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 æsthetic 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 Brantôme. 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 Brantôme?” 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 Brantôme, 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 Brantôme 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 ça très joli._” And she handed him _Le Maître 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 Brantôme. 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 Brantôme,” 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 Brantôme 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 _fiançailles_ 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 Hôtel
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 _pâté de foie gras_ and truffles to be
despatched—the Hôtel 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 hôtelier_, 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.
“_Ça 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
Brantôme. 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 ça_,” 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.”
“_Aïe, aïe!_ 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 _hôtelier_ like me count
syllables on his fingers? _Ah, non!_ I can make excellent pâté 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.”