A SEAT BY THE ARENA
Rivière had bought fresh clothes and other necessities at the suburban
shops of Neuilly. He had shaved off his moustache; arranged his hair
differently; put on a new shape of collar. It is curious how the shape
of a collar is associated in most minds with the impression of a man's
features. To change into another shape is to make a very noticeable
difference to one's appearance.
He had also bought travelling necessities. His intention was to wander
for a couple of months. It would help him to clear his brain from the
tangle of financial matters which still obsessed it against his will. He
wanted to sweep out the Hudson Bay scheme, Lars Larssen, Olive, and many
other matters from the living-room of his mind. He wanted a couple of
months in which to settle himself in the new personality; plan out his
future work in detail; set the mental fly-wheel turning, so as to
concentrate his energies undividedly on the work to come.
In the afternoon, old Mme Dromet entered the villa to scrub and clean.
She had a standing arrangement to come two or three afternoons a week.
"Are you going away from Paris?" shouted old Mme Dromet to her employer,
seeing the portmanteau and the other signs of departure. She was
stone-deaf, and in the manner of deaf people always shouted what she had
to say.
Rivière nodded assent, and produced a paper of written instructions.
These he read through with her, so as to make sure that she thoroughly
understood. Then he gave her a generous allowance to cover the next few
months.
Later in the afternoon, he was seated with his modest travelling
equipment in a cab, driving to No. 8, Rue Laffitte. He mounted to the
offices of the financier and, in order to test the efficacy of his
changed appearance, asked to see Mr Clifford Matheson.
For a moment the clerk stared at the visitor. The resemblance to his
employer was certainly very striking. Yet there were differences. Mr
Matheson wore a close-cut moustache, while this man was clean-shaven.
The commanding look, the hard-set mask of the financier were softened
away; there was joy of life, there was freedom of soul in the features
and in the attitude of this visitor.
"I am Mr John Rivière, his half-brother. Will you tell him that I am
here?"
The clerk felt somehow relieved. That of course explained the striking
resemblance. He replied: "Mr Matheson has not been at the office to-day,
sir. I fancy he has left for Monte Carlo. I am not sure, but I believe
that was his intention."
"Has he left no message for me?"
"I will see, sir. Please take a seat."
Presently the clerk returned. "I am sorry, sir, but there doesn't seem
to be any message left for you."
"Tell him I called," said Rivière, and went back to his cab. In it he
was driven to the Gare de Lyon. At the booking-office he asked for a
ticket for Arles. His intention was to travel amongst the old cities of
Provence, and then make his way to the Pyrenees and into Spain. There
was no definite plan of journey; he wanted only some atmosphere which
would help him to clear his mind for the work to come. In the Midi the
early Spring would be breathing new life over the earth.
About midnight the southern express stopped at some big station. The
rhythmic sway and clatter of a moving train had given place to a
comparative stillness that awoke John Rivière from sleep. He murmured
"Dijon," and composed himself to a fresh position for rest. Some hours
later there was again a stoppage, and instinctively he murmured
"Lyon-Perrache." The phases of the journey along the main P.L.M. route
had been burnt into him from the visits with Olive to Monte Carlo.
In the morning the strange land of Provence opened out under mist which
presently cleared away beneath the steady drive of the sun. The low
hills that border the valley of the Rhone cantered past him--quaint,
treeless hills here scarped and sun-scorched, there covered with low
balsam shrubs. Now and again they passed a straggling white village
roofed with big, curved, sun-mellowed tiles. Around the village there
would be a few trees, and on these the early Spring of the Midi had laid
her fingers in tender caress.
The air was keen and yet strangely soft; to Rivière it was wine of life.
He drew it in thirstily; let the wind of the train blow his hair as it
listed; watched greedily the ever-changing landscape. The strange bare
beauty of this land of sunshine and romance brought him a keen thrill of
happiness.
It was as though he had loosed himself from prison chains and had
emerged into a new life of freedom.
In full morning they reached Arles, the old Roman city in the delta of
the Rhone. It clusters, huddles around the stately Roman arena on the
hill in the centre of the town--a place of narrow, tortuous _ruelles_
where every stone cries out a message from the past. In the lanes, going
about the business of the day, were women and girls moulded in the
strange dark beauty of the district--the "belles Arlésiennes" famous in
prose and verse.
Yet chiefly it was the arena that fascinated him. All through the
afternoon he wandered about the great stone tiers, flooded in sunlight,
and reconstructed for himself a picture of the days when gladiators down
below had striven with one another for success--or death. The arena was
the archetype of civilized life.
Now he was a spectator, one of the multitude who look on. It was good to
sit in the flooding sunlight and know that he was no longer a gladiator
in the arena. There was higher work for him to do, away from the
merciless stabbing sword and the cunning of net and trident.
At intervals during the afternoon a few tourists--mostly
Americans--rushed up in high-powered, panting cars to the gateway of the
arena; gave a hurried ten minutes to the interior; and then whirled away
across the white roads of the Rhone delta in a scurry of dust.
Only one visitor seemed to realize, like himself, the glamour of the
past and to steep the mind in it. This was a woman. Her age was perhaps
twenty-five, in her bearing was that subtle, scarcely definable,
sureness of self which marks off womanhood from girlhood. She climbed
from tier to tier of the amphitheatre with firm confident step; stood
gazing down on her dream pictures of the scene in the arena; moved on to
a fresh vantage-point. She wore a short tailored skirt which ignored the
ugly, skin-tight convention of the current fashion. Her cheeks were
fresh with a healthy English colour; her eyes were deep blue, toning
almost to violet; her hair was burnished chestnut under the soft felt
hat curled upwards in front; a faint odour of healthy womanhood formed
as it were an aura around her.
All this John Rivière had noticed subconsciously as she passed close by
him on the ledge where he sat, walking with her firm, confident step.
Though he noted it appreciatively, yet it disturbed him. He did not want
to notice any woman. He had big work to do, and on that he wanted to
concentrate all his faculties. He had had no thought of a woman in his
life when he broke the chains that shackled him to the Clifford Matheson
existence. He purposed to have no call of sex to divert him from the
realization of his big idea.
Presently she had climbed to the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, and
stood out against the sky-line of the sunset-to-be, deep-chested,
straight, clean-limbed, a very perfect figure of a modern Diana.
It is a dangerous place on which to stand, that topmost ledge of the
amphitheatre, with no parapet and a sheer drop to the street below.
Almost against his will, Rivière mounted there.
But there was no occasion for his help, and they two stood there, some
yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the
limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the
marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city of the ghostly past.
Twice she looked towards him as though she must speak out the thoughts
conjured up by this splendid scene. It wanted only some tiny excuse of
convention to bridge over the silence between them, but Rivière on his
side would not seek it, and the woman hesitated to ask him to take up
the thread that lay waiting to his hand.
A cold wind sprang up, and she descended and made her way to her hotel
on the Place du Forum.
At dinner in the deserted dining-room of his hotel, Rivière found
himself seated at the next table to her. There are only two hotels
worthy of the name in Arles, and the coincidence of meeting again was of
the very slightest. Yet somehow he felt subconsciously that the arm of
Fate was bringing their two lives together, and he resented it.
The silence between them remained unbroken.
In the evening he wrapped himself in a cloak against the bitter wind
rushing down the valley of the Rhone and spreading itself as an
invisible fan across the delta, and wandered about the dark alleys of
the town, twisting like rabbit-burrows, lighted only here and there with
a stray lamp socketed to a stone wall. Now he had left the big-thoughted
age of the Romans, and was carried forward to the crafty, treacherous
Middle Ages. In such an alley as this, bravos had lurked with daggers
ready to thrust between the shoulder-blades of their victims. Now he was
in a wider lane through which an army had swept pell-mell to slay and
sack, while from the overhanging windows above desperate men and women
shot wildly in fruitless resistance. Now he was in another of the
lightless rabbit-burrows....
A sudden sharp cry of fear cut out like a whip-lash into the blackness.
A woman's cry. There were sounds of angry struggle as Rivière made
swiftly to the aid of that woman who cried out in fear.
Stumbling round a corner of the twisting alley, he came to where a gleam
from a shuttered window showed a slatted glimpse of a woman struggling
in the arms of a lean, wiry peasant of the Camargue. Rivière seized him
by the collar and shook him off as one shakes a dog from the midst of a
fray. The man loosed his grip of the woman, and snarling like a dog,
writhed himself free of Rivière. Then, whipping out a knife from his
belt, he struck again and again. Rivière tried to ward with his left
arm, but one blow of the knife went past the guard and ripped his cheek
from forehead to jawbone.
At that moment a shutter thrown open shot as it were a search-light into
the blackness of the alley, full on to the man with the knife, and
Rivière, putting his whole strength into the blow, sent a smashing
right-hander straight into the face of his adversary. Thrown back
against the alley-wall, the man rebounded forward, and fell, a huddled,
nerveless mass, on the ground.
From doorways near men came out with lights ... there was a hubbub of
noise ... excited questions eddied around Rivière.
But the latter made no answer. He turned to find the woman who had been
attacked.
"Mr Rivière!"
It was the woman who had stood by him on the topmost ledge of the
amphitheatre, drinking in that glorious fiery sunset over the grey
Camargue. She was flushed, but very straight and erect.
"That brute was attacking me. Oh, if only I had had some weapon!" Then
she noticed the blood dripping from the gash in his forehead, and cried
out: "You're hurt! Take this."
Her handkerchief was pressed into his hand. He answered as he took it:
"It's nothing. Fortunately it missed the eye. And you?"
"I'm not hurt, thanks. Oh, you were splendid! It makes one feel proud to
be an Englishwoman."
"Come to the hotel," he said, and ignoring the excited questioning of
the knot of men, took her arm and led her rapidly to their hotel on the
Place du Forum.
"Let me dress your wound until the doctor can come."
"I don't want a doctor," he replied coldly. A sudden aloofness had come
into his voice.
Her eye sought his with a piqued curiosity. For a moment, forgetting
that here was a man who had rescued her from insult at considerable
bodily risk, she saw him only as a man of curious, almost boorish
brusqueness. Why this sudden cold reserve?
Then, with a reddening of cheek at her momentary lapse from gratitude,
she began to thank him for his timely help.
Rivière cut her short. "There is nothing to thank me for. I didn't even
know it was you. I heard a woman's cry--that was all. You ought not to
go about these dark _ruelles_ alone at night-time."
They were at the door of their hotel by now.
"Can't I dress the wound for you?" she asked. "I've had practice in
first aid, Mr Rivière."
He paused suddenly in the doorway and asked her abruptly: "How do you
know my name?"
"I know more than your name. When your cut has been dressed, I'll
explain in full."
"Thank you, but I can manage quite well myself. Let us meet again in the
_salon_ in, say, half an hour's time."
They parted in the corridor and went to their respective rooms.
When they met again, he had his head bound up with swathes of linen. His
face was white with the loss of blood, and she gave a little cry of
alarm.
"You were badly hurt!"
"No; merely a surface cut. But please tell me what you know about me."
There was a quick change in her to a smiling gaiety. The man was human
again--he had at all events a very human curiosity.
"The name was from the hotel register, naturally," she answered. "But I
know also that you are on your way to Monte Carlo, which certainly can't
come from the register."
Rivière's face became coldly impassive as he waited for her to explain
further.
"You are a scientist," she continued slowly, watching him to note the
effect of her words. "You are to meet a lady for the first time at Monte
Carlo. Yet she knows you by your first name, John. You see that I know a
good deal about you."
She waited for him to question her further, but he remained silent, deep
in thought.
More than a little piqued that he would not question further, she gave
him abruptly the solution of the riddle.
"Two nights ago I travelled here from Paris in the same train with an
Englishwoman and her father. They took breakfast at the table near to
mine in the restaurant car, and I could scarcely help overhearing what
they were saying. They chatted about you. Then I found your name in the
hotel register."
"But why did you look it up?" he challenged abruptly.
She parried the question. "The name caught my eye by accident. Naturally
I was interested by the coincidence."
Rivière turned the conversation to the impersonal subject of Arles and
its Roman remains, and soon after they said good-night.
"Shall I see you at breakfast?"
"I hope so," he answered.
As she moved out of the room, a splendidly graceful figure radiating
health and energy and life full-tide, Rivière could not help following
her with his eyes. His innermost being thrilled despite himself to the
magic of her splendid womanhood.
It plucked at the strings of the primitive man within him.
In his room that evening he took up the blood-drenched handkerchief. In
the corner was the name "Elaine Verney." The name conveyed nothing to
him. He threw the handkerchief away, and shut her from his thoughts. He
wanted no woman in this new life of his.
With the morning came a resolution to avoid her altogether. He rose very
early and took the first train out of Arles.
It took him to Nîmes.