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 c?ur?”
“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 Brant?me in the Dordogne, made illustrious by one of the quaintest of French writers——”
“The Abbé Brant?me 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 Brant?me,” Fortinbras continued after a pause, “you will find an hotel called the H?tel des Grottes, kept by an excellent and massive man by the name of Bigourdin, a poet and a philosopher and a mighty maker of paté 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 Brant?me?” 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 Brant?me—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 Brant?me,” 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.