When they swung round the great bend of the Rhone, and Vienne came in
sight, Tommy uttered a cry of exultation.
“Oh Clementina, let us stay here for a week!”
When they stood an hour afterwards on the great suspension bridge that
connects Vienne with the little town of Sainte-Colombe, and drank in the
afternoon beauty of the place, Tommy amended his proposition.
“Oh Clementina,” said he, “let us stay here for ever!”
Clementina sighed, and watched the broad blue river sweeping in its
majestic curve between the wooded mountains from whose foliage peeped a
myriad human habitations, the ancient Château-Fort de la Bâtie standing
a brave and mutilated sentinel on its dominating hill, the nestling town
with its Byzantine towers and tiled roofs, the Gothic west front of the
Cathedral framed by the pylons of the bridge, the green boulevarded
embankment and the fort of Sainte-Colombe in its broader and more
smiling valley guarded, it too, by its grim square tower, the laughing
peace of the infinite web of afternoon shadow and afternoon sunlight.
Away up the stream a barge moved slowly down under a sail of burnished
gold. A few moments afterwards coming under the lee of the mountains,
the sail turned into what Tommy, who had pointed it out, called a
dream-coloured brown. From which it may be deduced that Tommy was
growing poetical.
In former times Clementina would have rebuked so nonsensical a fancy.
But now, with a nod, she acquiesced. Nay more, she openly agreed.
“We who live in a sunless room in the midst of paint-pots, know nothing
of the beauty of the world.”
“That’s true,” said Tommy.
“We hope, when we’re tired, that there is such a place as the Land of
Dreams, but we imagine it’s somewhere east of the sun, and west of the
moon. We don’t realise that all we’ve got to do to get there is to walk
out of our front door.”
“It all depends upon the inward eye, doesn’t it?” said the boy. “Or,
perhaps, indeed, it needs a double inward eye—two personalities, you
know, harmonised in a subtle sort of way, so as to bring it into focus.
You see what I mean? I don’t think I could get the whole dreamy
adorableness of this if I hadn’t you beside me.”
“Do you mean that, Tommy?” she asked, with eyes fixed on the Rhone.
“Of course I do,” he replied, earnestly.
Her lips worked themselves into a smile.
“I never thought my personality could harmonise with any other on God’s
earth.”
“You’ve lived a life of horrible, rank injustice.”
She started, as if hurt. “Ah! don’t say that.”
“To yourself, I mean, dearest Clementina. You’ve never allowed yourself
a good quality. Now you’re beginning to find out your mistake.”
“When it’s pointed out that I can harmonise with your beautiful nature!”
At the flash of the old Clementina, Tommy laughed.
“I’m not going to deny that there’s good in me. Why should I? If there
wasn’t, I shouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have asked me to be your
companion,” he added quickly, fearing lest she might put a wrong
construction on his words. “When a good woman does a man the honour of
admitting him to her intimate companionship, he knows he’s good—and it
makes him feel better.”
Her left elbow rested on the parapet of the bridge, and her chin rested
on the palm of her hand. Without looking at him she stretched out the
other hand and touched him.
“Thank you for saying that, Tommy,” she said in a low voice.
Their mutual relations had modified considerably during the journey. The
change, in the first place, had come instinctively from Tommy. Hitherto,
Clementina had represented little to his ingenuous mind but the
rough-and-ready comrade, the good sort, the stunning portrait-painter.
With many of his men friends he was on practically the same terms. Quite
unconsciously he patronised her ever so little, as the Prince Charmings
of life’s fairy-tale are apt to patronise those who are not quite so
charming or quite so princely as themselves. When he had dined with the
proud and gorgeous he loved to strut before her aureoled in his
reflected splendour; not for a moment remembering that had Clementina
chosen to throw off her social nonconformity she could have sat in high
places at the houses of such a proud and gorgeous hierarchy as he, Tommy
Burgrave, could not hope, for many years, to consort with. Sometimes he
treated her as an old family nurse, who spoiled him, sometimes as a
bearded master; he teased her; chaffed her, laid traps to catch her
sharp sayings; greeted her with “Hullo,” and parted from her with an
airy wave of the hand. But as soon as they set off on their travels the
subtle change took place, for which the fact of his being her guest
could only, in small degree, account. Being in charge of all
arrangements, and thus asserting his masculinity, he saw Clementina in a
new light. For all her unloveliness she was a woman; for all her lack of
convention she was a lady born and bred. She was as much under his
protection as any dame or damsel of the proud and gorgeous to whom he
might have had the honour to act as escort; and without a moment’s
self-consciousness he began to treat Clementina with the same courteous
solicitude as he would have treated such dame or damsel, or, for the
matter of that, any other woman of his acquaintance. Whereas, a month or
two before he would have tramped by her side for miles without the
thought of her possible fatigue entering his honest head, now her
inability to stroll about the streets of these little provincial towns,
without physical exhaustion, caused him grave anxiety. He administered
to her comfort in a thousand ways. He saw to the proper working of the
shutters in her room, to the smooth opening of the drawers and presses;
put the fear of God into the hearts of chamber-maids and valets through
the medium of a terrific lingua franca of his own invention; supplied
her with flowers; rose early every morning to scour the town for a _New
York Herald_ so that it could be taken up to Clementina’s room with her
coffee, and _petit croissant_. His habit of speech, too, became more
deferential, and his discourse gained in depth and sincerity what it
lost in picturesque vernacular. To sum up the whole of the foregoing in
a phrase, Tommy’s attitude towards Clementina grew to be that of an
extremely nice boy towards an extremely nice maiden aunt.
This change of attitude acted very powerfully on Clementina. As she had
remarked, it was a new sensation to be taken care of: one which she
liked very much indeed. All the sternly repressed feminine in her—all
that she called the silly fool woman—responded to the masculine
strength and delicacy of touch. She, on her side, saw Tommy in a new
light. He had developed from the boy into the man. He was responsible,
practical, imperious in his frank, kindly, Anglo-Saxon way. It was a new
joy for the woman, who, since girlhood, had fought single-handed for her
place in the world, to sit still and do nothing while difficulties
vanished before his bright presence just as the crests of alarming
steeps vanished before the irresistible rush of the car.
Once when a loud report and the grinding of the wheels announced a
puncture, she cried involuntarily.
“I’m so glad!”
Tommy laughed. “Well, of all the feminine reasons for
gladness!”—Clementina basked in her femininity like a lizard in the
sun. “I suppose it’s because you can sit in the shade and watch Johnson
and me toiling and broiling like niggers on the road.”
She blushed beneath her swarthy skin. That was just it. She loved to see
him throw off his coat and grapple like a young Hercules with the tyre.
For Johnson’s much more efficient exertions she cared not a scrap.
Her heart was full of new delights. It was a new delight to feel
essentially what she in her irony used to term a lady; to be addressed
with deference and tenderness, to have her desires executed just that
instant before specific formulation which gives charm and surprise.
Every day she discovered a new and unsuspected quality in Tommy, and
every evening she dwelt upon the sweetness, freshness, and strength of
his nature. The lavender fragrance, the nice maiden-aunt-ity of her
relations with Tommy, I am afraid she missed.
It gave her an odd little thrill of pleasure when Tommy propounded his
theory of the perfect focal adjustment of the good in their natures.
When he implicitly gave her rank as angel she was deeply moved. So she
stretched out her hand and touched him and said “Thank you.”
“You said nothing about my proposal to stay here for ever,” he remarked,
after a while.
“I’m quite ready,” she replied absently. “Why shouldn’t we?”
Tommy pointed out a white château that flashed through the greenery of
the hill behind the cathedral.
“That’s the place we’ll take. We’ll fill it with books—chiefly sermons,
and flowers—chiefly poppies, and we’ll smoke hashish instead of
tobacco, and we’ll sleep and paint dream-pictures all the rest of our
lives.”
“I suppose you can’t conceive life—even a dream-life—without pictures
to paint in it?”
“Not exactly,” said he. “Can you?”
“I shouldn’t be painting pictures in my dream-life.”
“What would you be doing?”
But Clementina did not reply. She looked at the brave old sentinel fort
glowing red in the splendour of the westering sun. Tommy continued—“I’m
sure you would be painting. How do you think a musician could face an
existence without music? or a golfer without golf?” and he broke into
his fresh laugh. “I wonder what dream-golf would be like? It would be a
sort of mixed arrangement, I guess, with stars for balls and clouds for
bunkers and meads of asphodels for putting greens.” He suddenly lifted
his hands, palm facing palm, and looked through them at the framed
picture. “Clementina dear, if I don’t get that old Tour de la Bâtie with
the sunset on it, I’ll die. It will take eternity to get it right, and
that’s why we must stay here for ever.”
“We’ll stay as long as you like,” said Clementina, “and you can paint to
your heart’s content.”
“You’re the dearest thing in the world,” said Tommy.
Dinner time drew near. They left the bridge reluctantly, and mounted the
great broad flight of forty steps that led to the west door of the
Cathedral. A few of the narrow side streets brought them into the Place
Miremont, where their hotel was situated. In the lazy late afternoon
warmth it looked the laziest and most peaceful spot inhabited by man.
The square, classic Town Library, hermetically closed, its inner
mysteries hidden behind drawn blinds, stood in its midst like a
mausoleum of dead and peaceful thoughts. Nothing living troubled it save
a mongrel dog asleep on the steps. No customer ruffled the tranquillity
of the shops around the _Place_. A red-trousered, blue-coated little
soldier—so little that he looked like a toy soldier—and an old man in
a blouse, who walked very slowly in the direction of the café, were the
only humans on foot. Even the hotel omnibus, rattling suddenly into the
square, failed to break the spell of quietude. For it was empty, and its
emptiness gave a pleasurable sense of distance from the fever and the
fret of life.
It is even said that Pontius Pilate found peace in Vienne, lying,
according to popular tradition, under a comparatively modern monolith
termed the Aiguille.
“Are you quite sure this place isn’t too dead-and-alive for you?”
Clementina asked, as they approached the hotel.
He slid his hand under her arm.
“Oh no!” he cried, with a little reassuring squeeze. “It’s heavenly.”
While she was cleansing herself for dinner, Clementina looked in the
glass. Her hair, as usual, straggled untidily over her temples. She wore
it bunched up anyhow in a knot behind, and the resentful hair-pins
invariably failed in their office. This evening she removed the faithful
few, the saving remnant that for the world’s good remains in all
communities, even of hair-pins, and her hair thick and black fell about
her shoulders. She combed it, brushed it, brought it up to the top of
her head and twisting it into a neat coil held it there with her hand,
and for a moment or two studied the effect somewhat dreamily. Then, all
of a sudden, a change of mood swept over her. She let the hair down
again, almost savagely wound it into its accustomed clump into which she
thrust hair-pins at random, and turned away from the mirror, her mouth
drawn into its old grim lines.
Tommy found her rather uncommunicative at dinner which was served to
them at a separate side table. At the table d’hôte in the middle of the
room, eight or nine men, habitués and commercial travellers fed in
stolid silence. She ate little. Tommy; noticing it, openly reproached
himself for having caused her fatigue. The day in the open air—and open
air pumped into the lungs at the rate of thirty or forty miles an
hour—was of itself tiring. He ought not to have dragged her about the
town. Besides, he added with an appearance of great wisdom, a surfeit of
beauty gave one a soul-ache. They had feasted on nothing but beauty
since they had left Chalon-sur-Saône that morning. He, too, had a touch
of soul-ache; but luckily it did not interfere with his carnal appetite.
It ought not to interfere with Clementina’s. Here was the whitest and
tenderest morsel of chicken that ever was and the crispest bit of
delectable salad. He helped her from the dish which she had refused at
the hands of the waiter, and she ate meekly. But after dinner, she sent
him off to the café by himself, saying that she would read a novel in
the salon and go to bed early.
The loneliness of the salon, instead of resting her, got on her nerves;
which angered her. What business had she, Clementina Wing, with nerves?
Or was Tommy right? Perhaps it was soul-ache from which she was
suffering. Certainly, one strove to pack away into oneself anything of
beauty, making it a part of one’s spiritual being. One could be a
glutton and suffer from the consequences. The soul-ache, if such it
were, had nothing of origin in the emotions that had prompted her touch
on Tommy’s arm, or the coiling of her hair on the top of her head.
Nothing at all. Besides, it was a very silly novel, a modern French
version of Daphnis and Chloe, in which Daphnis figured as a despicable
young neuropath whom Tommy would have kicked on sight, and Chloe, a sly
hussy whom a sensible mother would have spanked. She threw it into a
corner and went to her room to brace her mind with Tristram Shandy.
She had not been long there, however, when there came a knocking at her
door. On her invitation to enter, the door opened and Tommy stood
breathless on the threshold. His eyes were bright and he was quivering
with excitement.
“Do come out. Do come out and see something. I hit upon it unawares, and
it knocked me silly. I’ve run all the way back to fetch you.”
“What is it?”
“Something too exquisite for words.”
“What about the soul-ache?”
“Oh! Let us have an orgy while we’re about it,” he cried recklessly.
“It’s worth it. Do come. I want you to feel the thing with me.”
The appeal was irresistible. It was spirit summoning spirit. Without
thinking, but dimly conscious of a quick throbbing of the heart,
Clementina put on her hat and went with Tommy out of the hotel. The full
moon blazed from a cloudless sky, flooding the little silent square. She
paused on the pavement.
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” she said.
“Oh—that’s only the silly old moon,” cried Tommy. “I’ve got something
much better for you than that.”
“What is it?” she asked again.
“You wait,” said he.
He took her across the square, through two or three turns of narrow
cobble-paved streets, whirled her swiftly round a corner and said;
“Look!”
Clementina looked, and walked straight into the living heart of the
majesty that once was Rome. There, in the midst of an open space, the
modern houses around it obscured, softened, de-characterised by the
magic-working moon, stood in its proud and perfect beauty the Temple of
Augustus and Livia. Twenty centuries, with all their meaning, vanished
in a second. It was the heart of Rome. There was the great Temple,
perfect, imperishable, with its fluted Corinthian columns, its
entablature, its pediment, its noble cornice throwing endless mysteries
of shadow. No ruin, from which imagination flogged by scholarship might
dimly picture forth what once had been; but the Temple itself,
untouched, haughty, defying Time, the companion for two thousand years
of the moon that now bathed it lovingly, as a friend of two thousand
years’ standing must do, in its softest splendour, and sharing with the
moon its godlike scorn of the hectic and transitory life of man.
Clementina drew a sharp breath of wonder. Moisture clouded her eyes. She
could not speak for the suddenness of the shock of beauty. Tommy gently
took her arm, and they stood for a long time in silence, close together.
In their artists’ sensitiveness they were very near together, too, in
spirit. She glanced at his face in the moonlight, alive with the joy of
the thing, and her heart gave a sudden leap. All the beauty of the day
translated itself into something even more radiant that flooded her
soul, causing the rows of fluted columns to swim before her eyes until
she shut them with a little sigh of content.
At last they moved and walked slowly round the building.
“I just couldn’t help fetching you,” said Tommy.
“Oh, I’m glad you did. Oh so glad. Why didn’t we know of this before we
came.”
“Because we are two thrice-blessedly ignorant cockneys, dear. I hate to
know what I’m going to see. It’s much better to be like stout Cortez and
his men in the poem and discover things, isn’t it? By Jove, I shall
never forget running into this.”
“Nor I,” said Clementina.
“The moment the car turned the bend to-day I knew something was going to
happen here.”
More had happened than Tommy dreamed of in his young philosophy. Nor did
Clementina enlighten him. She slid his arm from under hers and took it,
and leaned ever so little on it, for the first time for many, many years
a happy woman.
When they left the Temple she pleaded for an extension of their walk.
She was no longer tired. She could go on for ever beneath such a moon.
“A night made for lovers,” said Tommy, “and we aren’t the only
ones—look!”
And indeed there were couples sauntering by, head to head, talking of
the things the moon had heard so many million times before.
“I suppose they take us also for lovers,” said Clementina foolishly.
“I don’t care if they do,” said Tommy. “Let us pretend.”
“Yes,” said Clementina. “Let us pretend.”
They wandered thus lover-like through the town, and came on the quay
where they sat on the coping of the parapet, and watched the moonlit
Rhone and the brave old Château-Fort on the hill.
“Are you glad you came with me?” she asked.
“It has been a sort of enchanted journey,” he replied, seriously. “And
to-night—well to-night is just to-night. There are no words for it.
I’ve never thanked you—there are things too deep for thanks. In return
I would give you everything I’ve got—in myself, you know—if you wanted
it. In fact,” he added, with a boyish laugh, “I’ve given it to you
already whether you want it or not.”
“I do want it, Tommy,” she said, with a catch in her voice. “You don’t
know how much I want it.”
“Then you have a devoted, devoted, devoted slave for the rest of your
life.”
“I do believe you are fond of me.”
“Fond of you!” he cried. “Why, of course I am. There’s not another woman
like you in the world.” He took her hand and kissed it. “Bless you,” he
said. Then he rose. “We’ve sat out here long enough. Your hands are
quite cold and you’ve only that silly blouse on. You’ll catch a chill.”
“I’m quite warm,” said Clementina mendaciously; but she obeyed him with
surprising meekness.
If any one had had a sufficiently fantastic imagination and sufficient
audacity to prophesy to Clementina before she started from London the
effect upon her temperament of a Roman Temple and moonshine, she would
have said things in her direct way uncomplimentary to his intelligence.
She would have forgotten her own epigram to the effect that woman always
has her sex hanging round the neck of her spirit. But her epigram had
proved its truth. She was feeling a peculiar graciousness in the focal
adjustment above considered, was letting her spirit soar with its
brother to planes of pure beauty, when lo! suddenly, spirit was hurled
from the empyrean into the abyss by the thing clinging round its neck,
which took its place on the said planes with a pretty gurgle of
exultation.
That is what had happened.
And is it not all too natural? There are plants which will keep within
them a pallid life in a coal-cellar—but put in the sun and the air and
the rain will break magically into riotous leaf and bud and flower.
Love, foolish, absurd, lunatic, reprehensible—what you will—had come
into the sun and the air and the rain, and it had broken magically into
blossom. Of course, she had no business to bring it into the air; she
ought to have kept it in the coal-cellar; she ought not to have let the
door be opened by the wheedlings of a captivating youth. In plain
language, a woman of six-and-thirty ought never to have fallen in love
with a boy of twenty-three. Of course not. A vehement passionate nature
is the easiest thing in the world to keep under control. A respectable
piece of British tape ought to be strong enough leash for any tiger of
the jungle.
That Clementina, ill-favoured and dour, should have given herself up, in
the solitude of her room, to her intoxication is, no doubt, a matter for
censure. It was mad and bad and sad, but it was sweet. It was human. The
rare ones from whom no secrets of a woman’s pure heart are hid might say
that it was divine. But the many who pity let them not grudge her hour
of joy to a woman of barren life.
But it was only an hour. The grey dawn crept into the sleepless room,
and the glamour of the moonlight had gone. And there was a desperate
struggle in the woman’s soul. The boy’s words rang in her ears. He was
fond of her, devoted to her, would give up his life to her. He spoke
sincerely. Why should she not take the words at a little above their
face-value? No strong-natured woman of five-and-thirty, with
Clementina’s fame and wealth and full great sympathy need fear rebuff
from a generous lad who professes himself to be her devoted, devoted,
devoted slave. All she has to do is to put up the banns. Whether
ultimate bliss will be achieved is another matter. But to marry him out
of hand is as easy as lying. It did not need Clementina’s acute
intelligence for her to be fully aware of this. And another temptation
crept over her pillow to her ear, peculiarly insidious. The boy would be
free to pursue his beloved art without sordid cares. There would be no
struggle and starvation and fringed hems to his trousers. A woman who
really loves a man would sooner her heart were frayed than his
trouser-hems.
She rose and threw wide the shutters. The little Place Miremont looked
ghostly in the white light, and the classic Bibliothèque, with its
round-headed windows, more than ever a calm mausoleum of human wisdom.
It is strange how coldly suggestive of death is the birth of day.
Clementina crept back to bed and, tired out, fell asleep. The waiter
bringing in the breakfast tray awakened her. On the _New York Herald_
which Tommy had gone to the railway station to procure, lay a dewy
cluster of red and yellow roses; on a plate a pile of letters, the top
one addressed in Etta Concannon’s great girlish scrawl.
Why in the world should a bunch of parrot-tulips have flared before her
eyes? They did. They had marked the beginning of it. The red and yellow
roses marked the end.
“_Attendez un moment_,” she said to the waiter, while she tore open the
envelope and glanced through Etta’s unimportant letter. “Bring me a
telegraph form.”
He produced one from his pocket. If you ask a waiter in a good French
provincial hotel for anything—a copy of Buckle’s History of
Civilisation or a boot-jack—he will produce it from his pocket. He also
handed her a pencil.
This she bit musingly for a few seconds. Then she scribbled hastily on
the telegraph form:
“_Join me at once. Book straight through to Lyons. Wire train. Will meet
you at station. Promise you_”—Her lips twisted into a wry smile as the
word she sought entered her head—“_heavenly time. My guest of course.
Clementina. Hôtel du Nord, Vienne._”
“By the way, _garçon_,” she said, handing him the telegram, “why is this
called the Hôtel du Nord?”
“_Parceque, Madame, c’est ici, à Vienne, que commence le Midi_,” replied
the waiter.
He bowed himself out. A courtier of Versailles at the levée of the
Pompadour could not have made his speech and exit with better grace.
Later in the day Clementina received the reply from Etta.
“_You darling, starting to-morrow. Arrive Lyons seven o’clock morning
Thursday._”
Tommy, fired by the picture made by the bend of the Rhone and the
Château-Fort de la Bâtie, spent most of the day on the quay, with the
paraphernalia of his trade, easel and canvas and box of colours and
brushes, painting delightedly, while Clementina, beneath an
uncompromising white umbrella with a green lining, bought on her
travels, sat near by reading many tales out of one uncomprehended novel.
Just before dinner she informed him of the almost immediate arrival of
Etta Concannon.
“Oh, I say!” he exclaimed in an injured voice. “That spoils everything.”
“I don’t think so,” said Clementina.