[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.”