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 paté 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 paté de foie gras? You must have unwarrantable faith in me.”
“Perhaps, in the end,” said he soberly, “it might amuse you to make paté 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-gr............