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 _pâté 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 _pâté de foie gras_? You must have unwarrantable faith in me.”
“Perhaps, in the end,” said he soberly, “it might amuse you to make
_pâté 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-grandfather, a simple peasant, rose
to be _Général de Brigade_ in the _Grand Armée_ of Napoléon. After
Waterloo, he would accept no favour from the Bourbons, and retired to
Brantôme, the home of his race, and with his little economies he bought
the Hôtel des Grottes, at which he had worked years before as a little
_va-nu-pieds_, turnspit, holder of horses—_que sais-je, moi_? Those
were days, mademoiselle, of many revolutions of fortune.”
“And all that means——?” asked Corinna, impressed, in spite of English
prejudice, by the simple yet not inglorious ancestry of the huge
innkeeper.
“It means, mademoiselle,” said Bigourdin, “that I wish to present myself
to you as an honest man. But as I am of no credit, myself, I would like
to expose to you the honour of my family. My great-grandfather, as I
have said, was _Général de Brigade_ in the _Grande Armée_. My
grandfather, _simple soldat_, fought side by side with the English in
the Crimea. My father, Sergeant of Artillery, lost a leg and an arm in
the War of 1870. My younger brother was killed in Morocco. For me, I
have done my _service militaire_. _Ou fait ce qu’on peut._ It is chance
that I am forty years of age and live in obscurity. But my name is known
and respected in all Périgord, mademoiselle——”
“And again—all that means?”
“That if a _petit hôtelier_ like me ventures to lay a proposition at the
feet of a _jeune fille de famille_ like yourself—the _petit hôtelier_
wishes to assure her of the perfect _honorabilité_ of his family. In
short, Mademoiselle Corinne, I love you very sincerely. I can make no
phrases, for when I say I love you, it comes from the innermost depths
of my being. I am a simple man,” he continued very earnestly, and with
an air of hope, as Corinna flashed out no repulse, but sat sphinx-like,
looking away from him across the room, “a very simple man; but my heart
is loyal. Such as I am, Mademoiselle Corinne—and you have had an
opportunity of judging—I have the honour to ask you if you will be my
wife.”
Corinne knew enough of France to realise that all this was amazing. The
average Frenchman, whom Bigourdin represented, is passionate but not
romantic. If he sets his heart on a woman, be she the angel-eyed spouse
of another respectable citizen or the tawdry and naughty little
figurante in a provincial company, he does his honest (or dishonest)
best to get her. _C’est l’amour_, and there’s an end to it. But he
envisages marriage from a totally different angle. Far be it from me to
say that he does not entertain very sincere and tender sentiments
towards the young lady he proposes to marry. But he only proposes to
marry a young lady who can put a certain capital into the business
partnership which is an essential feature of marriage. If he is
attracted towards a damsel of pleasing ways but devoid of capital, he
either behaves like the appalling Monsieur Camille Fargot, or puts his
common sense, like a non-conducting material, between them, and in all
simplicity, doesn’t fall in love with her. But here was a manifestation
of freakishness. Here was Bigourdin, man of substance, who could have
gone to any one of twenty families of substance in Périgord and chosen
from it an impeccable and well-dowered bride—here he was snapping his
fingers at French bourgeois tradition—than which there is nothing more
sacrosanct—putting his common sense into his cap and throwing it over
the windmills, and acting in a manner which King Cophetua himself, had
he been a Frenchman, would have condemned as either unconventional or
insane.
Corinna’s English upper middle-class pride had revolted at the
suggestion that she should become an employee in a little bourgeois inn;
but her knowledge of French provincial life painfully quickened by her
experience of yesterday assured her that she was the recipient of the
greatest honour that lies in the power of a French citizen to offer. An
English innkeeper daring to propose marriage she would have scorched
with blazing indignation, and the bewildered wretch would have gone away
wondering how he had mistaken for an angel such a Catherine-wheel of a
woman. But against Bigourdin, son of other traditions so secure in his
integrity, so delicate in his approach, so intensely sincere in his
appeal, she could find within her not a spark of anger. All conditions
were different. The plane of their relations was different. She would
never have confessed to a flirtation with an English innkeeper. Besides,
she had a really friendly feeling for Bigourdin, something of
admiration. He was so big, so simple, so genuine, so intelligent. In
spite of Martin’s complaint that she could not realise the spirit of
modern France, her shrewd observation had missed little of the moral and
spiritual phenomena of Brantôme. She was well aware that Bigourdin,
_petit hôtelier_ that he was, stood for many noble ideals outside her
own narrow horizon. She respected him; she also derived feminine
pleasure from his small mouth and the colour of his eyes. But the
possibility of marrying him had never entered her head. She had not the
remotest intention of marrying him now. The proposal was grotesque. As
soon as she got clear of the place she would throw back her head and
roar with laughter at it; a gleeful little devil was already dancing at
the back of her brain. For the moment, however, she did not laugh: on
the contrary a queer thrill again ran through her body, and she felt a
difficulty in looking him in the face. After having thrown herself at a
man’s head yesterday only to be spurned, her outraged spirit found
solace in having to-day another man suppliant at her feet. Of his
sincerity there could be no possible question. This big, good man loved
her. For all her independent ways and rackety student experiences, no
man before had come to her with the loyalty of deep love in his eyes, no
man had asked her to be his wife. Absurd as it all was, she felt its
flattering deliciousness in every fibre of her being.
“_Eh bien_, Mademoiselle Corinne, what do you answer?” asked Bigourdin,
after a breathless silence during which, with head bent forward over the
table, she had been nervously fiddling with her gloves.
“You are very kind, Monsieur Bigourdin. I never thought you felt like
that towards me,” she said falteringly, like any well-brought-up
school-girl. “You should have told me.”
“To have expressed my feelings before, Mademoiselle, would have been to
take advantage of your position under my roof.”
Suddenly there came an unprecedented welling of tears in her eyes, and a
lump in her throat. She sprang to her feet and with rare impulsiveness
thrust out her hand.
“Monsieur Bigourdin, you are the best man I have ever met. I am your
friend, your very great friend. But I can’t marry you. It is
impossible.”
He rose too, holding her and put the eternal question.
“But why?”
“You deserve a wife who loves you. I don’t love you. I never could love
you”—and then from the infinite spaces of loneliness there spread about
her soul a frozen desolation, and she stood as one blasted by Polar
wind—“I shall never love a man all my life long. I am not made like
that.”
And she seemed to shrivel in his grasp and, flitting between the
snow-clad tables like a wraith, was gone.
“_Bigre!_” said Bigourdin, sitting down again.
* * * * *
Soon afterwards, Fortinbras and Martin, coming in from the terrace,
found him sprawling over the table a monumental mass of dejection. But,
full of their own conceits, they did not divine his misery. Fortinbras
smote him friendly wise on his broad back and aroused him from lethargy.
“It is all arranged, _mon vieux_ Gaspard,” he cried heartily. “I have
been pouring into awakening ears all the divine distillations of my
philosophy. I have initiated him into mysteries. He is a neophyte of
whom I am proud.”
Bigourdin, in no mood for allusive hyperbole, shook himself like a great
dog.
“What kind of imbecility are you talking?”
“The late Polydore——” Fortinbras began.
“Ah! Finish with it, I beg you,” interrupted Bigourdin, with an unusual
air of impatience.
“It isn’t a joke, I assure you,” said Martin. “I have come to the end of
my resources. I must work. You will, sooner or later have to fill the
place of Polydore. Give me the wages of Polydore and I am ready to fill
it. I could not be more incapable, and perhaps I am a little more
intelligent.”
“It is serious?”
“As serious as can be.”
Bigourdin passed his hand over his face. “I went to sleep last night in
a commonplace world, I wake up this morning to a fantastic universe in
which I seem to be a leaf, like those outside”—he threw a dramatic
arm—“driven by the wind. I don’t know whether I am on my head or my
heels. Arrange things as seems best to you.”
“You accept me then as waiter in the Hôtel des Grottes?”
“_Mon cher_,” said Bigourdin, “in the state of upheaval in which I find
myself I accept everything.”
The upheaval or rather overthrow—for he used the word
“_bouleversement_”—of the big man was evident. He sat the dejected
picture of defeat. No man in the throes of sea-sickness ever cared less
what happened to him. Fortinbras looked at him shrewdly and his thick
lips formed themselves into a noiseless whistle. Then he exchanged a
glance with Martin, who suddenly conjectured the reason of Bigourdin’s
depression.
“She ought to be spanked,” said he in English.
Fortinbras beamed on him. “You do owe something to me, don’t you?”
“A lot,” said Martin.
Félise, her face full of affairs of high importance ran into the
_salle-à-manger_.
“_Mon Oncle_, le Père Didier sends word that he has decided not to kill
his calf till next week. What shall we do?”
“We’ll eat asparagus,” Bigourdin replied and lumbered out into the
November drizzle.
Three pairs of wondering eyes sought among themselves a solution of this
enigmatic utterance.
“_Mais qu’est-ce que cela veut dire?_” cried Félise, with pretty mouth
agape.
“It means, my child,” said Fortinbras, “that your uncle, with a
philosopher’s survey of the destiny of the brute creation, refuses to be
moved either to ecstatic happiness or to ignoble anger by the
information that the life of the obscure progeny of a bull and a cow has
been spared for seven days. For myself I am glad. So is our
tender-hearted Martin. So are you. The calf has before him a crowded
week of frisky life. Send word to Père Didier that we are delighted to
hear of his decision and ask him to crown the calf with flowers and send
him along to-day for afternoon tea.”
He smiled and waved a dismissing hand. Félise, laughing, kissed him on
the forehead and tripped away, having little time to spare for
pleasantry.
The two men smoked in silence for some time. At last Fortinbras,
throwing the butt end of his cigarette into Corinna’s coffee-bowl, rose,
stretched himself and yawned heartily.
“Having now accomplished my benevolent purpose,” said he, “I shall
retire and take some well-earned repose. In the meanwhile, Monsieur
Polydore Martin, you had better enter upon your new duties.”
So Martin, after he had procured a tray and an apron from the pantry,
took off his coat, turned up his shirt-sleeves and set to work to clear
away the breakfast things.