_The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne_
Mr. Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., awoke. He awoke to an intense consciousness
of being wide awake. It was dark. He damned his ill-luck, for he knew
that insomnia had marked him for its own for the rest of the night.
‘Phillibert _v._ Phillibert, Cohen & Smith,’ would dance through his
head till morning. He threw himself into an impatient turn and all but
fell out of bed. Indeed, one foot touched the floor. He swung towards
the other side and immediately came into contact with a wooden wall.
He lay on his back for some time, his hands over his eyes, wondering.
Then he laughed to himself. Why, of course, he was in a ship’s bunk.
How silly not to realize it at once. It was the Whitsuntide recess, and
he and his wife were going on a much needed holiday. He turned over
again and composed himself to sleep. But the important will case of
‘Phillibert _v._ Phillibert, Cohen & Smith’ worried him. He should have
made application to the Judge in the Chancery Court before starting on
his journey. For the life of him he couldn’t remember to have done so.
To his client the point was of vast importance.
He racked his brains. On Saturday there had been the consultation at
his Chambers with Miss Phillibert and Griffiths, her solicitor. It was
arranged that he should make the application on Monday.
That was yesterday.
It was the oddest thing in the world. Even if he himself had forgotten
the appointment--a most improbable thing--his clerk would have reminded
him; his clerk, Gregson, a pallid, clock-faced man, as infallible
and implacable as a machine. He shrugged his shoulders. He must have
appeared in court and forgotten it. It was high time for him to take
a rest. He had been working at high pressure for months, and was dead
tired; fagged out.... That old fool of a Phillibert was certainly under
undue influence when he made the will. The letter of Mrs. Cohen.... He
tossed impatiently. He would dismiss the case from his mind. The only
value of a holiday was to clean out your brain and give it a rest. He
made mighty resolve to sleep. The blanket slipped and he found himself
a-cold. He cursed the hardness and discomfort of ships’ bunks as he
groped for it on the floor.
It was a very curious ship. There was no creak of the woodwork, no
throb of the engines, no motion. The silence of death was only broken
by a queer, rhythmical scrunching sound, which seemed like the lap
of idle waves against the vessel’s side. Either the engines had
broken down or the ship was becalmed or befogged.... He snuggled up
in the retrieved blanket, all the bedclothes that the ship afforded,
and resigned himself to circumstances. After all, it was rest that
mattered. Golf was but a means of attaining rest, and Le Touquet....
Le Touquet!
The thought hit him like a hammer. What on earth was he doing on board
ship, at dead of night, on his way to Le Touquet which was a cab-drive
from Boulogne? He swung out of bed and, standing up, realized for the
first time that his legs were bare. His hands plucking at his only
garment proved it to be a flannel shirt open at the neck. Never had the
unadventurous Paradyne gone to bed in a flannel shirt. For night attire
a suit of plate-armour would have been as customary. A bit of the truth
flashed upon him. He was not on board ship at all. But where the devil
was he? A crowing cock tore the stillness and told him that he was on
dry land.
Where the devil was he? In a train? He fumbled round about the
bunk for an electric switch and found nothing to correspond with a
sleeping-car’s accessories. His bare feet trod bare and gritty boards.
A swept-out hand hit--so that his knuckles were grazed--something cold
and hard, which in its turn rattled loud against a similar substance.
He stood still and sweated.
Presently, his eyes accustomed to the darkness, he recognized on the
ground a yard-long slit of pale light by the bunk head. That meant a
doorway at any rate. He fumbled till he found a key in a lock, thrust
the opened door outwards, and stood on the threshold amazed, gazing out
into a strange world in the dimmest light of dawn.
There was a road which the near distance swallowed up into nothingness.
Vague trees loomed like sentinels. Immediately below three wooden steps
at his feet swept a broad stretch of grass bordering the road. Far away
across an infinite vastness of plain shimmered the dull lemon and green
reflection of some radiance. The rhythmical scrunching sound went on.
It was somewhere behind him.
He descended the three steps, recognized that what he had taken for a
ship was but a sort of gipsy caravan, and that the noise was made by a
tethered horse comfortably munching the wayside grass.
The most bewildered of young and brilliant leaders of the Chancery
Bar, clad only in a flannel shirt reaching to his knees, a vesture
of humility for any man counting as religion the decencies of life,
returned to the caravan steps and in the dusk of the growing twilight
made out that which was therein. Pots and pans and brooms and brushes
hanging from roof and walls in a nightmare medley. The bunk was but a
thinly cushioned plank, the blanket some dark horror. He entered and
his feet grew entangled in what, stooping down, he found to be articles
of raiment. He groped and gradually collected a pair of cotton socks,
canvas trousers, curiously unfamiliar; yet, on the other hand, his
familiar golfing shoes and Norfolk jacket. He dressed himself gladly,
for he shivered in the cold of the dawn.
Both phenomena, the cold and the dawn, he realized. Blanket around
him, he sat on the threshold of the absurd structure in which, without
question, he had his immediate being, clasped his head in his hands and
concentrated his mind on the solution of the amazing problem:
‘Where am I? And what the devil am I doing here, wherever I am?’
Loss of memory? No. Absurd! He was Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., aged
forty-two. All his past life lay an open book to him. Winchester;
King’s College, Cambridge; the Bar. From childhood an honourable
history of ambition, work and success. He was certainly not wandering
about like a fool not knowing who he was.
Yet his present circumstances needed elucidation.
Let him trace back things to Friday--or rather start with Friday,
the day of Viola’s wedding. Viola was his daughter, a very young and
modern girl who had made socially, though not financially, an excellent
marriage. As Earls and Judges and Cabinet Ministers and their wives
could not be expected to turn up at Ealing, where he dwelt, the
wedding reception was held at the Hyde Park Hotel. There were two or
three hundred people, a band and champagne and wedding presents and
detectives and photographers and journalists and a young bridegroom
with an Honourable before his name; everything that girlish bride could
desire. A great success.
When Cosmo Paradyne came to say good-bye to his daughter, it occurred
to him that he was but distantly acquainted with her. Still, he
performed his paternal duty.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I wish you weren’t going out to India, it’s so
very far away.’
Whereat she laughed. ‘You never supposed I was going to live in Ealing
all my life.’
He shrugged his shoulders. After all, it mattered very little where one
lived.
He remembered the shrug and the reflection. Everything was perfectly
clear. His wife drove home in the car. He took a cab to his chambers
where some work awaited him, papers to read in connection with that
infernal ‘Phillibert _v_. Phillibert, Cohen & Smith.’ He took the
train to Ealing, dressed, dined alone with Martha. The dinner was
not particularly good. He was the last man in the world to insist on
delicate cookery. He had neither the time nor the thought for pleasures
of the table. But tough mutton was tough mutton; bad for the digestion
and therefore bad for work.
His wife, in her thin-lipped, acid, final voice, replied to his
remonstrance:
‘I think it’s exceedingly good mutton. Roach is the best butcher in the
neighbourhood. If he weren’t, I shouldn’t go to him.’
He did not press the point, having given up argument with Martha this
many a year. He resumed their disconnected talk about the wedding and
mentioned Viola’s scornful repudiation of Ealing.
‘Perhaps it’s a bit suburban,’ he said, with a smile.
‘It’s where I shall end my days,’ replied Martha. ‘And where, if Viola
hadn’t married, she would have ended hers.’
[Illustration]
She looked, with the pride of possession, around the decorous
dining-room, its walls deadly with gloomy oil paintings; two
full-length of her father and mother, ugly and awe-inspiring
personages. For it was her own house, bequeathed to her (together with
other worldly goods) by her father, a prosperous solicitor who had
given Cosmo his first brief; and into it had she entered as a bride;
and in it had she constructed and developed her own virtuous, dutiful
and rigid life.
‘You’re not getting dissatisfied and wanting to change, I hope?’
‘Oh, no, no,’ he replied hastily. ‘It’s good for me to live out of
town.’
‘You get your fresh air and your golf.’
‘I do,’ said he.
He remembered that when the butler came round with a cheese soufflé he
waved it away.
‘I assure you there’s nothing wrong with that,’ said his wife.
He passed his hand over his lined, clean-shaven face and apologized
courteously. During all the twenty years of his married life he had
never quarrelled with Martha. He regarded her as a cosmic condition
of his existence, like breakfast, rain and fog, and, again like these
phenomena, remote from his vital interests. He had no appetite, he
said; was too tired to eat; dog-weary; she must forgive him.
‘Of course I do,’ she replied politely. ‘But, all the same, it isn’t
funny looking after a dead man.’
He was a dry, pragmatic fellow, accustomed to interpret the exact
signification of words.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Nothing more than what I said, Cosmo.’
Sitting on the steps of the caravan, he repeated, as these incidents
passed through his mind:
‘Yes, what the devil did she mean by that?’
He continued his review.
The dull meal over, he lit his after-dinner cigar, his one concession
to the hedonistic, and smoked it as usual, in solitude. Mrs. Paradyne
allowed cigarettes, on necessary occasions, in her drawing-room, but
never cigars. As it tasted bitter, he threw it away half-smoked and
joined his wife, whom he found casting up wedding accounts at her
escritoire. After a short while, he bade her good night, kissed a
half-turned cheek and, according to unvarying custom when at home, went
into his study to work. He was in the middle of a book, _The Relations
of Equity to Common Law_, which, luminously written, would supply a
long-felt want. He sat down and opened out his manuscript.
There his memory failed. What had happened after that? Instinctively he
searched his right-hand pocket for his pipe. He found it; but he found
something else, too, which caused him mighty astonishment. It was a
very short, though somewhat elaborate, silver flageolet.
The dim light of dawn had now overspread the earth so that objects near
and far were visible; but, for the next few moments, all that he saw
was the bright and alluring instrument in his hands.
Now, Cosmo Paradyne was a musician in a dry and scientific way;
furthermore, an authority on the history and use of wind instruments.
He had founded the Ealing Symphonic Society and once a month or so
played oboe or clarinet at their concerts. He had a fair collection in
his study. But this silver flageolet had never been in his possession.
He had never seen one like it.
He stared at it, put it to his lips, and, fingering the stops and keys,
began to play, without premeditated act of volition, an extraordinary
air. But after a few phrases he leaped to his feet in a shiver of
fright, dropping the flageolet on the grass. How had this Puckish
melody come into his head?
Then, returning memory flashed a clear picture.
He had fallen asleep over his _Relations of Equity to Common Law_, to
be awakened late by clear and curious music outside the house. His
study and his bedroom leading off it were on the ground floor. His
study window lay open to the lawn. He stepped out, walked a few paces,
and there at the angle of the building by the curve of the entrance
drive stood the musician. He was an ordinary young man in a soft felt
hat, and he played a flageolet which gleamed silver in the starlight.
Cosmo Paradyne stood bemused and fascinated, for never had he heard
such wonder from a flageolet. It was like the song of birds; the song
of trees, of streams, of woods; the song of laughter, of dainty frolic,
of elfin devilry. Now it broke into trills of a joy so exquisite that
he caught his breath; now into phrases of longing that gripped his
heart. And it was all based on a _motif_ which he had not heard before,
of which he had not dreamed of hearing, simple as the music of the
wind, yet subtle as though it harped upon the rays of a star.
The young man ceased suddenly, advanced, took off his hat and held it
out for alms.
‘I’m glad you don’t mind my playing,’ said he. ‘Many people turn me
away. Last night I had a dog set on me, to my extreme discomfort.’
‘But you’re a musician. An extraordinary musician,’ said Paradyne.
The young man laughed frankly. ‘I rather think I am,’ said he. And he
edged his hat an inch or two nearer.
To bestow upon this amazing minstrel the largess of a shilling were
impossible. He fumbled in his case and dropped a pound note into the
hat.
‘I thank you, sir, for your bounty,’ said the young man, pocketing the
note. He put on his hat with a flourish and prepared to turn.
‘Excuse me,’ said Paradyne, ‘I happen to be an amateur clarinettist,
and I thought I knew as much as any man living of the music written
for wind-instruments; but the thing you were playing just now I can’t
recognize.’
[Illustration: THE YOUNG MAN CEASED SUDDENLY]
‘I’m sure you can’t,’ replied the young man pleasantly. ‘It is my own
composition, and it has never even been set down on paper; much less
published for amateurs--saving your presence--to make a hash of. Again,
sir, a million thanks. Good night.’
[Illustration]
He swept a bow and marched off. Paradyne went into the house, with the
music ringing through his brain.
The next morning to chambers. It was all perfectly clear. Griffiths had
brought his elderly client, Miss Phillibert, to consultation.
Wait a bit. He sat on the caravan steps again. Something rather funny
had happened. Yes. In the middle of it he had started to whistle and
had been brought back to his senses only by the staggered expression on
the faces of solicitor and client. He had been whistling this damned
tune.
He lunched at his club, at a solitary table, not feeling equal to
jaunty companionship. Then home to Ealing where, feeling ill and jaded,
he went to bed. There, in spite of his wife’s protests, did he remain.
Martha did not believe in people staying in bed unless they came out in
spots or betrayed _malaise_ by other unmistakable physical symptoms.
It upset the routine of the house. Still, he was the master. She would
give the necessary orders. For dinner he had a sole which Martha called
fried, but which he, with elementary humour, called dried; whereupon
she went off, taking leave of him with acerb courtesy.
Later, servants came to make his bed and see to the comfort of his
night. He rose, put on his dressing-gown, and felt very much the
better for his rest. He bade the butler set out his golfing things in
readiness for the morrow--Sunday. He went into his study next door.
Being at a loose end, for to-night no work was possible, he bethought
him of Tuesday’s early start for Boulogne. Better get everything in
readiness now, there being no principles in life more imperative than
foresight and method. So, idly, he got together, from the mentally
docketed and locked drawers in which they lay, his bundle of ten-pound
notes, his store of French money left over from last year’s golfing
holiday, his yellow Cook’s tickets procured a few days ago with their
reservations of Pullman and Private Cabin, his letter from the Le
Touquet hotel confirming his order for rooms, a little wad of visiting
cards, a prescription for tonic and another for indigestion pills and
a very dirty card setting forth, in tabulated form, the mathematical
rules for the banker’s draw at Chemin de Fer. Having passed the lot in
review he stuffed them into his special leather holiday wallet, which,
entering his now prepared bedroom, he laid upon the dressing-table,
intending to lock it up in the drawer.
Now, did he, or didn’t he? He couldn’t remember.
At any rate, what was certain was that, when he re-entered his study to
turn out the light preparatory to going to bed, he heard the infernal
young man in the garden playing his fantastically diabolical tune.
Again he went forth--this time in pyjamas and dressing-gown--and again
he stood entranced till the musician ended and came forward smiling,
with outstretched hat.
‘Go on, go on,’ cried Paradyne.
‘Alas, I have but one piece,’ said the young man, ‘and I only play it
once.’
Paradyne flapped his hands against empty night pockets.
‘I’m sorry----’ he began.
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘I must go into the house, and----’
‘I pray you, don’t.’
‘Will you come to-morrow night?’
The young man cocked his head at a humorous angle and smiled, holding
up a protesting hand. ‘I only came to-night because you seemed to
appreciate my music. But to-morrow----? Do you think I’m going to spend
my life in Ealing?’
The very words of his daughter, Viola. He put his hands up to his
temples as though to steady an odd rocking.
He said:
‘Who are you? Tell me. I should very much like to know.’
‘Ah, that’s my secret,’ laughed the young man.
And mockingly he put the flageolet to his lips and played a few bars,
the _motif_ of his melody.
‘Wait, please,’ cried Paradyne. ‘You interest me enormously. I can’t
let you go without----I shan’t be a moment.’
He turned the corner, crossed the lawn, and entered the house through
the French window of the study. When he returned, Treasury note in
hand, the musician had disappeared. He opened the wooden gate of the
circular entrance drive and looked up and down the road in vain search
for the musician.
Sleep was impossible. It was a hot night in early June. Through his
brain rang the tantalizing music. He rose.
‘I’m going crazy,’ said he. ‘I must walk it off.’
Never had he done such a thing in his decorous life as to get out of
bed and take a midnight walk. But now he did it. He clad himself in his
golfing things, laid ready to his hand, and going through his study,
locking the door behind him and putting the key in his pocket, he
marched out. He marched out along the white respectable road bordered
by the grounds of respectable villas, swinging his stick, with a
feeling of schoolboy freedom. And, suddenly, in the distance he heard
the abominable tune.
[Illustration: HE MARCHED ON ALONG THE WHITE, RESPECTABLE ROAD]
And then? And, then, all was blank. Behind that and his present
awakening, blank, nothingness, darkness, what you will.
[Illustration]
He argued it out in lawyer-fashion. There was the young man’s silver
flageolet on the grass. That meant that he must have overtaken him
and by some means got possession of the instrument. Possibly he had
wandered some distance in his company, and had fainted by the way. He
realized that he had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. What
more simple explanation than that, he cracking up altogether, his
friend had stuffed him into this gipsy caravan, while he and the owner
had gone off to the nearest town for medical assistance? So it was
Sunday morning after all, and his walking terror lest he should have
missed his Monday application before the Judge was futile.
‘Splendid,’ said he, ‘splendid!’ He rose and thrust his hands into the
pockets of his Norfolk jacket. In the left-hand pocket he felt the key
of his study window. He laughed aloud and called himself a silly ass.
It was now broad daylight. A wooden gate a few yards ahead of him
opened, and a small girl in a blue smock emerged, holding in her hand a
bottle of milk. She came towards him and piped childishly:
‘_Voici le lait, Monsieur._’
‘What?’
It was a roar of bewilderment at which the child shrank back,
frightened.
[Illustration: “WHY CHARTRES, MONSIEUR, TEN KILOMETRES?”]
‘_C’est le lait que Monsieur a commandé, hier soir._’
‘My God,’ said he.
‘_C’est six sous, Monsieur_,’ said the child, holding out her hand.
He was in France after all. Of that he now had no need to be assured
by the child’s speech and attire. A glance around the infinite plain,
dotted sparsely with red-roofed farm buildings and crossed by dead
straight line of poplars marking roads like the one in front of him
gave him full evidence. But how he had got to France, what he was
doing there with a hawker’s caravan and a horse, he had no notion. And
whereabouts in France was he? Certainly not near Le Touquet.
‘Where does this road lead to?’ he asked, waving a hand.
‘Why Chartres, Monsieur. Ten kilometres. Are you not going to the fair?’
She touched a chord that awakened echoes of dreamland. His
sub-conscious self had already registered a long while ago, it seemed,
the fact of the fair at Chartres. The child still held out her hand
and murmured her claim for six sous. A plunge into his trousers pocket
brought up a handful of French money. He gave her a franc and waved her
away. She ran off somewhat scared by his madness, but exuberant at his
generosity.
‘I give it up,’ said Cosmo Paradyne.
But he didn’t. In the breast-pocket of his golfing jacket he found
the travelling wallet which he had filled that Saturday night at
Ealing. He examined its contents. One first-class ticket for London to
Boulogne--that was obviously the one destined for Martha; his own he
must have used; three ten-pound notes--he had put ten into the wallet;
so he must have changed seventy pounds English money. A wad of French
hundred-franc notes. Cards and prescriptions. The soiled Chemin de Fer
card. Also a new document or two. One, a dirty piece of coarse paper
which he unfolded, was a receipt in French, villainously written and
spelled, for the purchase of the caravan, stock and horse. It was
made out in his name, Monsieur Cosmo Paradyne. It was duly stamped,
signed Galéo Gaspard, and dated the twelfth of June. He scratched a
puzzled head. That was Tuesday in Whitsun week. The dates in his mind
were clear. The Courts rose on the eighth. He had decided to start
for Le Touquet on the fifth. The night when he went forth from his
house, key in pocket, was that of Saturday the second of June. Ten days
therefore had elapsed between his midnight walk and his purchase of
this ridiculous outfit.
Another document, stamped with the stamp of the Republic, was a
hawker’s licence.
He sighed and entered the caravan, hung, roof and sides, with pots and
pans and gaudy scarves and encumbered with battered cases of cheap
cutlery, and perceived at the end a cupboard, which, when opened, he
found to be stored with food and cooking utensils. There was half a
vast circular loaf; eggs, butter, coffee, a good twelve inches of
mighty sausage. On the floor stood a tin ewer filled with water. He
found also an elementary toilet equipment which, certainly, had never
seen Ealing.
For Cosmo Paradyne the history of the next hour or two was surprise
piled on astonishment. A glimpse in a small hanging mirror showed a
bronzed almost youthful face and clear eyes. His hands were brown and
the palms curiously hardened. To make coffee and boil eggs for the
satisfaction of an unprecedented hunger seemed a matter of everyday
habit. He ate the food with extraordinary relish. As he shaved and
washed, there lurked at the back of his mind a dim consciousness of
having gone through the same performances amid the same surroundings
for a long time past. He seemed to know that stuffed away at the bottom
of the cupboard were his golf stockings and knickerbockers and cap. A
prescient glance around showed him on a ledge a coarse, peasant’s straw
hat with a floppy brim which he recognized as his ordinary daily wear.
He put it on and went out into the early morning sunshine and drew
great breaths of the sweet air.
He laughed, exhilarated by a new sensation as though he had undergone
a radical physical change. What was it? It took him some time to
realize that never before had he been conscious of such supreme and
exhilarating health. It was a joy to feel the spring in his mere tread.
He lit his pipe and hands in pockets stared, with proprietary air,
over the illimitable landscape of La Beauce. Then he walked round his
perambulating property. A big-boned brown horse ceased his munching as
he approached and thrust forth a questing muzzle. At the back of the
vehicle he found a bag of provender and a wooden pail of water from
which he administered to the animal’s needs.
He reflected for a moment. There was a horse, there was a thing on
wheels. The logical procedure was to harness the horse and travel on,
all the more because no earthly purpose could be served by remaining
stationary in the wilderness. It was only when he had attached the
animal, in the most business-like way, between the shafts, that he
began to wonder how the deuce he had managed to do it. His life had
been passed remote from horses. Never had he driven or ridden, still
less, harnessed one. It was amazing.
Stooping down he picked up the silver flageolet which he had all but
forgotten. How went the air which he had played that morning and which
had brought back those clear pictures of his garden in Ealing? He could
not remember. Even with the instrument to his lips and his fingers on
the stops he could not recall it. It had gone like elfin music heard in
a dream.
‘It’s all damned queer,’ said he.
For a while past there had been a scant traffic along the endless road;
farmers’ carts, lumbering waggons and here and there a brisk little
ramshackle motor-car. He clambered to the platform above the shafts,
took the reins and the horse moved on at a sober walk. He lit another
pipe and reconstructed his elusive history. And now, having got
his brain into working order, he concentrated it on the facts such
as he knew them. The key in his pocket, the singularly unclean shirt
that he was wearing, proved that he had journeyed straight from Ealing
to his present position near Chartres. He had therefore mysteriously
disappeared from his home. He grasped at the sudden realization of what
this must have meant to Martha.
[Illustration: HE LIT ANOTHER PIPE]
He dropped the reins and sat, feet dangling, horror-stricken, while
the horse plodded stolidly on. For the twenty years of their married
life, during his brief and rare absences from home, she had never been
without full news of his whereabouts. She must have been, must still
be, frantic with anxiety. He must telegraph to her at once. Why not
leave this ridiculous gipsy van on the road and beg a lift from the
first passing car to Chartres? Possibly, if one had passed just then,
he would have obeyed the impulse. But these were days long before the
war, when small busy cars were not yet as ants along the roads of
France.
By the time one rattled by, his exact mind had grappled with
the circumstances. That he should be the hero of a ‘mysterious
disappearance’ was incredible. Martha, a capable woman, would at once
have put the police on his track. A well-known man dressed in golf
clothes and without any luggage couldn’t make his way from London to
Folkestone to Boulogne, without leaving behind him a thousand traces of
his passing. People didn’t disappear in such simple and casual fashion.
The sensitive network of civilization rendered it an impossibility. If
he had been wandering about suffering from loss of memory, some tactful
messenger would have discovered him and brought him home.
Well, he would send his telegram, give the caravan to the first blind
beggar, and start at once for England. How he should manage to account
for his defection in the matter of ‘Phillibert _v._ Phillibert, Cohen
& Smith,’ he did not know. But he surely could get back in time
for the re-opening of the Courts--the Trinity sittings--and leave the
necessary excuses to the wit of his excellent clerk. He had a heavy
couple of months before him. The old sixteen hours a day grind. Loss of
memory or not, he must have had a marvellous holiday to put him in this
pink of physical condition.
‘Poor old Martha _must_ know,’ said he.
He found himself all at once in a low, whitewashed village straggling
on each side of the road. Outside an _estaminet_ decorated with the
double dice box indicating that it was also a _débit de tabac_ hung a
row of newspapers in a tin file. It struck him that he had not seen a
paper for some days. He descended and bought one.
It bore the date of the tenth of September.
[Illustration: THE HORSE, WITHOUT HIS CONSCIOUS GUIDANCE, TOOK THE
BEWILDERED MAN TO CHARTRES]
The horse, without his conscious guidance, took the bewildered man to
Chartres. There he pulled new-found wits together. He took his midday
meal in the _salle à manger_ of a humble inn full of country folk who
had come for the morrow’s fair. His caravan he had left by the wayside
on the entrance avenue of plane-trees, in charge of a shock-headed boy,
one of a family owning a yellow-and-red-striped caravan, apparently in
an analogous line of business with his own. In those far-off blissful
days, a five-franc piece shone vast and silvery before lowly eyes....
He had entered the humble inn instinctively, as one accustomed to such
accommodation, without giving a thought to the pretentious Hôtel du
Grand Monarque on the _great_ place, where the refined of all nations
naturally sought their sustenance.
He sat down at a crowded table between a wizened, blue-bloused peasant
with a cropped white head and a neck like that of a moulting parrot
craning over a dingy white collar around which was tied a half-inch
of black ribbon by way of cravat, and a buxom farm-wife in spotless
head-gear, brilliant silk neckerchief and great gold earrings. They
ate lusciously with great clatter and prestidigitation of knives, and
drank the little grey stony wine, and talked of crops and cattle and
marriages and deaths.
And Paradyne, as brown and dusty and with as little outer pretensions
to gentility as any of them, found himself talking to his neighbours
of these elemental things with a familiarity born of custom. And then
from the lady: ‘Monsieur was a stranger in the _pays_?’ Yes, he was
a _marchand forain_, a hawker. He sold a bit of everything and went
where he thought the market was best. She opined that one must make
_pas mal_--a tidy bit--of money. But for herself she did not like the
adventurous life. Not that she had tried it. She could not conceive
happiness outside the family. _Tiens_, she had a husband--she made a
movement of her head towards a food-absorbing male by her side--and
five children. She lived at Gallardon eighteen kilometres off, and had
no desire to travel. Once had she been to Paris; but _oh, là, là!_
No, truly the family was the only thing. But he must have a family
somewhere?
Like Peter he denied instantly. No, he was alone, taking his food
where he could find it. In her Gaulish fashion she twitted him with
having families scattered along the highroads of France. This delicate
impeachment he again denied, whereupon the lady, with a laughing glance
out of dark eyes, and an ‘_allons donc!_’ thrust an arch elbow into his
ribs. And when her husband claimed her attention, he talked to the old
farmer about weather and wheat and apples and _rillettes_, the sausages
that were served to them, and all the other wonders of La Beauce. And
Cosmo Paradyne knew that for three months he had been leading this life
of open air and earth and primitive interests, and, in some odd way,
had fallen victim to its fascination.
[Illustration: “TIENS, SHE HAD A HUSBAND!”]
On a hurried, worried holiday some years before he had visited Chartres
with his wife, and had made his intellectual man’s pilgrimage to the
cathedral.
Be it insisted on here, by the way, that no haggis was more tightly
stuffed with giblets and oatmeal than was Cosmo Paradyne with
knowledge. From pre-Winchester days onwards he had been the paragon
of examinees. His career had been one of meteoric brilliance. In his
course he had made himself easy master of three foreign languages,
German, Italian and French; his musical ear, his one æsthetic gift, had
caught and assimilated the accents; after a day or two among a foreign
peasantry he could reproduce their intonations, and his marvellous
memory could store the patois words which he picked up.... So was he
master of the historical or archæological side of the arts of painting
and architecture. His mind had ever been receptive of facts, and,
tenaciously holding them, of co-ordinating them into an imperishable
crystallization. With such mental qualities, is it to be wondered at
that, at forty-two, he was one of the leaders of the Chancery Bar?
‘What a judge the little devil will make when he’s sick of making
money!’ said his brethren.
On his previous visit therefore to the Cathedral of Chartres, Cosmo
Paradyne, drawing from the vast stores of his learning, gave his
wife an accurate account of the history of the fabric. He showed her
that portion which dated from the middle of the thirteenth century,
the stained glass of the same period, the Renaissance screen, the
difference between the one twelfth-century spire and the other of the
sixteenth century. The Cathedral was, to him, an agglomeration of
fascinating facts. Martha had listened distractedly and eventually had
replied:
‘Yes. That’s very interesting; but I think it’s rather pretty, all the
same.’
Having nothing to do, he strolled through the rising ground from which
the stupendous edifice commands the plain whose horizon is as vast as
that of mid-ocean. Suddenly the tricksy memory that had been playing
the devil with him of late captured, unsummoned, the air of the silver
flageolet. He hummed it, and somewhat impatiently dismissed it from his
thoughts, as he entered the wonder of heaven-seeking piers and shafts
of vast spaces and of stained colours of glass through which the sun
of the September afternoon streamed ineffably.
He sat on a rush-bottomed chair near the font and drank the glory
in like a man parched by a lifelong thirst. He went out very tired,
hanging his head, feeling half-drunken. He sat on the low parapet of
the parvis and remembered words of long ago flitted through his brain:
‘You see that masonry--restored after the fire----’ and so on, and so
on; and Martha’s acid voice: ‘Rather pretty, all the same.’
He spread out his hands drunkenly and rushed into the cathedral again
and gave himself up to the immensity of its loveliness.
Later he called at the Post Office seeking the answer to a long,
explanatory telegram which he had sent to Martha from the village where
he had learned the date. He must obtain news of her before starting on
his homeward journey.
In the cathedral he had been so happy; drenched in a sensuous
envelopment of beauty. In the crude hall of the Post Office, before
the wire-surrounded pigeon-hole, existence shrivelled into sordidness.
As a piece of identification he handed his hawker’s licence through the
aperture and waited, while search was made, with a grim smile on his
face. Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., was developing a sense of humour. A scrubby
official in a dirty brown holland smock handed him a gummed-up bit of
blue paper.
He read:
‘In view previous telegrams cannot believe loss of memory story.
Conduct disgraceful. Have kept up fiction of nervous breakdown and
foreign holiday for the family’s sake. To avoid scandal am willing
to receive you. Wire date arrival so that I can announce beforehand.
Martha.’
He reeled out of the Post Office. What were the telegrams to which she
alluded?
However, his deduction had been exact. Martha had known where he
was. There had been no mysterious disappearance to make a newspaper
sensation. All that was to the good. Martha had also saved his
face. Doubtless, the excellent Gregson had returned his briefs with
satisfactory explanations. He could go back and take up his work in the
most natural way in the world. He could go back and take up Martha who
was ‘willing to receive’ him.
He noted that the telegram bore the place name Paddington. It was
characteristic of Martha not to trust to the Ealing Post Office, but to
take the train in order to send the message from the London Terminus.
Martha was not sympathetic. Obviously she distrusted him; and, her mind
being on the track of an imaginary paramour, she would add a rasp to a
life that only mutual indifference had kept smooth. Well, he certainly
had suffered some mental disturbance, and, if he had followed anybody
it was not a woman, but must have been the easy young man with the
silver flageolet. But Martha would never believe it, even though he
showed her the instrument and played the bewitching tune.
It was dusk when he reached his caravan by the wayside of the
plane-tree avenue. His neighbours courteously informed him of their
jealous care of his possessions. They had watered and fed the horse,
and had guarded the vehicle as though it had been the Ark of the
Covenant. Paradyne again bestowed largess on the shock-headed boy.
The family sprawled on the grass eating their evening meal. The
sight reminded him of his own healthy hunger. He unlocked his door
and produced his rough store of food, the main part of which was
his sturdy twelve inches of sausage and a bottle of red wine which
he discovered with two others, wrapped up for safety’s sake in his
golfing knickerbockers. He sat on the steps and ate his supper with
an enjoyment that, in his memory, had never attended physical things.
He had despised the men who wasted their time and talk on flavours
of food and wine. He could not tell old port from new, nor had it
mattered to him whether he drank it with walnuts or with mackerel. But
that evening a great truth dawned on him. The salty, pungent, garlicky
sausage and the new coarse wine were predestined for each other in
Heaven’s Buttery. He ate and drank with an almost palpitating joy.
He filled his pipe with cheap French tobacco and the first puff or two
fell into harmony with the wine and the sausage. Its perfume mingled
with that of dust and beasts and the warm September smell that arose in
the gathering night from the near city and the vast, environing plain.
‘My God,’ said he, ‘it’s good to be alive.’
And as he said it, his memory flashed back to the inexplicable words
of Martha on the night of Viola’s wedding: ‘----it isn’t funny looking
after a dead man.’
‘What the devil did she mean by that?’ he had asked himself.
Now came a glimmering of the answer in the form of another question:
was he so sure that then, and, indeed, all his life before, he hadn’t
been a dead man?
The phrase worried him for a while. He had a dim, uneasy feeling that
he had used it, as Viola’s and the young man’s remark about Ealing, in
the forgotten telegrams. Well, well. He shrugged his shoulders. What
did it matter? In a day or two he must inevitably learn their purport.
Sufficient for the night was the beauty thereof. A damned queer thing,
beauty. He mused. He had known it, of course, as an intellectual
conception. But now, it was an emotional matter. It plucked at things
within his inmost being and swept unimagined chords. The Cathedral.
This dreamy fruitful plain, panting for the soon-coming swell of
moonlight.
Yes, he must go back. But things would never be quite the same.
The friendly neighbours in the red-and-yellow-striped caravan busied
themselves with preparations for departure. They must take up early
position in the fair-ground, according to police regulations. They
advised Monsieur to do the same. Monsieur, smoking contentedly, replied
that he had plenty of time before him, and watched them start. They
made polite farewells.
The last to do so was the obvious sister of the shock-headed boy, a
half-gipsy wench in the early twenties, artlessly clad in soiled and
scanty raiment, but superb in the flowing contours of her lithe youth,
and in her coarse loveliness.
‘_A demain, Monsieur._’
‘_A demain et bonsoir, Mademoiselle_,’ said he with a smile and a bow.
She lingered a few instants holding him with eyes half-mocking,
half-alluring. Then, with an ironical toss of her head, she turned
and faded into the dusk. Only when she had gone, did he realize that,
during his meal, his gaze had rested pleasurably and conjecturingly
upon her; and now her startling picture was imprinted on his mind. She
was but a slatternly wild thing, unwashed, unkempt; the only external
note of the picturesque about her being a flaming orange neckerchief;
living on the fringe of civilization, with possibly no morals to speak
of. But, God! She was alive!
For the first time in his cramped existence, he grew vehemently aware
of the wonder of woman as magnificent woman, of her wonder as elemental
complement of man. It had been only the flash of a dark-eyed drab
across his vision. But the flash awakened him, so that he gasped,
to the mighty potentialities of life. God! That girl was alive in
all her sensuous and animal mystery. And he--he smote his brow--he,
too, was alive. Lustily alive.... The thought stole into his brain:
Martha--Martha who had twitted him with being a dead man--had she ever
been anything else but a dead woman? What of the physical mystery of
the flesh, which this girl of naught had suddenly proclaimed, had
he ever dreamed of conjecturing from the cold and acid woman whose
lips conventionally kissed had been as unresponsive as the hem of her
garment? Nothing. As woman, newly revealed, Martha was dead. And she
loved her living death, gloried in it, strove to maintain all who came
near her within the sphere of its blight.
His ears heard the roar, and his eyes beheld the welter of the vast
waters of strange emotions and fierce passions and intolerable joys
that had ever beaten against the arid fortress in which he had been
content to have his bleak and indifferent being.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and leaned dejected against the
jamb of the caravan door. What a mighty and dreadful power was Fate.
No wonder the Greeks made their gods bow down before its supremacy.
The irony of it. Again a Greek conception. The Greeks were right.
How otherwise could he explain the staggering situation in which he
found himself? What but the relentless cruelty of Fate compelled
him, at that moment when the world revealed itself in terms of vital
beauty and infinite meaning, to return as return he must, to the old
withered life of Ealing and the blight of Martha, and the routine
of brain-exhausting, nerve-atrophying, soul-killing, meaningless
drudgery in the Court of Chancery? What single hour’s happiness had he,
intellectual automaton, ever got out of it? What had his brain-cramped
life held that could compare with that morning’s thrill of intense
physical fitness, with that evening’s leap towards the Unknown of
Passion?
‘Oh, damn!’ he said despondently.
According to his duty as husband and man of grave responsibilities, he
ought even now to be on his way to Paris. But he had been too weary of
spirit to make the effort; at any rate too much in love with the day’s
strange freedom. Besides, how could he leave caravan and horse adrift?
The caravan he might have abandoned. Its value was of no account to
a man of his fortune. But the horse was a living thing, a creature of
responsive sentiment, like a dog. It rubbed its muzzle against his arm
as though to manifest fondness. He must make fair and square provision
for the horse. To-night’s friendly encounter had showed him the way.
To-morrow, at the fair, would he sell for a song the whole outfit to
his late kindly neighbours; and then the stern and relentless journey
back to England.
The gradual traffic going fair-wards passed him by. But he did not hear
it, wrapped in his despairing thoughts. The night wore on. The full
moon arose, and, shining through the over-arching vault of foliage,
fantastically diapered the white road.
From his breast pocket, at last, he drew the silver flageolet and
looked at it in wistful perplexity. He put it to his lips, at first
idly and then with a quivering sense of mastery. And lo! he played the
whole of the melody through from beginning to end with its song of
birds and its elfin laughter and its longings and haunting mockery
just as the young man had played it in the starlight of his garden.
And, as he played, his heart was uplifted in a strange exultation,
such as--he now remembered dimly--had inspired him once before when he
had put the flageolet to his lips. He caught at an elusive memory and
gripped it hard, and stared wide-eyed before him with open mouth.
A bit of waste land by the roadside under the starlight. It looked like
a brick-field. They sat on some scattered rubbish. He could just see
the young man’s clear-cut, humorous face. ‘Sir, for my music I’ll take
what you like to give me. But my flageolet no money can buy. On the
other hand, to him who can play my composition through without fault, I
yield it gladly.’
Yes; he had played it through from beginning to end.
The young man bowed:
‘It is yours,’ said he....
‘But what will you do without it?’
[Illustration: THE PLAIN, WHOSE HORIZON IS AS VAST AS THAT OF MID-OCEAN]
‘I have a new tune in my head more suited to the piccolo which I carry
in my pocket, and which, indeed, I prefer as an instrument.’
‘This,’ laughed Paradyne, fingering the silver keys and stops, ‘is good
enough for me.’
‘Perhaps for the present. But you will grow more fastidious. It has
none of the woodland softness. The shepherds of Theocritus, if you
remember, piped not into metal but into reed that sprang from organic
life.’
He pulled out the homeliest little piccolo in the world. Paradyne
stretched out a hand. The young man laughed.
‘Not yet,’ said he. Then suddenly: ‘Where are you going?’
‘For a walk.’
‘So am I. First through France. Then through Italy, then Sicily.’
‘France, Italy, Sicily----’ the faint echo of his murmured response
floated back. ‘Fortunate young man!’
‘Why should you be less fortunate than I? The road is open. Come with
me,’ said the young man, and laid a hand upon his arm.
Then, as always, the rift in the curtain that veiled the past three
months closed suddenly. But the vision, as far as it went, had been
startlingly complete.
He laughed aloud as he gazed on the shimmering pipe, and his laughter
was informed with the thrill of pride. It had come to him not as a
thing chaffered for and sordidly purchased; but as a minstrel’s prize,
such as, in the times of which Theocritus sang, he might have been
awarded by a challenging god.
France. Italy. Sicily. _Theocritus_--‘O Singer of Persephone----’ How
did Wilde’s Villanelle go?
‘Slim Lacon keeps a goat for thee,
For thee the jocund shepherds wait;
O Singer of Persephone!
Dost thou remember Sicily?’
He repeated the final quatrain two or three times, enjoying its
flavour. Then, suddenly, inspired with new strength and purpose, he
jumped to the ground, harnessed the horse to the caravan, and started
down the moonlit avenue to the town of Chartres. But he did not stay
at the fair-ground. He passed through and, casting a humorous glance
at the yellow-and-red-striped caravan in which the vivid girl lay
presumably asleep, blew a kiss to her with his fingers, as to a symbol,
and made his slow progress through the narrow streets of the sleeping
city.
The dawn found him, with the shining eyes of one awakened to Life’s
promise, jogging southward on an irrevocable way, never, in this life,
to retrace his steps.
[Illustration]
_Illustrated Gift Books_