"It was there that I made her acquaintance," he resumed, after having
lit the cigarette from my pipe. "We met, we talked, we fixed it up. She
is not the woman to go by four roads to a thing. She did me the honour
of going straight for me. Ah, but what a wonderful woman! She rules that
cafe like a kingdom; a Semiramis, a Queen Elizabeth, a Catherine de'
Medici. She sits enthroned behind the counter all day long and takes the
money and counts the saucers and smiles on rich clients, and if a waiter
in a far corner gives a bit of sugar to a dog she spots it, and the
waiter has a deuce of a time. That woman is worth her weight in
thousand-franc notes. She goes to bed every night at one, and gets up in
the morning at five. And virtuous! Didn't Solomon say that a virtuous
woman was more precious than rubies? That's the kind of wife the wise
man chooses when he gives up the giddy ways of youth. Ah, my dear sir,
over and over again these last two or three days my dear old parents--I
have been on a visit to them in Aigues-Mortes--have commended my wisdom.
Amelie, who is devoted to me, left her cafe in Carcassonne to make their
acquaintance and receive their blessing before our marriage, also to
show them the lace on her _dessous_ and her new silk dress. They are too
old to take the long journey to Carcassonne. 'My son,' they said, 'you
are making a marriage after our own hearts. We are proud of you. Now we
can die perfectly content.' I was wrong, perhaps, in saying that Amelie
has no sentiment," he continued, after a short pause. "She adores me. It
is evident. She will not allow me out of her sight. Ah, my dear friend,
you don't know what a happy man I am."
For a brilliant young man of five-and-thirty, who was about to marry a
horrible Megaera ten or twelve years his senior, he looked unhealthily
happy. There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had caught the
woman's fancy. She was at the dangerous age, when even the most
ferro-concrete-natured of women are apt to run riot. She was
comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled me. He was obviously
marrying her for her money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all the
cynics could he manage to look so confoundedly joyful about it?
The mistral blew bitterly. I snuggled beneath the rug and hunched up my
shoulders so as to get my ears protected by my coat-collar. Aristide,
sufficiently protected by his goat's hide, talked like a shepherd on a
May morning. Why he took for granted my interest in his unromantic, not
to say sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the whole history of
it from its modest beginnings to its now penultimate stage. From what I
could make out--for the mistral whirled many of his words away over
unheeding Provence--he had entered the Cafe de l'Univers one evening, a
human derelict battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding a
seat immediately beneath Mme. Gougasse's _comptoir_, had straightway
poured his grievances into a feminine ear and, figuratively speaking,
rested his weary heart upon a feminine bosom. And his buffetings and
grievances and wearinesses? Whence came they? I asked the question
point-blank.
[Illustration: HAD STRAIGHTWAY POURED HIS GRIEVANCES INTO A
FEMININE EAR]
"Ah, my dear friend," he answered, kissing his gloved finger-tips, "she
was adorable!"
"Who?" I asked, taken aback. "Mme. Gougasse?"
"_Mon Dieu_, no!" he replied. "Not Mme. Gougasse. Amelie is solid, she
is virtuous, she is jealous, she is capacious; but I should not call her
adorable. No; the adorable one was twenty--delicious and English; a
peach-blossom, a zephyr, a summer night's dream, and the most provoking
little witch you ever saw in your life. Her father and herself and six
of her compatriots were touring through France. They had circular
tickets. So had I. In fact, I was a miniature Thomas Cook and Son to the
party. I provided them with the discomforts of travel and supplied
erroneous information. _Que voulez-vous?_ If people ask you for the
history of a pair of Louis XV. corsets, in a museum glass case, it's
much better to stimulate their imagination by saying that they were worn
by Joan of Arc at the Battle of Agincourt than to dull their minds by
your ignorance. _Eh bien_, we go through the chateaux of the Loire,
through Poitiers and Angouleme, and we come to Carcassonne. You know
Carcassonne? The great grim _cite_, with its battlements and bastions
and barbicans and fifty towers on the hill looking over the rubbishy
modern town? We were there. The rest of the party were buying picture
postcards of the _gardien_ at the foot of the Tour de l'Inquisition. The
man who invented picture postcards ought to have his statue on the top
of the Eiffel Tower. The millions of headaches he has saved! People go
to places now not to exhaust themselves by seeing them, but to buy
picture postcards of them. The rest of the party, as I said, were deep
in picture postcards. Mademoiselle and I promenaded outside. We often
promenaded outside when the others were buying picture postcards," he
remarked, with an extra twinkle in his bright eyes. "And the result? Was
it my fault? We leaned over the parapet. The wind blew a confounded
_meche_--what do you call it----?"
"Strand?"
"Yes--strand of her hair across her face. She let it blow and laughed
and did not move. Didn't I say she was a little witch? If there's a
Provencal ever born who would not have kissed a girl under such
provocation I should like to have his mummy. I kissed her. She kept on
laughing. I kissed her again. I kissed her four times. At the beginning
of the fourth kiss out came her father from the postcard shop. He waited
till the end of it and then announced himself. He announced himself in
such ungentlemanly terms that I was forced to let the whole party,
including the adorable little witch, go on to Pau by themselves, while
I betook my broken heart to the Cafe de l'Univers."
"And there you found consolation?"
"I told my sad tale. Amelie listened and called the manager to take
charge of the _comptoir_, and poured herself out a glass of Frontignan.
Amelie always drinks Frontignan when her heart is touched. I came the
next day and the next. It was pouring with rain day and night--and
Carcassonne in rain is like Hades with its furnaces put out by human
tears--and the Cafe de l'Univers like a little warm corner of Paradise
stuck in the midst of it."
"And so that's how it happened?"
"That's how it happened. _Ma foi!_ When a lady asks a _galant homme_ to
marry her, what is he to do? Besides, did I not say that the Cafe de
l'Univers was the most prosperous one in Carcassonne? I'm afraid you
English, my dear friend, have such sentimental ideas about marriage.
Now, we in France----_Attendez, attendez!_" He suddenly broke off his
story, lurched forward, and gripped the back of the front seat.
"To the right, man, to the right!" he cried excitedly to McKeogh.
We had reached the point where the straight road from Aigues-Mortes
branches into a fork, one road going to Montpellier, the other to Nimes.
Montpellier being to the west, McKeogh had naturally taken the left
fork.
"To the right!" shouted Aristide.
McKeogh pulled up and turned his head with a look of protesting inquiry.
I intervened with a laugh.
"You're wrong in your geography, M. Pujol. Besides, there is the
signpost staring you in the face. This is the way to Montpellier."
"But, my dear, heaven-sent friend, I no more want to go to Montpellier
than you do!" he cried. "Montpellier is the last place on earth I desire
to visit. You want to go to Nimes, and so do I. To the right,
chauffeur."
"What shall I do, sir?" asked McKeogh.
I was utterly bewildered. I turned to the goat-skin-clad,
pointed-bearded, bright-eyed Aristide, who, sitting bolt upright in the
car, with his hands stretched out, looked like a parody of the god Pan
in a hard felt hat.
"You don't want to go to Montpellier?" I asked, stupidly.
"No--ten thousand times no; not for a king's ransom."
"But your four thousand francs--your meeting Mme. Gougasse's train--your
getting on to Carcassonne?"
"If I could put twenty million continents between myself and Carcassonne
I'd do it," he explained, with frantic gestures. "Don't you understand?
The good Lord who is always on my side sent you especially to deliver
me out of the hands of that unspeakable Xantippe. There are no four
thousand francs. I'm not going to meet her train at Montpellier, and if
she marries anyone to-morrow at Carcassonne it will not be Aristide
Pujol."