stout, pleasant-faced woman of thirty came towards them with
many apologies for lateness. This was Mrs. Dangerfield. Lucilla
presented Martin.

“Behold in me the complete dragoman. Mr. Overshaw has engaged me for the
season. It’s his first visit to Egypt and I’m going to show him round.
I’ll draw up a programme for a personally conducted tour, every hour
accounted for and replete with distraction.”

“It sounds dreadful,” laughed Mrs. Dangerfield. “Do you think you’ll
survive, Mr. Overshaw?”

“Not only that,” said Martin, “but I hope for a new lease of life.”

“We start,” said Lucilla, “with a drive through the town, during which I
shall point out the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks, the Bank of Egypt and the
Opera House. Then we shall enter on the shopping expedition in the
Mousky, where I shall prevent Mrs. Dangerfield from being robbed while
bargaining for Persian lacq. I’m ready, Laura, if you are.”

She led the way out. Martin exchanging words of commonplace with Mrs.
Dangerfield, followed in an ecstasy. Did ever woman, outside
Botticelli’s _Primavera_, walk with such lissomeness? A chasseur turned
the four-flanged doors and they emerged into the clear morning sunshine.
The old bearded Arab carriage porter called an hotel _arabeah_ from the
stand. But while the driver, correct in metal-buttoned livery coat and
tarbush, was dashing up with his pair, Martin caught sight of Fortinbras
walking towards them.

“There he is,” said Martin.

“Who?”

“Fortinbras.”

“Nonsense,” said Lucilla. “That’s an English Cabinet Minister, or an
American millionaire, or the keeper of a gambling saloon.”

But when he came nearer, she admitted it was Fortinbras. She waved her
hand in recognition. Nothing could have been more charming than her
greeting; nothing more urbane than his acknowledgment, or his bow, on
introduction to Mrs. Dangerfield. He had come, said he, to lay his
respectful homage at her feet; also to see how his young friend was
faring in a strange land. Lucilla asked him where he was staying.

“When last I saw you,” he answered, “I said something about the perch of
the old vulture.”

She eyed him, smiling: “You look more like the wanton lapwing.”

“In that case I need even a smaller perch, the merest twig.”

“But ‘Merest Twig, Cairo,’ isn’t an address,” cried Lucilla. “How am I
to get hold of you when I want you?”

Fortinbras regarded her with humorous benevolence. The question was
characteristic. He knew her to be generous, warm-hearted and impatient
of trivial convention: therefore he had not hesitated to go to her in
his anxious hour; but he also knew how those long delicate fingers had
an irresistible habit of drawing unwary humans into her harmless web. He
had not come to Cairo just to walk into Lucilla’s parlour. He wanted to
buzz about Egypt in philosophic and economical independence.

“That, my dear Lucilla,” said he, “is one more enigma to be put to the
credit of the Land of Riddles.”

Ibrahim stood impassively holding open the door of the _arabeah_. A
couple of dragomen in resplendent robes and turbans, seeing a new and
prosperous English tourist, had risen from their bench on the other side
of the road and lounged gracefully forward.

“You’re the most exasperating person I ever met,” exclaimed Lucilla.
“But while I have you, I’m going to keep you. Come to lunch at
one-fifteen. If you don’t I’ll never speak to you again.”

“I’ll come to lunch at one-fifteen, with very great pleasure,” said
Fortinbras.

The ladies entered the carriage. Martin said hastily:

“You gave me the slip last night.”

“I did,” said Fortinbras. He drew the young man a pace aside, and
whispered: “You think those are doves harnessed to the chariot. They’re
not. They’re horses.”

Martin broke away with a laugh, and sprang to the back seat of the
carriage. It drove off. The dragoman came up to the lonely Fortinbras.
Did he want a guide? The Citadel, the Pyramids, Sakkara? Fortinbras
turned to the impassive Ibrahim and in his grand manner and with
impressive gesture said:

“Will you tell them they are too beautiful. They would eclipse the
splendour of all the monuments I am here to visit.”

He walked away and Ibrahim, translating roughly to the dragomen,
conveyed uncomplimentary references to the virtue of their grandmothers.

Meanwhile Martin, in beatitude, sat on the little seat, facing his
goddess. She was an integral part of the exotic setting of Cairo. It was
less real life than an Arabian Night’s tale. She was interfused with all
the sunshine and colour and wonder. Only the camels padding along in
single file, their bodies half hidden beneath packs of coarse grass,
seemed alien to her. They held up their heads, as the carriage passed
them, with a damnably supercilious air. One of them seemed to catch his
eye and express contempt unfathomable. He shook a fist at him.

“I hate those brutes,” said he.

“Good gracious! Why?” asked Lucilla. “They’re so picturesque! A camel is
the one thing I really can draw properly.”

“Well, I dislike them intensely,” said he. “They’re inhuman.”

He could not translate his unformulated thought into conventional words.
But he knew that at the summons of the high gods all the world of
animate beings would fall down and worship her: every breathing thing
but the camel. He hated the camel.




                              CHAPTER XIX


LUCILLA kept her word. She was not a woman of half measures. Just as she
had set out, impelled by altruistic fancy, to carry provincial little
Félise through part of a Riviera season, and had thoroughly accomplished
her object, so now she devoted herself whole-heartedly to the guidance
of Martin through the Land of Egypt. In doing so she was conscious of
helping the world along. Hitherto it was impeded in its progress by a
mild, scholarly gentleman wasting his potentialities in handing soup to
commercial travellers. These potentialities she had decided to develop,
so that in due season a new force might be evolved which could give the
old world a shove. To express her motives in less universal terms, she
set herself the holiday task of making a man of him. To herself she
avowed her entire disinterestedness. She had often thought of adopting
and training a child; but that would take a prodigiously long time, and
the child might complicate her future life. On the other hand, with
grown men and women, things went more quickly. You could see the grass
grow. The swifter process appealed to her temperament.

First she incorporated him, without chance of escape, in her own little
coterie, the Dangerfields, and the Watney-Holcombes, father, mother and
daughter, Americans who lived in Paris. They received him guaranteed by
Lucilla as an Englishman without guile, with democratic American
frankness. Of Mr. Dangerfield, a grim-featured banker, possessing a dry,
subrident humour, Martin was somewhat afraid. But with the
Watney-Holcombes, cheery, pleasure-loving folk, he was soon at his ease.

“The only thing you mustn’t do,” said Lucilla, “is to fall in love with
Maisie”—Maisie was a slip of a girl of nineteen, whom he regarded as an
amusing and precocious child—“There is already a young man floating
about in the smoke of St. Louis.”

It was an opportunity to make romantic repudiation, to proclaim the
faith by which he lived. But he had not yet the courage. He laughed, and
declared that the smoky young man might sleep peacefully of nights. The
damsel herself took him as a new toy and played with him harmlessly and,
subtly inspired by Lucilla, commanded her father, a chubby, innocent
man, with a face like a red, gold-spectacled apple, to bring Martin from
remote meal solitude and establish him permanently at their table. Thus,
Martin being an accepted member of a joyous company, could go here,
there and everywhere with any one of them without furnishing cause for
gossip. Lucilla had a deft way of not putting herself in the wrong with
a censorious though charming world. Under the nominal auspices of the
Dangerfields and the Watney-Holcombes, Martin mingled with the best of
Cairo society. He attended race-meetings, golf-club teas, hotel balls
and merry little suppers. He went to a reception at the Agency and shook
hands with the great English ruler of Egypt. He was swept away in
automobiles to Helouan and Heliopolis, to the Mena House to see the
Pyramids and the Sphinx both by daylight and by moonlight. A young
soldier discovering a bond in knowledge of love of France invited him to
Mess on a guest night. Lucilla, ever watchful and tactful, saw that he
went in full dress, white tie and white waistcoat, and not in dinner
jacket. She pervaded his atmosphere, teaching him, training him, opening
up new vistas for his mind and soul. Every encomium passed on him she
accepted as a tribute to herself. It was infinitely more interesting
than training a dog or a horse.

Martin, blissfully unaware of experiment, or even of guidance, lived in
a dream of delight. His goddess seemed ever ready to hand. Together they
visited mosques and spent enchanted hours in the Bazaar. She knew her
way about the labyrinth, could even speak a few words of Arabic. Supreme
fair product of the West she stood divinely pure amid the swarthy
vividness of the unalterable East. She was a flawless jewel in the
barbaric setting of those narrow streets, filled with guttural noise,
outlandish bustle of camels and donkeys and white-clad men, smells of
hoary spiciness, colour from the tattered child’s purple and scarlet to
the yellow of the cinnamon pounded at doorways in the three-foot
mortars; those streets winding in short joints, each given up to its
particular industry—copper beaters, brass-workers, leather-sellers,
workers in cedar and mother-of-pearl, sellers of cakes and kabobs, all
plying their trades in the frontless caves that served as shops; streets
so narrow and sunless that one could see but a slit of blue above the
latticed fronts of the crazy houses. He loved to see her deal with the
supple Orientals. In bargaining she did not haggle; with smiling majesty
she paid into the long slender palm a third, or a half or two-thirds of
the price demanded, according to her infallible sense of values, and
walked away serene possessor of the merchandise. Lucilla, having a
facile memory, had not boasted in vain that she could play dragoman. He
found from the books that her archæological information was correct; he
drank in her wisdom.

For his benefit she ordained a general expedition to Sakkara. One golden
day the party took train to Badrashen, whence, on donkeys, they plunged
into the desert. Riding in front with him, she was his for most of that
golden day; she discoursed on the colossal statue, stretched by the
wayside, of Rameses II, on the step pyramid, on the beauties of the
little tombs of Thi and Ptah-hetep, whose sculptures and paintings of
the Vth Dynasty were alive, proceeding direct from the soul of the
artist and thus crying shame on the conventional imitations of a
thousand or two years later with which most of the great monuments of
Egypt are adorned. And all she said was Holy Writ. And at Mariette’s
House where they lunched—the bungalow pitched in the middle of the
baking desert and overlooking the crumbling brown masses of tombs—he
glanced around at their picnicking companions and marvelled at her grace
in eating a hard-boiled egg. It was a noisy, excited party and it was
“Lucilla this,” and “Lucilla that,” all the time, for there was hot
argument.

“I don’t take any stock in bulls, so I’m not going to see the Serapeum,”
declared Miss Watney-Holcombe.

“But Lucilla says you’ve got to,” exclaimed Martin. Then he realised
that unconsciously he had used her Christian name. He flushed and under
cover of the talk turned to her with an apology. He met laughing eyes.

“Scrubby little artists in Paris call me Lucilla without the quiver of
an eyelash.”

“What may be permissible to a scrubby little artist in Paris,” said
Martin, “mayn’t be permitted to one who ought to know better.”

She passed him a plate containing the last banana. He declined with a
courteous gesture.

“Martin,” she said, deliberately dumping the fruit in front of him, “if
you don’t look out, you will die of conscientiousness.”

During part of the blazing ride back to Badrashen when the accidents of
route and the vagrom whimsies of donkeys brought him to the side of the
dry Mr. Dangerfield, he reflected on the attitude of men admitted to the
intimacy of goddesses and great queens. What did Leicester call the
august Elizabeth when she deigned to lay aside her majesty? And what
were the sensations of Anchises, father of pious Æneas, when he first
addressed Venus by her _petit nom_?

                 *        *        *        *        *

“Well,” said Fortinbras, the next day, “and how is my speculator in
happiness getting on?”

They were sitting on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, their usual
midday meeting-place. Save on these occasions the philosopher seemed to
live dimly, in a sort of Oriental twilight. Yet all that Martin had seen
(with the exception of the social moving-picture) he had also seen and
therefrom sucked vastly more juice than the younger man. How and in what
company he had visited the various monuments he did not say. It amused
him to maintain his mysterious independence. Very rarely, and only when
compelled by the imperious ruthlessness of Lucilla, did he otherwise
emerge from his obscurity than on these daily visits to the famous
terrace. There surrounded by chatter in all tongues and by
representatives of all cities from Seattle round the earth’s girth to
Tokio, he loved to sit and watch the ever-shifting scene—the traffic of
all the centuries in the narrow street, from the laden ass driven by a
replica of one of Joseph’s brethren to the modern Rolls-Royce sweeping
along with a fat and tarbushed dignitary of the court; the ox-cart
omnibus carrying its dingy load of veiled women; the poor funeral
procession, the coffin borne on shoulders amid the perfunctory
ululations of hired mourners; on the footpaths the contrast of slave
attended, black-robed, trim-shod Egyptian ladies in yashmaks and the
frank summer-clad Western women; Soudanese and Turks and Greeks and Jews
and straight, clear-eyed English officers, and German tourists attired
for the wilds of the Zambesi; and here and there a Gordon Highlander
swinging along in kilts and white tunic; and lounging against the
terrace balustrade, the dragomen, flaunting villains gay in rainbow
robes, and the vendors of beads and fly-whisks and postcards holding up
their wares at arm’s height and regarding prospective purchasers with
the eyes of a crumb-expectant though self-respecting dog who sits on his
tail by his master’s side; and, across the way, the curio shops rich
with the spoils of Samarcand. From all this when alone he garnered the
harvest of a quiet eye. When Martin was with him, he shared with his
pupil the golden grain of the panorama.

“How,” said he, “is my speculator in happiness getting on?”

“The stock is booming,” replied Martin with a laugh.

“What an education,” said Fortinbras, “is the society of American men of
substance!”

“It pleases you to be ironical,” said Martin, “but you speak literal
truth. An American doesn’t set a man down as a damned fool because he is
ignorant of his own particular line of business. Dangerfield, for
instance, who keeps a working balance of his soul locked up in a safe in
Wall Street, has explained to me the New York Stock Exchange with the
most courteous simplicity.”

“And in return,” said Fortinbras, waving away a seller of
rhinoceros-horn amber, with the gesture of a monarch dismissing his
chamberlain, “you have given him an exhaustive criticism, not untempered
with jaundice, of lower middle-class education in England.”

“Now, how the deuce,” said Martin, recklessly throwing his half-finished
cigarette over the balustrade—“How the deuce did you know that?”

“_C’est mon secret_,” replied Fortinbras. “It is also the secret of a
dry and successful man like Mr. Dangerfield, with whom I am sorry to
have had no more than ten minutes’ conversation. In those ten minutes I
discovered in him a lamentable ignorance of the works of Chaucer,
Cervantes and Tourguenieff, but for my benefit he sized up in a few
clattering epigrams the essence of the Anglo-Saxon, Spanish and
Sclavonic races, and, for his own, was extracting from me all I know
about Tolstoi, when Lucilla called me away to expound to his wife the
French family system. From which you will observe that the American
believes in a free exchange of knowledge as a system of education. To
revert to my original question, however, you imagine that your present
path is strewn with roses?”

“I do,” said Martin.

“That’s all I desire to know, my dear fellow,” said Fortinbras
benevolently.

“And what about yourself?” asked Martin. “What about your pursuit of
happiness?”

“I am studying Arabic,” replied Fortinbras, “and discussing philosophy
with one Abu Mohammed, a very learned Doctor of Theology, with a very
long white beard, from whose sedative companionship I derive much
spiritual anodyne.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

Soon after this the whole Semiramis party packed up their traps and went
by night train to Luxor. There they settled down for a while and did the
things that the floating population of Luxor do. They rode on donkeys
and on camels and they drove in carriages and sand-carts. They visited
the Tombs of the Kings and the Tombs of the Queens, and the Tombs of the
Ministers and Karnak and their own private and particular Temple of
Luxor. And Martin amassed a vast amount of erudition and learned to know
gods and goddesses by their attitudes and talked about them with casual
intimacy. His nature drank in all that there was of wonder and charm in
these relics of a colossal past like an insatiable sponge; and in Upper
Egypt the humble present is but a relic of the past. The
twentieth-century fellaheen guiding the ox-drawn wooden plough might
have served for models of any bas-relief or painting in any tomb of
thousands of years ago. So too might the half-naked men in the series of
terraced trenches draining water from the Nile by means of rude wooden
lever and bucket to irrigate the land. The low mud houses of the
villages were the same as those which covering vast expanses on either
side of the river made up the mighty and populous city of Thebes. And
the peasantry purer in type than the population of Cairo, which till
then was all the Egypt that Martin knew, were of the same race as those
warriors who gained vain victories for unsympathetic Kings.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The ridgy, rocky, sandy desert, startlingly yellow against the near-blue
dome of sky. A group of donkeys, donkey-boys, violently clad dragomen,
one or two black-robed, white-turbaned official guides, Europeans as
exotic to the scene as Esquimaux in Hyde Park. An excavated descent to a
hole surmounted by a signboard as though it were the entrance to some
underground boozing-ken, an Egyptian soldier in khaki and red tarbush.
An inclined plane, then flight after flight of wooden steps through
painted chamber after painted chamber, and at last, deep down in the
earth, lit by electric light, the heart of the tomb’s poor mystery: the
mummified body of a great King, Amen-Hetep II, in an uncovered sandstone
sarcophagus. It is the world’s greatest monument to the awful and futile
vanity of man.

“Thank God,” said Martin, as he came out with Lucilla into the open air.
“Thank God for the great world and sunshine and life. The whole thing is
fascinating, is soul-racking, but I hate these people who lived for
nothing but death. I wanted to bash that King’s face in. There was that
poor devil of an artist who spent his soul over those sculptures, going
at them hammer and chisel in the black bowels of the earth with nothing
but an oil-lamp on the scaffold beside him, for years and years—and
when he had finished, calmly put to death by that brute lying there, so
that he should not glorify any other swollen-headed worm of a tyrant.”

They sat down on the sand in a triangular patch of shade. Lucilla
regarded him with approbation.

“I love to hear you talk vehemently,” she remarked.

“It’s because I have learned to feel vehemently,” said Martin.

“Since when?”

“Since I first met you,” said Martin, with sudden daring.

“It’s not my example you’ve been profiting by,” she laughed. “You’ve
never heard me raving at a poor old mummy.”

Cool and casual, she warded off the shaft of his implied declaration. He
had not another weapon to hand. He said:

“You’ve said things equally violent when you have felt deeply. That is
your great power. You live intensely. Everything you do you put your
whole self into. You have the faculty of making everybody around you do
the same.”

At that moment Mr. Watney-Holcombe appeared at the mouth of the tomb,
mopping his rubicund face. At Lucilla he shook a playful fist.

“Not another darned monument for me this day.”

“I don’t seem to have succeeded with him, anyway,” she said in a low and
ironical voice.

Martin, gentlest of creatures, felt towards Mr. Watney-Holcombe for the
moment as he had felt towards Amen-Hetep. The rosy-faced gentleman sat
beside them and talked flippantly of gods and goddesses; and soon the
rest of the party joined them. The opportunity for which Martin had
waited so long, of which he had dreamed the extravagant dreams of an
imaginative child, was gone. He would have to wait yet further. But he
had spoken as he had never before dared to speak. He had told her
unmistakably that she had taught him to feel and to live. As the other
ladies approached he sprang to his feet and held out a hand to aid the
divinity to rise. She accepted it frankly, nodded him pleasant thanks.
The pressure of her little moist palm kept him a-tingle for long
afterwards.

They had a gay and intimate ride home. The donkey boys thwacked the
donkeys so that they galloped to the shattering of sustained
conversation between the riders. But in one breathing space, while they
jogged along side by side, she said:

“If I have done anything to help you on your way, I regard it as a
privilege.”

“You’ve done everything for me,” said Martin. “To whom else but you do I
owe all this?” His gesture embraced earth and sky.

“I only made a suggestion,” said Lucilla.

“You’ve done infinitely more. Anybody giving advice could say: ‘Go to
Egypt.’ You said, ‘Come to Egypt,’ and therein lies all the difference.
You have given me of yourself, so bountifully, so generously——” He
paused.

“Go on,” she said. “I love to hear you talk.”

But the donkey-boys perceiving Mr. Dangerfield mounted on a fleet
quadruped about to break through the advance guard, thwacked the donkeys
again, and Martin, unless he shouted breathlessly, could not go on
talking.

That evening there was a dance at the Winter Palace Hotel, where they
were staying. Martin, on his arrival at Cairo, had been as ignorant of
dancing as a giraffe; but Lucilla, Mrs. Dangerfield and Maisie having
commandeered the Watney-Holcombe’s private sitting room at the Semiramis
whenever it suited them, had put him through a severe and summary
course. He threw himself devotedly into the new delight. A lithe figure
and a quick ear aided him. Before he left Cairo he could dance one-steps
and two-steps with the best; and so a new joy was added to his
existence. And to him it was a joy infinitely more sensuous and magnetic
than to those who from childhood have regarded dancing as a commonplace
social pleasure. To understand, you must put yourself in the place of
this undeveloped, finely tempered man of thirty.

His arm was around the beloved body, his hand clasped hers, the
fragrance of her hair was in his nostrils, their limbs moved in perfect
unison with the gay tune. His heart sang to the music, his feet were
winged with laughter. In young enjoyment, she said with literal
truthfulness:

“You are a born dancer.”

He glowed and murmured glad incoherencies of acknowledgment.

“You’re a born all sorts of other things, I believe,” she said, “that
only need bringing out. You have a rhythmical soul.”

What she meant precisely she did not know, but it sounded mighty fine in
Martin’s ears. Ever since his first interview with Fortinbras he had
been curiously interested in that vague organ and its evolution. Now it
was rhythmical. To explain herself she added: “It is in harmony with the
great laws of existence.”

A new light shone in his eyes and he held himself proudly. He looked
quite a gallant fellow, straight, English, masterful. Her skirts swished
the feet of a couple of elderly English ladies sitting by the wall. Her
quick woman’s ears caught the remark: “What a handsome couple.” She
flushed and her eyes sparkled into his. He replied to her psychological
dictum:

“At any rate it’s in harmony with the deepest of them all.”

“What is that?”

“The fundamental law,” said he.

They danced the gay dance to the end. They stopped breathless, and
laughed into each other’s eyes. She took his arm and they left the
ball-room.

“Unless you will dance with me again,” he said, “this is my last dance
to-night.”

“Why?”

“I leave you to guess,” said he.

“It was as near perfection as could be,” she admitted. “I feel rather
like that myself. Perhaps more so; for I don’t want to spoil things even
by dancing with you again.”

“Do you really mean it?”

She nodded frankly, intimately, deliciously.

“Let us go outside, away from everybody,” he suggested.

They crossed the lounge and reached the Western door. Both were living a
little above themselves.

“When last we talked sense,” she said, “you spoke about a fundamental
law. Come and expound it to me.”

They stood on the terrace amid other flushed and happy dancers.

“Let us get away from these people.”

“Who know nothing of the fundamental law,” said Lucilla.

So they went along a spur of the terrace, a sort of rococo bastion
guarding the entrance to the hotel, and there they found solitude. They
sat beneath the velvet, star-hung sky. Fifty yards away flowed the Nile,
with now and then a flashing ripple. From a ghyassa with ghostly white
sail creeping down the river came an Arab chant. The flowers of the
bougainvillea on the hotel porch gleamed dim and pale. A touch of
khamsin gave languor to the air. Lucilla drew off her gloves, bade him
put them down for her. He preferred to keep them warm and fragrant, a
part of herself.

“Now about this fundamental law,” she said in her lazy contralto.

Her hand hung carelessly, temptingly over the arm of her chair.
Graciously she allowed him to take and hold it.

“Surely you know.”

“I want you to tell me, Mr. Philosopher.”

He dallied with the adorable situation.

“Since when have I become Master and you Pupil, Lucilla?”

“Since you began, presumably to plunge deep into profundities of wisdom
where I can’t follow you. Behold me at your feet.”

He moved his chair close to hers and she allowed him to play with her
slender fingers.

“The fundamental law of life,” said he, bending towards her, “is love.”

“I wonder!” said Lucilla.

She lay in the long chair, her head against the back. He drew her
fingers to his lips.

“I’m sure of it. I’m sure of it as I’m sure that there’s a God in
Heaven, as that,” he whispered, in what the sophisticated may term an
anti-climax, “there’s a goddess on earth.”

“Who is the goddess?” she murmured.

“You,” said he.

“I like being called a goddess,” she said, “especially after dancing the
two-step. Hymns Ancient and Modern.”

“Do you know what is the most ancient hymn in the world?”

“No.”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Am I not here to be instructed?”

“You are beautiful and I love you. You are wonderful and I love you. You
are adorable and I love you.”

“How did you learn to become so lyrical?”

Martin knew not. He was embarked on the highest adventure of his life. A
super-Martin seemed to speak. Her tone was playful, not ironical. It
encouraged him to flights more lyrical still. In the daylight of reason
what he said was amazing nonsense. Beneath the Egyptian stars, in the
atmosphere drowsy with the scents of the East and the touch of khamsin
it sounded to receptive ears beautifully romantic. Through the open door
came the strains of an old-fashioned waltz, perhaps meretricious, but in
the exotic surroundings sensuous and throbbing with passion. He bent
over her and now possessed both hands.

“All that I feel for you, all that you are to me,” he said, concluding
his rhapsody. Then, as she made no reply, he asked: “You aren’t angry
with me?”

“I’m not a granite sphinx,” she said, in her low voice. “No one has ever
said things like that to me before. I don’t say men haven’t tried. They
have; but they’ve always made themselves ridiculous. I’ve always wanted
to laugh at them.”

Said Martin: “You are not laughing at me?”

“No,” she whispered. And after a long pause: “No, I am not laughing at
you.”

She turned her face to him. Her lips were very near. Mortal man could
have done neither more nor less than that which Martin did. He kissed
her. Then he drew back shaken to the roots of his being. She with closed
eyes; he saw the rise and fall of her bosom. The universe, earth and
stars and the living bit of the cosmos that was he, hung in breathless
suspense. Time stopped. There was no space.

He was holding her beloved hands so delicately and adorably veined:
before his eyes, in the dim light, were her lips, slightly parted, which
he had just kissed.

Presently she stirred, withdrew her hands, passed them across her eyes
and with dainty touches about her hair, as she sat up. Time went on and
there was space again and the stars followed their courses. Martin threw
an arm round her.

“Lucilla,” he cried quiveringly.

But with a quick movement she eluded his embrace and rose to her feet.
She kept him off with a little gesture.

“No, no, Martin. There has been enough foolishness for one night.”

But Martin, man at last, caught her and crushed her to him with all his
young strength and kissed her, not as worshipper kisses goddess, but as
a man kisses a woman.

At last she said, like millions of her sisters in similar circumstances:
“You’re hurting me.”

Like millions of his brethren, he released her. She panted for a moment.
Then she said: “We must go in. Let me go first. Give me a few minutes’
grace. Good-night.”

Mortal gentleman and triumphant lover could do no more or no less. She
sped down the terrace and disappeared. He waited, his soul aflame. When
he entered the lounge, she was not there. He saw the Dangerfields and
the Watney-Holcombes and one or two others sitting in a group over
straw-equipped glasses. He knew that Lucilla was not in the
dancing-room. He knew that she had fled to solitude. Cheery
Watney-Holcombe catching sight of him, waved an inviting hand. Martin,
longing for the sweet loneliness of the velvet night, did not dare
refuse. His wits were sharpened. Refusal would give cause for
intolerable gossip. He came forward.

“What have you done with Lucilla?” cried Mrs. Dangerfield.

“She has gone to bed. We’ve had a heavy day. She’s dead beat,” said
Martin.

And thus he entered into the Kingdom of the Men of the World.




                               CHAPTER XX


THE next morning, Martin enquiring for Miss Merriton learned that she
had already started on a sketching excursion with Hassan, the old,
one-eyed dragoman. Her destination was unknown; but the fact that Hassan
had taken charge of a basket containing luncheon augured a late return.
Martin spent a sorry forenoon at Karnak which, deprived of the vivifying
influence of the only goddess that had ever graced its precincts, seemed
dead, forlorn and vain. It was a day, too, of khamsin, when hot stones
and sand are an abomination to the gasping and perspiring sense. And yet
Lucilla had gone off into the desert. She would faint at her easel. She
would get sunstroke. She would be brought back dead. And anxious Martin
joined a languid luncheon table. There was talk of the absent one. If
she had not been Lucilla they would have accounted her mad.

He sat through the sweltering afternoon on the eastern terrace over a
novel which he could not read. Last night he had held her passionately
in his arms. Her surrender had been absolute and eloquent avowal.
Already the masculine instinct of possession spoke. Why did she now
elude him? He had counted on a morning of joy that would have eclipsed
the night. Why had she gone? Deep thought brought comforting solution.
To-morrow they were to migrate to Assouan. This was their last day in
Luxor where, up to now, Lucilla had not made one single sketch. Now, had
she not told him in Brantôme that her object in going to Egypt was to
paint it? Generously she had put aside her art for his sake—until the
last moment. Of this last moment she was taking advantage. Still—why
not a little word to him? He turned to his book. But the thrill of the
great kiss pulsated through his veins. He gave himself up to dreams.

Later in the afternoon, Watney-Holcombe, fly-whisk in one hand and
handkerchief in the other, took him into the cool, darkened bar, and
supplied him with icy drink and told him tales of his early days in San
Francisco. A few other men lounged in and joined them. Desultory talk
furnished an excuse for systematic imbibing of cold liquid. When Martin
reached the upper air he found that Lucilla had already arrived and had
gone to her room for rest. He only saw her when she came down late for
dinner. She was dressed in a close-fitting charmeuse gown of a strange
blue shade like an Egyptian evening. Her pleasant greeting differed no
whit from that of twenty-four hours ago. Not by the flicker of a brown
eyelash did she betray recollection of last night’s impassioned
happenings.

She talked of her excursion to the eager and reproachful group. A
sandstorm had ruined a masterpiece, her best brushes, her hair and old
Hassan’s temper. She had swallowed half Sahara with her food. Her very
donkey, cocking round an angry eye, had called her the most opprobrious
term in his vocabulary—an ass. Altogether she had enjoyed herself
immensely.

“You ought to have come, Martin,” she said coolly.

He made the obvious retort. “You did not give me the chance.”

“If only you had been up at dawn,” she laughed.

“I was,” he replied. “I lay awake most of the night and I saw the
sunrise from my bedroom window.”

“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “You were looking the wrong way. You were
adoring the East while I was going out to the West.”

“All that is very pretty, but I’m dying of hunger,” said
Watney-Holcombe, carrying her off to the dining room.

The rest followed. At table, she sat between her captor and Dangerfield,
so that Martin had no private speech with her. After dinner
Watney-Holcombe and Dangerfield wandered off to the bar to play
billiards. Martin declining an invitation to join them remained with the
four ladies in the lounge. Lucilla had manœuvred herself into an
unassailable position between the two married women. Martin and Maisie
sat sketchily on the outskirts behind the coffee table. The band
discoursed unexhilarating music. Talk languished. At last Maisie sprang
to her feet and took Martin unceremoniously by the arm.

“If I sit here much longer I shall sob. Come on out and do something.”

Martin rose. “What can we do?”

“Anything. We can gaze at the stars and you can swear that you love me.
Or we can go and look at Cook’s steamboat.”

“Will you come with us, Lucilla?” asked Martin.

She shook her head and smiled. “I’m far too tired and lazy.”

The girl, still holding his arm, swung him round. He had no choice but
to obey. They walked along the quay as far as the northern end of the
temple. By the time of their return Lucilla had gone to bed. She had
become as elusive as a dream.

He did not capture her till the next morning on the railway station
platform, before their train started. By a chance of which he took swift
advantage, she stood some paces apart from the little group of friends.
He carried her further away. Moments were precious; he went at once to
the root of the matter.

“Lucilla, why are you avoiding me?”

She opened wide eyes. “Avoiding you, my dear Martin?”

“Yesterday you gave me no opportunity of speaking to you, and this
morning it has been the same. And I’ve been in a fever of longing for a
word with you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “And now you have me, what is the word?”

“I love you,” said Martin.

“Hush,” she whispered, with an involuntary glance round at the
red-jerseyed porters and the stray passengers. “This is scarcely the
place for a declaration.”

“The declaration was the night before last.”

“Hush!” she said again, and laid her gloved hand on his arm. But he
insisted.

“You haven’t forgotten?”

“Not yet. How could I? You must give me time.”

“For what?” he asked.

“To forget.”

A horrible pain shot through him. “Do you want to forget all that has
passed between us?”

She raised her eyes, frankly, and laughed. “My dear boy, how can we go
into such intimate matters among this rabble?”

“Oh, my dear,” said Martin, “I am only asking a very simple question. Do
you want to forget?”

“Perhaps not quite,” she replied softly, and the pain through his heart
ceased and he held up his head and laughed, and then bent it towards her
and asked forgiveness.

“If I didn’t forgive you, I suppose you’d be miserable?”

“Abjectly wretched,” he declared.

“That wouldn’t be a fit frame of mind for a six-hour stifling and dusty
railway journey. So let us be happy while we can.”

At Assouan they went to the hotel on the little green island in the
middle of the Nile. In the hope of her redeeming a half promise of early
descent before dinner, he dressed betimes and waited in the long lounge,
his eyes on the lift. She appeared at last, fresh, radiant, as though
she had stepped out of the dawn. She sat beside him with an adorable
suggestion of intimacy.

“Martin,” she said, “I want you to make me a promise, will you?”

His eyes on hers, he promised blindly.

“Promise me to be good while we’re here.”

“Good?” he queried.

“Yes. Don’t you know what ‘good’ means? It means not to be tempestuous
or foolish or inquisitive.”

“I see,” said Martin, with a frown between his brows. “I mustn’t”—he
hesitated—“I mustn’t do what I did the other night, and I mustn’t say
that all my universe, earth and sun and moon and stars are packed in
this”—his fingers met the drapery of her bodice in a fugitive, delicate
touch—“and I mustn’t ask you any questions about what you may be
thinking.”

There was a new tone in his voice, a new expression in his eyes and
about the corners of his lips, all of which she was quick to note. She
cast him a swift glance of apprehension, and her smile faded.

“You set out the position with startling concreteness.”

“I do,” said he. “Up to a couple of days ago I worshipped you as a
divine abstraction. The night before last, things, to use your words,
became startlingly concrete. You are none the less wonderful and
adorable, but you have become the concrete woman of flesh and blood I
want and would sell my soul for.”

She glanced at him again, anxiously, furtively, half afraid. In such
terms do none but masterful men speak to women; men who from experience
of a deceitful sex know how to tear away ridiculous veils; or else men
who, having no knowledge of woman whatever, suddenly awaken with
primitive brutality to the sex instinct. Her subtle brain worked out the
rapid solution. Her charming idea of making a man of Martin had
succeeded beyond her most romantic expectations. She realised that
facing him dry and cold, as she was doing now, would only develop a
dramatic situation which would be cut uncomfortably short by the first
careless friend who stepped out of the lift. She temporised, summoning
the smile to her eyes.

“Anyway, you’ve promised.”

“I have,” said Martin.

“You see, you can’t stand with a pistol at my head whenever we meet
alone. You must give me time.”

“To forget?”

“To make up my mind whether to forget or remember,” she declared
radiantly. “Now what more do you want an embarrassed woman to say?”

Swiftly she had reassumed command. Martin yielded happily. “If it isn’t
all I want,” said he, “it’s much more than I dared claim.”

She rose and he rose too. She passed her hand through his arm. “Come and
see whether anybody has had the common sense to reserve a table for
dinner.”

Thus during her royal pleasure, their semi-loverlike relations were
established; rather perhaps were they nicely balanced on a knife-edge,
the equilibrium dependent on her skill. As at Luxor, so at Assouan did
they the things that those who go to Assouan do. They lounged about the
hotel garden. They took the motor ferry to the little town on the
mainland and wandered about the tiny bazaar. They sailed on the Nile.
They went to the merriest race meetings in heathendom, where you can
back your fancy in camel, donkey or buffalo for a shilling upwards at
the state _pari-mutuel_. They made an expedition to the Dam. The main
occupation, as it is that of most who go to Assouan, was not to pass the
time, but to sit in the sun and let the time pass. A golden fortnight or
so slipped by. Martin lived as freely in his goddess’s company as he had
done at Cairo or Luxor. She had ordained a period of probation. All his
delicacy of sentiment proclaimed her justified. She comported herself as
the most gracious of divinities, and the most warmly sympathetic of
human women, leading him by all the delicate devices known to Olympus
and Clapham Common, to lay bare to her his inmost soul. He told her all
that he had to tell: much that he had told already: his childhood in
Switzerland, his broken Cambridge career, his life at Margett’s
Universal College, his adventures with Corinna, his waiterdom at
Brantôme, his relations with Fortinbras, Bigourdin, Félise. The only
thing in his simple past that he hid was his knowledge of the tragedy in
the life of Fortinbras. “And then you came,” said he, “and touched my
dull earth, and turned it into a New Jerusalem of ‘pure gold like unto
clear glass.’” And he told her of his consultation with the Dealer in
Happiness, and his journey to London and his meeting with Corinna in the
flimsy flat. It seemed to him that she had the divine power of taking
his heart in her blue-veined hands and making it speak like that of a
child. For everything in the world for which that heart had longed she
had the genius to create expression.

In spite of all the delicious intimacy of such revelation he observed
his compact loyally. For the quivering moment it was enough that she
knew and accepted his love; it was enough to realise that when she
smiled on him, she must remember unresentfully the few holy seconds of
his embrace. And yet, when alone with her, in the moonlit garden, so
near that accidental touch of arm or swinging touch of skirt or other
delicate physical sense of her, was an essential part of their
intercourse, he wondered whether she had a notion of the madness that
surged in his blood, of the tensity of the grip in which he held
himself.

And so, lotus-eating, reckless of the future, happy only in the
throbbing present, he remained with Lucilla and her friends at Assouan
until the heat of spring drove them back to Cairo.

There, on the terrace of Shepheard’s, on the noon of his arrival, he
found Fortinbras. The Dealer in Happiness, economically personally
(though philosophically) conducted, had also visited Luxor and had
brought away a rich harvest of observation. He bestowed it liberally on
Martin, who, listening with perplexed brow, wondered whether he himself
had brought away but chaff. After a while Fortinbras enquired:

“And the stock we wot of—is it still booming?”

Martin said: “I’ve been inconceivably happy. Don’t let us talk about
it.”

Presently Lucilla and Mrs. Dangerfield joined them and Fortinbras was
carried off to the Semiramis to lunch. It was a gay meal. The
Watney-Holcombes had gathered in a few young soldiers, and youth
asserted itself joyously. Fortinbras, urbane and debonair, laughed with
the youngest. The subalterns thinking him a personage of high importance
who was unbending for their benefit, paid him touching deference. He
exerted himself to please, dealing out happiness lavishly; yet his bland
eyes kept keen watch on Martin and Lucilla sitting together on the
opposite side of the great round table. Once he caught and held her
glance for a few seconds; then she flushed, as it seemed, angrily, and
flung him an irrelevant question about Félise. When the meal was over
and he had taken leave of his hosts, he said to Martin, who accompanied
him to the West door by which he elected to emerge:

“Either you will never want me again, or you will want a friendly hand
more than you have wanted a friendly hand in your life before—and I am
leaving this land of enchantment the day after to-morrow. _Dulce est
dissipere etc._ But dissipation is the thief of professional
advancement. If a dealer in cheaper and shoddier happiness arises in the
quartier I am lost. There was already before I left, a conscientious and
conscienceless Teuton who was trying to steal my thunder and retail it
at the ignominous rate of a franc a reverberation. I cannot afford to
let things drift. Neither, my son,” he tapped the young man impressively
on the shoulder. “Neither can you.”

Martin straightened himself, half resentful, and twirled his trim
moustache.

“It’s all very well, my son,” said Fortinbras with his benevolent smile,
“but all the let-Hell-come airs in the world can’t do anything else but
intensify the fact that you’re a Soldier of Fortune. Faint heart—you
know the jingle—and faintness of heart is not the attribute of a
soldier. Good-bye, my dear Martin.” He held out his hand. “You will see
me to-morrow at our usual haunt.”

Fortinbras waved adieu. Martin lit a cigarette and sat in a far corner
of the verandah. The westering sun beat heavily on the striped awning.
Further along, by the door, a small group of visitors were gathered
round an Indian juggler. For the first time, almost, since his landing
in Egypt, he permitted himself to think. A Soldier of Fortune. The words
conveyed sinister significance: a predatory swash-buckler in search of
any fortune to his hand: Lucilla’s fortune. Hitherto he had blinded
himself to sordid considerations. He had dived, figuratively speaking,
into his bag of sovereigns, as into a purse of Fortunatus. The magic of
destiny would provide for his material wants. What to him, soul-centred
on the ineffable woman, were such unimportant and mean preoccupations?
He had lived in his dream. He had lived in his intoxication. He had
lived of late in the splendour of a seismic moment. And now, crash! he
came to earth. A Soldier of Fortune. An adventurer. A swindler. The
brutal commonsense aspect grinned in his face. On ship-board Fortinbras
had warned him that he was an adventurer. He had not heeded. . . . He
was a Soldier of Fortune. He must strike the iron while it was hot. That
was what Fortinbras meant. He must secure the heiress. He hated
Fortinbras. The sudden realisation of his position devastated his soul.
And yet he loved her. He desired her as he had not dreamed it to be in a
man’s power to desire.

At last his glance rested on the little crowd around the Indian juggler;
and then suddenly he became aware of her flashing like a dove among
crows. Her lips and eyes were filled with a child’s laughter at the
foolish conjuring. When the trick was over she turned and, seeing him,
smiled. He beckoned. She complied, with the afterglow of amusement on
her face; but when she came near him her expression changed.

“Why, what’s the matter?” she asked.

He pushed a chair for her. They sat.

“I must speak to you, once and for all,” he said.

“Don’t you think it’s rather public?”

“The Indian is going,” he replied, with an indicating gesture, “and the
people too. It’s too hot for them to sit out here.”

“Then what about me?” she asked.

He sprang to his feet with an apology. She laughed.

“Never mind. We are as well here as anywhere. Sit down. Now, why this
sudden tragic resolution?”

“An accidental word from Fortinbras. He called me a Soldier of Fortune.
The term isn’t pretty. You are a woman of great wealth. I am a man
practically penniless. I have no position, no profession. I am what the
world calls an adventurer.”

She protested. “That’s nonsense. You have been absolutely honest with me
from first to last.”’

“Honest in so far as I’ve not concealed my material situation. But
honourable? . . . If you had known in Brantôme that I had already dared
to love you, would you have suggested my coming to Egypt?”

“Possibly not,” replied Lucilla, the shadow of an ironical smile playing
about her lips. “But—we can be quite frank—I don’t see how you could
have told me.”

“Of course I couldn’t,” he admitted. “But loving you as I did, I ought
not to have come. It was not the part of an honourable man.”

His elbow on the arm of the cane chair and his chin on his hand he
looked with haggard questioning into her eyes. She held his glance for a
brief moment, then looked down at her blue-veined hands.

“You see,” he said, “you don’t deny it. That’s why I call myself an
adventurer.”

Her eyes still downcast, she said: “You have no reason in the world to
reproach yourself. As soon as you could, with decency, tell me that you
loved me, you did. And you made it clear to me long before you told me.
And I don’t think,” she added in a low voice, “that I showed much
indignation.”

“Why didn’t you?” he asked.

She intertwined her fingers nervously. “Sometimes a woman feels it good
to be loved. And I’ve felt it good—and wonderful—all the time.
Once—there was a man, years ago; but he’s dead. Since then other men
have come along and I’ve turned them down as gently as I could. But no
one has done the mad thing that you have done for my sake. And no one
has been so simple and loyal—and strong. You are different. I have had
the sense of being loved by a man pure and unstained. God knows you are
without blame.”

“Then, my dear,” said he, bending his head vainly so as to catch her
face otherwise than in profile and to meet the eyes hidden beneath the
adorable brown lashes, “what is to happen between us two?”

For answer, she made a little despairing gesture.

“If I had the right of an honest man seeking a woman in marriage,” he
said, “I would take matters into my own hand. I would follow you all
over the world until I won you somehow or the other.”

She turned on him in a flash of passion.

“If you say such things, you will make me marry you out of humiliation
and remorse.”

“God forbid I should do that,” said Martin.

She averted her head again. There was a span of silence. At the extreme
end of the long deserted verandah, beneath the sun-baked awning, with
only the occasional clatter of a carriage or the whirr of a motor
breaking the stillness of this drowsy embankment of the Nile, they might
have been miles away in the desert solitude under the palm-tree of
Fortinbras’s dream.

Lucilla was the first to speak. “It is I who am to blame for everything.
No; let me talk. I’ve got the courage to talk straight and you’ve got
the courage to listen. You interested me at Brantôme. Your position
there was so un-English. Of course I liked you. I thought you ought to
be roused from stagnation. It was just idle fancy that made me talk
about Egypt. I thought it would do you good to cut everything and see
the world. When I took Félise away with me and saw how she expanded and
developed, I thought of you. I’ve done the same often before with girls,
like Félise, who have never been given a chance, and it has been a
fascinating amusement. I had never made the experiment with a man. I
wanted to see how you would shape, what kind of impression all the new
kind of life would make on you. I realise it now, but till now I
haven’t, that all my so-called kindnesses to girls have been heartless
experimenting. I could keep twenty girls in luxury for twenty years
without considering the expense. That’s the curse of unlimited money!
one abuses its power. . . . With you, of course, money didn’t come in. I
hadn’t the insanity to ask you to be my guest, as I could ask young
women. But money aside, I knew I could give you what I gave them; and
from what Félise let drop I gathered you had some little private means.
So I wrote to you—on the off-chance. I thought you would come. People,
have a way of doing what I ask them. You were going to be the most
fascinating amusement of all. You see, that’s how it was.”

She paused. His face hardened. “Well,” said he, “go on.”

“Can’t you guess the rest?”

“No,” said he, “I can’t.”

There was a note in his voice that seemed to tear her heart. She pressed
both hands to her eyes.

“If you knew how I despise and hate myself!”

“No, no, my dear,” said Martin. He touched her shoulder, warm and soft.
Only the convention of a diaphanous flimsy sleeve gave sanction. She let
his hand remain there for a moment or two; then gripped it and flung it
away. But the nervous clasp of her fingers denied resentment. She turned
a white face.

“I knew you loved me. It was good, as I’ve told you, to feel it. I meant
to escape as I’ve escaped before. I don’t excuse myself. Then came the
night at Luxor. I let myself go. It was a thing of the senses. Something
snapped, as it has done in the case of millions of women under similar
conditions. You could have done what you liked with me. I shall never
forget if I live to be ninety. Do you think I’ve been sleeping
peacefully all these nights ever since? I haven’t.”

She looked at him defiantly. Said Martin:

“You must care for me—a little. The veriest little is all I dare ask
for.”

“No, it isn’t,” she answered, meeting his eyes. “Don’t delude yourself.
You are asking for everything. And if I had everything to give I would
give it to you. You may think I have played with you heartlessly for the
last three or four weeks. Any outsider knowing the bare facts would
accuse me. Perhaps I ought to have sent you away; but I hadn’t the
strength. There. That’s a confession. Make what you will of it.”

“All I can make of it,” said Martin tremulously, “is that you’re the
woman for me, and that you know it.”

“I do,” she said. “I’m up against facts and I face them squarely. On the
other hand you’re not the man for me. If ever a woman has tried to love
a man, I’ve tried to love you. That’s why I’ve made you stay. I’ve
plucked my heart out—all, all but the roots. There’s a dead man there,
at the roots”—she flung out both hands and her shoulders heaved—“and
he is always up between us, and I can’t, I can’t. It’s no use. I must
give myself altogether, or not at all. I’m not built for the
half-and-half things.”

He sat grim, feeling more a stone than a man. She clutched his arm.

“Suppose I did marry you. By all the rules of the game I ought to. But
it would only be misery for both of us. There would be twenty thousand
causes for misery. Don’t you see?”

“I see everything,” said Martin. He rose and leaned both elbows on the
verandah and faced her with bent brows. “I see everything. You have put
your case very clearly. But suppose I say that you haven’t played the
game. Suppose I say that you should have known that no man who wasn’t in
love with you—except an imbecile—would have followed you to Egypt as
I’ve done. Suppose I say that you’ve played havoc with my life. Suppose
I instance everything that has passed between us, and I assert the rules
of the game, and I ask you as a man, shaken to his centre with love of
you, to marry me, what would you say?”

She rose and stood beside him, holding her head very proudly.

“Put upon my honour like that,” she replied, “I should have to say
‘Yes.’”

He took both her hands in his and raised them to his lips.

“That’s all I want to know. But as I don’t reproach you, I’m not going
to ask you, my dear. If I were Lord of the Earth or a millionth part of
the earth I would laugh and take the risk. But as things are, I can’t
accept your generosity. You are the woman I love and shall always love.
Good-bye and God bless you.”

He wrung her hand and marched down the verandah, his head in the air,
looking a very gallant fellow. After a few seconds’ perplexity she ran
swiftly in pursuit.

“Martin!” she cried.

He turned and awaited her approach.

“I feel I’ve behaved to you like the lowest of women. I’ll make my
amends if you like. I’ll marry you. There!”

Martin stood racked with the great temptation. All his senses absorbed
her beauty and her wonder. At length he asked:

“Do you love me?”

“I’ve told you all about that.”

“Then you don’t. . . . Yes or No? It’s a matter of two lives.”

“I’ve tried and I will try again.”

“But Yes or No?” he persisted.

“No,” she said.

Again he took her hands and kissed them.

“That ends it. If I married you, my dear, I should indeed be a Soldier
of Fortune, and you would have every reason to despise me. Now it is
really good-bye.”

Her gaze followed him until he disappeared into the hotel. Then she
moved slowly to the balustrade baking in the sunshine, and leaning both
elbows on it stared through a blur of tears at the detested beauty of
the world.




                              CHAPTER XXI


FORTINBRAS paced the deck of the homeward bound steamer deep in thought.
He still wore the costume of the elderly cabinet minister; but his air
was that of the cabinet minister returning to a wrecked ministry. His
broad shoulders were rounded and bent; his face had fallen from its
benevolent folds into fleshy haggardness. He felt old; he felt
inexpressibly lonely. He had not repeated the social experiment of the
voyage out. Save to his Dutch and Russian table neighbours he had not
the heart to speak to any one. A deep melancholy enwrapped him. After
his philosophical communion with the sage Abu Mohammed he shrank from
platitudinous commerce with the profane. It was for the heart and not
for the mind that he craved companionship. He was travelling
(second-class, for economy’s sake) back to the old half-charlatan life.
For all one’s learning and wisdom, one cannot easily embark on a new
career in the middle-fifties. He must be _Marchand de Bonheur_ to the
end.

He wondered whether he would miss Cécile. Such things had happened. No
matter how degraded, she had been a human thing to greet him on his
return from his preposterous toil. Also, her needs had been an
incentive; they had sharpened the hawk’s vision during the daily round
of cafés and restaurants, and quickened his pounce upon the divined
five-franc piece. Would he have the nerve, the unwearied patience, the
bitter sense of martyrdom, wherewith to carry on his trade? Again, in
days past his heavy heart had been uplifted by the love of a child like
the wild flowers from which Alpine honey is made, away in the depths of
old-world France. But now he had forfeited her love. She had written to
him, all these weeks in Egypt, dutifully, irreproachably; had given him
the news, such as it was, of Brantôme. She had told him of the state of
her uncle’s health—invariably robust; of the arrivals and departures of
elegant motorists; of the march through the town decorated for the
occasion of a host of _petits soldats_, amid the enthusiasm and
Marseillaise singing of the inhabitants; of the sudden death by apoplexy
of the good Madame Chauvet, and the sudden development of business on
the part of her daughters, who almost immediately had taken the next
shop and launched out into iron wreaths and crosses, and artificial
flowers and funeral inscriptions, touching and pious; of the purchases
of geese; of the infatuation of the elderly Euphémie for the youthful
waiter, erstwhile _plongeur_ of the Café de l’Univers; of all sorts and
conditions of unimportant happenings; finally of the betrothal of
Monsieur Lucien Viriot and Estelle Mazabois, the daughter of the famous
Mazabois who kept a great drapery establishment of Périgueux—“she has
the dowry of a princess and the head of a rocking-horse, so they are
sure to be happy,” wrote Félise. The manner of this last announcement
shocked him. Félise had changed. She had given him all the news, but her
letters had grown self-conscious and artificial. To avoid the old,
artless expressions of endearment, she rushed into sprightly narrative,
and signed herself “his affectionate daughter.” He had lost Félise.

Yes, he felt old and lonely, unnerved for the struggle. Even Martin had
forsaken him.

He had encountered a stony-faced, wrong-headed young man on the terrace
of Shepheard’s Hotel the noon before he sailed, and found all his
nostrums for happiness high-handedly rejected. Martin had been an idle
woman’s toy, a fiery toy as it turned out; and when she burned her
fingers, she had dropped him. So much was obvious; most of it he had
foreseen. He had counted on eventual declaration and summary dismissal;
but he had not reckoned on a prelude of reciprocated sentiment. Contrary
to habit, Martin gave him but a confused view of his state of mind. The
unhappy lover would hear not a word against his peerless lady. On the
other hand, his love for her had blasted his existence. This appalling
fact, though he did not proclaim it so heroically, he allowed Fortinbras
to apprehend. He neither reproached him for past advice nor asked for
new. To the suggestion that he should return to Brantôme and accept
Bigourdin’s offer, he turned a deaf ear. He had cut himself adrift; he
must go whithersoever winds and tides should carry him, and they were
carrying him far from Périgord.

“In what direction?” Fortinbras had enquired.

“Thank Heaven, I don’t know myself,” he had answered. “Anyhow, I am
going to seek my fortune. I must have money and power so that I can snap
my fingers at the world. That’s what I’m going to live for.”

And soon after that declaration he had wrung Fortinbras by the hand, and
hailing an _arabeah_ had driven off into the unknown. Fortinbras had
felt like the hen who sees her duckling brood sail away down the brook.
He had lost control of his disciple; he mattered nothing to the young
man setting forth on his wild-goose chase after fortune. His charming
little scheme had failed. He anticipated the reproaches of Bigourdin,
the accusation in the eyes of Félise. “Why did you side with the enemy?
Why did you drive Martin away?” . . .

He felt old and lonely, a pathetic failure; so he walked the
second-class deck with listless shoulders and bowed head, his hands in
his pockets.

“_Tiens!_ Monsieur Fortinbras! who would have thought it?” cried a fresh
voice.

He looked up and saw a dark-eyed girl, her head enveloped in a
motor-veil, who extended a friendly hand.

“_Mademoiselle_ . . .” he began uncertainly.

“_Mais oui!_ Eugénie Dubois. You must remember me. There was also _le
grand Jules_—Jules Massart.”

“Yes, I remember,” he said courteously, with a wan smile.

“You saved us both from a pretty mess.”

“I remember the saving; but I forget the mess. It is my rule always to
forget such things.”

She laughed gaily, burst into an account of herself. She was a modiste
in the great Paris firm of Odille et Compagnie, which had a branch at
Cairo. Now she was recalled for the Paris and London season.

“_Et justement_”—she plucked at his sleeve and led him to a seat—“I am
in a tangle of an affair which keeps me awake of nights. You fall upon
me from the skies like an angel. Be good and give me a consultation.”

She fished out her purse and extracted a twenty-five piastre piece. He
motioned her hand away.

“_Mon enfant_” said he. “You are an honourable little soul. But I don’t
do business on a holiday. _Raconte-moi ton affaire._”

But she protested. She would not abuse his kindness. Either a
consultation at the regulation price or no consultation at all. At last
he said:

“_Eh bien!_ give me your five francs.”

She obeyed. He rose. “Come,” said he, and led the way to the stairhead
by the saloon where was fixed the collecting box in aid of the Fund for
Shipwrecked Mariners. He slipped the coin down the slot.

“Now,” said he, “honour is satisfied.”

But listening to her artless and complicated tale, he wondered, while a
shiver ran over his frame, whether he would ever be able again to slip a
five-franc piece into his waistcoat pocket. He felt yet older than
before, incapable of piercing to the root of youth’s perplexities. He
counselled with oracular vagueness, conscious of not having earned his
fee. He paced the deck again.

“Were it not for Abu Mohammed,” he said, “I should call it a disastrous
journey.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

Meanwhile Martin, lonelier even than he, sat in the bows of a great
Eastward bound steamer, his eyes opened to the staring facts of life. No
longer must he masquerade as the man of fashion—never again until he
had bought the right. The remains of his small capital he must keep
intact for the day of need. No more the luxury of first-class travel.
This voyage in the steerage was but a means of transit to the new lands
where he would win his way to fortune. He needed no advice. He had
spiritually and morally outgrown his tutelage. No longer, so he told
himself, would he nourish his soul on dreams. It could feed if it liked
on memories. The madness had passed. He drew the breath of an honest
man. If he had taken Lucilla at her word and married her, what would
have been his existence? Trailing about the idle world in the wake of a
rich wife, dependent on her bounty even for a pair of shoe-laces; eating
out his heart for the love she could not give; at last, perhaps,
quarrelling desperately, or else with sapped will-power sunk in sloth,
accepting from her an allowance on condition that they should live
apart. He had heard of such marriages since he had mingled with the
wealthy. Even had she met him with a love as passionate as his own,
would the happiness have lasted? In his grim mood he thought not. He
reasoned himself into the conviction that his loss had been his gain.
Far better that he should be among these few poor folk who sat down to
table in their shirt-sleeves, than that he should be eating the
flesh-pots of dishonour in the land of Egypt. He himself dined in his
shirt-sleeves, as he had done many a time before in the kitchen of the
Hôtel des Grottes.

Yet he hungered for her. It seemed impossible that he should never see
her again, never again watch the sweep of the adorable brown eyelashes,
the subtle play of laughter around her mobile lips; never again greet
with delicious heart-pang the sight of her slim figure willowy like
those in the _Primavera_. In vain he schooled himself to regard her as
one dead. The witchery of her obsessed him night and day. He learned
what it was to suffer.

He had taken his deck passage to Hong-Kong—why he could scarcely tell.
It sounded very far away—as far away from her as practicable. As the
sultry days went on, he realised that he had not reckoned on the
tremendous distance of Hong-Kong. It was past Bombay, Colombo, Penang
and Singapore. At such ports as he could, he landed, but the glamour of
the East had gone. He was a man who had expended his power of wonder and
delight. He looked on them coldly as places he might possibly exploit,
should Hong-Kong prove barren. Also the period of great heat had begun,
and he found danger in strolling about the deadly streets. On ship-board
he slept on deck. As they neared Hong-Kong his heart sank. For the first
time he wished that Fortinbras were with him. Perhaps he had repaid
affection with scant courtesy. He occupied himself with a long letter to
his friend, setting out his case. He then imagined the reply. “My son,”
said the mellow, persuasive voice, “have you not been carrying on from
thrill to thrill the Great Adventure begun last August, when you threw
off the chains of Margett’s? Have you not filled your brain and your
soul with new and breathless sensations? Have you not tasted joys
hitherto unimagined? Have you not been admitted to the heart of a great
and loyal nation? Have you not flaunted it in the dazzling splendour of
the great world? Have you not steeped your being in the gorgeous colour
of the East? Have not your pulses throbbed with an immortal passion for
a woman of surpassing beauty? Have you not known, what is only accorded
to the select of the sons of men, a supreme moment of delirious joy when
Time stood still and Space was not? Have you not lived intensely all
this wonderful year? Are you the same blank-minded, starving-souled,
mild negation of a man who sat as a butt for Corinna’s pleasantries at
the Petit Cornichon? Have you not progressed immeasurably? Have you not
gained spiritual stature, wisdom both human and godlike? And are you not
now, having passed through the fiery furnace not only unscathed but
tempered, setting out on the still greater adventure—the conquest of
the Ends of the Earth? Less than a year ago what were you but a slave?
What are you now? A free man.”

So through the ears of fancy ran the sonorous rhetoric of Fortinbras.
Martin tore up his letter and scattered the fragments on the sea. A day
or two afterwards, with a stout heart, he landed at Victoria, the
capital of Hong-Kong.

                 *        *        *        *        *

A half-caste clerk to whom he had entrusted his card returned from the
inner office.

“Mr. Tudsley will see you, sir.”

Martin followed him into a darkened office, cooled by an electric fan,
where a white-clad, gaunt, yellow-faced Englishman sat at a desk. The
clerk closed the door and retired. The yellow-faced Englishman rose and
smiled, after glancing at Martin’s card on the desk before him.

“Mr. Overshaw? What can I do for you?”

“You can give me some work,” said Martin.

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” said Martin. “I must apologise for troubling you.”

He was about to withdraw. Mr. Tudsley glanced at him shrewdly.

“Wait a minute. Sit down. I don’t seem to place you. Who are you and
where do you come from?”

“That’s my name,” said Martin, pointing to his card, “and I have just
arrived from Europe, or to be more exact, from Egypt.”

“By the _Sesostris?_”

“Yes.”

Mr. Tudsley took up and scanned a type-written sheet of paper.

“I don’t see your name on the passenger list.”

“Possibly not,” said Martin. “I came steerage.”

“Indeed?” Martin, spruce in his well-cut grey flannels, looked anything
but a deck passenger. “What made you do that?”

“Economy,” said Martin.

“And why have you come to me?”

“I made a list last night, at the hotel, of the leading firms in
Hong-Kong and yours was among them.”

“Haven’t you any introductions?”

“No.”

“Then what induced you to come to this particular little Hell upon
Earth?”

“Chance,” said Martin. “One place is pretty much the same to me as
another.”

“What kind of work are you looking for?”

“Anything. From sweeping the floor to running a business.”

“Only coolies sweep floors here,” said Mr. Tudsley, tilting back his
chair and clasping his hands behind his back. “And only experienced men
of business run businesses. What business have you run?”

“None,” said Martin.

“Well, what business qualifications have you?”

“None. But I’m an educated man—Cambridge——”

“Yes, yes, one sees that,” the other interrupted. “There are millions of
them.”

“I’m bilingual, English and French, and my German is good enough for
ordinary purposes.”

“Do you know anything of accounts?”

“No,” said Martin.

“Can you add up figures correctly?”

“I daresay,” said Martin.

“Have you ever tried?”

“No,” said Martin.

Mr. Tudsley handed him a mass of type-written papers pinned together.
“Do you know what that is?”

Martin glanced through the document. “It seems to be a list of
commodities.”

“It’s a Bill of Lading. First time you’ve ever seen one?”

“Yes,” said Martin.

“Have you any capital?”

“A little. A few hundred pounds.”

“Then stick to it like grim death. Don’t part with it here.”

“I haven’t the slightest intention of doing so,” said Martin.

The lean, yellow-faced man brought his chair back to normal
perpendicularity and swung it round—it worked on a swivel.

“Mr. Overshaw,” said he, “pardon a perfect stranger giving you
advice—but you seem to be a frank, straight man. You’ve made a mistake
in coming to Hong-Kong. It’s a beast of a climate. In a few days’ time
the rains will begin. Then it will rain steadily, drearily, hopelessly,
damply, swelteringly, deadlily day after day, hour after hour, for four
months. That’s one way of looking at things. There’s another. I am
perfectly sure there’s not a vacancy for an amateur clerk in the whole
of Hong-Kong. If we want a linguist—your specialty—we can get Germans
by the dozen who not only know six languages but who have been trained
as business experts from childhood—and we can get them for twopence
halfpenny a month.”

Martin, remembering the discussions at the Café de l’Univers, replied:

“And when the war comes?”

“What war?”

“Between England and Germany.”

“My dear fellow, what in the world are you talking of? There’s not going
to be any war. Besides,” he smiled indulgently, “suppose there was—what
then?”

“First,” said Martin, “you would have given the enemy an intimate
knowledge of your trade, which by the way he is even now reporting by
every mail to his government”—he was quoting the dictum of a highly
placed Egyptian official whom he met at a dinner party in Cairo—“and
then you would have to fall back upon Englishmen.”

Mr. Tudsley laughed and rose, so as to end the interview.

“I’ll take the risk of that,” he said easily. “But the immediate
question is: ‘What are you to do?’ Have you visited any other firms?”

“Several,” said Martin.

“And what have they said?”

“Much the same as you, Mr. Tudsley, only not so kindly and courteously.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Tudsley, shy at the compliment. “I don’t
see why Englishmen meeting at the other end of nowhere shouldn’t be
civil to each other. But my advice is: Clear out of Hong-Kong. There’s
nothing doing.”

“What about Shanghai?”

“That’s further still from Europe.”

“Singapore?”

“That’s better—on the way back.”

“I must thank you,” said Martin, “for giving me so much of your time.”

“Not a bit I am only sorry I can’t give you a job or put you on to one.
But you see the position, don’t you?”

Martin smiled wryly. “I’m beginning to see it with painful clearness.”

“Good-bye and good luck,” said Mr. Tudsley.

“Good-bye,” said Martin.

Between then and the date of sailing of the next homeward bound steamer,
Martin knocked at every door in Hong-Kong. Nobody wanted him. There was
nothing he could do. There was no place for him on the very lowest rung
of any ladder to fortune.

He sailed to Singapore.




                              CHAPTER XXII


WHEN Martin landed at Marseilles he found the world on the brink of war.

He had spent the early summer roaming about the East looking, as he had
looked at Hong-Kong, for work that might lead to fortune and finding
none. A touch of fever had caused a friendly doctor at Penang to pack
him off to Europe by the first boat. It had been a Will o’ the Wisp
chase mainly in the rains, when the Straits Settlements are not abodes
of delight. It is bad enough that your boots should be mildewed every
morning; but when the mildew begins to attack your bones it is best to
depart. Martin embarked philosophically. He had tried the East because
it was nearer to his original point of departure. Now he would try the
West—America or Canada. In a temperate climate he could undertake
physical labour. His muscles were solid, and save for the touch of fever
of which the sea-air had soon cured him, his health was robust. He could
hew wood, draw water, dig the earth. In a new country he could not
starve. At the last pinch he could fall back on the profession he had
learned at the Hôtel des Grottes. Furthermore, by eating the bread and
choosing the couch of hardship he had spent comparatively little of his
capital. His vagabondage had hardened him physically and morally. He
knew the world. He had mixed with all kinds and conditions of men. Egypt
seemed a sensuous dream of long ago. He deafened his heart to its
memories. It would take ten years to make anything of a fortune. If he
succeeded, then, in ten years’ time, he would seek Lucilla. In the
meanwhile he would not waste away in despair. He faced the future with
confidence. While standing with his humble fellow passengers in the bows
of the vessel, he felt his pulses thrill at the first sight of the blue
islands of Marseilles. It was France, country almost of his adoption. He
rejoiced that he had decided not to book his ticket to Southampton, but
to pass through the beloved land once again before he sailed to another
Hemisphere. Besides, his money and most of his personal effects
(despatched from Egypt) were lying at Cook’s office in Paris. The
practical therefore turned sentiment into an easy channel. He landed,
carrying his bag in his hand, bought a paper on the quay from a
screaming urchin, and to his stupefaction found the world on the brink
of war.

At Gibraltar he had not seen a newspaper. None had penetrated to the
steerage and he had not landed. He had taken it for granted that the
good, comfortable old earth was rolling its usual course. Now, at
Marseilles, he became aware of every one in the blazing sunshine of the
quays staring at newspapers held open before them. At the modest hotel
hard by, where he deposited his bag, he questioned the manager. Yes, did
not he know? Austria had declared war on Servia. Germany had rejected
all proposals from England for a conference. The President of the
Republic had hurried from Russia. Russia would not allow Servia to be
attacked by Austria. France must join Russia. It was a _coup_ prepared
by Germany. “_Ca y est, c’est la guerre_,” said he.

Martin went out into the streets and found a place on the crowded
terrace of one of the cafés on the Cannebière. All around him was the
talk of war. The rich-voiced Provençaux do not speak in whispers. There
was but one hope for peace, the successful intervention of England
between Russia and Austria. But Germany would not have it. War was
inevitable. Martin bribed a chasseur to find him some English papers, no
matter of what date. With fervent anxiety he scanned the history of the
momentous week. What he read confirmed the talk. Whatever action England
might take, France would be at war in a few days. He paid for his drink
and walked up the Cannebière. He saw no smiling faces. The shadow of war
already overspread the joyous town. A battalion of infantry passed by,
and people stood still involuntarily and watched the soldiers with looks
curiously stern. And Martin stood also, and remained standing long after
the clanging tram-cars temporarily held up had blocked them from his
sight. And he knew that he could not go to America.

In a little spot in the heart of France lived all the friends he had in
the world; all the brave souls he had learned to love. Brantôme appeared
before him as in a revelation, and a consciousness of ingratitude smote
him so that he drew a gasping breath. Not that he had forgotten them. He
had kept up a fitful correspondence with Bigourdin who had never hinted
a reproach. But until an hour or two ago he had been prepared to wipe
Brantôme out of his life, to pass through France without giving it an
hour of greeting—even an _ave atque vale_.

In the past seven months of mad folly and studied poverty, where had he
met characters so strong, ideals so lofty, hearts so loyal? What had he
learned among the careless superficial Anglo-American society in Egypt
comparable with that which he had learned in this world-forgotten little
bourgeoisie in France? Which of them had touched his nature below the
layer of his vanity? What ideals had he met with in the East? Could he
so term the complacent and pessimistic opportunism of the Tudsleys; the
querulous grumbling of officials; the honest dulness of sea-captains and
seamen? He judged superficially, it is true; for one has to strike deep
before one can get at the shy soul of a Briton. But a man is but the
creature of his impressions. From his own particular journeyings of
seven months he had returned almost bewilderingly alone. East of
Marseilles there dwelt not a human being whose call no matter how faint
sounded in his ears. England, in so far as intimate personal England was
concerned, had no call for him either. Nor had America, unknown, remote,
unfriendly as Greenland.

Jostled, he walked along the busy thoroughfare, a man far away, treading
the paths of the spirit. In this mighty convulsion that threatened the
earth, there was one spot which summoned him, with a call clear and
insistent. His place was there, in Périgord, to share in its hopes and
its fears, its mourning and its joy.

He returned to the hotel for his bag and took the first train in the
direction of Brantôme. What he would do when arrived, he had no definite
notion. It was something beyond reason that drove him thither. Something
irresistible; more irresistible than the force which had impelled him to
Egypt. Then he had hesitated, weighed things for and against. Now, one
moment had decided him. It never occurred to him to question. Through
the burning south of France he sped. As yet only the shadow of war hung
over the land; the awful Word had not yet gone forth. Swarthy men and
women worked in the baking vineyards and gathered in the yellow harvest.
But here and there on flashing glimpses of white road troops marched
dustily and military waggons lumbered along. And in the narrow,
wooden-seated third-class carriage on the slow and ever stopping train,
the talk even of the humblest was of war. At every station some of the
passengers left, some entered. There seemed to be a sudden concentration
homewards. At every station were soldiers recalled from leave to their
garrisons. These, during the journey, were questioned as authoritative
functionaries. Yes, for sure, there would be war. Why they did not know,
except that the _sales bêtes_ of Germans were, at last, going to invade
France.

Said one, “I saw an officer yesterday in our village—the son of
Monsieur le Comte de Boirelles who has the big _château là-bas_—we have
known each other from childhood—and he said, ‘_Hein, mon brave, ca y
est!_’ And I said: ‘What, _mon lieutenant_?’ And he said, ‘_V’là le son,
le son du canon_.’ Fight like a good son of Boirelles, or I’ll cut off
your ears.’ And I replied, _quasiment comme ça_: ‘You will not have the
opportunity, _mon lieutenant_, you being in the artillery and I in the
infantry.’ And he laughed with good heart. ‘Anyhow,’ said he, ‘if you
return to the village, when the war is over, without the military medal,
and I am alive, I’ll make my mother do it, in the courtyard of the
château, with her own scissors.’ I tell you this to prove to you that I
know there is going to be war.”

And the women, holding their blue bundles on their knees in the crowded
compartment—for in democratic France demos is not allowed the luxury of
luggage-racks—looked at the future with anxious eyes. What would become
of them? The government would take their men. Their men would be killed
or maimed. Even if the men returned safe and sound, in the meantime, how
would they live? _Ah, mon Dieu! Cette rosse de guerre!_ They cursed the
war as though it were a foul and conscious entity.

The interminable journey, by day, by night, with tedious waits at great
ghostly junctions, at last was over. Martin emerged from the station of
Brantôme and immediately before him stood the familiar ramshackle
omnibus of the Hôtel des Grottes. Old Grégoire, the driver, on beholding
him staggered back and almost fell over the step of the vehicle.

“_Monsieur Martin! C’est vous?_”

Recovering, he advanced with great, sun-glazed hand.

“Yes. It is indeed I,” laughed Martin.

“It is everybody that will be content,” cried Grégoire. “How one has
talked of you, and wished you were back. And now, that this _sacrée
guerre_ is coming——”

“That’s why I’ve come,” said Martin. “How are monsieur and
mademoiselle?”

Both were well. It was they who would be glad to see Monsieur Martin.
The old fellow, red-faced, white-haired, clean shaven, with a
comfortable gash of a mouth, clapped him on the shoulder.

“_Mais v’là un solide gaillard?_”

“_Tu trouves?_”

Why, of course Grégoire found him transformed into a stout fellow. When
he had arrived a year ago he was like a bit of wet string. What a thing
it was to travel. And yet he had been in China where people ate rats and
dogs, which could not be nourishing food. In a fortnight, on the good
meat and _foie gras_ of Périgord, he would develop into a veritable
giant. If Monsieur Martin would enter. . . . He held the door open. No
one else had arrived by the train.

The omnibus jolted and swayed along the familiar road, through the
familiar cobble-paved streets, along the familiar quays, past many a
familiar face. They all seemed to chant the welcome of which the old
driver had struck the key. Martin felt strangely happy and the tears
were very near his eyes. Monsieur Richard, the butcher, catching sight
of him, darted a pace or two down the pavement so as to make sure, and
threw up both hands in greeting. And as they turned the corner of the
hill surmounted by the dear grey tower of the old Abbey, Monsieur le
Curé saw him and smiled and swept a salute with his old dusty hat, which
Martin acknowledged through the end window of the omnibus.

They drew up before the familiar door of the old white inn. Baptiste was
there, elderly, battered, in his green baize apron.

“_Mais, mon Dieu, c’est vous?—mais—— _” He wrung Martin’s hand. And,
as once before, on the return of Félise, not being able to cope with his
emotions, he shouted on the threshold of the vestibule: “_Monsieur,
monsieur, c’est Monsieur Martin qui arrive!_”

“_Qu’est-ce que tu dis là?_” cried a familiar voice from the bureau.

“_C’est Monsieur Martin._”

Martin entered, and in the vestibule encountered Bigourdin.

“_Mais mon vieux_,” cried the vast man. “_C’est toi? C’est vraiment toi,
enfin?_”

It was the instinctive, surprised and joyous greeting of the two
servants. Martin stood unstrung. What had he done to deserve it? Before
he could utter a word, he felt two colossal arms swung round him and a
kiss implanted on each cheek. Then Bigourdin held him out and looked at
him, and, like Grégoire, told him how solid he looked.

“_Enfin!_ You’ve come back. Tell me how and when and why. Tell me all.”

Martin’s eyes were moist. “My God!” said he, with a catch in his voice,
“you are a good fellow.”

“Not a bit, _mon cher_. We are friends, and in friendship there is
something just a little bit sacred. But tell me, _nom d’une pipe!_ all
about yourself.”

“I was on my way,” said Martin, with his conscientious honesty, “from
Penang to New York. At Marseilles I heard for the first time of the war
in which France will be involved and of which we have so often talked.
And something, I don’t know what, called me here—_et me voici!_”

“_C’est beau. C’est bien beau de ta part_,” said Bigourdin seriously.
“Let us go and find Félise.”

Now, when a Frenchman characterises a deed as _beau_, it is in his
opinion very fine indeed.

But before they could move, Euphémie rushed from her kitchen and all but
embraced the wanderer and Joseph, late _plongeur_ at the Café de
l’Univers and now waiter at the hôtel, came shyly from the
_salle-à-manger_, and the brightness of his eyes was only equalled by
the lustre of the habiliments that formerly had belonged to Martin.
Bigourdin despatched him in quest of Félise. Soon she came, from the
_fabrique_, looking rather white. Joseph had shot his news at her. But
she came up looking Martin straight in the eyes, her hand extended.

“_Bonjour_, Martin. I am glad to see you again.”

“So am I,” said he. “More than glad. It’s like coming back to one’s own
people.”

She drew up her little head and asked with a certain bravura: “How is
Lucilla?”

He winced; but he did not show it. He smiled. “I don’t know. I haven’t
heard of her since March.”

“Neither have I,” she said. “Not since January. She seems to be a bird
of passage through other people’s lives.”

Bigourdin laughed, shaking a great forefinger. “I bet that is not
original. I bet you are quoting your old philosopher of a father!”

She coloured and said defiantly: “Yes. I confess it. It is none the less
true.”

“And how is the good Fortinbras?” asked Martin, to turn a distressful
conversation.

“_A merveille!_ We are expecting him by any train. It is I who am making
him come. To-morrow I may be called out. France will want more than the
Troupes Métropolitaines and the Réserves to fight the Germans. They will
want the Territorials, _et c’est moi, l’armée territoriale_.” He thumped
his chest. “It was written that I should strike a blow for France like
my fathers. But while I am striking the blow who is to look after my
little Félise and the Hôtel des Grottes? It is well to be prepared. When
the mobilisation is ordered, there will be no more trains for
civilians.”

“And what do you feel about the war, Félise?” asked Martin.

She clenched her hands: “I would give my immortal soul to be a man!” she
cried.

Bigourdin hugged her. “That is a daughter of France! I am proud of our
little girl. _On dirait une Jeanne d’Arc._ But where is the Frenchwoman
now who is not animated by the spirit of La Pucelle d’Orléans?”

“In the meanwhile, _mon oncle_,” said Félise, disengaging herself
demurely from his embrace, “Martin looks exceedingly dusty and hungry,
and no one has even suggested that he should wash or eat or have his bag
carried up to his room.”

Bigourdin regarded her with admiration. “She is wonderful. She thinks of
everything. Baptiste. Take up Monsieur Martin’s things to the _chambre
d’honneur_.”

“But, my dear fellow,” Martin protested, “I only want my old room in
which I have slept so soundly.”

But Bigourdin would have none of it. He was the Prodigal Son. “_Et
justement!_” he cried, slapping his thigh, “we have a good calf’s head
for _déjeuner_. Yes, it’s true,” he laughed delightedly. “The fatted
calf. It was fatted by our neighbour Richard. _C’est extraordinaire!_”

So Martin shaved and washed in the famous bath room, and changed, and
descended to the _salle-à-manger_. The only guests were a few
anxious-faced commercial travellers at the centre table. All but one
were old acquaintances. He went the round, shaking hands, amid cordial
greetings. It was the last time, they said. To-morrow they would be
mobilised. The day after they would exchange the sample box for the pack
of the soldier; in a week they would have the skin torn off the soles of
their feet; and in a month they would be blown to bits by shells. They
proclaimed a lack of the warrior spirit. They had a horror of blood,
even a cat’s. It stirred up one’s stomach. _Mais enfin_ one did not
think of such unimportant things when France was in peril. If your house
was in danger of being swept away by flood, there was no sense in being
afraid to catch cold through having your feet wet. Each in his way
expressed the same calm fatalistic patriotism. They had no yearning to
be killed. But if they were killed—they shrugged their shoulders. They
were France and France was they. No force could dismember them from
France without France or themselves bleeding to death. It was very
simple.

Martin left them and sat down with Bigourdin and Félise, at their table
in the corner by the door. It was the first time he had ever done so.
Félise ate little and spoke less. Now and again, as he told of his mild
adventures in the Far East, he caught her great dark eyes fixed on him,
and he smiled, unaccountably glad. But always she shifted her glance and
made a pretence of eating or drinking. Once, when Bigourdin, called by
innkeeper’s business to one of the commercial travellers, had left the
table, she said:

“You have changed. One would say it was not the same man.”

“What makes you think so?” he laughed.

“You talk differently. There is a different expression on your face.”

“I’m sorry,” said he.

“I don’t see why you should be sorry,” said Félise.

“If you no longer recognise me,” said he—they talked in French—“I must
come to you as a stranger.”

She bit her lip and flushed. “I did not know what I was saying. Perhaps
it was impertinent.”

“How could it be, Félise?” he asked, bending across the table. “But if I
have changed, is it for the better or the worse?”

“Would you be a waiter here again?”

Martin looked for a second into his soul.

“No,” said he.

“_Voilà!_” said Félise.

“But I couldn’t tell you why.”

“It’s not necessary,” said Félise.

Bigourdin joined them. The meal ended. Félise went off to her duties.
Bigourdin said:

“Let us go and drink our coffee at the Café de l’Univers. Everybody is
there, at this hour, the last day or two. We may learn some news.”

They descended the hill and walked along the blazing quays. Martin knew
every house, every stone, every old woman who pausing from beating her
linen on the side of the Dronne waved him a welcome. And men stopped him
and slapped his shoulder and shook him by the hand.

“You recognise the good heart of Périgord,” said Bigourdin.

Martin replied, with excusable Gallic hyperbole: “_C’est mon pays_. I
find it again, after having wandered over the earth.”

They turned into the narrow, cool Rue de Périgueux. On the opposite side
of the street, they saw Monsieur Foure, _adjoint du maire_, walking
furiously, mopping a red forehead, soft straw hat in hand. He sped
across to them, too excited to realise that Martin had gone and
returned.

“Have you heard the news? The Mayor has received a telegram from Paris.
The order of mobilisation goes out to-day.”

“_Bon_,” said Bigourdin.

The terrace of the Café de l’Univers was crowded with the notables of
the town, who, in their sober way, only frequented the café after
dinner. The special côterie had their section apart, as at night. They
were all assembled—Fénille of the Compagnie du Gaz; Beuzot, Professor
of the Ecole Normale; the Viriots, father and son; Thiébauld, managing
director of the quarries; Bénoît of the railway; Rutillard, the great
chandler of corn and hay; and they did not need the _adjoint du Maire_
to tell them the news. The fresh arrivals, provided speedily with chairs
by the waiters, were swallowed up in the group. And Martin was assailed.

“_Et maintenant, l’Angleterre. Qu’est-ce qu’elle va faire?_”

It was the question on all French lips that day until England declared
war.

And Martin proclaimed, as though inspired from Whitehall, that England
would fight. For the moment his declaration satisfied them. The talk
swayed from him excitedly. France at war, at last, after forty years,
held their souls. They talked in the air, as men will, of numbers, of
preparations, of chances, of the solidarity of the nation. When there
was a little pause, the square-headed, white-haired Monsieur Viriot rose
and with a gesture, imposed silence.

“This is a moment,” said he, “for every misunderstanding between loyal
French hearts to be cleared up. We are now brothers in the defence of
our beloved country. _Mon brave ami Bigourdin, donne-moi ta main._”

Bigourdin sprang up,—in the public street—but what did that
matter?—and cried: “_Mon vieux Viriot_,” and the two men embraced and
kissed each other, and every one, much affected, cried “Bravo! Bravo!”
And then Bigourdin, reaching over the marble tables, took young Lucien
Viriot’s hands and embraced him and shook him by the shoulders, and
cried: “Here is a cuirassier who is going to cut through the Germans
like bladders of lard!”

It was a memorable reconciliation.

Fortinbras arrived late at night, probably by the last regular
train-services; for on the next day and for many days afterwards there
were wild hurry and crowds and confusion on roads and railways all
through France.

Into the town poured all the men of the surrounding villages, and the
streets were filled with them and their wives and mothers and children,
and strange officers in motor-cars whirled through the Rue de Périgueux.
Bands of young men falling into the well-remembered step marched along
the quays to the station singing the Marseillaise, and women stood at
their doorsteps blowing them kisses as they passed. And at the station
the great military trains adorned with branches of trees and flowers,
steamed away, a massed line of white faces and waving arms; and old men
and women young and old waved handkerchiefs until the train disappeared,
and then turned away weeping bitterly. Martin, Fortinbras and Bigourdin
went to many a train to see off the flower of the youth of the little
town. Lucien Viriot went gallantly. “A good war horse suits me better
than an office-stool,” he laughed. And Joseph, sloughing for ever
Martin’s shiny black raiment, went off too; and the younger waiters of
the Café de l’Univers, and Beuzot, the young professor at the Ecole
Normale, and the son of the _adjoint_, and _le petit Maurin_, who helped
his mother at her _Débit de Tabac_. Many a familiar face was carried
away from Brantôme towards some unknown battle-line and the thunder and
the slaughter—a familiar face which Brantôme was never to see again.
And after a day or two the town seemed futile, like a ball-room from
which the last dancers had gone.

Grave was the evening côterie at the Café de l’Univers. The rumour had
gone through France that England more than hesitated. Fortinbras
magnificently defended England’s honour. He had been very quiet at home,
tenderly shy and wistful with Félise, unsuggestive of paths to happiness
with Martin; his attitude towards intimate life one of gentle
melancholy. He had told Martin that he had retired from business as
_Marchand de Bonheur_. He had lost the trick of it. At Bigourdin’s
urgency he had purchased an annuity which sufficed his modest and
philosophic needs. No longer having the fierce incentive to gain the
hard-earned five-franc piece, no longer involved in a scheme of things
harmonious with an irregular profession, he was like the singer deprived
of the gift of song, the telepathist stricken with inhibitory impotence.
For all his odd learning, for all his garnered knowledge of the human
heart, and for all his queer heroic struggle, he stood before his own
soul an irremediable failure. So an older and almost a broken Fortinbras
had taken up his quarters at the Hôtel des Grottes. But stimulated by
the talk of war, he became once more the orator and the seer. He held a
brief for England and his passionate sincerity imposed itself on his
hearers.

“Thank God!” said he afterwards, “I was right.”

But in the meanwhile, Martin, strung in every fibre to high pitch by
what he had heard, by what he had seen and by what he had felt, knew
that just as it was ordained that he should come to Brantôme, so it was
ordained that he should not stay.

“You talk eloquently and with conviction, Monsieur,” said the Mayor to
Fortinbras—there were a dozen in the familiar café corner, tense and
eager-eyed, and Monsieur Cazensac, the Gascon proprietor, stood by—“but
what proofs have you given us of England’s co-operation?”

Martin, with a thrill through his body, said in a loud voice:

“Monsieur le Maire, there is not a living Englishman with red blood in
his veins who has any doubt. I, the most obscure of Englishmen, speak
for my country. Get me accepted as a volunteer, the humblest
foot-soldier, and I will fight for France. Take up my pledge, Monsieur
le Maire. It is the pledge of the only Englishman in Brantôme on behalf
of the British Empire. There are millions better than I from all ends of
the earth who will be inspired by the same sentiments of loyalty. Get me
accepted!”

In English Martin could never have said it. Words would have come shyly.
But he was among Frenchmen, attuned to French modes of expression. A
murmur of approbation arose.

“Yes,” cried Martin. “I offer France my life as a pledge for my country.
Get me accepted, _Monsieur le Maire_.”

The Mayor, a lean, grey-eyed, bald-headed man, with a straggly,
iron-grey beard, looked at him intently for a few moments.

“_C’est bien_,” said he. “I take up your pledge. I have to go to-morrow
to Périgueux to see _Monsieur le Préfet_, who has a certain friendliness
for me. He has influence with the _Ministère de la Guerre_. Accompany me
to Périgueux. I undertake to see that it is arranged.”

“I thank you, Monsieur le Maire,” said Martin.

Then everybody talked at once, and lifted their glasses to Martin, and
Monsieur Viriot despatched Cazensac for the sweet champagne in which
nearly a year ago they had drunk Lucien’s health; and Bigourdin embraced
him; and when the wine was poured out, there were cries of “_Vive
l’Angleterre!_” “_Vive la France!_” “_Vive Martin!_” And the
square-headed old Monsieur Viriot set the climax of this ovation by
lifting his glass at arm’s length and proclaiming “_Vive notre bon
Périgordin!_”

Said Fortinbras, who sat next to him, “I would give the rest of my life
to be as young as you, just for the next few months. My God, you must
feel proud!”

Martin’s steady English blood asserted itself: “I don’t,” said he, “I
feel a damned premature hero.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

It is only in the Légion Etrangère, that fantastic, romantic regiment of
dare-devil desperadoes capable of all iniquities and of all heroisms,
that a foreigner can enlist straight away, no questions asked. To be
incorporated in the regular army of France is another matter. Wires have
to be pulled. They were pulled in Martin’s case. It was to his credit
that he had served two years—gaining the stripes of a corporal—in the
Rifle Corps of the University of Cambridge. At the psychological moment
of pulling, England declared war on Germany. The resources of the
British Empire, men and money and ships and blood were on the side of
France. England and France were one. A second’s consideration of the
request of the Préfet de la Dordogne and a hurriedly scrawled signature
constituted Martin a potential member of the French Army.

It happened that, when the notice of authorisation came, the first
person he ran across was Félise, by the door of the _fabrique_. He waved
the paper.

“I am accepted.”

She turned pale and put her hand to her heart, but she met his eyes
bravely.

“When do you go?”

“At once—straight to Périgueux to enlist.”

“And when will you come back?”

“God knows,” said he.

Then he became aware of her standing scared, with parted lips and
heaving bosom.

“Of course I hope to come back; some time or other, when the War’s over.
Naturally—but——”

She said quaveringly—“You may be killed.”

“So may millions. I take my chance.”

She turned aside, clapped both hands to her face and broke into a
passion of weeping. Instinctively he put an arm around her. She sobbed
on his shoulder. He whispered:

“Do you care so much about what happens to me?”

She tore herself away and faced him with eyes flashing through her
tears.

“Do you think I’m a stick or a stone? I am half English, half French.
You are going to fight for England and France. Don’t you think women
feel these things? You are a part of the Englishwoman and the
Frenchwoman that is going out to fight, and I would hate you if you
didn’t fight, but I don’t want you to be killed.”

She fled. And not till he left the Hôtel des Grottes did he see her
again alone. When with Bigourdin and Fortinbras he was about to enter
the old omnibus to take him to the station, she pinned a tricolour
ribbon on his coat, and then saying “Good-bye and God bless you,” looked
him squarely in the eyes. It was in his heart to say, “You’re worth all
the Lucillas in the universe.” But there were Bigourdin and Fortinbras
and Euphémie and Baptiste and Grégoire and the chambermaid and a few
straggling girls from the _fabrique_ all standing by. He said:

“God bless you, Félise. I shall never part with your ribbon as long as I
live.”

Grégoire climbed to his seat. Bigourdin closed the door. The omnibus
jolted and swayed down the road. The elfin figure of Félise was suddenly
cut off at the turn. And that was the last of the Hôtel des Grottes.

A week or so later, Martin drilling in the hot barrack square realised
that just a year had passed since he first set eyes on Brantôme. A year
ago he had been a spineless, aimless drudge at Margett’s Universal
College. Now, wearing a French uniform, he was about to fight for France
and England in the greatest of all wars that the world had seen. And
during those twelve months through what soul-shaking experiences had he
not passed! Truly a wonderful year.

“_Mais vous, num’ro sept! Sacré nom de Dieu! Qu’est-ce que vous
faites-là!_” screamed the drill sergeant.

Whereupon Martin abruptly realised the intense importance of the present
moment.




                             CHAPTER XXIII


THE weary weeks passed by with their alternations of hopes and fears.
Martin, insignificant speck of blue and red, was in the Argonne.
Sergeant Bigourdin of the _Armée Territoriale_ was up in the north. The
history of their days is the history of the war which has yet to be
written; the story of their personal lives is identical with that of the
personal lives of the millions of men who have looked and are looking
Death always in the face, cut off as it were from their own souls by the
curtain of war.

Things went drearily at the Hôtel des Grottes. But little manhood
remained at Brantôme. Women worked in the fields and drove the carts and
kept the shops where so few things were sold. Félise busied herself in
the _fabrique_, her staff entirely composed of women. Fortinbras made a
pretence of managing the hotel to which for days together no travellers
came. No cars of pleasant motorists were unloaded at its door. Now and
then an elderly bagman in vain quest of orders sat in the solitary
_salle-à-manger_, and Fortinbras waited on him with urbane melancholy.
Thrown intimately together father and daughter grew nearer to each
other. They became companions, walking together on idle afternoons and
sitting on mild nights on the terrace, with the town twinkling
peacefully below them. They talked of many things. Fortinbras drew from
the rich store of his wisdom, Félise from her fund of practical
knowledge. There were times when she forgot the harrowing mystery of her
mother, and, only conscious of a great and yearning sympathy, unlocked
her heart and cried a little in close and comforting propinquity.
Together they read the letters from the trenches, all too short, all too
elusive in their brave cheeriness. The epistles of Martin and Bigourdin
were singularly alike. Each said much the same. They had not the
comforts of the Hôtel des Grottes. But what would you have? War was war.
They were in splendid health. They had enough to eat. They had had a
sharp tussle with the _Boches_ and many of their men were killed. But
victory in the end was certain. In the meanwhile they needed some warm
underclothes as the nights were growing cold; and would Félise enclose
some chocolate and packets of Bastos. Love to everybody and _Vive la
France!_

These letters Fortinbras would take to the Café de l’Univers and read to
the grey-headed remnant of the coterie, each of whom had a precisely
similar letter to read. The _Adjoint du Maire_ was the first to come
without a letter. He produced a telegram which was passed from hand to
hand in silence. He had come dry-eyed and brave, but when the telegram
reached him, after completing its round, he broke down.

“_C’est stupide!_ Forgive me, my friends. I am proud to have given my
son to my country. _Mais enfin_, he was my son—my only son. For the
first time I am glad that his mother is no longer living.” Then he
raised his head valiantly. “_Et toi_, Viriot—Lucien, how is he doing?”

Then some one heard of the death of Beuzot, the young professor at the
Ecole Normale.

At last, after a long interval of silence came disastrous news of
Bigourdin, lying seriously, perhaps mortally wounded in a hospital in a
little northern town. There followed days of anguish. Telegrams elicited
the information that he had been shot through the lung. Félise went
about her work with a pinched face.

In course of time a letter came from Madame Clothilde Robineau at
Chartres:

    My Dear Niece:

    Although your conduct towards me was ungrateful, I am actuated
    by the teachings of Christianity in extending to you my
    forgiveness, now that you are alone and unprotected. I hear from
    a friend of the Abbé Duloup, a venerable priest who is
    administering to the wounded the consolations of religion, that
    your Uncle Gaspard is condemned to death. Christian duty and
    family sentiment therefore make it essential that I should offer
    you a home beneath my roof. You left it in a fit of anger
    because I spoke of your father in terms of reprobation. But if
    you had watched by the death-bed of your mother, my poor sister,
    as I did, in the terrible garret in the Rue Maugrabine, you
    would not judge me so harshly. Believe me, dear child, I have at
    heart your welfare both material and spiritual. If you desire
    guidance as to the conduct of the hotel I shall be pleased to
    aid you with my experience.

                                       Your affectionate Aunt,
                                                Clothilde Robineau.

The frigid offer well meant according to the woman’s pale lights, Félise
scarcely heeded. Father or no father, uncle or no uncle, protector or no
protector, she was capable of conducting a score of hotels. The last
thing in the world she needed was the guidance of her Aunt Clothilde.
Save for one phrase in the letter she would have written an immediate
though respectful refusal and thought nothing further of the matter. But
that one phrase flashed through her brain. Her mother had died in the
Rue Maugrabine. They had told her she had died in hospital. Things
hitherto bafflingly dark to her became clear—on one awful, tragic
hypothesis. She shook with the terror of it.

It was the only communication the postman had brought that late
afternoon. She stood in the vestibule to read it. Fortinbras engaged in
the bureau over some simple accounts looked up by chance and saw her
staring at the letter with great open eyes, her lips apart, her bosom
heaving. He rose swiftly, and hurrying through the side door came to her
side.

“My God! Not bad news?”

She handed him the letter. He read, his mind not grasping at once that
which to her was essential.

“The priests are exaggerating. And as for the proposal——”

“The Rue Maugrabine,” said Félise.

He drew the quick breath of sudden realisation, and for a long time they
stood silent, looking into each other’s eyes. At last she spoke, deadly
white:

“That woman I saw—who opened the door for me—was my mother.”

She had pierced to the truth. No subterfuge he could invent had power to
veil it. He made a sad gesture of admission.

“Why did you hide it from me?” she asked.

“You had a beautiful ideal, my child, and it would have been a crime to
tear it away.”

She held herself very erect—there was steel in the small body—and
advanced a step or so towards him, her dark eyes fearless.

“You know what you gave me to understand when I saw her?”

“Yes, my child,” said Fortinbras.

“You also were an ideal.”

He smiled. “You loved me tenderly, but I was not in your calendar of
saints, my dear.”

She mastered herself, swallowing a sob, but the tears rolled down her
cheeks.

“You are now,” she said.

He laughed uncertainly. “A poor old sinner of a saint,” he said, and
gathered her to him.

And later, in the salon, before the fire, for the autumn was damp and
cold, he told her the cheerless story of his life, concealing nothing,
putting the facts before her so that she could judge. She sat on the
rug, her arm about his knee. She felt very tired, as though some part of
her had bled to death. But a new wonder filled her heart. In a way she
had been prepared for the discovery. In her talks with her uncle and
with Martin she had been keen to mark a strange disingenuousness. She
had accused them of conspiracy. They were concealing something; what,
she knew not; but a cloud had rested on her mother’s memory. If, on that
disastrous evening, the frowsy woman of the Rue Maugrabine had revealed
herself as her mother, her soul would have received a shock from which
recovery might have been difficult. Now the shock had not only been
mitigated by months of torturing doubt, but was compensated by the
thrill of her father’s sacrifice.

When he had ended, she turned and wept and knelt before him, crying for
forgiveness, calling him all manner of foolish names.

He said, stroking her dark hair: “I am only a poor old bankrupt
_Marchand de Bonheur_!”

“You will be _Marchand de Bonheur_ to the end,” she said, and with total
want of logical relevance she added: “See what happiness you have
brought me to-night.”

“At any rate, my dear,” said he, “we have found each other at last.”

She went to bed and lay awake till dawn looking at a new world of wrong
doing, suffering and heroism. Who was she, humble little girl, living
her sequestered life, to judge men by the superficialities of their
known actions? She had judged her father almost to the catastrophe of
love. She had judged Martin bitterly. What did she know of the riot in
his soul? Now he was offering his life for a splendid ideal. She felt
humble beside her conception of him. And her Uncle Gaspard, great,
tender, adored, was lying far, far away in the north, with a bullet
through his body. She prayed her valiant little soul out for the two of
them. And the next morning she arose and went to her work brave and
clear-eyed, with a new hope in God based upon a new faith in man.

A day or two later she received a wild letter from Corinna Hastings.
Corinna’s letters were as frequent as blackberries in March. Félise
knitted her brows over it for a long time. Then she took it to her
father.

“The sense,” she said, “must lie in the scrabble I can’t make out.”

Fortinbras put on his spectacles and when, not without difficulty, he
had deciphered it, he took off the spectacles and smiled the benevolent
smile of the _Marchand de Bonheur_.

“Leave it to me, my dear,” said he. “I will answer Corinna.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

In the tiny town of Wendlebury, in the noisy bosom of her family,
Corinna was eating her heart out. During the latter days of June she had
returned to the fold, an impecunious failure. As a matter of theory she
had upheld the principles of woman suffrage. As a matter of practice, in
the effort to obtain it, she loathed it with bitter hatred. She lacked
the inspiration of its overwhelming importance in sublunary affairs. She
was willing enough to do ordinary work in its interests, at a living
wage, even to the odious extent of wearing an anæmic tricolor and
selling newspapers in the streets. But when her duties involved
incendiarism, imprisonment and hunger, striking, Corinna revolted. She
had neither the conviction nor the courage. Miss Banditch reviled her
for a recreant, a snake in the grass and a spineless doll and left the
flat, forswearing her acquaintance for ever. Headquarters signified
disapproval of her pusillanimity. Driven to desperation she signified
her disapproval of Headquarters in unmeasured terms. The end came and
prospective starvation drove her home to Wendlebury. When the war broke
out, in common with the rest of the young maidenhood of the town, she
yearned to do something to help the British Empire. Her sister Clara, to
satisfy this laudable craving, promptly married a subaltern, and, when
he was ordered to the front, went to live with his people. The next
youngest sister, Evelyn, anxious for Red Cross work, found herself
subsidised by an aunt notoriously inimical to Corinna. Corinna therefore
had to throw in her lot with Margaret and Winnie, chits of fifteen and
thirteen—the intervening boys having flown from the nest. What was a
penniless and, in practical matters, a feckless young woman to do? She
knitted socks and mufflers and went round the town collecting money for
Belgian refugees. So did a score of tabbies, objects of Corinna’s
scornful raillery who district-visited the poor to exasperation. She
demanded work more glorious, more heroic; but lack of funds tied her to
detested knitting-needles. As the Vicar’s daughter she was compelled to
go to church and listen to her father’s sermons on the war; compared
with which infliction, she tartly informed her mother, forcible feeding
was a gay amusement.

Once or twice she had a postcard from Martin in the Argonne. She cursed
herself, her destiny and her sex. If only she was a man she would at
least have gone forth with a gun on her shoulder. But she was a woman;
the most helpless thing in women God ever made. Even her mother, whom
she had rated low on account of intellectual short-comings, she began to
envy. At any rate she had generously performed her woman’s duty. She had
brought forth ten children, five men children, two of whom had rushed to
take up arms in defence of their country. Martin’s last postcard had
told Corinna of Bigourdin being called away to fight. In her enforced
isolation from the great events of the great world she became acutely
conscious that in all the great world only one individual had ever found
a use for her. A flash of such knowledge either scorches or illuminates
the soul.

Then early in November she received a misspelt letter laboriously
written in hard pencil on thin, glazed paper. It was addressed from a
hospital in the North of France.

    Mademoiselle Corinna:

    I have done my best to strike a blow for my beloved country. It
    was written that I should do so, and it was written perhaps that
    I should give my life for her. I am dictating these words to my
    bedside neighbour who is wounded in the knee. For my part, a
    German bullet has penetrated my lung, and the doctors say I may
    not live. But while I still can speak, I am anxious to tell you
    that on the battlefield your image has always been before my
    eyes and that I always have in my heart a love for you tender
    and devoted. Should I live, Mademoiselle, I pray you to forget
    this letter, as I do not wish to cause you pain. But should I
    die, let me now have the consolation of believing that I shall
    have a place in your thoughts as one who has died, not
    unworthily or unwillingly, in a noble cause.

                                           Gaspard-Marie Bigourdin.

Corinna sat for a long time, frozen to her soul, looking out of her
bedroom window at the hopeless autumn drizzle, and the sodden leaves on
the paths of the vicarage garden. Then, with quivering lips, she sat
down at the rickety little desk that had been hers since childhood and
wrote to Bigourdin. She sealed it and went out in the rain and dropped
it in the nearest pillar box. When she reached her room again, the
realisation of the inadequacy of her words smote her. She threw herself
on her bed and sobbed. After which she wrote her wild letter to Félise.

For the next few days a chastened Corinna went about the Vicarage. An
unusual gentleness manifested itself in her demeanour, and at last
emboldened Mrs. Hastings, good, kind soul, to take the unprecedented
step of enquiring into her wayward and sharp-tongued daughter’s private
affairs.

“I’m afraid, dearie, that letter you had from France contained bad
news.”

“Yes, mother,” said Corinna, with a sigh.

They were alone in the drawing room. Mrs. Hastings laid aside her
knitting, rose slowly—she was a portly woman—and went across to
Corinna and put her arm about her shoulders.

“Can’t you tell me what it was, dearie?” she whispered.

Corinna melted to the voice. It awakened memories of unutterable comfort
of childish years. She surrendered to the embrace.

“Yes, mother. The truest man I have ever known—a Frenchman—is dying
over there. He asked me to marry him a year ago. And I was a fool,
mother. Oh! an awful fool!”

And half an hour later, she said tearfully: “I’ve been a fool in so many
ways. I’ve misjudged you so, mother. It never occurred to me that you
would understand.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Hastings, stroking her hair, “to bring ten children
into the world and keep them going on small means, to say nothing of
looking after a husband, isn’t a bad education.”

The next day came a telegram.

“Re letter Félise. If you want to find yourself at last go straight to
Bigourdin. Fortinbras.”

The message was a lash. She had not contemplated the possibility of
going to France. In the sleepless nights she had ached to be with him.
But how? In Tierra del Fuego he would be equally inaccessible.

“Go straight to him.” The words were very simple. Of course she would
go. Why had she waited for Fortinbras to point out her duty?

Then came the humiliating knowledge of impotence. She looked in her
purse and counted out her fortune of thirteen shillings and sevenpence
halfpenny. A very humble Corinna showed letter and telegram to her
mother.

“The war seems to have turned everything upside down,” said the latter.
“You ought to go, dear. It’s a sacred duty.”

“But how can I? I have no money. I can’t ask father.”

“Come upstairs,” said Mrs. Hastings.

She led the way to her bedroom and from a locked drawer took an
old-fashioned japanned despatch-box, which she opened.

“All my married life,” she said, “I have managed to keep something
against a rainy day. Take what you want, dear.”

Thus came the overthrowal of all Corinna’s scheme of values. She went to
France, a woman with a warm and throbbing heart.




                              CHAPTER XXIV


IT was with difficulty that she reached the little French town, and it
was with infinitely more difficulty that she overcame military obstacles
and penetrated into the poor little whitewashed school that did duty as
a hospital. It was a great bare room with a double row of iron
bedsteads, a gangway between them. Here and there an ominous screen shut
off a bed. A few bandaged men half dressed were sitting up smoking and
playing cards. An odour of disinfectant caught her by the throat. A
human form lying by the door with but little face visible, was moaning
piteously. She shrank on the threshold, aghast at this abode of mangled
men. The young _aide-major_ escorting her, pointed up the ward.

“You will find him there, Mademoiselle, Number Seventeen.”

“How is he?” she asked.

“The day before yesterday he nearly went,” he snapped his finger and
thumb. “A hemorrhage which we stopped. But the old French stock is solid
as oak, Mademoiselle. A hole or two doesn’t matter. He is going along
pretty well.”

“Thank God!” said Corinna.

A nurse with red-cross badge met them. “Ah, it is the lady for Sergeant
Bigourdin. He has been expecting you ever since your letter.”

His eyes were all of him that she recognised at first. His great, hearty
face had grown hollow and the lower part was concealed by a thick, black
beard. She remembered having heard of _les poilus_, the hairy-ones, as
the Territorial Troops were affectionately termed in France. But his
kind, dark eyes were full of gladness. The nurse set a stool for Corinna
by the bedside. On her left lay another black-bearded man who looked at
her wistfully. He had been Bigourdin’s amanuensis.

“This angel of tyranny forbids me to move my arms,” whispered Bigourdin
apologetically. The little whimsical phrase struck the note of the man’s
unconquerable spirit. Corinna smiled through tears. The nurse said:
“Talk to him and don’t let him talk to you. You can only have ten
minutes.” She retired.

“_Cela vous fait beaucoup souffrir, mon pauvre ami?_” said Corinna.

He shook his head. “Not now that you are here. It is wonderful of you to
come. You have a heart of gold. And it is that little talisman, _ce
petit cœur d’or_, that is going to make me well. You cannot imagine—it
is like a fairy tale to see you here.”

Instinctively Corinna put out her hand and touched his lips. She had
never done so feminine and tender a thing to a man. She let her fingers
remain, while he kissed them. She flushed and smiled.

“You mustn’t talk. It is for me who have sound lungs. I have come
because I have been a little imbecile, and only at the eleventh hour I
have repented of my folly. If I had been sensible a year ago, this would
not have happened.”

He turned happy eyes on her; but he said with his Frenchman’s clear
logic:

“All my love and all the happiness that might have been would not have
altered the destinies of Europe. I should have been brought here, all
the same, with a ridiculous little hole through my great body.”

Corinna admitted the truth of his statement. “But,” said she, “I might
have been of some comfort to you.”

His eyebrows expressed the shrug of which his maimed frame was
incapable. “It is all for the best. If I had left you at Brantôme, my
heart would have been torn in two. I might have been cautious to the
detriment of France. As it was, I didn’t care much what happened to me.
And now they have awarded me the _médaille militaire_; and you are here,
to make, as Baudelaire says, ‘_ma joie et ma santé_.’ What more can a
man desire?”

Now all this bravery was spoken in a voice so weak that the woman in
Corinna was stirred to its depths. She bent over him and whispered—for
she knew that the man with the wistful gaze in the next bed was
listening:

“_C’est vrai que tu m’aimes toujours?_”

She saw her question answered by the quick illumination of his eyes, and
she went on quickly: “And I, I love you too, and I will give you all my
poor life for what it is worth. Oh!” she cried, “I can’t imagine what
you can see in me. Beside you I feel so small, of so little account. I
can do nothing—nothing but love you.”

“That’s everything in the world,” said Bigourdin.

They were silent for a moment. Then he said: “I should like to meet the
_Boche_ who fired that rifle.”

“So should I,” she cried fiercely. “I should like to tear him limb from
limb.”

“I shouldn’t,” said Bigourdin. “I should like to decorate him with a
pair of wings and a little bow and arrow. . . .”

The nurse came up. “You must go now, mademoiselle. The patient is
becoming too excited. It is not your fault. Nothing but a bolster across
their mouths will prevent these Périgordins from talking.”

A tiny bedroom in a house over a grocer’s shop was all the accommodation
that she had been able to secure, as the town was full of troops
billeted on the inhabitants. As it was, that bedroom had been given up
to her by a young officer who took pity on her distress. She felt her
presence impertinent in this stern atmosphere of war. After seeing
Bigourdin, she wandered for a while about the rainy streets and then
retired to her chilly and comfortless room, where she ate her meal of
sardines and sausage. The next day she presented herself at the hospital
and saw the _aide-major_.

“Can you give me some work to do?” she asked. “I don’t pretend to be
able to nurse. But I could fetch and carry and do odd jobs.”

But it was a French hospital, and the _règlement_ made no provision for
affording prepossessing young Englishwomen romantic employment.

Of course, said the _aide-major_, if Mademoiselle was bent upon it, she
could write an application which would be forwarded to the proper
quarter. But it would have to pass through the _bureaux_—and she, who
knew France so well, was aware what the passing through the _bureaux_
meant. Unless she had the ear of high personages, it would take weeks
and perhaps months.

“And in the meantime,” said Corinna, “my _grand ami_, Number 17 down
there, will have got well and departed from the hospital.”

“Mademoiselle,” said he, “you have already saved the life of one gallant
Frenchman. Don’t you think that should give you a sentiment of duty
accomplished?”

She blushed. He was kind. For he was young and she was pretty.

“I can let you see your _gros heureux_ to-day,” said he. “It is a
favour. It is against the _règlement_. If the _major_ hears of it, there
will be trouble. By the grace of God he has a bilious attack which
confines him to his quarters. But, _bien entendu_, it is for this time
only.”

She thanked him and again found herself by Bigourdin’s bedside. The
moment of her first sight of him was the happiest in her life. She had
wrought a miracle. He was a different man inspired with the supreme will
to live. The young doctor had spoken truly. A spasm of joy shook her. At
last she had been of some use in the world. . . . She saw too the
Bigourdin whom she had known. His great, black beard had vanished. One
of the _camarades_, with two disposable arms, had hunted through the
kits of the patients for a razor and had shaved him.

“They tell me I am getting on magnificently,” said he. “This morning
there is no longer any danger. In a few months I shall be as solid as
ever I was. It is happiness that has cured me.”

They talked. She told him of her conversation with the _aide-major_. He
reflected for a moment. Then he said:

“Do you wish to please me?”

“What am I here for?” asked Corinna.

“You are here to spoil me. Anyhow—if you wish to please me, go to
Brantôme, and await me. To know that you are there, _chez-moi_, will
give me the courage of a thousand lions, and you will be able to console
my poor Félise who every night is praying for Martin by the side of her
little white bed.”

And so it was arranged. After two days extraordinary travel, advancing
from point to point by any train that happened to run, shunted on
sidings for interminable periods, in order to allow the unimpeded
progress of military trains, waiting weary hours at night in cold,
desolate stations, hungry and broken, but her heart aglow with a new and
wonderful happiness, she reached Brantôme.

She threw her arms round the neck of an astonished, but ever urbane
elderly gentleman in the vestibule of the Hôtel des Grottes and kissed
him.

“He’s getting well,” she cried a little hysterically. “He sent me here
to wait for him. I’m so happy and I’m just about dead.”

“But yet there’s that spark of life in you, my dear Corinna,” said
Fortinbras, “which, according to the saying, distinctly justifies hope.
Félise and I will see to it that you live.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

It was winter before Bigourdin was well enough to return. By that time
Corinna had settled down to her new life wherein she found the making of
_foie gras_ an enticing mystery. Also, in a town where every woman had
her man—husband, brother, son or lover—either in hourly peril of
death, or dead or wounded, there was infinite scope for help and
consolation. And when a woman said: “_Hélas! Mon pauvre homme. Il est
blessé là-bas_,” she could reply with a new, thrilling sympathy and a
poignant throb of the heart: “And my man too.” For like all the other
women there, she had “_son homme_.” Her man! Corinna tasted the fierce
joy of being elemental.

There was much distress in the little town. The municipality did its
best. In many cases the wives valiantly carried on the husband’s
business. But in the row of cave dwellings where the quarrymen lived no
muscular arms hewed the week’s wages from the rocks. Boucabeille,
Martin’s Bacchanalian friend, had purged all his offences in heroic
battle, and was lying in an unknown grave. Corinna, learning how Martin
had carried the child home on his shoulders, brought her to the hotel
and cared for her, and obtained work for the mother in the _fabrique_.

Never before had Corinna had days so full; never before had she awakened
in the morning with love in her heart. Félise, grown gentler and happier
since the canonisation of her father, gave her unstinted affection.

And then Bigourdin arrived, nominally on sick-leave, but with private
intimation that his active services would be required no longer. This
gave a touch of sadness to his otherwise joyous home-coming.

“I have not killed half enough Boches,” said he.

A few days after his return came a letter from Martin. And it was
written from a hospital.

    My Dearest Félise:

    I am well and sound and in perfect health. But a bullet got me
    in the left arm while we were attacking a German trench, and a
    spent bit of shrapnel caught me on the head and stunned me. When
    I recovered I was midway between the trenches in the zone of
    fire and I had to lie still between the dead bodies of two of
    our brave soldiers. I thought much, my dear, while I was lying
    there expecting every minute a bullet to finish me. And some of
    what I thought I will tell you, when I see you, for I shall see
    you very soon. After some thirty-six hours I was collected and
    brought to the field hospital, where I was patched up, and in
    the course of a day or so sent on to the base. I lay on straw
    during the journey in a row of other wounded. France has the
    defects of her qualities. Her soil is so fertile that her stalks
    of straw are like young oak saplings. When I arrived I had such
    a temperature and was so silly with pain that I don’t very well
    remember what happened. When I got sensible they told me that
    gangrene had set in and that they had chopped off my arm above
    the elbow. I always thought I was an incomplete human being,
    dear, but I have never been so idiotically incomplete as I am
    now. Although I am getting along splendidly I want to do all
    sorts of things with the fingers that aren’t there. I turn to
    pick up something and there’s nothing to pick it up with. A week
    before I was wounded, I had a finger nail torn off, and it still
    hurts me, somewhere in space, about a foot away from what is
    _me_. You would laugh if you knew what a nuisance it is. . . . I
    make no excuses for asking you to receive me at Brantôme; all
    that is dear to me in the world is there—and what other spot in
    the wide universe have I to fly to?

“But _sacré nom d’une pipe_!” cried Bigourdin—for Félise, after private
and tearful perusal of the letter, was reading such parts of it aloud as
were essential for family information—“What is the imbecile talking of?
Where else, indeed, should he go?”

Félise continued. Martin as yet unaware of Bigourdin’s return, sent him
messages.

“When you write, will you tell him I have given to France as much of
myself as I’ve been allowed to? Half an arm isn’t much. _Mais c’est déjà
quelque chose._”

“_Quelque chose!_” cried Bigourdin. “But it is a sacred sacrifice. If I
could get hold of that little bit of courageous arm I would give it to
Monsieur le Curé and bid him nail it up as an object venerable and
heroic in his parish church. _Ah! le pauvre garçon, le pauvre garçon_,”
said he. “_Mais voyez-vous_, it is the English character that comes out
in his letter. I have seen many English up there in the North. No longer
can we Frenchmen talk of _le phlègme britannique_. The astounding
revelation is the unconquerable English gaiety. _Jamais de longs
visages._ If a decapitated English head could speak, it would launch you
a whimsical smile and say: “What annoys me is that I can’t inhale a
cigarette.” And here our good Martin makes a joke about the straw in the
ambulance-train. _Mon Dieu!_ I know what it is, but it has never
occurred to me to jest about it.”

In the course of time Martin returned to Brantôme. The railway system of
the country had been fairly adjusted in the parts of France that were
distant from scenes of military operations. Bigourdin borrowed Monsieur
le Maire’s big limousine which had not been commandeered—for the Mayor
was on many committees in the Department and had to fly about from place
to place and with Corinna and Félise and Fortinbras he met Martin’s
train at Périgueux. As it steamed in a hand waved from a window below a
familiar face. They rushed to the carriage steps and in a moment he was
among them—in a woollen Kepi and incredibly torn blue-grey greatcoat
and ragged red trousers, the unfilled arm of the coat dangling down
idly. But it was a bronzed, clear-eyed man who met them, for all his war
battering.

Bigourdin welcomed him first, in his exuberant way, called him _mon
brave, mon petit héros_, and hugged him. Fortinbras gripped his hand,
after the English manner. Corinna, happy and smiling through glistening
eyes, he kissed without more ado. And then he was free to greet Félise,
who had remained a pace or two in the background. Her great, dark eyes
were fixed upon him questioningly. She put out a hand and touched the
empty sleeve. She read in his face what she had never read before. His
one poor arm, stretched in an instinctive curve—with a little sobbing
cry she threw herself blindly into his embrace.

The tremendous issues of existence with which for five months he had
been grappling had wiped out from his consciousness, almost from his
memory, the first enthralling kiss of another woman. Caked with mud,
deafened by the roar of shells, sleeping in the earth of his trench, an
intimate of blood and death day after day, he had learned that Lucilla
had been but an _ignis fatuus_ leading him astray from the essential
meaning of his life. He knew, as he lay wounded beneath the hell of
machine-gun fire between the trenches that there was only one sweet,
steadfast soul in the world who called him to the accomplishment of his
being.

When, in the abandonment of her joy and grief his lips met the soft,
quivering mouth of Félise, care, like a garment, fell from him. He
whispered: “You have a great heart. I’ve not deserved this. But you’re
the only thing that matters to me in the world.”

Félise was content. She knew that the war had swept his soul clean of
false gods. Out of that furnace nothing but Truth could come.

And so Martin returned for ever to the land of his adoption, which on
the morrow was to take him after its generous and expansive way as a
hero to its bosom. The Englishman who had given a limb for Périgord was
to be held in high honour for the rest of his days.

He was a man now who had passed through most human experiences. A man of
fine honour, of courage tested in a thousand ways, of stiffened will, of
high ideals. The life that lay before him was far dearer than any other
he could have chosen. For it matters not so much the life one leads as
the knowledge of the perfect way to live it. And that knowledge, based
on wisdom, had Martin achieved. He knew that if the glittering prizes of
the earth are locked away behind golden bars opening but to golden keys,
there are others far more precious lying to the hand of him who will but
seek them in the folds of the familiar hills.

The five sat down to dinner that evening in the empty _salle-à-manger_;
for not a guest, even the most decrepit commercial traveller, was
staying at the hotel. Yet never had they met at a happier meal. Félise
cut up Martin’s food as though it had been blessed bread. In the middle
of it Fortinbras poured out half a glass of wine.

“My children,” said he, “I am going to break through the habit of years.
This old wine of Burgundy is too generous to betray me on an occasion so
beautiful and so solemn. I drink to your happiness.”

“But to whom do Martin and I owe our happiness?” cried Corinna, with a
flush on her cheek, and a glistening in her blue eyes. “It is to
you—from the first to last to you, _Marchand de Bonheur_!”

“My God! Yes,” said Martin, extending his one arm to Fortinbras.

The ex-Dealer in Happiness regarded them both benevolently. “For the
first time in my life,” said he, “I think I have reason to be proud of
my late profession. Like the artist who has toiled and struggled, I can,
without immodesty, recognise my masterpiece. It was my original
conception that Martin and Corinna, crude but honest souls, should find
an incentive to the working out of their destiny by falling in love.
Therefore I sent them out together. That they should have an honourable
asylum, I sent them to my own kin. When I found they wouldn’t fall in
love at all, I imagined the present felicitous combination. I have been
aided by the little accident of a European war. But what matter? The
Gods willed it, the Gods were on my side. Out of evil there inscrutably
and divinely cometh good. My children, my heart is very full of the
consolation that, at the end of many years that the locust hath eaten, I
have perhaps justified my existence.”

“_Mon père_,” cried Félise, “all my life long your existence has had the
justification of heroic sacrifice.”

“My dear,” said he, “if I hadn’t met adversity with a brave face, I
should not have been a man—still less a philosopher. And now that my
duty here is over, if I don’t go back to Paris and find some means of
helping in the great conflict, I shall be unworthy of the name of
Englishman. So as soon as I see you safely and exquisitely married, I
shall leave you. I shall, however, come and visit you from time to time.
But when I die”—he paused and fishing out a stump of pencil scribbled
on the back of the menu card—“when I die, bury me in Paris on the south
side of the Seine and put this inscription on my tombstone. One little
vanity is accorded by the gods to every human being.”

He threw the card on the table. On it was written:

                            “_Ci-gît_
                            _Fortinbras_
                      _Marchand de Bonheur._”

When the meal was over they went up to the prim and plushily furnished
salon, where a wood fire was burning gaily. Bigourdin brought up a
cobwebbed bottle of the Old Brandy of the Brigadier and uncorked it
reverently.

“We are going to drink to France,” said he.

He produced from the cupboard whose doors were veiled with green-pleated
silk, half a dozen of the great glass goblets and into each he poured a
little of the golden liquid, which, as he had once said, contained the
soul of the _Grande Armée_.

“Stop a bit,” said Martin. “You’re making a mistake. There are only five
of us.”

“I am making no mistake at all,” said Bigourdin. “The sixth glass is for
the shade of the brave old Brigadier. If he is not here now among us to
honour the toast, I am no Christian man.”

                                THE END




                                  THE
                            WILLIAM J. LOCKE
                               YEAR-BOOK

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                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES

    Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where
    multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

    Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer
    errors occur.









End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wonderful Year, by William J. Locke

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