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 ?sthetic 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 Brant?me. 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 Brant?me?” 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 Brant?me, 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 Brant?me 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 ?a très joli.” And she handed him Le Ma?tre 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 Brant?me. 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 Brant?me,” 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 Brant?me 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 fian?ailles 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 H?tel 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 paté de foie gras and truffles to be despatched—the H?tel 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 h?telier, 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.
“?a 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 Brant?me. 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 ?a,” 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.”
“A?e, a?e! 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 h?telier like me count syllables on his fingers? Ah, non! I can make excellent paté 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.”