In the little hamlet of Haroc, in the Isle of St. Loup, there lived a
man who--though living under the English flag--was absolutely untypical
of the French tradition. He was quite unnoticeable, but that was exactly
where he was quite himself. He was not even extraordinarily French; but
then it is against the French tradition to be extraordinarily French.
Ordinary Englishmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned;
imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old John
Bull of the caricatures. He was stout; he was quite undistinguished; and
he had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. He
was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by
politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic,
had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly
returning to the Church in his later years. He had a genius (if one can
even use so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius for
saying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject; or rather
what we in England would call the conventional thing. For it was not
convention with him, but solid and manly conviction. Convention implies
cant or affectation, and he had not the faintest smell of either. He was
simply an ordinary citizen with ordinary views; and if you had told him
so he would have taken it as an ordinary compliment. If you had asked
him about women, he would have said that one must preserve their
domesticity and decorum; he would have used the stalest words, but he
would have in reserve the strongest arguments. If you had asked him
about government, he would have said that all citizens were free and
equal, but he would have meant what he said. If you had asked him about
education, he would have said that the young must be trained up in
habits of industry and of respect for their parents. Still he would
have set them the example of industry, and he would have been one of the
parents whom they could respect. A state of mind so hopelessly central
is depressing to the English instinct. But then in England a man
announcing these platitudes is generally a fool and a frightened fool,
announcing them out of mere social servility. But Durand was anything
but a fool; he had read all the eighteenth century, and could have
defended his platitudes round every angle of eighteenth-century
argument. And certainly he was anything but a coward: swollen and
sedentary as he was, he could have hit any man back who touched him with
the instant violence of an automatic machine; and dying in a uniform
would have seemed to him only the sort of thing that sometimes
happens. I am afraid it is impossible to explain this monster amid the
exaggerative sects and the eccentric clubs of my country. He was merely
a man.
He lived in a little villa which was furnished well with comfortable
chairs and tables and highly uncomfortable classical pictures and
medallions. The art in his home contained nothing between the two
extremes of hard, meagre designs of Greek heads and Roman togas, and on
the other side a few very vulgar Catholic images in the crudest colours;
these were mostly in his daughter's room. He had recently lost his wife,
whom he had loved heartily and rather heavily in complete silence,
and upon whose grave he was constantly in the habit of placing hideous
little wreaths, made out of a sort of black-and-white beads. To his only
daughter he was equally devoted, though he restricted her a good deal
under a sort of theoretic alarm about her innocence; an alarm which was
peculiarly unnecessary, first, because she was an exceptionally reticent
and religious girl, and secondly, because there was hardly anybody else
in the place.
Madeleine Durand was physically a sleepy young woman, and might easily
have been supposed to be morally a lazy one. It is, however, certain
that the work of her house was done somehow, and it is even more rapidly
ascertainable that nobody else did it. The logician is, therefore,
driven back upon the assumption that she did it; and that lends a sort
of mysterious interest to her personality at the beginning. She had very
broad, low, and level brows, which seemed even lower because her warm
yellow hair clustered down to her eyebrows; and she had a face just
plump enough not to look as powerful as it was. Anything that was heavy
in all this was abruptly lightened by two large, light china-blue eyes,
lightened all of a sudden as if it had been lifted into the air by two
big blue butterflies. The rest of her was less than middle-sized, and
was of a casual and comfortable sort; and she had this difference from
such girls as the girl in the motor-car, that one did not incline to
take in her figure at all, but only her broad and leonine and innocent
head.
Both the father and the daughter were of the sort that would normally
have avoided all observation; that is, all observation in that
extraordinary modern world which calls out everything except strength.
Both of them had strength below the surface; they were like quiet
peasants owning enormous and unquarried mines. The father with his
square face and grey side whiskers, the daughter with her square face
and golden fringe of hair, were both stronger than they know; stronger
than anyone knew. The father believed in civilization, in the storied
tower we have erected to affront nature; that is, the father believed in
Man. The daughter believed in God; and was even stronger. They neither
of them believed in themselves; for that is a decadent weakness.
The daughter was called a devotee. She left upon ordinary people the
impression--the somewhat irritating impression--produced by such a
person; it can only be described as the sense of strong water being
perpetually poured into some abyss. She did her housework easily; she
achieved her social relations sweetly; she was never neglectful and
never unkind. This accounted for all that was soft in her, but not for
all that was hard. She trod firmly as if going somewhere; she flung her
face back as if defying something; she hardly spoke a cross word, yet
there was often battle in her eyes. The modern man asked doubtfully
where all this silent energy went to. He would have stared still more
doubtfully if he had been told that it all went into her prayers.
The conventions of the Isle of St. Loup were necessarily a compromise
or confusion between those of France and England; and it was vaguely
possible for a respectable young lady to have half-attached lovers, in a
way that would be impossible to the _bourgeoisie_ of France. One man in
particular had made himself an unmistakable figure in the track of this
girl as she went to church. He was a short, prosperous-looking man,
whose long, bushy black beard and clumsy black umbrella made him seem
both shorter and older than he really was; but whose big, bold eyes, and
step that spurned the ground, gave him an instant character of youth.
His name was Camille Bert, and he was a commercial traveller who had
only been in the island an idle week before he began to hover in the
tracks of Madeleine Durand. Since everyone knows everyone in so small
a place, Madeleine certainly knew him to speak to; but it is not very
evident that she ever spoke. He haunted her, however; especially at
church, which was, indeed, one of the few certain places for finding
her. In her home she had a habit of being invisible, sometimes through
insatiable domesticity, sometimes through an equally insatiable
solitude. M. Bert did not give the impression of a pious man, though he
did give, especially with his eyes, the impression of an honest one. But
he went to Mass with a simple exactitude that could not be mistaken for
a pose, or even for a vulgar fascination. It was perhaps this religious
regularity which eventually drew Madeleine into recognition of him. At
least it is certain that she twice spoke to him with her square and open
smile in the porch of the church; and there was human nature enough in
the hamlet to turn even that into gossip.
But the real interest arose suddenly as a squall arises with the
extraordinary affair that occurred about five days after. There was
about a third of a mile beyond the village of Haroc a large but lonely
hotel upon the London or Paris model, but commonly almost entirely
empty. Among the accidental group of guests who had come to it at this
season was a man whose nationality no one could fix and who bore the
non-committal name of Count Gregory. He treated everybody with complete
civility and almost in complete silence. On the few occasions when he
spoke, he spoke either French, English, or once (to the priest) Latin;
and the general opinion was that he spoke them all wrong. He was a
large, lean man, with the stoop of an aged eagle, and even the eagle's
nose to complete it; he had old-fashioned military whiskers and
moustache dyed with a garish and highly incredible yellow. He had the
dress of a showy gentleman and the manners of a decayed gentleman; he
seemed (as with a sort of simplicity) to be trying to be a dandy when he
was too old even to know that he was old. Ye he was decidedly a handsome
figure with his curled yellow hair and lean fastidious face; and he wore
a peculiar frock-coat of bright turquoise blue, with an unknown order
pinned to it, and he carried a huge and heavy cane. Despite his silence
and his dandified dress and whiskers, the island might never have heard
of him but for the extraordinary event of which I have spoken, which
fell about in the following way:
In such casual atmospheres only the enthusiastic go to Benediction; and
as the warm blue twilight closed over the little candle-lit church and
village, the line of worshippers who went home from the former to the
latter thinned out until it broke. On one such evening at least no one
was in church except the quiet, unconquerable Madeleine, four old women,
one fisherman, and, of course, the irrepressible M. Camille Bert. The
others seemed to melt away afterwards into the peacock colours of the
dim green grass and the dark blue sky. Even Durand was invisible instead
of being merely reverentially remote; and Madeleine set forth through
the patch of black forest alone. She was not in the least afraid of
loneliness, because she was not afraid of devils. I think they were
afraid of her.
In a clearing of the wood, however, which was lit up with a last patch
of the perishing sunlight, there advanced upon her suddenly one who was
more startling than a devil. The incomprehensible Count Gregory, with
his yellow hair like flame and his face like the white ashes of the
flame, was advancing bareheaded towards her, flinging out his arms and
his long fingers with a frantic gesture.
“We are alone here,” he cried, “and you would be at my mercy, only that
I am at yours.”
Then his frantic hands fell by his sides and he looked up under his
brows with an expression that went well with his hard breathing.
Madeleine Durand had come to a halt at first in childish wonder, and
now, with more than masculine self-control, “I fancy I know your face,
sir,” she said, as if to gain time.
“I know I shall not forget yours,” said the other, and extended once
more his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture. Then of a sudden there
came out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous phrases. “It is as well
that you should know the worst and the best. I am a man who knows no
limit; I am the most callous of criminals, the most unrepentant of
sinners. There is no man in my dominions so vile as I. But my dominions
stretch from the olives of Italy to the fir-woods of Denmark, and there
is no nook of all of them in which I have not done a sin. But when I
bear you away I shall be doing my first sacrilege, and also my first act
of virtue.” He seized her suddenly by the elbow; and she did not scream
but only pulled and tugged. Yet though she had not screamed, someone
astray in the woods seemed to have heard the struggle. A short but
nimble figure came along the woodland path like a humming bullet and
had caught Count Gregory a crack across the face before his own could
be recognized. When it was recognized it was that of Camille, with the
black elderly beard and the young ardent eyes.
Up to the moment when Camille had hit the Count, Madeleine had
entertained no doubt that the Count was merely a madman. Now she was
startled with a new sanity; for the tall man in the yellow whiskers and
yellow moustache first returned the blow of Bert, as if it were a sort
of duty, and then stepped back with a slight bow and an easy smile.
“This need go no further here, M. Bert,” he said. “I need not remind you
how far it should go elsewhere.”
“Certainly, you need remind me of nothing,” answered Camille, stolidly.
“I am glad that you are just not too much of a scoundrel for a gentleman
to fight.”
“We are detaining the lady,” said Count Gregory, with politeness; and,
making a gesture suggesting that he would have taken off his hat if
he had had one, he strode away up the avenue of trees and eventually
disappeared. He was so complete an aristocrat that he could offer his
back to them all the way up that avenue; and his back never once looked
uncomfortable.
“You must allow me to see you home,” said Bert to the girl, in a gruff
and almost stifled voice; “I think we have only a little way to go.”
“Only a little way,” she said, and smiled once more that night, in
spite of fatigue and fear and the world and the flesh and the devil. The
glowing and transparent blue of twilight had long been covered by the
opaque and slatelike blue of night, when he handed her into the lamp-lit
interior of her home. He went out himself into the darkness, walking
sturdily, but tearing at his black beard.
All the French or semi-French gentry of the district considered this a
case in which a duel was natural and inevitable, and neither party had
any difficulty in finding seconds, strangers as they were in the place.
Two small landowners, who were careful, practising Catholics, willingly
undertook to represent that strict church-goer Camille Burt; while the
profligate but apparently powerful Count Gregory found friends in
an energetic local doctor who was ready for social promotion and
an accidental Californian tourist who was ready for anything. As no
particular purpose could be served by delay, it was arranged that the
affair should fall out three days afterwards. And when this was settled
the whole community, as it were, turned over again in bed and thought
no more about the matter. At least there was only one member of it who
seemed to be restless, and that was she who was commonly most restful.
On the next night Madeleine Durand went to church as usual; and as usual
the stricken Camille was there also. What was not so usual was that when
they were a bow-shot from the church Madeleine turned round and walked
back to him. “Sir,” she began, “it is not wrong of me to speak to you,”
and the very words gave him a jar of unexpected truth; for in all the
novels he had ever read she would have begun: “It is wrong of me to
speak to you.” She went on with wide and serious eyes like an animal's:
“It is not wrong of me to speak to you, because your soul, or anybody's
soul, matters so much more than what the world says about anybody. I
want to talk to you about what you are going to do.”
Bert saw in front of him the inevitable heroine of the novels trying to
prevent bloodshed; and his pale firm face became implacable.
“I would do anything but that for you,” he said; “but no man can be
called less than a man.”
She looked at him for a moment with a face openly puzzled, and then
broke into an odd and beautiful half-smile.
“Oh, I don't mean that,” she said; “I don't talk about what I don't
understand. No one has ever hit me; and if they had I should not feel
as a man may. I am sure it is not the best thing to fight. It would be
better to forgive--if one could really forgive. But when people dine
with my father and say that fighting a duel is mere murder--of course
I can see that is not just. It's all so different--having a reason--and
letting the other man know--and using the same guns and things--and
doing it in front of your friends. I'm awfully stupid, but I know that
men like you aren't murderers. But it wasn't that that I meant.”
“What did you mean?” asked the other, looking broodingly at the earth.
“Don't you know,” she said, “there is only one more celebration? I
thought that as you always go to church--I thought you would communicate
this morning.”
Bert stepped backward with a sort of action she had never seen in him
before. It seemed to alter his whole body.
“You may be right or wrong to risk dying,” said the girl, simply; “the
poor women in our village risk it whenever they have a baby. You men are
the other half of the world. I know nothing about when you ought to die.
But surely if you are daring to try and find God beyond the grave and
appeal to Him--you ought to let Him find you when He comes and stands
there every morning in our little church.”
And placid as she was, she made a little gesture of argument, of which
the pathos wrung the heart.
M. Camille Bert was by no means placid. Before that incomplete gesture
and frankly pleading face he retreated as if from the jaws of a dragon.
His dark black hair and beard looked utterly unnatural against the
startling pallor of his face. When at last he said something it was:
“O God! I can't stand this!” He did not say it in French. Nor did he,
strictly speaking, say it in English. The truth (interesting only to
anthropologists) is that he said it in Scotch.
“There will be another mass in a matter of eight hours,” said Madeleine,
with a sort of business eagerness and energy, “and you can do it then
before the fighting. You must forgive me, but I was so frightened that
you would not do it at all.”
Bert seemed to crush his teeth together until they broke, and managed to
say between them: “And why should you suppose that I shouldn't do as you
say--I mean not to do it at all?”
“You always go to Mass,” answered the girl, opening her wide blue eyes,
“and the Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God.”
Then it was that Bert exploded with a brutality which might have come
from Count Gregory, his criminal opponent. He advanced upon Madeleine
with flaming eyes, and almost took her by the two shoulders. “I do not
love God,” he cried, speaking French with the broadest Scotch accent; “I
do not want to find Him; I do not think He is there to be found. I must
burst up the show; I must and will say everything. You are the happiest
and honestest thing I ever saw in this godless universe. And I am the
dirtiest and most dishonest.”
Madeleine looked at him doubtfully for an instant, and then said with a
sudden simplicity and cheerfulness: “Oh, but if you are really sorry it
is all right. If you are horribly sorry it is all the better. You have
only to go and tell the priest so and he will give you God out of his
own hands.”
“I hate your priest and I deny your God!” cried the man, “and I tell you
God is a lie and a fable and a mask. And for the first time in my life I
do not feel superior to God.”
“What can it all mean?” said Madeleine, in massive wonder.
“Because I am a fable also and a mask,” said the man. He had been
plucking fiercely at his black beard and hair all the time; now he
suddenly plucked them off and flung them like moulted feathers in the
mire. This extraordinary spoliation left in the sunlight the same face,
but a much younger head--a head with close chestnut curls and a short
chestnut beard.
“Now you know the truth,” he answered, with hard eyes. “I am a cad who
has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for a
private reason of his own. I might have played it successfully on any
other woman; I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played. It's
just like my damned luck. The plain truth is,” and here when he came to
the plain truth he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it
to the girl in the motor-car.
“The plain truth is,” he said at last, “that I am James Turnbull the
atheist. The police are after me; not for atheism but for being ready to
fight for it.”
“I saw something about you in a newspaper,” said the girl, with a
simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.
“Evan MacIan said there was a God,” went on the other, stubbornly, “and
I say there isn't. And I have come to fight for the fact that there
is no God; it is for that that I have seen this cursed island and your
blessed face.”
“You want me really to believe,” said Madeleine, with parted lips, “that
you think----”
“I want you to hate me!” cried Turnbull, in agony. “I want you to be
sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God.”
“But there is,” said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the air
of one telling children about an elephant. “Why, I touched His body only
this morning.”
“You touched a bit of bread,” said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. “Oh, I
will say anything that can madden you!”
“You think it is only a bit of bread,” said the girl, and her lips
tightened ever so little.
“I know it is only a bit of bread,” said Turnbull, with violence.
She flung back her open face and smiled. “Then why did you refuse to eat
it?” she said.
James Turnbull made a little step backward, and for the first time in
his life there seemed to break out and blaze in his head thoughts that
were not his own.
“Why, how silly of them,” cried out Madeleine, with quite a schoolgirl
gaiety, “why, how silly of them to call _you_ a blasphemer! Why,
you have wrecked your whole business because you would not commit
blasphemy.”
The man stood, a somewhat comic figure in his tragic bewilderment,
with the honest red head of James Turnbull sticking out of the rich and
fictitious garments of Camille Bert. But the startled pain of his face
was strong enough to obliterate the oddity.
“You come down here,” continued the lady, with that female emphasis
which is so pulverizing in conversation and so feeble at a public
meeting, “you and your MacIan come down here and put on false beards
or noses in order to fight. You pretend to be a Catholic commercial
traveller from France. Poor Mr. MacIan has to pretend to be a dissolute
nobleman from nowhere. Your scheme succeeds; you pick a quite convincing
quarrel; you arrange a quite respectable duel; the duel you have planned
so long will come off tomorrow with absolute certainty and safety. And
then you throw off your wig and throw up your scheme and throw over
your colleague, because I ask you to go into a building and eat a bit of
bread. And _then_ you dare to tell me that you are sure there is nothing
watching us. Then you say you know there is nothing on the very altar
you run away from. You know----”
“I only know,” said Turnbull, “that I must run away from you. This has
got beyond any talking.” And he plunged along into the village, leaving
his black wig and beard lying behind him on the road.
As the market-place opened before him he saw Count Gregory, that
distinguished foreigner, standing and smoking in elegant meditation
at the corner of the local café. He immediately made his way rapidly
towards him, considering that a consultation was urgent. But he had
hardly crossed half of that stony quadrangle when a window burst open
above him and a head was thrust out, shouting. The man was in his
woollen undershirt, but Turnbull knew the energetic, apologetic head of
the sergeant of police. He pointed furiously at Turnbull and shouted
his name. A policeman ran excitedly from under an archway and tried to
collar him. Two men selling vegetables dropped their baskets and joined
in the chase. Turnbull dodged the constable, upset one of the men into
his own basket, and bounding towards the distinguished foreign Count,
called to him clamorously: “Come on, MacIan, the hunt is up again.”
The prompt reply of Count Gregory was to pull off his large yellow
whiskers and scatter them on the breeze with an air of considerable
relief. Then he joined the flight of Turnbull, and even as he did so,
with one wrench of his powerful hands rent and split the strange, thick
stick that he carried. Inside it was a naked old-fashioned rapier. The
two got a good start up the road before the whole town was awakened
behind them; and half-way up it a similar transformation was seen to
take place in Mr. Turnbull's singular umbrella.
The two had a long race for the harbour; but the English police were
heavy and the French inhabitants were indifferent. In any case, they got
used to the notion of the road being clear; and just as they had come
to the cliffs MacIan banged into another gentleman with unmistakable
surprise. How he knew he was another gentleman merely by banging into
him, must remain a mystery. MacIan was a very poor and very sober
Scotch gentleman. The other was a very drunk and very wealthy English
gentleman. But there was something in the staggered and openly
embarrassed apologies that made them understand each other as readily
and as quickly and as much as two men talking French in the middle of
China. The nearest expression of the type is that it either hits or
apologizes; and in this case both apologized.
“You seem to be in a hurry,” said the unknown Englishman, falling back
a step or two in order to laugh with an unnatural heartiness. “What's
it all about, eh?” Then before MacIan could get past his sprawling and
staggering figure he ran forward again and said with a sort of shouting
and ear-shattering whisper: “I say, my name is Wilkinson. _You_
know--Wilkinson's Entire was my grandfather. Can't drink beer myself.
Liver.” And he shook his head with extraordinary sagacity.
“We really are in a hurry, as you say,” said MacIan, summoning a
sufficiently pleasant smile, “so if you will let us pass----”
“I'll tell you what, you fellows,” said the sprawling gentleman,
confidentially, while Evan's agonized ears heard behind him the first
paces of the pursuit, “if you really are, as you say, in a hurry, I know
what it is to be in a hurry--Lord, what a hurry I was in when we all
came out of Cartwright's rooms--if you really are in a hurry”--and he
seemed to steady his voice into a sort of solemnity--“if you are in a
hurry, there's nothing like a good yacht for a man in a hurry.”
“No doubt you're right,” said MacIan, and dashed past him in despair.
The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the top of the
hill behind him. Turnbull had already ducked under the intoxicated
gentleman's elbow and fled far in front.
“No, but look here,” said Mr. Wilkinson, enthusiastically running after
MacIan and catching him by the sleeve of his coat. “If you want to hurry
you should take a yacht, and if”--he said, with a burst of rationality,
like one leaping to a further point in logic--“if you want a yacht--you
can have mine.”
Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him. “We are really in the
devil of a hurry,” he said, “and if you really have a yacht, the truth
is that we would give our ears for it.”
“You'll find it in harbour,” said Wilkinson, struggling with his speech.
“Left side of harbour--called _Gibson Girl_--can't think why, old
fellow, I never lent it you before.”
With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his face in
the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flying
companion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went
through a crisis of instantaneous casuistry, in which it may be that he
decided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can profess
no doubt. Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told the
tale; ten minutes afterwards he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into
the yacht called the _Gibson Girl_ and had somehow pushed off from the
Isle of St. Loup.