Clementina motored to Lyons by herself; dined in gaunt and lonely
splendour at the Grand Hotel, and met Etta Concannon’s train very early
the next morning. Etta, dewy fresh after her all night train journey,
threw her arms round her neck and kissed her effusively. She was a
heaven-born darling, a priceless angel, and various other hyperbolical
things. Yes, she had had a comfortable journey; no trouble at all; all
sorts of nice men had come to her aid at the various stages. She had
been up since five standing in the corridor and looking at the country
which was fascinating. She had no idea it was so full of interest.
“And did one of the nice men get up at five too, and stand in the
corridor?” asked Clementina.
The girl flushed and laughed. “How did you guess? I couldn’t help it.
How could I? And it was quite safe. He was ever so old.”
“I’m glad I’ve got you in charge now,” said Clementina.
“I’ll be so good, dear,” said the girl.
The luggage secured, they drove off. Etta’s eyes sparkled, as they went
through the ugly, monotonous, clattering streets of Lyons.
“What an adorable town!”
As it was not even lit by the cheap glamour of the sun, for the sky was
overcast and threatening, it looked peculiarly depressing to normal
vision. But youth found it adorable. O thrice blessed blindness of
youth!
“What has happened to Mr. Burgrave?” she asked, after a while, “I
suppose his time was up and he had to go back.”
“Oh, no,” said Clementina coolly. “He’s at Vienne.”
“Oh-h!” said Etta, with a little touch of reproach. “I thought it was
just going to be you and I and us two.”
“We’ll put him in front next to Johnson and have the back of the car all
to ourselves. But I thought you liked Tommy Burgrave.”
“He’s quite harmless,” said Etta carelessly.
“And he thinks of nothing in the world but his painting, so he won’t
bother his head much about you,” said Clementina.
Etta fell at once into the trap. “I’m not going to let him treat me as
if I didn’t exist,” she cried. “I’m afraid you’ve been spoiling him,
darling. Men ought to be shown their place and taught how to behave.”
His behaviour, however, on their first meeting was remarkably correct.
The car, entering Vienne, drew up by the side of the quay where he had
pitched his easel. He rose and ran to greet its occupants with the most
welcoming of smiles, which were not all directed at Clementina. Etta had
her share. It is not in the nature of three-and-twenty to look morosely
on so dainty a daughter of Eve—all the daintier by contrast with the
dowdy elder woman by her side. Tommy had spoken truly when he had
professed his downright honest affection for Clementina; truly also when
he had deprecated the summoning of the interloping damsel. But he had
not counted on the effect of contrast. He had seen Etta in his mind’s
eye as just an ordinary young woman who would disturb that harmonious
adjustment of artistic focus on whose discovery he had prided himself so
greatly. Now he realised her freshness and dewiness and goodness to look
upon. She adorned the car; made quite a different vehicle of it.
Standing by the door he noticed how passers-by turned round and glanced
at her with the frank admiration of their race. Tommy at once felt
himself to be an enviable fellow; he was going to take a great pride in
her; at the lowest, as a mere travelling adjunct, she did him credit.
Clementina watched him shrewdly, and the corners of her mouth curled in
an ironical twist.
“It isn’t my fault, Miss Concannon, that I didn’t come to Lyons to meet
you. Clementina wouldn’t let me. You know what a martinet she is. So I
was here all last evening simply languishing in loneliness.”
“Why wouldn’t you let poor Mr. Burgrave come to Lyons, Clementina?”
laughed Etta.
“If you begin to pester me with questions,” replied Clementina, “I’ll
pack you off to England again.”
“All inquiries to be addressed to the courier,” said Tommy.
“And you’ll answer them?”
“Every one,” said Tommy.
Thus the freemasonry of youth was at once established between them. Etta
smiled sweetly on him as the car drove off to the hotel, and Tommy
returned to his easel with the happy impression that everything,
especially the intervention of interloping damsels, was for the best in
this best of all possible worlds.
They met shortly afterwards at déjeuner, the brightest of meals, whereat
Etta talked her girlish nonsense, which Tommy took for peculiarly
sparkling discourse. Clementina, wearing the mask of the indulgent
chaperon, let the babble flow unchecked.
“Do you think Etta will spoil everything?” she asked him, as soon as
they were alone for a moment.
“Oh no,” cried the ingenuous Tommy. “She’s going to be great fun.”
“H’m!” said Clementina, feeling as though she might make the historic
reply of the frog at whom the boys threw stones. But she had
deliberately brought about the lapidation. She winced; but she could not
complain.
It must not be imagined, however, that Tommy transferred his allegiance
in youth’s debonair, thoughtless way to the newer and prettier princess.
On the contrary, in all the little outward shows of devotion he
demonstrated himself more zealously than ever to be Clementina’s vassal.
In the excursions that they made during the next few days keeping Vienne
as a base—to La Tour du Pin, Grenoble, Saint-Marcellin, Mont-Pilat—it
was to Clementina that he turned and pointed out the beauties of the
road, and her unsteady footsteps that he guided over rough and
declivitous paths. To her he also turned for serious conversation. The
flowers and the _New York Herald_ came to her room as unfailingly as the
morning coffee. He manifested the same tender solicitude as to her
possible sufferings from hunger, drought, dust or fatigue. He paid her
regal honour. In this he was aided and abetted by Etta Concannon, who
had her own pretty ways of performing homage. In fact, the care of
Clementina soon became at once a rivalry and a bond between them, and
Clementina, so far from being neglected, found herself the victim of
emulous and sometimes embarrassing ministrations. As she herself phrased
it in a moment of bitter irony, they were making love over her live
body.
They left Vienne, Tommy having made sufficient studies for immortal
studio paintings, and took up their quarters at Valence. There is a
spaciousness about Valence rare in provincial towns of France. You stand
in the middle of wide boulevards, the long vista closed at one end by
the far blue tops of the mountains of the Vivarais, and at the other by
the distant Alps, and you think you are dwelling in some sweet city in
the air. In the clear sunshine it is as bright and as crisp as a cameo.
“I love Vienne, but I adore Valence,” said Etta Concannon. “Here I can
breathe.”
They were sitting on the terrace of a café in the Place de la République
in front of the great monument to Emile Augier. It was the cool of the
evening and a fresh breeze came from the mountains.
“I, too, am glad to get out of Vienne,” said Clementina.
Tommy protested. “That’s treason, Clementina. We had such ripping times
there. Do you remember the evening I fetched you out to see the Temple
of Augustus and Livia?”
Clementina gave one of her non-committal grunts. She did indeed remember
it. But for that night the three of them would not have been sitting
together over coffee at Valence.
“Tommy’s so sentimental,” Etta remarked.
“Since when have you been calling him ‘Tommy’?” asked Clementina.
“We fixed that up this afternoon,” he said, cheerfully. ‘Mr. Burgrave’
suggests an afternoon party where one carts tea and food about—not a
chummy motor tour.”
“We agreed to adopt each other as cousins,” said Etta.
“We were kind of lonely, you know,” laughed Tommy. “We happen to have no
cousins of our own, and, besides, you deserted us to-day, and we felt
like two abandoned babes in the car.”
“I don’t think you were much to be pitied,” said Clementina.
In pursuance of her scheme of self-annihilation she had several times
sent them out on jaunts together, while she herself went for a grim walk
in the dust and heat. This afternoon Etta had returned radiant. She had
had the time of her life, and Tommy was the dearest thing that ever
happened. Etta was addicted to the hyperbole of her generation. At
dinner Tommy had admitted the general amenity of their excursion to
Valence Crest—and now came the avowal of the establishment of their
cousinly and intimate relations. The scheme was succeeding admirably.
How could it fail? Throw together two bright, impressionable and
innocent young humans of opposite sexes, and of the same social
position, link them by a common tie, let them spend hours in each
other’s company, withdraw the ordinary restrictions that limit the
intercourse of such beings in everyday society, bathe them in sunshine
and drench their souls with beauty, and you have the Garden of Eden over
again, the Serpent being replaced by his chubby and winged successor.
The result is almost inevitable. But you can withdraw with certainty the
qualifying adverb, when one of the potentially high contracting parties
has been suffering from heart-scratch, and has announced her intention
of becoming a hospital nurse.
I am quite aware that in the eyes of the world Clementina’s conduct was
outrageous. Etta was the only child of a wealthy admiral; Tommy, a
penniless painter. Admiral Concannon had confidently entrusted his
daughter to her care and had not the least idea of what was going on.
When the disastrous story should reach his ears, he would foam
righteously at the mouth, and use, with perfect justification, the most
esoteric of quarter-deck language. I do not attempt to defend
Clementina. All the same, you must remember that in Tommy Burgrave she
was giving to Etta as a free gift her most priceless possession. Tommy
in her eyes was the real Prince Charming—at present, as often happens
in fairy tales, under a cloud, but destined in real life, as in the
fairy tales, to come, by a speedy wave of the magic wand, into his
principality. As to the waving of the magic wand, she had her own ideas.
She was quite prepared to weather the admiral’s storm.
“There was never anything so sudden but the fight of two rams,” is
Rosalind’s startling description of the courtship between Oliver and
Celia. These lovers, however, were Elizabethans who did things in a
large, splendid and unhesitating way. The case with Tommy and Etta, who
were moderns, governed by all kinds of subtleties and delicacies, three
centuries’ growth, was not quite so instantaneous. The ordinary modern
youth and maiden, of such clean upbringing, walk along together, hand in
hand in perfect innocence, for a long time, never realising that they
are in love with one another till something happens. The maiden may be
sent into the country by an infuriated mother. Hence revelation with
anguish. The indiscreet jesting of a friend, a tragedy causing both to
come hard against the bed-rock facts of life, may shatter the guileless
shell of their love. I know of two young things who came by the
knowledge through bumping their heads together beneath a table while
searching for a fallen penny. A shock, a jar is all that is needed. But
with Tommy and Etta nothing yet had happened. They walked along together
sweetly imagining themselves to be fancy-free. If the truth were known
it would be found that the main subject of their conversation was
Clementina.
When the time came for them to leave the café, Tommy helped both ladies
to put on their jackets. The human warmth of the crowded terrace
sheltered from the mountain breeze by the awnings had rendered wraps
unnecessary. But outside they discovered the air to be chill. Clementina
first was invested—with the slightest hint of hurry. She turned and saw
Tommy snatch Etta’s jacket from a far too ready waiter’s hand. In his
investiture of Etta there was the slightest hint of lingering. In the
nice adjustment of the collar their fingers touched. The girl raised
laughing eyes which his met tenderly. A knife was thrust through
Clementina’s heart and she closed her thin lips tightly to dissimulate
the pain.
Etta came into her room that night under the vague pretence of playing
maid and helping her to undress. Her aid chiefly consisted in sitting on
the bed and chattering out of a bird-like happiness.
“It’s all just heaven,” she declared. “I wish I could show you how
grateful I am. I’ve had nothing like it all my life. When I get home I
won’t rest till I’ve teased father into getting a car—he’s so
old-fashioned you know, and thinks his fat old horses and the family
omnibus make up the only equipage for a gentleman. But I’ll worry him
into a car, and then we’ll go all over Europe. But it won’t be quite the
same without—without you, Clementina, dear.”
Clementina wriggled into an old flannel dressing jacket and began to
roll a cigarette.
“I thought you were going to be a hospital nurse.”
“So did I,” said the girl, a shadow flitting swiftly over her face. “But
I don’t seem to want to now, I should hate it.”
“What has made you change your mind?” asked Clementina, after the first
puff of smoke.
Etta, on the bed, nursed her knee. Her fair hair fell in a mass about
her shoulders. She looked the picture of innocence—a female child
Samuel out of an illustrated Family Bible.
“The sight of you, darling, at Lyons Station.”
“Little liar!” murmured Clementina.
But she forebore to question the girl further. She had no intention of
supplying the necessary shock above mentioned. The observance of the
gradual absorption of these two young souls one in the other was far too
delicious an agony to be wantonly broken. Besides, it hardened her
nature (so she fondly imagined), dried up the newly found well-head of
passion, reduced the soft full woman back to the stony-hearted;
wooden-faced, bitter-tongued, cynical, portrait-painting automaton, the
enviable, self-mutilated Clementina of a few months ago. When a woman
wants to punish herself she does so conscientiously. The offending Eve
should be thoroughly whipped out of her.
The car of thirty-five million dove-power sped through the highways of
sunny France—through enchanted forest glades, over mountains of the
moon; through cities of wonderland, so, at least, it seemed to two young
souls. For Clementina, alas, the glamour of sky and sunshine and
greenery had departed. For Johnson, happy possessor of a carburation in
lieu of a temperament it had never existed. From Valence they struck
north-west, though St. Etienne, Roanne, Nevers, Bourges. It was at
Bourges that she came upon the two young people unawares.
She had entered, not knowing where they were, for they had gone off
together, the cloistered courtyard of the Hôtel de Jacques Cœur. Now the
cloister forms an arcaded gallery a few feet above the ground, which is
reached by a flight of steps. She heard voices, approached hidden from
them, beheld the pair sitting on the bottom step, in the cool shadow.
“I should never get the whole adorableness of this,” said Tommy, “if I
hadn’t you beside me. You and I seem to be like the two barrels of a
field-glass—adjusted to one focus.”
Clementina, hugging the wall, tip-toed out of the cloister. There was
only one alternative, a whirlwind, a hurricane of a temptation which she
was strong enough to resist: to descend then and there and box his ears
soundly.