He went back to Paris, and a week later the trouble broke out in Narbonne.

At first it did not seem very serious. One understood vaguely that the wine-growers were in revolt. The Paris buyers had been adulterating the vintages—making one cask into a dozen—so that they came to a year when there was such a glut of this adulterated wine on the market, that the wine-growers of the South were left with wine to spill in the gutters, and wine to give to the pigs—but without bread to give to their children.

Then there arose one of those men who flame into history for a few vivid moments. A leader of men, whose words were sparks dropped among straw; who had but to say "Kill," and they would kill, until he bade them stop.

For a time, in a way essentially peculiar to France, the ludicrous prevailed. Municipalities resigned, mayors and all, and there was no giving nor taking in marriage, no registration of births or deaths. Odd stories of the despair of love—sick peasantry at postponed weddings—filled the papers; the Assiette au Beurre published a special number satirizing the situation. It was a good joke in Paris—but at Perpignan and Montpellier twenty thousand vignerons were talking of bloody revolution, and marching with blue and silver banners, and calling on the Government to put a tax on sugar, so as to make adulteration so costly that it should be profitless....

And Humphrey in the Paris office distilled a column a day from the forty columns that the French Special Correspondents sent to their papers, while Dagneau, up[333] at the Ministry of the Interior, garnered facts and official communiqués.

Work was his salvation and his solace. Everything of the past was wiped away from his mind when Humphrey worked. The personal things affecting his own private life became trivial beside the urgent importance of keeping The Day well-informed. And thus habit had fortified his power of resistance to external matters that might have disturbed a mind less trained to make itself subservient to the larger issue of duty. In a week—a brief week—he had gone through every phase of sorrow, anger, self-pity at his rejection. He thought of writing—indeed, he went so far one night as to compose a letter imploring Elizabeth for forgiveness, promising everything she wished ... but, when it was written, he tore it into little pieces. A mood of futile oaths followed. He felt that he had been balked of her by trickery. It led to violent hatred of her cold austerity, her icy splendour. He put away the thought of her from him. After all, what did it matter? They would never have been happy together. Always she was above him, distant and unattainable ... yet those fine moments, when she had stooped down and lifted him up, when gold and brilliance took the place of the dross in his mind! How she filled him with dreams of overwhelming possibilities, of ennobling achievements.... Below the crust of the selfishness and vanity of his life, there was a rich vein of good and strong desire ready to be worked, if she had only known. There were moments when his whole soul ached with an intense longing to be exalted and free from the impoverished squalor of its surroundings. He knew it, and the thought of it made him unjust to Elizabeth. She had not known of those constant conflicts which endured over years that seemed everlasting,—a guerrilla warfare with conscience.

[334]

They had not mattered. She had given his soul back to him, to do as he liked with it; she had forsaken him before he was strong enough to stand alone....

The telephone bell rang. He adjusted the metal band over his head. "Londres," said the voice of the operator. His ears heard nothing but the voice of The Day calling to him; his eyes saw nothing but the sheets of writing at his side, and everything else faded from his mind but the news of the night....

He put the receiver down, and almost immediately the telephone bell rang, and he heard a voice telling him that it was Charnac.... "Where have you been?" asked Charnac. "One has missed you." Humphrey explained his absence.

"Can you come to supper to-night," Charnac called. "Your little Desirée will be there." His voice came out of the depths of space, calling Humphrey to the gaiety of life. "Your little Desirée...." It brought to him, vividly, her thin, supple figure; those strange blue eyes that looked widely from beneath the pale eyebrows; and the lips of cherry-red. The song that she had sung that night had been lilting ever since in his mind:
"... Je perds la tête
'Suis comme une bête."

He saw her in all her alluring languor, secret, and mysterious. And it was the eternal mystery in her that attracted him. For a few moments he hesitated, indeterminately, at the telephone. "Eh bien, mon vieux," called Charnac's voice. "Will you come? 11.30 at the Chariot d'Or."

"I'll come," said Humphrey.

It was ten-thirty. Ripples of unrest stirred his mind; he felt deeply agitated. He knew that he was on the brink of a new and complex development in[335] his life; and the future stretched before him, vague and impenetrable, full of a promise of mournful and fierce delights, of happiness inconceivable, and sorrow inexperienced. No scruples retarded him now, and the voice of conscience was stilled, but despite all this, an indefinable mist of melancholy clouded his soul.

Dagneau came briskly into the office. Humphrey ceased brooding, and swung round in his chair.

"Lamb," he said, "I'm going out to supper to-night."

"Oh! la! la!" Dagneau laughed. "Who's the lucky lady?"

"Not for the likes of little lambs that have to stay in the office and keep the fort."

Dagneau made a grimace. "I suppose it isn't safe for both of us to leave," he said.

"No fear," Humphrey replied. "There's no knowing what these fellows mayn't be up to in the South. Anyhow, if anything urgent happens, come along to me. I shall be in the Chariot d'Or until one o'clock."

Dagneau was a good fellow, thought Humphrey, as his cab climbed the hill to Montmartre. It was jolly decent of him not to mind. He forgot the office now, and thought only of the night's adventuring. There was fully a half-hour to spare, so he idled it away on the terrace of a café sipping at a liqueur. Every variety of street hawker came to persuade sous from him: they had plaster figures for sale, or wanted to cut his silhouette in black paper, or draw a portrait of him in pastels, or sell him ballads and questionable books, bound in pink, pictorial covers. The toy of the moment, frankly indecent, yet offered with a childlike innocence that made it impossible for one to be disgusted with the vendors, was thrust before him fifty times. They showed him how it worked, and when he refused, they brought from inner pockets picture-postcards which[336] they tried to show him covertly, until he drove them away with the argot he had learned from Dagneau.

At the time appointed a cab climbed the steep Rue Pigalle, and drew up before the Chariot d'Or. Charnac sat in the middle comfortably squeezed in between Margot and Desirée. They waved a cheery greeting as they saw Humphrey, and he helped them down. Without any question he linked his arm in Desirée's, and led her up the brilliant scarlet staircase to the supper-room. Her meek acceptance of him, and the............