After leaving Clementina, Tommy went for a long brisk walk in order to
clear his mind, and on his homeward way along the Embankment, branched
off to the middle of old Chelsea Bridge in order to admire the moonlight
view; he also took off his hat in order to get cool. The treacherous May
wind cooled him effectually and sent him to bed for three days with a
chill.
Clementina sat by his rueful bedside and rated him soundly. The idea of
one just recovering from pneumonia setting his blood boiling hot and
then cooling himself on a bridge at midnight in the bitter north-east
wind! He was about as sane as his uncle. They were a pretty and
well-matched pair. Both ought to be placed under restraint. A dark house
and a whip would have been their portion in the good old times.
“I’ve got ’em both now,” said Tommy, grinning. “This confounded bedroom
is my dark house and your tongue is the whip.”
“I hope it hurts like the devil,” said Clementina.
Tommy wrote from his sick bed a dignified and manly letter to his uncle,
and, like Brutus, paused for a reply. None came. Quixtus read it, and
his warped vision saw ingratitude and hypocrisy in every line. He had
already spoken to Griffiths about the office-stool in the Star Insurance
Company. Tommy’s emphatic refusal to sit on it placed him in an awkward
position with regard to Griffiths. Openings in a large insurance office
are not as common as those for hop-pickers in August. Griffiths, a
sour-tempered man at times, would be annoyed. Quixtus, encouraged by
Vandermeer, regarded himself as an ill-used uncle, and not only missed
all the thrill of his deed of wickedness, but accepted Tommy’s decision
as a rebuff to his purely benevolent intentions. He therefore added the
unfortunate Tommy to the list of those whom he had tried and found
wanting. He had a grievance against Tommy. Such is the topsyturvydom of
man after a little thread has snapped in his brain.
Now, it so happened that, on the selfsame day that Tommy crawled again
into the open air, Clementina, standing before her easel and painfully
painting drapery from the lay figure, suddenly felt the whole studio
gyrate in a whirling maelstrom into whose vortex of unconsciousness she
was swiftly sucked. She fell in a heap on the floor, and remained there
until she came to with a splitting headache and a sensation of carrying
masses of bruised pulp at various corners of her body instead of limbs.
Her maid, Eliza, finding her lying white and ill on the couch to which
she had dragged herself, administered water—there was no such thing as
smelling-salts in Clementina’s house—and, on her own responsibility,
summoned the nearest doctor. The result of his examination was a
diagnosis of overwork. Clementina jeered. Only idlers suffered from
overwork. Besides, she was as strong as a horse. The doctor reminded her
that she was a woman, with a woman’s delicately adjusted nervous system.
She also had her sex’s lack of restraint. A man, finding that he was
losing sleep, appetite, control of temper and artistic grip, would
abandon work and plunge utterly unashamed into hoggish idleness. A woman
always feels that by fighting against weakness she is upholding the
honour of her sex, and struggles on insanely till she drops.
“I’m glad you realise I’m a woman,” said Clementina.
“Why?”
“Because you’re the first man who has done so for many years.”
The doctor, a youngish man, very earnest, of the modern neuropathic
school, missed the note of irony. This was the first time he had seen
Clementina.
“You’re one of the most highly strung women I’ve ever come across,” said
he, gravely. “I want you to appreciate the fact and not to strain the
tension to breaking-point.”
“You wrap it up very nicely,” said Clementina, “but, to put it brutally,
your honest opinion is that I’m just a silly, unreasonable, excitable,
sex-ridden fool of a female like a million others. Isn’t that so?”
The young doctor bore the scrutiny of those glittering, ironical points
of eyes with commendable professional stolidity.
“It is,” said he, and in saying it he had the young practitioner’s
horrible conviction that he had lost an influential new patient. But
Clementina stretched out her hand. He took it very gladly.
“I like you,” she said, “because you’re not afraid to talk sense. Now
I’ll do whatever you tell me.”
“Go away for a complete change—anywhere will do—and don’t think of
work for a month at the very least.”
“All right,” said Clementina.
When Tommy, looking very much the worse for his relapse, came in the
next day to report himself in robust health once more, Clementina
acquainted him with her own bodily infirmities. It was absurd, she
declared, that she should break down, but absurdity was the guiding
principle of this comic planet. Holiday was ordained. She had spent a
sleepless night thinking how she should make it. Dawn had brought
solution of the problem. Why not make it in fantastic fashion,
harmonising with the absurd scheme of things?
“What are you going to do?” asked Tommy. “Spend a frolicsome month in
Whitechapel, or put on male attire and go for a soldier?”
“I shall hire an automobile and motor about France.”
“It’s sporting enough,” said Tommy, judicially, “but I should hardly
call it fantastic.”
“Wait till you’ve heard the rest,” said Clementina. “I had originally
intended to take Etta Concannon with me; but since you’ve come here
looking like three-ha’porth of misery, I’ve decided to take you.”
“Me?” cried Tommy. “My dear Clementina, that’s absurd.”
“I thought you would agree with me,” said Clementina, “but I’m going to
do it. Wouldn’t you like to come?”
“I should think so!” he exclaimed, boyishly. “It would be gorgeous.
But——”
“But what?”
“How can I afford to go motoring abroad?”
“You wouldn’t have to afford it. You would be my guest.”
“It’s delightful of you, Clementina, to think of it—but it’s
impossible.”
Whereupon an argument arose such as has often arisen between man and
woman.
“I’m old enough to be your grandmother, or at least you think so, which
comes to the same thing,” said Clementina.
Tommy’s young pride would not allow him to accept largesse from feminine
hands, however elderly and unromantic.
“If I had a country house and hosts of servants and several motor-cars
and asked you to stay, you’d come without hesitation.”
“That would be different. Don’t you see for yourself?”
Clementina chose not to see for herself. Here was a dolorous baby of a
boy disinherited by a lunatic uncle, emaciated by illness and unable to
work, refusing a helping hand just because it was a woman’s. It was
preposterous. Clementina grew angry. Tommy held firm.
“It’s merely selfish of you. Don’t you see I want a companion?”
Tommy pointed out the companionable qualities of Etta Concannon. But she
would not hear of Etta. The sight of Tommy’s wan face had decided her,
and she was a woman who was accustomed to carry out her decisions. She
was somewhat dictatorial, somewhat hectoring. She had taken it into her
head to play fairy godmother to Tommy Burgrave, and she resented his
repudiation of her godmotherdom. Besides, there were purely selfish
reasons for choosing Tommy rather than Etta, which she acknowledged with
inward candour. Tommy was a man who would fetch and carry and keep the
chauffeur up to the mark, and inspire gendarmes and custom-house
officials and maitres-d’hotel with respect, and, although Clementina
feared neither man nor devil, she was aware of the value of a suit of
clothes filled with a male entity as a travelling adjunct to a lone
woman. With Etta the case would be different. Etta would fetch her
motor-veil and carry her gloves with the most adoringly submissive grace
in the world; but all the real fetching and carrying for the two of them
would have to be done by Clementina herself. Therein lay the difference
between Clementina and the type generally known as the emancipated
woman. She had no exaggerated notions of the equality of the sexes,
which in feminine logic generally means the high superiority of women.
Circumstance had emancipated her from dependence upon the other sex, but
on the circumstance and the emancipation she cast not too favourable an
eye. She had a crystal clear idea of the substantial usefulness of men
in this rough and not always ready cosmic scheme. Therefore, for
purposes of utility, she wanted Tommy. In her usual blunt manner she
told him so.
“You run in here at all hours of the day and night, and it’s Clementina
this and Clementina that until I can’t call my soul my own—and now, the
first time I ask you to do me a service you fall back on your silly
little prejudices and vanity and pride, and say you can’t do it.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Tommy, humbly.
“I tell you what it is,” said Clementina, with a curiously vicious
feminine stroke, “you’d come if I was a smart-looking woman with fine
clothes who could be a credit to you—but you won’t face going about
with an animated rag-and-bone shop like me.”
Tommy flushed as pink as only a fair youth can flush; he sprang forward
and seized her wrists and, unwittingly, hurt her in his strong and
indignant grip.
“What you’re saying is abominable and you ought to be ashamed of
yourself. If I thought anything like that I’d be the most infernal cur
that ever trod the earth. I’d like to shake you for daring to say such
things about me.”
He flung away her hands and stalked off to the other end of the studio,
leaving her with tingling wrists and unfindable retort.
“If you really think I can be of service to you,” he said, in a
dignified way, having completed the return journey, “I shall be most
happy to come.”
“I don’t want you to make a martyr of yourself,” she snapped.
Tommy considered within himself for a moment or two, then broke into his
boyish laugh.
“I’m an ungrateful pig, and I’ll follow you all over the world. Dear old
Clementina,” he added, more seriously, putting his hand on her shoulder,
“forgive me.”
Clementina gently removed his hand. She preferred the grip on the wrists
that hurt. But, mollified, she forgave him.
So in a few days they started on their travels.
* * * * *
The thirty-five horse-power car whirled them, a happy pair, through the
heart of summer. Above the blue sky blazed, and beneath the white road
gleamed a shivering streak. The exhilarating wind of their motion filled
their lungs and set their tired pulses throbbing. Now and then, for
miles, the great plane trees on each side of the way formed the
never-ending nave of an infinite cathedral, the roof a miracle of green
tracery. Through quiet, sun-baked villages they passed, at a snail’s
pace, hooting children and dogs from before their path—and because they
proceeded slowly and Tommy was goodly to look upon, the women smiled
from their doorways, or from the running laundry stream where they knelt
and beat the wet clothes, or from the fountain in the cool, flagged
little square jutting out like a tiny transept from the aisle of the
street. Babies stared stolidly. Here and there a bunch of little girls,
their hair tied in demure pigtails, the blue sarrau over their loud
check frocks; would laugh and whisper, and one more daring than the rest
would wave an audacious hand, and when Tommy blew her a kiss from his
fingers there came the little slut’s gracious response, amid mirth and
delight unspeakable. Men would look up from their dusty, bare, uneven
bowling-alley beneath the trees and watch them as they went by. An
automobile, in spite of its frequency, is always an event in a French
village. If it races mercilessly through; there is reasonable
opportunity to curse which always gladdens the heart of man. If it
proceeds slowly and shows deference to the inhabitants, it is an event
rare enough to command their admiration. Instead of shutting their eyes
against a sort of hell-chariot in a whirlwind; they can observe the
gracefully built car and its stranger though human occupants, which is
something deserving a note in the record of an eventless day. If they
stopped and quitted the car so as to glance at leisure at old church or
quaint fountain—and in many an out-of-the-way village in France the
water of the community gushes forth from a beautiful work of art—all
the idlers of the sunny place clustered round the car, while the British
chauffeur stood by the radiator, impeccably vestured and unembarrassed
as a Fate. At noon came the break for déjeuner; preferably in some
little world-forgotten townlet, where, after the hors-d’œuvre, omelette,
cutlet, chicken, and fruit—and where is the sad, plague-stricken hamlet
of France that cannot, in the twinkling of an eye, provide such a meal
for the hungry wayfarer?—they loved to take their coffee beneath the
awning of a café on the shady side of the great, sleepy square, and
absorb the sleepy, sunny, prosperous spirit of the place; the unpainted
bandstand in the centre, the low-lying houses with sleepy little shops
and cafés—Heavens! how many cafés!—around it, the modern, model-built
Hôtel de Ville, the fine avenue of plane trees without which no Grande
Place in France could exist, and, above the roofs of the houses, the
weather-beaten, crumbling Gothic tower of the church surmounted by its
extinguisher-shaped leaden belfry alive with vivid yellows and olives.
And then the road again past the rapidly becoming familiar objects; the
slow ox-carts; the herd of wayside goats in charge of a dirty,
tow-headed child; the squad of canvas-suited soldiers; the great
lumbering waggons drawn by a string of three gaudily and elaborately
yoked horses, the driver fast asleep on the top of his mountainous load;
the mongrel dogs that sought, and happily found not, euthanasia beneath
the wheels of the modern car of Juggernaut; the sober-vested peasant
women bending beneath their burdens with the calm unexpressive faces of
caryatides grown old and withered. Towards the late afternoon was
reached the larger town where they would halt for the night: first came
the eternal, but grateful, outer boulevard cool with foliage, running
between newly built, perky houses and shops and then leading into the
heart of the older city, grey, narrow-streeted, picturesque. As the
automobile clattered through the great gateway of the hotel into the
paved courtyard, out came the decent landlord and smiling landlady,
welcomed their guests, summoned unshaven men in green-baize aprons—who,
at dinner, were to appear in the decorous garb of waiters, and in the
morning, by a subtle modification of costume (dingy white aprons instead
of green-baize) were to do uncomplaining work as housemaids—to take
down the luggage, and showed the travellers to their clean, bare rooms.
After the summary removal of the journey’s dust came the delicious
saunter through the strange old town; the stimulus of the sudden burst
into view of the west front of a cathedral, with its deeply recessed and
sculptured doorways, and its great, flamboyant window struck by the
westering sun; the quick, indrawn breath of delight when, in a narrow,
evil-smelling, cobble-paved street, they came unexpectedly upon some
marvel of an early Renaissance façade, with its refined riot of
ornament, its unerring proportions, its laughing dignity—laughing all
the more and with all the more dignity, as became its mocking,
aristocratic soul, because the ground floor was given up to a dingy
tinsmith and its upper storeys to the same class of easy-going,
slatternly folk who sat at the windows of the other unconsidered houses
in the sallow and homely street; the gay relief of emerging from such
unsavoury and foot-massacring by-ways into the quarter of the town on
which the Syndicat d’Initiative prides itself—the wide, well-kept
thoroughfare or _place_ with its inevitable greenery, its flourishing
cafés thick with decorous folk beneath the awnings, its proud and
prosperous shops, its Municipal Theatre, Bourse, Hôtel de Ville, its
generously spouting fountain, its statue of the great son—poet, artist,
soldier—of the locality; its crowd of well-fed saunterers—fat and
greasy citizens, the supercilious aristocrat and the wolf-eyed anarchist
might perhaps join together in calling them—but still God’s very worthy
creatures; its general expression, not of the joy of life, for a
provincial town is, as a whole, governed by conditions which affect only
a part of a great capital, but of the undeniable usefulness and
pleasurableness of human existence. Then, after dinner, out again to the
cool terrace of a café—in provincial France no one lounges over coffee
and tobacco in an hotel—and lastly to bed, with wind and sun in their
eyes and in their hearts the peace of a beautiful land.
They had planned the first part of their route—Boulogne, Abbeville,
Beauvais, Sens, Tonnerre, Dijon, through the Côté d’Or and down the
valley of the Rhone to Avignon. After that the roads of France were open
to them to go whithersoever they willed. The ground, the experience, the
freedom, all were new to them. To Clementina France had practically been
synonymous with Paris—not Paris of the Grands Boulevards, Montmartre,
and expensive restaurants, but Paris of the Left Bank, of the studios,
of struggle and toil—a place not of gaiety but grimness. To Tommy it
meant Paris, too—Paris of the young artist-tourist, a museum of great
pictures—the Louvre, the Luxembourg, the Pantheon immortalised by Puvis
de Chavannes; also Dieppe, Dinard, and such-like dependencies of
Britain. But of the true France such as they beheld it now they knew
nothing, and they beheld it with the wide-open eyes of children.
After a few days the weariness fell from Clementina’s shoulders; new
life sped through her veins. Her hard lips caught the long-forgotten
trick of a smile. She almost lost the art of acid speech. She grew young
again.
Tommy held the money-bag.
“I’m not going to look like a maiden aunt treating a small boy to buns
at a confectioner’s,” she had declared. “I’m going to be a real lady for
once and see what it’s like.”
So Clementina did nothing in the most ladylike manner, while Tommy
played courier and carried through all arrangements with the impressive
air of importance that only a young Briton in somebody else’s motor-car
can assume. He had forgotten the little sacrifice of his pride, he had
forgotten, or at least he disregarded, with the precious
irresponsibility of three-and-twenty, the fact that his income was
reduced to the negligible quantity of a pound a week; he gave himself up
to the enjoyment of the passing hour, and if ever he did cast a forward
glance at the clouded future, behold! the clouds were rosy with the
reflections of the present sunshine.
He was proud of his newly discovered talent as a courier, and boasted in
his boyish way.
“Aren’t you glad you’ve got me to take care of you?”
“It’s a new sensation for me to be taken care of.”
“But you don’t dislike it?”
He was arranging at the bottom of the car a pile of rugs and wraps as a
footstool for Clementina, at the exact height and angle for her
luxurious comfort.
Clementina sighed. She was beginning to like it very much indeed.