brightened him: but he found dejectedly, on looking back, that all
these falsehoods appeared to have been told either to some woman who
was chaste or to some husband who was suspicious, entirely with the
view of curing these failings and making matters more pleasant for
everybody. A Puysange did not lie with the flat-footed design of
getting something for himself, because such deviations from exactness,
somehow, made you uncomfortable; nor through fear, because a Puysange,
quite candidly, did not understand what people meant when they talked
about fear.
No, one must be logical. Florian found that his sins—to name for once
the quaint term with which so many quaint people would, he knew, label
the majority of his actions,—seemed untiringly to have labored toward
beneficence. Florian was not prepared to assert that this established
any general rule: for some persons, it well might be that the practise
of these technical irregularities produced actual unhappiness: but
Florian was here concerned just with his own case. And it did not,
whatever a benevolent saint advised,—and ought, of course, in his
exalted position to advise,—it did not afford the material for any
rational sort of repentance. And to prevaricate about this deficiency,
or to patch up with Heaven through mutual indulgence some not quite
candid compromise, was not a proceeding in which Florian cared to
have part, or could justify with honorable precedents. Say what you
might, even though you spoke from behind the locked gates of paradise,
Puysange remained Puysange, and wholly selfish and utilitarian lying
made Puysange uncomfortable.
In fine, Florian earnestly wanted to repent, where repentance was
so plainly a matter of common-sense, and seemed his one chance for
an inexcruciate future: but the more he reflected upon such of his
irregularities as he could for the life of him recollect, the less
material they afforded him for repentance. No, one must be logical.
And logic forced him to see that under the present divine régime there
was slender hope for him. So his conscience was in these days in a
most perturbed state: he seemed to be deriving no profit whatever from
a wasted lifetime of pious devotion: and the more widely he and Aluys
had conducted their investigations, the less remunerative did Florian
everywhere find the pursuit of beauty and holiness.
_20._
_Smoke Reveals Fire_
Thus it was not until the coming in of spring that Florian rode away
from the Hôtel de Puysange, riding toward Bellegarde and the business
which must be discharged. Florian went by way of Storisende, the home
of his dead brother, for Florian’s son still lived there, and Florian
now felt by no means certain he would ever see the boy again, now that
Holy Hoprig roosted over the Bellegarde to which Florian returned.
Florian came to Storisende unannounced, as was his usage. Madame
Marguerite de Puysange and Raoul’s children kept her chamber, with a
refusal to see Florian which the steward, to all appearance, had in
transmission considerably censored. Florian thought that this poor
fellow faced somewhat inadequately the problem of the proper demeanor
toward a great peer who had very recently killed your master; and that
too much fidgeting marred his endeavor to combine the politeness
appropriate to a duke with the abhorrence many persons feel to be
demanded by fratricide.
Meanwhile the father wished to know of his son’s whereabouts. Monsieur
the Prince de Lisuarte had left the house not long after breakfast, it
was reported, and might not return until evening. Florian shrugged,
dined alone, and went out upon the south terrace, walking downward,
into gardens now very ill tended. Raoul had let the gardens fall from
their old, well remembered, sleek estate....
So much of Florian’s youth had been passed here that with Florian went
many memories. He had made love to a host of charming girls in this
place, in these gardens which were now tenantless and half ruined: and
none of these girls had he been able to love utterly, because of his
mad notions about Melior. He comprehended now of how much he had been
swindled by this lunacy. His dislike of Melior—of that insufferable
bright-colored imbecile,—rose hot and strong.
So many women had been to him only the vis-à-vis in a pleasurable
coupling, when he might have got from them the complete and high
insanity which other lads got out of loving! He remembered, for
example, another April afternoon in this place, the April before his
first marriage.... Yes, it had happened just yonder.
Florian turned to the right, passing the little tree from the East,
which seemed no bigger now than he remembered it in boyhood; and then
trampled through a thick undergrowth which hid what he remembered
as a trim lawn. Raoul had really let the gardens fall into a quite
abominable state. A person who had taken no better care of Storisende
had not deserved to inherit such a fine property: and Florian
remembered now with some compunction how easily, when he disposed of
their father, he could also have disposed of their father’s foolish
will. But Florian too, as he admitted, had always spoiled Raoul.
Florian came to a boulder some four feet in height, before which stood
a smaller rock that was flat-topped and made a natural seat. Both
were overgrown with patches of gray-green lichen. He looked downward.
Against the boulder, partly hidden by old withered leaves, lay two flat
stones which were each near a foot in length and about an inch thick,
two valueless unextraordinary stones which he remembered.
He lifted these stones. Where they had lain, the ground showed dark
and wet, and was perforated with small holes. The raising of the first
stone disclosed a bloodless yellow centipede, which flustered and
wavered into hiding among the close-matted dead leaves. Under the other
stone, a great many ants were hastily carrying their small white eggs
into those holes in the ground. Some twenty gray winged ants remained
clustering together futilely. There was adhering to the under side of
this second stone a clotted web. Florian saw the evicted spider, large
and clumsy looking but very quick of movement, trundling away from
molestation much as the centipede had fled.
It seemed to him that no life ought to be in this place; not even the
life of insects should survive in this ruined haunt of memories. He set
the two rocks at right angles to the boulder, just as he and a girl,
who no longer existed anywhere, had placed them eighteen years ago.
Moss had grown upon the boulder, so that the rocks did not fit against
it so snugly as they had done once, but they stood upright now a foot
apart. Florian gathered five fallen twigs, broke them, and piled the
fragments in this space. From his pocket he took a letter, from the
Abbess de Chelles, which he crumpled and thrust under the twigs. He
took out flint and steel, and struck a spark, which fell neatly into
the crevice between his left thumb and the thumbnail. The pensive
gravity of his face was altered as he said “Damn!” and sucked at his
thumb. Then he tried again, and soon had there just such a tiny fire as
he and that dark-haired girl had once kindled in this place.
He sat there, feeding the small blaze with twigs and yet more twigs:
and through his thinking flitted thoughts not wholly seized. But this
fire was to him a poem. So went youth, and by and by, life. Brief heat
and bluster and brilliancy, a little noise, then smoke and ashes: then
youth was gone, with all its sparkle and splutter. You were thirty-six:
you still got love-letters from abbesses of the blood royal, but your
heart was a skuttle of cold cinders. And all that which had been, in
these gardens and in so many other places, did not matter to you. It
probably did not matter to anybody, and never had mattered. Yes, like
this tiny blazing here, so went youth, and by and by, life....
“Why, what the devil, my friend—!”
Someone was speaking very close at hand. Florian looked up, strangely
haggard, looked into the face of his son Gaston. The young Prince de
Lisuarte was not alone, for a little behind him stood a dark-haired
staring peasant girl. She was rather pretty, in a fresh and wholesome
way that acquitted her of rational intelligence; and her bodice,
Florian noted, had been torn open at the neck. Well, after all, Gaston
was sixteen.
“My father!” the boy said now. But Florian observed with approval
that the embarrassment was momentary. “This is in truth a delightful
surprise, monsieur,” Gaston continued. “We saw the smoke, and could
not imagine what caused it here in the park—”
“So that,” said Florian, “you very naturally investigated—”
He was reflecting that, after all, he was not answerable, and owed no
explanation, to his son for making a small fire in the spring woods.
That was lucky, for the boy would not understand the poetry of it.
Florian saw too with approval that the young woman had disappeared. For
her to have remained would have been wholly tactless, since it would
have committed him to some expression of elevated disapproval. As it
was, he needed only to rise and shake hands with this tall son of his,
and then sit down again.
Gaston was rather picturesquely ugly: he indeed most inconsiderately
aspersed his grandmother’s memory by this injudicious resemblance to
the late King of England whom rumor had credited with the begetting of
Gaston’s mother. Carola, though, had been quite pretty. Florian thought
for a while of his first wife with less dislike than he had entertained
toward her for years. Still, he perceived, he did not actually like
this tall boy who waited before him, all in black. That would be for
Raoul....
“My son,” said Florian, slowly, “I am on my way homeward to dispose of
an awkward business in which there is an appreciable likelihood of my
getting my death. So the whim took me to see you, it may be, for the
last time.”
“But, monsieur, if there is danger you should remember that I count as
a man now that I am seventeen next month. I have already two duels to
my credit, I must tell you, in which I killed nobody, to be sure, but
gave very handsome wounds. So may I not aid in this adventure?”
“Would you fight then in my defence, Gaston?”
“Assuredly, monsieur.”
“But why the devil should you? Let us be logical, Gaston! You loved
that handsome hulking uncle of yours, not me, as people are customarily
supposed to love their fathers: and I have recently killed him. Your
damned aunt, I know, has been telling you that I ill-treated and
murdered your mother also. To cap all, you have a great deal to gain by
my death, for you are my heir. And I am too modest to believe that my
engaging qualities have ever ensnared you into any personal affection.”
The boy reflected. “No, there has been no love between us. And they say
you are wicked. But I would fight for you. I do not know why.”
Florian smiled. He nodded his head, in a sort of unwilling approval.
“We come of a queer race, my son. That is the reason you would fight in
my cause. It is also a reason why we may speak candidly.”
“Is candor, monsieur, quite possible between father and son?”
Florian liked that too, and showed as much. He said: “All
eccentricities are possible to our race. There are many quaint
chronicles to attest this, for there has always been a Puysange
somewhere or another fluttering the world. To-day I am Puysange.
To-morrow you will be Puysange. So I sit here with my little blaze
of spluttering twigs already half gray ashes. And you stand there,
awaiting my leisure, I will not ask how patiently.”
“I regard you, monsieur, with every appropriate filial sentiment. But
you can remember, I am afraid, just what that comes to.”
“I remember most clearly. In these matters we are logical. So it is the
defect of our race not ever to love anybody quite whole-heartedly; and
certainly we are not so ill-advised as to squander adoration upon one
another. Rather, we must restively seek everywhither for our desire,
even though we never discover precisely what is this desire. That also,
Gaston, is logic: for we of Puysange know, incommunicably but very
surely, that this unapprehended desire ought to be gratified. It is
this lean knowledge which permits us no rest, no complacent living in
the usual drowsiness....”
“They tell me, monsieur, that we derive this trait from that old Jurgen
who was our ancestor, and from tall Manuel too, whose life endures in
us of Puysange.”
“I do not know. I talked lately with a Monsieur Horvendile, who had
extreme notions about an Author who compiles an endless Biography, of
the life that uses us as masks and temporary garments. But I do not
know. I only know that this life was given me by my father, without any
knowledge as to what use I should preferably make of the unsought gift.
I only know that I have handed on this life to you, on the same terms.
Do with the life I gave you whatever you may elect. Now that I see you
for the last time, my premonitions tell me, I proffer no advice. I
shall not even asperse the effects of vice and evil-doing by protesting
that I in person illustrate them. No, I am conscious of a little
compassion for you, but that is all: I do not really care what becomes
of you. So I proffer no advice.”
“Therein, monsieur, at least, you do not deal with me as is the custom
of fathers.”
“No,” Florian replied. “No, I find you at sixteen already fighting
duels and tumbling wenches in the spring woods: and I spare you every
appropriate paternal comment. For one thing, I myself had at your age
indulged in these amusements; in fact, at your age, with my wild oats
sown, I was preparing to settle down to quiet domesticity with your
mother: and for another thing, I cannot see that your escapades matter.
It is only too clear to me as I sit here, with my little blaze of
spluttering twigs already half gray ashes, that in a while you and your
ardors and your adversaries and your plump wenches will be picked bones
and dust about which nobody will be worrying. These woods will then be
as young as ever: and nobody anywhere will be thinking about you nor
your iniquities nor your good actions, or about mine either; but in
this place every April will still be anemones.”
“Meanwhile I have my day, monsieur—”
“Yes,” Florian agreed,—“the bustling, restless and dissatisfying day of
a Puysange. That is your right, it is your logical inheritance. Well,
there has always been a Puysange, since Jurgen also made the most of
day and night,—a Puysange to keep his part of the world atwitter until
he had been taught, with bruises and hard knocks, to respect the great
law of living. Yes, there has always been a Puysange at that schooling,
and each in turn has mastered the lesson: and I cannot see how, in the
end, this, either, has mattered.”
“But what, monsieur, is this great law of living?”
Florian for a moment stayed silent. He could see yonder the little tree
from the East, already budding in the spring. He was remembering how,
a quarter of a century ago, another boy had asked just this question
just here. And living seemed to Florian a quite futile business. Men’s
trials and flounderings got them nowhither. A wheel turned, that was
all. Too large to be thought about, a wheel turned, without haste and
irresistibly. Men clung a while, like insects, to that wheel. The wheel
had come full circle. Now it was not Florian but Florian’s son who
was asking of his father, “What is this great law of living?” And no
response was possible except the old, evasive and cowardly answer. So
Florian gave it. One must be logical, and voice what logic taught.
“Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor,” Florian
replied,—“or not, at least, too often or too openly. I do not say, mark
you, my son, but that in private, and with the exercise of discretion,
one may cultivate one’s faculties.”
“Yes, but, monsieur, I do not see—”
“No,” Florian conceded, with a smiling toward his tall son which was
friendly but a little sad, “no, naturally you do not. How should you,
infamous seducer of the peasantry, when this is a law which no young
person anywhere is able to believe? Yet it is certain, dear child, that
if you openly offend against these notions you will be crushed: and it
is certain that if you honor them,—with, I am presupposing, a suitable
appreciation of the charms of privacy and sympathetic companions,—then
all things are permitted, and nobody will really bother about your
discreet pursuing of your desires. A wise man will avoid, though, for
his comfort’s health, all over-high and over-earnest desires.... This
is the knowledge, Gaston, which every father longs to communicate to
his son, without caring to confess that his own life has been such as
to permit the acquiring of this knowledge.”
And the boy shook his head. “I understand your words. But your meaning,
monsieur, I do not see....”
PART THREE
_THE END OF LEAN WISDOM_
_“Ne point aller chercher ce qu’on fait dans la lune,
Et vous mesler un peu de ce qu’on fait chez vous,
Où nous voyons aller tout sans-dessus-dessous.”_
_21._
_Of Melior Married_
Now Florian returned to Bellegarde to face the disillusion appointed
for every husband in passing from infatuation to paternity. His
disenchanted princess now was hardly recognizable. Her face was like
dough, her nose seemed oddly swollen; under and about the blood-shot
eyes were repulsive yellow splotches. As for the bloated body, he could
not bear to look at it. He was shaken with hot and sick disgust when he
saw this really perfectly dreadful looking creature.
Perhaps, though, Florian reflected, he saw her through emotions which
exaggerated every blemish unfairly. He knew all other pregnant women
had seemed to him unattractive rather than actually loathsome. But
here, here was the prize he had so long and fervently desired, the
prize to gain which he had sacrificed those dearest to him in this
world, and had parted with the comforting assurances of religion....
For, Melior, then, had flawless and unequalled beauty. So he had
bought, at an exceedingly stiff price, this shining superficies,
to learn almost immediately thereafter that she possessed not one
other desirable quality. And now Melior had not even the thin mask
of loveliness. Worse still, the beauty which he had worshipped since
boyhood now existed nowhere. To purchase an hour or two of really not
very remarkable entertainment, he had himself destroyed this beauty....
“My love,” said Florian, “now if only I were a conceited person, I
would dare to hope that the long months since I last saw you have
passed as drearily with you as with me.”
He kissed her tenderly. Even the woman’s breath was now unpleasant. It
seemed to Florian that nothing was being spared him.
“Yes, that sort of talk is all very well,” replied Melior, fretfully.
“But I do think that at a time when I have every right to expect
particular attention and care, you might at least have made an effort
to get home sooner, and not leave everything upon my shoulders,
especially with all the neighbors everywhere pretending, whenever I
come into the room, that they were not talking about your having killed
your brother—”
“Yes, yes, a most regrettable affair! But what, sweetheart, has been
going amiss at Bellegarde?”
“That is a pretty question for you to ask, with me in my condition,
with all these other worries on top of it, about your friend Orléans.
Because, knowing you as well as I do, Florian, and not being able to
feel as you do that a prime minister is no more than a house fly or
a flea,—and seeing quite well, too, how little you consider what my
feelings naturally would be if they cut off your head—”
“Ah, but let us take one thing at a time, and for the present leave my
head where it is. Do you mean that you have been unwell, my pet?”
“Have you no eyes in the head you keep talking about just to keep me
upset! But I do not wonder you prefer not to look at me, now I am such
a fright, and that is you men all over. Still, you might at least have
the decency to remember who is responsible for it, and that much I must
say.”
“But, dearest, I have both the eyes about which you inquire, and in
those doubtless partial orbs you happen not to look a fright. So I
cannot quite follow you. No, let us be logical! There is a slight
pallor, to be sure—But, no! No, dear Melior, upon the whole, I never
saw you looking lovelier, and I wonder of what you are talking.”
“I mean, you fool, that I am sick and miserable because now almost any
day I am going to have a baby.”
Florian was honestly shocked. He could remember no precedent among
his mistresses of anybody’s having put this news so bluntly: and
when he recalled the behavior of his first wife in precisely these
circumstances, he could not but feel that women were deteriorating.
A wife endowed with proper sensibility would have hidden her face
upon his shoulder, just as Carola had done, and would in this posture
have whispered her awed surmise that Heaven was shortly to consign
them a little cherub. But this big-bellied vixen appeared to have
no sensibilities. “You fool, now almost any day I am going to have
a baby!” was neither a loving nor a dignified way of announcing the
nearness of his freedom.
But Florian’s plump face was transfigured, as he knelt before his
Melior, and very reverently lifted to his lips her hand. He slipped a
cushion under his knee, made himself comfortable, and, kneeling still,
went on to speak of his bliss and of his love for her and of how sacred
in his eyes appeared the marks of her condition. She listened: he
could see that Melior was pleased; and he in consequence continued his
gallant romanticizing.
For Florian really wanted to be pleasant to the woman; and was resolved
politely to ignore even this last disillusionment, and to condone as
far as was humanly possible, the lack of consideration through which
this dreadful creature had now added to stupidity and garrulity even
physical ugliness.
But while Florian was talking he could see, too, that the central
diamond in the charmed ring that Melior wore was to-day quite black,
like an onyx, so that he took care to keep it covered with his hand all
the while he was talking about his adoration. Here was an appalling
omen, a portent, virtually, of open conflict between Florian and his
patron saint. The central stone of this ring had become as black and
as bright and as inimical looking as though, he reflected, one of the
small eyes of Marie-Claire Cazaio stared thence. This was a depressing
sight: and it seemed to Florian quite vexingly illogical that the ring
should change in this fashion when, after all, he was planning no harm
against Melior.
When she had borne her child, he meant of course to carry out his
bargain with brown Janicot,—a bargain that Florian considered an
entirely private matter, and an affair with which Hoprig could
not meddle without exhibiting absolute ill breeding. Then Melior
would disappear, Florian did not know whither, to be sure, but her
destination would be none of his selecting or responsibility. A really
logical ring would not call that contriving any harm against Melior.
Even Holy Hoprig must be reasonable enough to see that much. So Florian
for the while put aside his foreboding, and assured himself that, with
anything like fair luck, he was on the point of getting rid of this
dreadful woman forever. The reflection spurred him to eloquence and to
the kindliness which Florian had always felt to be due his wives in
their last hours.
_22._
_The Wives of Florian_
Florian watched his Melior with a not unnatural care. She remained, to
the eye, unperturbed, and was her usual maddening self throughout the
evening: it seemed to him she must inevitably have noticed the changing
of her ring; and in that event, he granted the woman’s duplicity at
least to be rather magnificent.
For Melior talked, on and on and on,—with that quite insupportable
air of commingled self-satisfaction and shrewdness,—about Monsieur du
Belloc’s new liveries, which were the exact color, my dear, of Madame
des Roches’ old wig, the one she was wearing that day she drove in
here in all that rain; and about how that reminded Melior of what a
thunderstorm had come up only last Thursday without the least warning;
and about how Marie-Claire had been looking at Melior again in that
peculiar way and ought not to be permitted to raise storms and cast
spells that dried up people’s cows.