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 cœur_?”
“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
Brantôme in the Dordogne, made illustrious by one of the quaintest of
French writers——”
“The Abbé Brantôme 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 Brantôme,” Fortinbras continued after a pause,
“you will find an hotel called the Hôtel des Grottes, kept by an
excellent and massive man by the name of Bigourdin, a poet and a
philosopher and a mighty maker of _pâté 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 Brantôme?” 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 Brantôme—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 Brantôme,” 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.