There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in sole charge of an automobile,
went gaily scuttering over the roads of France. I use the word
advisedly. If you had heard the awful thing as it passed by you would
agree that it is the only word adequate to express its hideous mode of
progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered, ramshackle tin
concern of hoary antiquity, belonging to the childhood of the race. Not
only horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was a vehicle of
derision. Yet Aristide regarded it with glowing pride and drove it with
such daredevilry that the parts must have held together only through
sheer breathless wonder. Had it not been for the car, he told me, he
would not have undertaken the undignified employment in which he was
then engaged--the mountebank selling of a corn-cure in the public places
of small towns and villages. It was not a fitting pursuit for a late
managing director of a public company and an ex-Professor of French in
an English Academy for Young Ladies. He wanted to rise, _ma foi_, not
descend in the social scale. But when hunger drives--_que voulez-vous_?
Besides, there was the automobile. It is true he had bound himself by
his contract to exhibit a board at the back bearing a flaming picture of
the success of the cure and a legend: "_Guerissez vos cors_," and to
display a banner with the same device, when weather permitted. But,
still, there was the automobile.
It had been lying for many motor-ages in the shed of the proprietors of
the cure, the Maison Hieropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten
by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred to their business
imagination. Why should they not use the automobile to advertise and
sell the cure about the country? The apostle in charge would pay for his
own petrol, take a large percentage on sales, and the usual traveller's
commission on orders that he might place. But where to find an apostle?
Brave and desperate men came in high hopes, looked at the car, and,
shaking their heads sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest of
ends, came Aristide. The splendour of the idea--a poet, in his way, was
Aristide, and the Idea was the thing that always held him captive--the
splendour of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his own automobile
dazed him. He beheld himself doing his hundred kilometres an hour and
trailing clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child a moth-eaten
rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the plains; to Aristide Pujol this
cheat of the scrap-heap was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer
of space.
How they managed to botch up her interior so that she moved unpushed
is a mystery which Aristide, not divining, could not reveal; and when
and where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is also vague. I
believe the knowledge came by nature. He was a fellow of many weird
accomplishments. He could conjure; he could model birds and beasts out
of breadcrumb; he could play the drum--so well that he had a kettle-drum
hanging round his neck during most of his military service; he could
make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he could imitate any animal that ever
emitted sound--a gift that endeared him to children; he could do almost
anything you please--save stay in one place and acquire material
possessions. The fact that he had never done a thing before was to him
no proof of his inability to do it. In his superb self-confidence he
would have undertaken to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden or
navigate a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease to bother my
head about so small a matter as the way in which he learned to drive a
motor-car.
Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering along the road that
leads from Arles to Salon, in Provence. He wore a goat-skin coat and a
goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears. His handsome bearded face,
with its lustrous, laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the
circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn visible in the long,
straight road that lost itself in the far distant mist; not a speck on
it signifying cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up to the
delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting engine to twenty miles an
hour. In spite of the racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and
jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like cymbals; every
valve wheezed and squealed; every nut seemed to have got loose and
terrifically clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching
noises escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an
over-insured tramp-steamer in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted
with loco-motor ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth from the open
exhaust-pipe as though the car were a Tophet on wheels. But all was
music in the ears of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always go),
the road scudded under him, and the morning air dashed stingingly into
his face. For the moment he desired nothing more of life.
This road between Arles and Salon runs through one of the most desolate
parts of France: a long, endless plain, about five miles broad, lying
between two long low ranges of hills. It is strewn like a monstrous
Golgotha, not with skulls, but with huge smooth pebbles, as massed
together as the shingle on a beach. Rank grass shoots up in what
interstices it finds; but beyond this nothing grows. Nothing can grow.
On a sunless day under a lowering sky it is a land accursed. Mile after
mile for nearly twenty miles stretches this stony and barren waste. No
human habitation cheers the sight, for from such a soil no human hand
could wrest a sustenance. Only the rare traffic going from Arles to
Salon and from Salon to Arles passes along the road. The cheery passing
show of the live highway is wanting; there are no children, no dogs,
no ducks and hens, no men and women lounging to their work; no
red-trousered soldiers on bicycles, no blue-bloused, weather-beaten
farmers jogging along in their little carts. As far as the eye can reach
nothing suggestive of man meets the view. Nothing but the infinite
barrenness of the plain, the ridges on either side, the long, straight,
endless road cleaving through this abomination of desolation.
To walk through it would be a task as depressing as mortal could
execute. But to the speed-drunken motorist it is a realization of dim
and tremulous visions of Paradise. What need to look to right or left
when you are swallowing up free mile after mile of dizzying road?
Aristide looked neither to right nor left, and knew this was heaven at
last.
[Illustration: BETWEEN THE FOLDS OF THE BLANKET PEEPED THE FACE OF A
SLEEPING CHILD]
Suddenly, however, he became aware of a small black spot far ahead in
the very middle of the unencumbered track. As he drew near it looked
like a great stone. He swerved as he passed it, and, looking, saw that
it was a bundle wrapped in a striped blanket. It seemed so odd that it
should be lying there that, his curiosity being aroused, he pulled up
and walked back a few yards to examine it. The nearer he approached the
less did it resemble an ordinary bundle. He bent down, and lo! between
the folds of the blanket peeped the face of a sleeping child.
"_Nom de Dieu!_" cried Aristide. "_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
He ought not to have said it, but his astonishment was great. He stared
at the baby, then up and down the road, then swept the horizon. Not a
soul was visible. How did the baby get there? The heavens, according to
history, have rained many things in their time: bread, quails, blood,
frogs, and what not; but there is no mention of them ever having rained
babies. It could not, therefore, have come from the clouds. It could not
even have fallen from the tail of a cart, for then it would have been
killed, or at least have broken its bones and generally been rendered a
different baby from the sound, chubby mite sleeping as peacefully as
though the Golgotha of Provence had been its cradle from birth. It could
not have come there accidentally. Deliberate hands had laid it down; in
the centre of the road, too. Why not by the side, where it would have
been out of the track of thundering automobiles? When the murderous
intent became obvious Aristide shivered and felt sick. He breathed
fierce and honest anathema on the heads of the bowelless fiends who had
abandoned the babe to its doom. Then he stooped and picked up the bundle
tenderly in his arms.
The wee face puckered for a moment and the wee limbs shot out
vigorously; then the dark eyes opened and stared Aristide solemnly and
wonderingly in the face. So must the infant Remus have first regarded
his she-wolf mother. Having ascertained, however, that it was not going
to be devoured, it began to cry lustily, showing two little white specks
of teeth in the lower gum.
"_Mon pauvre petit_, you are hungry," said Aristide, carrying it to the
car racked by the clattering engine. "I wonder when you last tasted
food? If I only had a little biscuit and wine to give you; but, alas!
there's nothing but petrol and corn-cure, neither of which, I believe,
is good for babies. Wait, wait, _mon cheri_, until we get to Salon.
There I promise you proper nourishment."
He danced the baby up and down in his arms and made half-remembered and
insane noises, which eventually had the effect of reducing it to its
original calm stare of wonderment.
"_Voila_," said Aristide, delighted. "Now we can advance."
He deposited it on the vacant seat, clambered up behind the wheel, and
started. But not at the break-neck speed of twenty miles an hour. He
went slowly and carefully, his heart in his mouth at every lurch of the
afflicted automobile, fearful lest the child should be precipitated from
its slippery resting-place. But, alas! he did not proceed far. At the
end of a kilometre the engine stopped dead. He leaped out to see what
had happened, and, after a few perplexed and exhausting moments,
remembered. He had not even petrol to offer to the baby, having
omitted--most feather-headed of mortals--to fill up his tank before
starting, and forgotten to bring a spare tin. There was nothing to be
done save wait patiently until another motorist should pass by from whom
he might purchase the necessary amount of essence to carry him on to
Salon. Meanwhile the baby would go breakfastless. Aristide clambered
back to his seat, took the child on his knees, and commiserated it
profoundly. Sitting there on his apparently home-made vehicle, in the
midst of the unearthly silence of the sullen and barren wilderness,
attired in his shaggy goat-skin cap and coat, he resembled an up-to-date
Robinson Crusoe dandling an infant Friday.
The disposal of the child at Salon would be simple. After having it fed
and tended at an hotel, he would make his deposition to the police, who
would take it to the Enfants Trouves, the department of State which
provides fathers and mothers and happy homes for foundlings at a cost to
the country of twenty-five francs a month per foundling. It is true that
the parents so provided think more of the twenty-five francs than they
do of the foundling. But that was the affair of the State, not of
Aristide Pujol. In the meanwhile he examined the brat curiously. It was
dressed in a coarse calico jumper, very unclean. The striped blanket was
full of holes and smelled abominably. Some sort of toilet appeared
essential. He got down and from his valise took what seemed necessary to
the purpose. The jumper and blanket he threw far on the pebbly waste.
The baby, stark naked for a few moments, crowed and laughed and
stretched like a young animal, revealing itself to be a sturdy boy about
nine months old. When he seemed fit to be clad Aristide tied him up in
the lower part of a suit of pyjamas, cutting little holes in the sides
for his tiny arms; and, further, with a view to cheating his hunger,
provided him with a shoe-horn. The defenceless little head he managed to
squeeze into the split mouth of a woollen sock. Aristide regarded him in
triumph. The boy chuckled gleefully. Then Aristide folded him warm in
his travelling-rug and entered into an animated conversation.
Now it happened that, at the most interesting point of the talk, the
baby clutched Aristide's finger in his little brown hand. The tiny
fingers clung strong.
A queer thrill ran through the impressionable man. The tiny fingers
seemed to close round his heart.... It was a bonny, good-natured,
gurgling scrap--and the pure eyes looked truthfully into his soul.
"Poor little wretch!" said Aristide, who, peasant's son that he was,
knew what he was talking about. "Poor little wretch! If you go into the
Enfants Trouves you'll have a devil of a time of it."
The tiny clasp tightened. As if the babe understood, the chuckle died
from his face.
"You'll be cuffed and kicked and half starved, while your adopted mother
pockets her twenty-five francs a month, and you'll belong to nobody, and
wonder why the deuce you're alive, and wish you were dead; and, if you
remember to-day, you'll curse me for not having had the decency to run
over you."
The clasp relaxed, puckers appeared at the corners of the dribbling
mouth, and a myriad tiny horizontal lines of care marked the sock-capped
brow.
"Poor little devil!" said Aristide. "My heart bleeds for you, especially
now that you're dressed in my sock and pyjama, and are sucking the only
shoe-horn I ever possessed."
A welcome sound caused Aristide to leap into the middle of the road. He
looked ahead, and there, in a cloud of dust, a thing like a torpedo came
swooping down. He held up both his arms, the signal of a motorist in
distress. The torpedo approached with slackened speed, and stopped. It
was an evil-looking, drab, high-powered racer, and two bears with
goggles sat in the midst thereof. The bear at the wheel raised his cap
and asked courteously:--
"What can we do for you, monsieur?"
At that moment the baby broke into heart-rending cries. Aristide took
off his goat-skin cap and, remaining uncovered, looked at the bear, then
at the baby, then at the bear again.
"Monsieur," said he, "I suppose it's useless to ask you whether you have
any milk and a feeding-bottle?"
"_Mais dites donc!_" shouted the bear, furiously, his hand on the brake.
"Stop an automobile like this on such a pretext----?"
Aristide held up a protesting hand, and fixed the bear with the
irresistible roguery of his eyes.
"Pardon, monsieur, I am also out of petrol. Forgive a father's feelings.
The baby wants milk and I want petrol, and I don't know whose need is
the more imperative. But if you could sell me enough petrol to carry me
to Salon I should be most grateful."
The request for petrol is not to be refused. To supply it, if possible,
is the written law of motordom. The second bear slid from his seat and
extracted a tin from the recesses of the torpedo, and stood by while
Aristide filled his tank, a process that necessitated laying the baby on
the ground. He smiled.
"You seem amused," said Aristide.
"_Parbleu!_" said the motorist. "You have at the back of your auto a
placard telling people to cure their corns, and in front you carry a
baby."
"That," replied Aristide, "is easily understood. I am the agent of the
Maison Hieropath of Marseilles, and the baby, whom I, its father, am
carrying from a dead mother to an invalid aunt, I am using as an
advertisement. As he luckily has no corns, I can exhibit his feet as a
proof of the efficacy of the corn-cure."
The bear laughed and joined his companion, and the torpedo thundered
away. Aristide replaced the baby, and with a complicated arrangement of
string fastened it securely to the seat. The baby, having ceased crying,
clutched his beard as he bent over, and "goo'd" pleasantly. The tug was
at his heart-strings. How could he give so fascinating, so valiant a
mite over to the Enfants Trouves? Besides, it belonged to him. Had he
not in jest claimed paternity? It had given him a new importance. He
could say "_mon fils_," just as he could say (with equal veracity) "_mon
automobile_." A generous thrill ran through him. He burst into a loud
laugh, clapped his hands, and danced before the delighted babe.
"_Mon petit Jean_," said he, with humorous tenderness, "for I suppose
your name is Jean; I will rend myself in pieces before I let the
Administration board you out among the wolves. You shall not go to the
Enfants Trouves. I myself will adopt you, _mon petit Jean_."
As Aristide had no fixed abode whatever, the address on his
visiting-card, "213 bis, Rue Saint-Honore, Paris," being that of an old
greengrocer woman of his acquaintance, with whom he lodged when he
visited the metropolis, there was a certain amount of rashness in the
undertaking. But when was Aristide otherwise than rash? Had prudence
been his guiding principle through life he would not have been selling
corn-cure for the Maison Hieropath, and consequently would not have
discovered the child at all.
In great delight at this satisfactory settlement of little Jean's
destiny, he started the ramshackle engine and drove triumphantly on his
way. Jean, fatigued by the emotions of the last half-hour, slumbered
peacefully.
"The little angel!" said Aristide.
The sun was shining when they arrived at Salon, the gayest, the most
coquettish, the most laughing little town in Provence. It is a place all
trees and open spaces, and fountains and cafes, and sauntering people.
The only thing grim about it is the solitary machicolated tower in the
main street, the last vestige of ancient ramparts; and even that, close
cuddled on each side by prosperous houses with shops beneath, looks
like an old, old, wrinkled grandmother smiling amid her daintier
grandchildren. Everyone seemed to be in the open air. Those who kept
shops stood at the doorways. The prospect augured well for the Maison
Hieropath.
Aristide stopped before an hotel, disentangled Jean, to the mild
interest of the passers-by, and, carrying him in, delivered him into the
arms of the landlady.
"Madame," he said, "this is my son. I am taking him from his mother, who
is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid. So he is alone on my hands. He is
very hungry, and I beseech you to feed him at once."
The motherly woman received the babe instinctively and cast aside the
travelling-rug in which he was enveloped. Then she nearly dropped him.
"_Mon Dieu! Qu'est-ce que c'est que ca?_"
She stared in stupefaction at the stocking-cap and at the long flannel
pyjama legs that depended from the body of the infant, around whose
neck the waist was tightly drawn. Never since the world began had babe
masqueraded in such attire. Aristide smiled his most engaging smile.
"My son's luggage has unfortunately been lost. His portmanteau, _pauvre
petit_, was so small. A poor widower, I did what I could. I am but a
mere man, madame."
"Evidently," said the woman, with some asperity.
Aristide took a louis from his purse. "If you will purchase him some
necessary articles of costume while I fulfil my duties towards the
Maison Hieropath of Marseilles, which I represent, you will be doing me
a kindness."
The landlady took the louis in a bewildered fashion. Allowing for the
baby's portmanteau to have gone astray, what, she asked, had become
of the clothes he must have been wearing? Aristide entered upon a
picturesque and realistic explanation. The landlady was stout, she was
stupid, she could not grasp the fantastic.
"_Mon Dieu!_" she said. "To think that there are Christians who dress
their children like this!" She sighed exhaustively, and, holding the
grotesque infant close to her breast, disappeared indignantly to
administer the very greatly needed motherment.
[Illustration: HE DEMONSTRATED THE PROPER APPLICATION OF THE CURE]
Aristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a well-earned _dejeuner_
went forth with the car into the Place des Arbres and prepared to ply
his trade. First he unfurled the Hieropath banner, which floated
proudly in the breeze. Then on a folding table he displayed his
collection of ointment-boxes (together with pills and a toothache-killer
which he sold on his own account) and a wax model of a human foot on
which were grafted putty corns in every stage of callosity. As soon as
half-a-dozen idlers collected he commenced his harangue. When their
numbers increased he performed prodigies of chiropody on the putty
corns, and demonstrated the proper application of the cure. He talked
incessantly all the while. He has told me, in the grand manner, that
this phase of his career was distasteful to him. But I scarcely believe
it. If ever a man loved to talk, it was Aristide Pujol; and what
profession, save that of an advocate, offers more occasion for wheedling
loquacity than that of a public vendor of quack medicaments? As a matter
of fact, he revelled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to
the first lady who confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench came
forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity for badinage which set
the good-humoured crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric
power. He had not the soul of a mountebank, for Aristide's soul had its
high and generous dwelling-place; but he had the puckish swiftness and
mischief of which the successful mountebank is made. And he was a
success because he treated it as an art, thinking nothing during its
practice of the material gain, laughing whole-heartedly, like his great
predecessor Tabarin of imperishable memory, and satisfying to the full
his instinct for the dramatic. On the other hand, ever since he started
life in the brass-buttoned shell-jacket of a _chasseur_ in a Marseilles
cafe, and dreamed dreams of the fairytale lives of the clients who
came in accompanied by beautifully dressed ladies, he had social
ambitions--and the social status of the mountebank is, to say the least
of it, ambiguous. Ah me! What would man be without the unattainable?
Aristide pocketed his takings, struck his flag, dismantled his table,
and visited the shops of Salon in the interests of the Maison Hieropath.
The day's work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious
offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented him with a transmogrified
Jean, cleansed and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of bourgeois
babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned his feet, and a rakish cap
decorated with white satin ribbons crowned his head. He also wore an
embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned
and dribbled self-consciously, and showed his two little teeth to the
proudest father in the world. The landlady invited the happy parent into
her little dark parlour beyond the office, and there exhibited a parcel
containing garments and implements whose use was a mystery to Aristide.
She also demanded the greater part of another louis. Aristide began to
learn that fatherhood is expensive. But what did it matter?
After all, here was a babe equipped to face the exigencies of a
censorious world; in looks and apparel a credit to any father. As the
afternoon was fine, and as it seemed a pity to waste satin and
rabbit-fur on the murky interior of the hotel, Aristide borrowed a
perambulator from the landlady, and, joyous as a schoolboy, wheeled the
splendid infant through the sunny avenues of Salon.
That evening a bed was made up for the child in Aristide's room, which,
until its master retired for the night, was haunted by the landlady, the
chambermaids and all the kitchen wenches in the hotel. Aristide had to
turn them out and lock his door.
"This is excellent," said he, apostrophizing the thoroughly fed, washed,
and now sleeping child. "This is superb. As in every hotel there are
women, and as every woman thinks she can be a much better mother than I,
so in every hotel we visit we shall find a staff of trained and
enthusiastic nurses. Jean, you will live like a little _coq en pate_."
The night passed amid various excursions on the part of Aristide and
alarms on the part of Jean. Sometimes the child lay so still that
Aristide arose to see whether he was alive. Sometimes he gave such
proofs of vitality that Aristide, in terror lest he should awaken the
whole hotel, walked him about the room chanting lullabies. This was in
accordance with Jean's views on luxury. He "goo'd" with joy. When
Aristide put him back to bed he howled. Aristide snatched him up and
he "goo'd" again. At last Aristide fed him desperately, dandled him
eventually to sleep, and returned to an excited pillow. It is a fearsome
thing for a man to be left alone in the dead of night with a young baby.
"I'll get used to it," said Aristide.
The next morning he purchased a basket, which he lashed ingeniously on
the left-hand seat of the car, and a cushion, which he fitted into the
basket. The berth prepared, he deposited the sumptuously-apparelled Jean
therein and drove away, amid the perplexed benisons of the landlady and
her satellites.
Thus began the oddest Odyssey on which ever mortals embarked. The man
with the automobile, the corn-cure, and the baby grew to be legendary in
the villages of Provence. When the days were fine, Jean in his basket
assisted at the dramatic performance in the market-place. Becoming a
magnet for the women, and being of a good-humoured and rollicking
nature, he helped on the sale of the cure prodigiously. He earned his
keep, as Aristide declared in exultation. Soon Aristide formed a
collection of his tricks and doings wherewith he would entertain the
chance acquaintances of his vagabondage. To a permanent companion he
would have grown insufferable. He invented him a career from the day of
his birth, chronicled the coming of the first tooth, wept over the
demise of the fictitious mother, and, in his imaginative way, convinced
himself of his fatherhood. And every day the child crept deeper into the
man's sunny heart.
[Illustration: IT IS A FEARSOME THING FOR A MAN TO BE LEFT ALONE IN THE
DEAD OF NIGHT WITH A YOUNG BABY]
Together they had many wanderings and many adventures. The wheezy, crazy
mechanism of the car went to bits in unexpected places. They tobogganed
down hills without a brake at the imminent peril of their lives. They
suffered the indignity of being towed by wine-wagons. They spent hours
by the wayside while Aristide took her to pieces and, sometimes with the
help of a passing motorist, put her together again. Sometimes, too, an
inn boasted no landlady, only a dishevelled and over-driven chambermaid,
who refused to wash Jean. Aristide washed and powdered Jean himself, the
landlord lounging by, pipe in mouth, administering suggestions. Once
Jean grew ill, and Aristide in terror summoned the doctor, who told him
that he had filled the child up with milk to bursting-point. Yet, in
spite of heterogeneous nursing and exposure to sun and rain and piercing
mistral, Jean throve exceedingly, and, to Aristide's delight, began to
cut another tooth. The vain man began to regard himself as an expert in
denticulture.
At the end of a fairly-wide circuit, Aristide, with empty store-boxes
and pleasantly-full pockets, arrived at the little town of
Aix-en-Provence. He had arrived there not without difficulty. On the
outskirts the car, which had been coaxed reluctantly along for many
weary kilometres, had groaned, rattled, whirred, given a couple of
convulsive leaps, and stood stock-still. This was one of her pretty
ways. He was used to them, and hitherto he had been able to wheedle
her into resumed motion. But this time, with all his cunning and
perspiration, he could not induce another throb in the tired engines.
A friendly motorist towed them to the Hotel de Paris in the Cours
Mirabeau. Having arranged for his room and given Jean in charge of the
landlady, he procured some helping hands, and pushed the car to the
nearest garage. There he gave orders for the car to be put into running
condition for the following morning, and returned to the hotel.
He found Jean in the vestibule, sprawling sultanesquely on the
landlady's lap, the centre of an admiring circle which consisted of two
little girls in pigtails, an ancient peasant-woman, and two English
ladies of obvious but graceful spinsterhood.
"Here is the father," said the landlady.
He had already explained Jean to the startled woman--landladies were
always startled at Jean's unconventional advent. "Madame," he had said,
according to rigid formula, "this is my son. I am taking him from his
mother, who is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid, so he is alone on my
hands. I beseech you to let some kind woman attend to his necessities."
There was no need for further explanation. Aristide, thus introduced,
bowed politely, removed his Crusoe cap, and smiled luminously at the
assembled women. They resumed their antiphonal chorus of worship. The
brown, merry, friendly brat had something of Aristide's personal charm.
He had a bubble and a "goo" for everyone. Aristide looked on in great
delight. Jean was a son to be proud of.
"_Ah! qu'il est fort--fort comme un Turc._"
"_Regardez ses dents._"
"The darling thing!"
"_Il est_--oh, dear!--_il est ravissante!_"--with a disastrous plunge
into gender.
"_Tiens! il rit. C'est moi qui le fais rire._"
"To think," said the younger Englishwoman to her sister, "of this wee
mite travelling about in an open motor!"
"He's having the time of his life. He enjoys it as much as I do," said
Aristide, in his excellent English.
The lady started. She was a well-bred, good-humoured woman in the early
thirties, stout, with reddish hair, and irregular though comely
features. Her sister was thin, faded, sandy, and kind-looking.
"I thought you were French," she said, apologetically.
"So I am," replied Aristide. "Provencal of Provence, Meridional of the
Midi, Marseillais of Marseilles."
"But you talk English perfectly."
"I've lived in your beautiful country," said Aristide.
"You have the bonniest boy," said the elder lady. "How old is he?"
"Nine months, three weeks and a day," said Aristide, promptly.
The younger lady bent over the miraculous infant.
"Can I take him? _Est-ce que je puis_--oh, dear!" She turned a whimsical
face to Aristide.
He translated. The landlady surrendered the babe. The lady danced him
with the spinster's charming awkwardness, yet with instinctive feminine
security, about the hall, while the little girls in pigtails, daughters
of the house, followed like adoratory angels in an altar-piece, and the
old peasant-woman looked benignly on, a myriad-wrinkled St. Elizabeth.
Aristide had seen Jean dandled by dozens of women during their brief
comradeship; he had thought little of it, as it was the natural thing
for women to do; but when this sweet English lady mothered Jean it
seemed to matter a great deal. She lifted Jean and himself to a higher
plane. Her touch was a consecration.
It was the hour of the day when infants of nine months should be washed
and put to bed. The landlady, announcing the fact, held out her arms.
Jean clung to his English nurse, who played the fascinating game of
pretending to eat his hand. The landlady had not that accomplishment.
She was dull and practical.
"Come and be washed," she said.
"Oh, do let me come, too," cried the English lady.
"_Bien volontiers, mademoiselle_," said the other. "_C'est par ici._"
The English lady held Jean out for the paternal good-night. Aristide
kissed the child in her arms. The action brought about, for the moment,
a curious and sweet intimacy.
"My sister is passionately fond of children," said the elder lady, in
smiling apology.
"And you?"
"I, too. But Anne--my sister--will not let me have a chance when she is
by."
After dinner Aristide went up, as usual, to his room to see that Jean
was alive, painless, and asleep. Finding him awake, he sat by his side
and, with the earnestness of a nursery-maid, patted him off to slumber.
Then he crept out on tiptoe and went downstairs. Outside the hotel he
came upon the two sisters sitting on a bench and drinking coffee. The
night was fine, the terraces of the neighbouring cafes were filled with
people, and all the life of Aix not at the cafes promenaded up and down
the wide and pleasant avenue. The ladies smiled. How was the boy? He
gave the latest news. Permission to join them at their coffee was
graciously given. A waiter brought a chair and he sat down. Conversation
drifted from the baby to general topics. The ladies told the simple
story of their tour. They had been to Nice and Marseilles, and they were
going on the next day to Avignon. They also told their name--Honeywood.
He gathered that the elder was Janet, the younger Anne. They lived at
Chislehurst when they were in England, and often came up to London to
attend the Queen's Hall concerts and the dramatic performances at His
Majesty's Theatre. As guileless, though as self-reliant, gentlewomen
as sequestered England could produce. Aristide, impressionable and
responsive, fell at once into the key of their talk. He has told me that
their society produced on him the effect of the cool hands of saints
against his cheek.
At last the conversation inevitably returned to Jean. The landlady had
related the tragic history of the dead mother and the invalid aunt. They
deplored the orphaned state of the precious babe. For he was precious,
they declared. Miss Anne had taken him to her heart.
"If only you had seen him in his bath, Janet!"
She turned to Aristide. "I'm afraid," she said, very softly, hesitating
a little--"I'm afraid this must be a sad journey for you."
He made a wry mouth. The sympathy was so sincere, so womanly. That which
was generous in him revolted against acceptance.
"Mademoiselle," said he, "I can play a farce with landladies--it happens
to be convenient--in fact, necessary. But with you--no. You are
different. Jean is not my child, and who his parents are I've not the
remotest idea."
"Not your child?" They looked at him incredulously.
"I will tell you--in confidence," said he.
Jean's history was related in all its picturesque details; the horrors
of the life of an _enfant trouve_ luridly depicted. The sisters listened
with tears in their foolish eyes. Behind the tears Anne's grew bright.
When he had finished she stretched out her hand impulsively.
"Oh, I call it splendid of you!"
He took the hand and, in his graceful French fashion, touched it with
his lips. She flushed, having expected, in her English way, that he
would grasp it.
"Your commendation, mademoiselle, is sweet to hear," said he.
"I hope he will grow up to be a true comfort to you, M. Pujol," said
Miss Janet.
"I can understand a woman doing what you've done, but scarcely a man,"
said Miss Anne.
"But, dear mademoiselle," cried Aristide, with a large gesture, "cannot
a man have his heart touched, his--his--_ses entrailles, enfin_--stirred
by baby fingers? Why should love of the helpless and the innocent be
denied him?"
"Why, indeed?" said Miss Janet.
Miss Anne said, humbly: "I only meant that your devotion to Jean was all
the more beautiful, M. Pujol."
Soon after this they parted, the night air having grown chill. Both
ladies shook hands with him warmly.
Anne's hand lingered the fraction of a second longer in his than
Janet's. She had seen Jean in his bath.
Aristide wandered down the gay avenue into the open road and looked at
the stars, reading in their splendour a brilliant destiny for Jean. He
felt, in his sensitive way, that the two sweet-souled Englishwomen had
deepened and sanctified his love for Jean. When he returned to the hotel
he kissed his incongruous room-mate with the gentleness of a woman.
In the morning he went round to the garage. The foreman mechanician
advanced to meet him.
"Well?"
"There is nothing to be done, monsieur."
"What do you mean by 'nothing to be done'?" asked Aristide.
The other shrugged his sturdy shoulders.
"She is worn out. She needs new carburation, new cylinders, new
water-circulation, new lubrication, new valves, new brakes, new
ignition, new gears, new bolts, new nuts, new everything. In short, she
is not repairable."
Aristide listened in incredulous amazement. His automobile, his
wonderful, beautiful, clashing, dashing automobile unrepairable! It was
impossible. But a quarter of an hour's demonstration by the foreman
convinced him. The car was dead. The engine would never whir again. All
the petrol in the world would not stimulate her into life. Never again
would he sit behind that wheel rejoicing in the insolence of speed. The
car, which, in spite of her manifold infirmities, he had fondly imagined
to be immortal, had run her last course. Aristide felt faint.
"And there is nothing to be done?"
"Nothing, monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she is worth."
"At any rate," said Aristide, "send the basket to the Hotel de Paris."
He went out of the garage like a man in a dream. At the door he turned
to take a last look at the Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him,
and all he saw of her was the ironical legend, "Cure your Corns."
At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied chiefly by Jean. One
of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while Miss Anne
administered the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest
country in the world--in that you can live your intimate, domestic life
in public, and nobody heeds.
"I hope you've not come to tell Jean to boot and saddle," said Miss
Anne, a smile on her roughly-hewn, comely face.
"Alas!" said Aristide, cheered by the charming spectacle before him. "I
don't know when we can get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly. I
ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles"--he spoke as if he were a
partner in the Maison Hieropath--"but I don't quite know what to do with
Jean."
"Oh, I'll look after Jean."
"But you said you were leaving for Avignon to-day."
[Illustration: ONE OF THE LITTLE GIRLS IN PIGTAILS WAS HOLDING HIM,
WHILE MISS ANNE ADMINISTERED THE FEEDING-BOTTLE]
She laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. "The Palace of the Popes has
been standing for six centuries, and it will be still standing
to-morrow; whereas Jean----" Here Jean, for some reason known to
himself, grinned wet and wide. "Isn't he the most fascinating thing of
the twentieth century?" she cried, logically inconsequential, like most
of her sex. "You go to Marseilles, M. Pujol."
So Aristide took the train to Marseilles--a half-hour's journey--and in
a quarter of the city resembling a fusion of Jarrow, an unfashionable
part of St. Louis, and a brimstone-manufacturing suburb of Gehenna, he
interviewed the high authorities of the Maison Hieropath. His cajolery
could lead men into diverse lunacies, but it could not induce the
hard-bitten manufacturer of quack remedies to provide a brand-new
automobile for his personal convenience. The old auto had broken down.
The manufacturer shrugged his shoulders. The mystery was that it had
lasted as long as it did. He had expected it to explode the first
day. The idea had originally been that of the junior partner, a
scatter-brained youth whom at times they humoured. Meanwhile, there
being no beplacarded and beflagged automobile, there could be no
advertisement; therefore they had no further use for M. Pujol's
services.
"Good," said Aristide, when he reached the evil thoroughfare. "It was a
degraded occupation, and I am glad I am out of it. Meanwhile, here is
Marseilles before me, and it will be astonishing if I do not find some
fresh road to fortune before the day is out."
Aristide tramped and tramped all day through the streets of Marseilles,
but the road he sought he did not find. He returned to Aix in dire
perplexity. He was used to finding himself suddenly cut off from the
means of livelihood. It was his chronic state of being. His gay
resourcefulness had always carried him through. But then there had been
only himself to think of. Now there was Jean. For the first time for
many years the dragon-fly's wings grew limp. Jean--what could he do with
Jean?
Jean had already gone to sleep when he arrived. All day he had been as
good as gold, so Miss Anne declared. For herself, she had spent the
happiest day of her life.
"I don't wonder at your being devoted to him, M. Pujol," she said. "He
has the most loving ways of any baby I ever met."
"Yes, mademoiselle," replied Aristide, with an unaccustomed huskiness in
his voice, "I am devoted to him. It may seem odd for a man to be wrapped
up in a baby of nine months old--but--it's like that. It's true. _Je
l'adore de tout mon coeur, de tout mon etre_," he cried, in a sudden
gust of passion.
Miss Anne smiled kindly, not dreaming of his perplexity, amused by his
Southern warmth. Miss Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to
dinner, Aristide sitting at the central _table d'hote_, the ladies at a
little table by themselves. After dinner they met again outside the
hotel, and drank coffee and talked the evening away. He was not as
bright a companion as on the night before. His gaiety was forced. He
talked about everything else in the world but Jean. The temptation to
pour his financial troubles into the sympathetic ears of these two dear
women he resisted. They regarded him as on a social equality, as a man
of means engaged in some sort of business at Marseilles; they had
invited him to bring Jean to see them at Chislehurst when he should
happen to be in England again. Pride forbade him to confess himself a
homeless, penniless vagabond. The exquisite charm of their frank
intimacy would be broken. Besides, what could they do?
They retired early. Aristide again sought the message of the stars; but
the sky was clouded over, and soon a fine rain began to fall. A bock at
a cafe brought him neither comfort nor inspiration. He returned to the
hotel, and, eluding a gossip-seeking landlady, went up to his room.
What could be done? Neither the sleeping babe nor himself could offer
any suggestion. One thing was grimly inevitable. He and Jean must part.
To carry him about like an infant prince in an automobile had, after
all, been a simple matter; to drag him through Heaven knew what
hardships in his makeshift existence was impossible. In his childlike,
impulsive fashion he had not thought of the future when he adopted Jean.
Aristide always regarded the fortune of the moment as if it would last
forever. Past deceptions never affected his incurable optimism. Now Jean
and he must part. Aristide felt that the end of the world had come. His
pacing to and fro awoke the child, who demanded, in his own way, the
soothing rocking of his father's arms. There he bubbled and "goo'd" till
Aristide's heart nearly broke.
"What can I do with you, _mon petit Jean_?"
The Enfants Trouves, after all? He thought of it with a shudder.
The child asleep again, he laid it on its bed, and then sat far into the
night thinking barrenly. At last one of his sudden gleams of inspiration
illuminated his mind. It was the only way. He took out his watch. It was
four o'clock. What had to be done must be done swiftly.
In the travelling-basket, which had been sent from the garage, he placed
a pillow, and on to the pillow he transferred with breathless care the
sleeping Jean, and wrapped him up snug and warm in bedclothes. Then he
folded the tiny day-garments that lay on a chair, collected the little
odds and ends belonging to the child, took from his valise the rest of
Jean's little wardrobe, and laid them at the foot of the basket. The
most miserable man in France then counted up his money, divided it into
two parts, and wrote a hasty letter, which, with the bundle of notes, he
enclosed in an envelope.
"My little Jean," said he, laying the envelope on the child's breast.
"Here is a little more than half my fortune. Half is for yourself and
the little more to pay your wretched father's hotel bill. Good-bye, my
little Jean. _Je t'aime bien, tu sais_--and don't reproach me."
* * * * *
About an hour afterwards Miss Anne awoke and listened, and in a moment
or two Miss Janet awoke also.
"Janet, do you hear that?"
"It's a child crying. It's just outside the door."
"It sounds like Jean."
"Nonsense, my dear!"
But Anne switched on the light and went to see for herself; and there,
in the tiny anteroom that separated the bedroom from the corridor, she
found the basket--a new Pharoah's daughter before a new little Moses in
the bulrushes. In bewilderment she brought the ark into the room, and
read the letter addressed to Janet and herself. She burst into tears.
All she said was:--
"Oh, Janet, why couldn't he have told us?"
And then she fell to hugging the child to her bosom.
Meanwhile Aristide Pujol, clad in his goat-skin cap and coat, valise in
hand, was plodding through the rain in search of the elusive phantom,
Fortune; gloriously certain that he had assured Jean's future, yet with
such a heartache as he had never had in his life before.
V