We carried out our programme to the letter, “finishing” Nîmes the
following day, and, as good fortune would have it, without once
encountering the objectionable troubadour within doors or abroad. I
hoped he had gone on to Montpelier, and that we had seen the last of
him--but I had overlooked the knapsack. We _did_ the churches, and the
Porte d’Auguste, and we visited again the fountain of the Nymphs with
its fair climbing garden, up which we mounted to the old ruined
Mausoleum called the Tour de Magne, where Fifine was much more
interested in the flying grasshoppers, with their marbled jackets and
underwings of crimson or azure, than in the supposititious history of
the building itself, to which I tried vainly to get her to attend. But
she was in a wilful mood, aggravated, perhaps, by the two or three
mosquito bites, which, for all our precautions, she had not escaped.
With one exception they were on her fingers; and the exception was
quite pretty in effect, forming a sort of beauty mark near her left
ear. I told her they looked like little swelling buds on a fair stem,
but without reconciling her to the disfigurement or the intolerable
itching. Poising an insect on her finger-tip, she would not even look
at the tower.
“I _will_ not be interested in it,” she said. “I don’t care a fig
whether it was a lighthouse, or a treasury, or a tomb; or whether it
is built of ashlar or cream-cheese; or whether it is an octagon or an
octopus. If you will paint it for me I will love it; if you won’t, I
shall catch grasshoppers.”
“Mayn’t I just sometimes,” I said, “enjoy myself, without making a
business transaction of my enjoyment?”
“That’s it,” she answered, watching the thing take flight. “You are
exactly like a schoolboy. A book, which you might delight in reading
voluntarily, becomes a _task_ if imposed upon you as a duty. I want
you to paint this, so you don’t want to paint it. Your attention
wanders, just as the schoolboy’s would, to all sorts of extraneous
interests that don’t matter. Your art should be your enthusiasm and
your obsession, and the difficult thing should be to get you away from
a subject, not to attract you to it. I daresay, clever as you are, you
might take a lesson in perseverance from many smaller men.”
“Perseverance, Fifine, is a dreadfully plebeian virtue,” said I.
“Well, then,” she retorted, “I like plebeian virtues. I can imagine
even your despised M. Cabarus coming up here and refusing to leave
until he had turned its poetic inspiration to some account.”
“To the account of scratching his egregious name on the walls, I
expect.”
“Yes, you may joke. But anyhow _his_ mastering purpose is to excel in
the gift which Nature has bestowed on him.”
I fairly whistled out my astonishment.
“My good gossip, you are talking entirely without book. You know
absolutely nothing about his mastering purpose. Why, you have only
spoken to him once, like myself; and we have heard what the landlord
said. I have just as much right from that to pronounce him a peddling
coxcomb, idling away his time between rhyming and philandering. I
should define him, if you asked me, as probably an erotic
sentimentalist.”
“I don’t ask you. Besides, I like sentimentality--in reason.”
“Well, I don’t; and it is never in reason. I abhor it. It is always a
manufactured emotion--like spread chords. The people who use spread
chords, in playing, or singing, or talking, are hypocrites and
impostors. I should liken them, morally, to procurers. They do not
feel, they calculate, emotional effects. I have heard Shelley’s
‘Indian Serenade’ sung by that sort in a way to make one sick. ‘I
ara-aise from dreams of thee in the first sweet er-ser-leep of night.’
Bah!”
“Felix!” said Fifine, amazed; “are you off your head?”
“Are you,” I said, “when you chastise me--_me_ with that meretricious
little skipjack?”
“But, how do you know he is meretricious? You have seen no more of him
than I have.”
“Exactly. My opinion of him has precisely the value of yours; and they
are both worth nothing.”
She came and put her hand upon my arm, and looked up in my face.
“I did not mean to hurt you, Felix.”
“With that?” I answered. “My mail is proof against better than
pea-shooters, Fifine.”
“You are not offended?”
“God bless you, no, child. I was as much in jest as you were.”
“Yes,” she said, and turned away.
But, as we walked down the hill together, after a long silence she
suddenly broke upon me again:--
“How dared I presume to read lessons to you--and after your
yesterday’s proof! I think you are the sweetest-tempered man I have
ever known, Felix.”
I laughed.
“O, no flattery, gossip!” I said. “The last thing I want is to be
exalted to a height I should have the deuce’s own trouble to maintain.
And, as to presumption, I am not so confident of myself as to resent
criticism of my methods.”
“No,” she said: “I wish--sometimes--for both our sakes--you were.” And
leaving me that cryptic pronouncement to digest, she fell silent
again.
Well, we got off early, as arranged, the next morning, and without any
hint given as to our destination, though the waiter, who brought our
coffee and our _note_ to command, was officious in his attentions and
enquiries.
“That was because you tipped him too much,” said Fifine, as we walked
to the station. “You men are always foolish in that respect. It is
stupid, because they have no legal right to demand anything at all.”
“Tipping is a detestable custom,” I answered; “but, when you talk of
legality, a waiter has as much right to expect a douceur as any other
tradesman. I have heard it said that the real and only definite line
of social demarcation lies between the tippable and the untippable;
but that is nonsense. We are all open to receive gratuities, in the
sense of supercharges on services rendered or goods retailed. The
lawyer who attunes his bill to the financial position of his client;
the doctor whose fee is this for the poor man and that for the rich;
the soldier or the sailor who, through interest, obtains preferment
over men, worthier, perhaps, but less fortunate than himself; the
politician who uses office as an invitation to bribery; the
adulterating shopkeeper; the preacher who rates his eloquence at a
pound more or less in the plate; not to speak of the sportsman who
accepts his vail in plain terms, and makes no bones about it--what are
they all but receivers of tips? It is the bit, little or much, over
and above the recognised scale of charges, which constitutes the tip;
and the waiter is as much entitled to expect his bonus as any other
wage-earner.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” said Fifine. “I said you tipped him too
much. But I didn’t mean to start you going. That is the worst of you:
you seem to hold contradictory opinions on every subject one may
mention.”
“M’amie, my gossip: controversy is the very essence of education.”
“O, don’t! we shall miss our train. It is past seven now.”
We caught it, however, easily, and again had a compartment to
ourselves; a boon which, in our then frame of mind, we were not
backward in appreciating. For we were full of happiness and gaiety, a
jocund irresponsible couple, who had now finally shaken off the
shackles of constraint, and were bound for the wilderness where no
proprieties were to question nor dangers to apprehend. Even the absurd
little shadow of Carabas was to me, in its dissipating, a matter for
some small self-congratulation, and I felt our flight into the
seaboard solitudes the breezier for its absence. As the long wastes
came about us, I flapped my wings, literally, like an imprisoned gull
that smells the ocean salt borne inland on a gale, and I croaked out
my jubilance. Fifine laughed, protestingly but indulgently.
“What a child you are!” she said.
“And just now I was a pedant,” I answered. “Truly some gossips are
hard to please.”
But suppressed excitement glowed in her all the same. It was her habit
to take it sedately; yet I could read the underlying emotion in every
pulse of colour that came and went in her cheek. Her eyes might dream
slumberous; but in their depths was an exulting spark that confessed
their vivid wakefulness. And she cried out once with rapture when
there passed close by the windows of the running train a
characteristic little procession--a shepherd boy, driving a flock of
twenty or so sheep, each individual member of which wore a favour of
crimson ribbon knotted into the wool above his withers.
“O, how pretty!” cried Fifine. “We are in Arcady, Felix--and--and I
will never eat mutton again.”
“Arcady it may be,” said I: “but, if so, Arcady has its wolves. Do you
see that great dim cliff of a hill over there?” (we were then nearing
Vauvert). “That is in the Cevennes, Fifine, and its name is Le Loup.”
“It shall stand for the symbol of all the wolves that ever were,” said
Fifine; “stricken into stone for their cruelties. I say this is
Arcady; and it shall be.”
“Very well,” I answered. “I am agreeable. Arcady it shall be--the land
of lovingkindness, where to be fond is not to be suspected. We can be
better friends than ever in Arcady, Fifine.”
“Can we?” she said, turning to look again from her window. “O, yes! I
suppose so.”
“Why!” I said. “Don’t you want us to be?”
She did not answer, and I left her to her momentary mood, whatever
that might betoken. The needle of a woman’s mind is an unsafe compass
to steer by. It may point warm west, and lead you, if you follow it,
crash on an arctic iceberg.
Deeper and deeper into that land of loneliness we ran on, until the
vine-strewn levels, rosy and flaming, which at first had accompanied
our flight, were all faded, as a sunset fades, into league-wide wastes
of melancholy grey. Harsh bents of grass and lifeless sand came all
about us, with pools of motionless water, from whose reeds great birds
flapped slowly upwards, sailing away to meet a low horizon. And then
at last, at near two hours from our starting, we saw, at the lean
land’s end, the pictured shadow of our goal; and there was the grim
old fortress town, its feet in the stagnant lagoons, its long ramparts
extending as massive and unbroken as when, at Philip the Bold’s
bidding, they first rose from the marshes.
Impregnable; unapproachable: but who would want to approach it? That
was the thought which occurred to Fifine, when first contemplating
that desolate outpost of the ages.
“I suppose nobody could get in, and I suppose nobody could get out,”
she said. “I hope that satisfied them. I should have thought the best
thing their enemies could have done would be to leave them stuck
there, and go round another way.”
“You have an excellent reasoning power in you, gossip,” said I. “But
you are no philosopher, or you would know that man is the one organism
congenitally incapable of leaving well alone. To let him escape a wild
beast by the skin of his teeth is merely to have him provoked to
borrow the first inadequate weapon, and go back to try conclusions
with his enemy. If you were to throw an empty biscuit tin into the
middle of the great Bog of Allen, and loudly proclaim that any man who
attempted to redeem it would do so at peril of your deadly wrath, a
hundred fools would be ready at once to risk their lives in the
reclaiming of that piece of lumber. And, after all, I shouldn’t be
prepared to blame the fools. I don’t know why; except that there is
something very inflaming to one’s obstinacy in overbearance.”
“If you have finished,” said Fifine, “we may as well go on.”
We went on, and, traversing the stretch of ground which curves between
the station and the walls, discovered, a little to our consternation,
that it was fair-day in Aigues-Mortes. Booths and caravans lined the
approach to the great entrance gate, called la Gardette, and all about
them, and thronging the entrance, were swarms of holiday folk, motley
and garish in their Sunday best.
Well, there was no help for it, and our only resource was to accept
the thing mediævally. The barbaric colour even assisted to that frame
of mind; for indeed the workaday trappings of modern France are much
of a dingy sameness everywhere, and it is only sparely, as in the case
of the cattle-drovers of the Camargue, that one encounters a local
survival of the ancient costumes. Dressed almost without exception as
our own men, even to the ugly cloth cap, are the labouring and
mechanic classes; in places, too, as remote as Aigues-Mortes; while
the women have been as ready on the whole to exchange for drab and
fustian the livelier raiment of past times. Wherefore this festive
frippery, though florid and vulgar in itself, had here its seeming
place in the context of stone walls and frowning battlements.
At any rate we tried to think so, as we passed under the archway into
that intricacy of narrow streets, and made our way with some
difficulty over the filthy pavements.
They were filthy, those pavements. When I had visited the town
earlier, it had been in spring, before the grapes were thought of, or
the wine-presses disinterred from their winter quarters. Now
everywhere the place was littered with the discarded refuse of the
harvest, great heaps of decomposing filth, thrown out to await the
scavengers, but whether human or elemental who might say. Only their
stench was a certain thing--horrible, indescribable, the Genie in
expansion of that rank acidity which in its condensed form inhabited
the bottled article. It rose from the gutters; from the mounds of
fœtid grape-skins piled about the inner walls; from a belated
wine-press still in use in the open streets, and revealing itself
crusted with the black scum its champings had rejected. Only here and
there, in the wider thoroughfares, or in the open _Place_, could one
escape the pursuing poison. Still we religiously _did_ our
Aigues-Mortes, though, I confess, with some failing confidence on my
part. And at last I stopped.
“The battlements, gossip!” I gasped. “The battlements--before all
illusion spends itself, and we fall stifled!”
Ah! that was another pair of shoes. We took our official pass at the
gateway--for the walls are a “_Monument Historique_”--and, mounting by
way of the Tour de Constance at the north angle, were quickly in that
atmosphere we had come to seek. Here from the summit we could first
descry the whole compact quadrilateral of the town, with its many
gates and towers, sitting, like some huge mediæval ark, on the shores
of the desolate land on which it had grounded and settled. On all
sides else were waste and water--marsh, and the long ribs of sand, and
weedy dreariness stretching to the horizon.
Well, this tower itself had its particular history; but that is for
the guidebooks. For us, in excelsis, were the long battlements, whence
one may gather one’s glorified impression of the place. High up we
wandered, and saw the whole tight little town packed, like a box of
bricks, within its walls. The odours reached not to us, but the sun
was gay so high, and it was sweet to loiter, and look down on the
cradled roofs and the almost empty streets--for the life of them had
gravitated fairwards. Once in a little garden we saw a pomegranate
tree in rosy fruit--a lovely touch of colour; and once a group of
merry girls went by, bareheaded and unadorned, fruit almost as fair.
Elsewise, it seemed, we had these deserted ramparts to ourselves, and
the view therefrom.
“But grant me still a friend in my retreat,” quoth and quoted I, “whom
I may whisper--Solitude is sweet.”
And at that instant, turning an angle, we saw the whole perspective of
battlements ahead fringed with human forms.
Fifine laughed delightfully, hearing my gasp of dismay.
“But they are bending over to look down at something,” she said. “We
_must_ go and see what it is.”
I leaned through an embrasure, straining my neck to view.
“O, don’t!” she exclaimed, pulling at my coat: “You will fall.”
“All right,” said I, recovering myself. “It is--why, Fifine, what is
the matter with you?” Her face was quite pale.
“You frightened me so,” she said. “Don’t, please, do that again.”
“Well, I will not.” I patted her shoulder, surprised and a little
touched. “One certainly has no right to take risks in a position like
mine--with a little gossip dependent on me.”
She lifted her face, with a tiny stamp of her foot.
“I tell you,” she said, “that if you were to fall, I should jump after
you.”
I looked at her a moment without answering; then I said, with a note
of huskiness in my voice which I could not quite control, “Allons,
donc, Fifine! Then it is certain I must not fall. Come; I am going to
show you a Provençal bull-fight. That is what the excitement is all
about.”
We found an unoccupied embrasure, through which we could command the
scene below. Right under the walls, on the strip of land which divided
them from the water, they had erected a frail barrier enclosing a
goodish space of ground; and within this area was enacting the game
which above all others these southerners love. And a game it is, no
more, and a manly game, calling for courage and dexterity, and without
any suggestion of the brutality which characterises the baser
business. They drive in a bull--commonly one of those, small and
black, which are especially raised for these _ferrades_, or
fêtes--having a rosette pinned between his horns; and the man who can
succeed in snatching this token wins the prize. That is all; but it
affords fair enough exercise for pluck and agility. Any one who likes
may take part in the sport: you will see some twenty or thirty engaged
in it as a rule: and the bull himself is often the most rompish member
of the party. Of course he _means_ business, but it is very seldom
that he gets the chance for a literal _stroke_ of it. Still, it is
that off-chance which constitutes the excitement; and, if he is a good
bull, he affords one a plenitude. The drawback to the thing, as an
entertainment, is the lack of colour, owing to the reason aforesaid.
These cuadrillas might, so far as their clothes go, be just a body of
ordinary young bank holiday-makers, roystering in Battersea-Park. And
perhaps it is on that account that, after a bull or two--the bouts as
a rule last only a few minutes--the novelty of the thing stales and
one has had enough of it.
Fifine was greatly excited at first, and in terror lest the beast in
one of his rushes should “get home.” “They can never go on misleading
him,” she said. “He will turn suddenly on a side-skip like that, and
have the man on his horns. O, Dieu merci! Did you see?”
“Rest happy, m’amie,” said I. “The bull will never do as you fear. And
for what reason, do you think. Why, because he charges with his eyes
shut.”
“His eyes shut?”
“Ah, yes! That is the players’ safety. If it were a cow, now, it would
be different. She would leave her tale of victims behind her, no
question; because she would keep her eyes open. A woman’s weapons are
not strength but vision. She sees very clearly what she is after, and
the best way to get it.”
“Does she indeed!” said Fifine, perking her lip at me. “And that is
only to flatter her with not being a blundering stupid.”
There was a goodish clustering of natives here, come up to view the
sport gratis, and so we walked on to regain our cherished solitude.
Long time we spent on those ramparts, utterly happy and at peace,
until hunger began to remind us of the hour.
“I have not asked you,” said Fifine, as we started to retrace our
steps, making lunchwards; “I don’t even know that I shall; I am not
sure that I want to know; I don’t know that I care----”
“Good gracious! What is it all about?”
“What your plans are--whether you propose stopping here, or going on
to--where?”
“I had meant to stay here, of course--say for a few days. We cannot
feel securer than at the world’s end.”
“O!”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Only O!”
“Now, what is in your mind? But let that pass. Supposing we go and
lunch before deciding anything further.”
There is only one Hôtel worth its title in Aigues-Mortes--that of the
St. Louis, near the little squat Place of its name. It is at best a
glorified cabaret, with quite a spacious room to feed in. We entered
this room, and the first person our eyes fell on was Carabas.
Now, I ask you, why should not M. Carabas Cabarus be free to visit
Aigues-Mortes precisely as and whenever he chose? I put the question
to avoid mistakes, and to anticipate any objections you might offer as
to his obtruding himself where he was neither wanted nor invited. He
was a wayfarer like ourselves, at perfect liberty to wander whither he
listed, and accountable in no way to whatever chance prejudices might
have been formed against him. Very well; then you will oblige me by
accepting him, as we did, with a cordiality which, if it masks any
sentiment, shall mask no sentiment of a less lively nature than
resignation.
I said “Damnation!” I think; but that was because I had run against
the corner of a table. It was an unoccupied table, and incontinently
we sat down at it; whereupon Carabas, who had not yet begun his meal,
jumped up from his place elsewhere, and came over to join us.
“Bien rencontré, Monsieur et Mademoiselle!” he said, with such an
enthusiasm of welcome that really I felt for the moment abashed. “Did
I not say there was a providence in our meeting? It is confirmed in
this reunion. I asked myself, when I heard you were gone--Whither? I
asked also the landlord. The omnibus-man, who was standing near,
answered for him. He had happened to be behind you when you took your
tickets. ‘Ah,’ thought I, ‘they will welcome a cicerone native to the
district, one who can tell them things they will not hear else--a man,
moreover, of some reputation; of insight, of a picturesque habit of
mind, maybe’--but, bah! it is no matter. To reach my destination by a
roundabout way--also, where was the objection? The advantage, rather,
since it rejoined me to comrades so amiable--and again, so seductive.
Wherefore I followed by the midday train.”
“Bon!” said I, quite cheerfully. “Only I fail to see the providence.”
“It took the shape of the omnibus-man,” said Fifine. “How stupid you
are.”
Carabas glanced at her approvingly, and at me disdainfully; and at the
moment a wan, malaria-whitened young woman, of a type common enough in
that infested district, laid on the table the hors-d’œuvre--blackened
potatoes baked, or rather unbaked, in their jackets, and a saucer of
olives.
But better was to come--to wit, after an indifferent potage, that
noblest of Provençal fish-courses, a dish of _petits-rougets_ as they
call them, small things of the mullet tribe and cooked like whitebait,
than which I could desire no sweeter satisfaction for a hungry man.
Followed a ragout of mutton, served with a mess of white beans full of
the little surprises of vegetable and fatty garnish the French know
how to introduce; and the end came in a dish of becs-fins.
Now, appetite being the absorbing consideration, I regarded little
else while I satisfied mine, listening only with my elbows, as they
say, to the mixed jargon of sentimentality, rhapsody, and unblushing
self-glorification with which Carabas, always addressing himself to my
companion, filled up the intervals between the courses. Elsewise he
was as busily occupied as the best of us--until it came to the birds.
And then I watched him with some secret amusement. I saw him glance
abstractedly at the dish, and appear as if about to help himself;
then, flashing a guilty look at Fifine, he pushed the seduction away,
with a magnificently affected air of offence.
“M. Cabarus,” I said, “what, sentimentally considered, is the
difference between a little bird and a little fish?”
“It is a matter of taste,” said he--rather well, I thought.
I laughed and leaned back. He waved his hand, as if he had dismissed a
foolish impertinence. He had early, I think, taken what he considered
my measure as a trifler and outsider. Yet I could not but wonder over
the incredible self-assurance which could thus assert itself against
all reason and policy. Surely, if his _objet_ were the sister, the
sensible thing would be to propitiate the guardian _brother_? But that
did not seem to occur to him. I was merely a tiresome obstacle in the
way to that perfect rapprochement which nature and circumstance had
decreed between him and her. They were souls affinitive, mutually
attracted, and, as such and thenceforth, discharged from all
conventional obligations. It was ludicrous, if you like; laughable to
a degree; yet, if you have observed, you will recognise that attitude
of mind, goatish and transcendental in one, as an attitude not
uncommon among Latins.
And how about Fifine’s acceptance of the implied understanding? Well,
a riddle will women always be! First I noticed, to my immense
amusement, how, after trifling a little with her birdlet, she left it
on her plate untasted. Carabas observed that too, and, you may be
sure, drew flattering conclusions from it. Moreover, it was obvious
that she was interested in him--and genuinely, for all her pretence of
secretly playing upon his foibles for my behoof. His enthusiasm, his
sentiment, his play of imagery on the subject of ancient legends, his
minute local knowledge, all attracted her; and when, lunch being
finished, she drew me aside, I knew what to expect.
“He is really very amusing, mon ami. I think we could do worse, after
all, than accept him as a guide.”
“Much worse, I am sure,” said I. “Tell him to lead on, and we will
follow.”
Nothing loth, he led on--and in that hat of hats. I just glanced at
Fifine, when he appeared in it; but she did not seem to notice.
Presently I fell behind, leaving them together, and, slipping away
unobserved, sought my own entertainment in my own way.
I re-entered the Porte de la Gardette somewhere near four o’clock, and
found the couple awaiting my appearance hard by. Fifine looked
disturbed and a little pale. She hurried to me.
“O, where _have_ you been?” she said. “We have been hunting for you
everywhere.”
“Why, to enjoy,” said I, pulling out my watch, “what you should not
have missed--the view of the town from the outside. But, if you are
ready, we must move to catch our train.”
She looked at me queerly a moment, her face working in an odd way
between question and reproach.
“Must we?” she said. “So you have made up your mind to go?”
“To Arles, yes,” I answered. “The prospect of this smell and Carabas
combined is more than I can face.”
“But he will be certain to accompany us!”
“There is room to breathe in Arles.”
“Felix, how absurd you are!”
“Honestly, m’amie,” said I gravely, “I could not take the
responsibility of recommending you this place for a stay. It was
spring when I was here before. I had not guessed its possibilities. If
you please, you must come with me--unless----” I looked significantly
at M. Carabas Cabarus, where he stood haughtily aside.
“If you dare to say another word,” said Fifine, in a low voice, “I
will never speak to you again.”