Those Arlesian days always come back to my memory with a peculiar
glow and poignancy all their own. The town itself is one of the very
fairest in the Rhone valley, beautiful in its ruins, in its situation,
in the stately picturesqueness of its people. I never think of it but
I am somehow reminded of Ariel’s song:--
“_Of his bones are coral made;_
_Those are pearls that were his eyes:_
_Nothing of him that doth fade,_
_But doth suffer a sea-change_
_Into something rich and strange._”
For in truth that very sea-change is there, dating from a time when
the city stood, like Venice, in the midst of wide lagoons, which
extended so far as the great rock of Montmajour three miles northward,
and which have since receded to leave bare the vast lonely delta of
the Camargue. Ariel and Arles! there seems even a significance in the
imperfect anagram; for does not wild music for ever haunt the place,
melodiously sounding the dirge of kings long dead, of knights and fair
ladies and courtly revels, whose iridescent dust yet clings about the
walls, or flutters in golden flakes and scales over the sunburnt
roofs.
“Into something rich and strange.” So it would appear. Its lumber is
the accumulation of rich ages--the loveliness of Greece, the pride of
Rome, the polychromatic splendour of the renaissance. All have
contributed to produce an impression which I can liken only to that
conveyed by opal, or mother-of-pearl, or long-buried glass or pottery.
I have felt the same mystery of blended colour in the sweep of
infinite downs, in the damasked glooms of Chartres cathedral, or when
standing before the great west window at Winchester, with its mad
inimitable mosaic of broken fragments, starry, kaleidoscopic,
translucent, a waste of wild-set jewels, for which I know not what
past genius was responsible, but may his perfect inspiration never
fall under the curse of the restorer. And Arles is a spectre of that
spectrum--at least so it haunts my inner vision--a town over which the
sea of ages has flowed, to leave it finally rich in a myriad tints and
corals, the infinite jetsam of time.
Perhaps association colours my view. It may very well be, for it
stands emblazoned enough in my memory, where, before walls which a
thousand years of sunshine have transmuted into gold, flits ever a
rainbow crowd of dreams and thoughts and emotions, not to be separated
from the living entities who gave them being and hospitality.
Well, I had struck for solitude, and only once more, it seemed, to be
outmanœuvred by circumstance. To Arles we were come, and so with gay
hearts to make the very best of a good thing.
To Fifine at least it was all au teint frais. She was enraptured with
the antiquities, and more, perhaps, with the modernities--the sparkle
of life, the jolly little _Place_ in which we were ensconced, the
friendly men, the stately women, with their chapelles and
cap-ribbons--now, alas, subdued, like Venetia’s gondolas, from hues
once double-dyed to sombre black--with the spirit of song and dance
which still animated this people out of the old melodious years. Very
early we went to see the sun set over the amphitheatre--a vision of
transcendent beauty. The Rondpoint was almost deserted: we halted high
up on the slope, so that our view could command, over and beyond the
vast stone cylinder whose base adapted itself to the fall of the hill,
the roofs and towers of the buildings beyond. The sun was down below
our level; but those house-tops stood up in its glow, making a vividly
intense background to the shadowy blue sweep of the arena. Their walls
were primrose, their tiles were burning vermilion; here and there a
raw advertisement stood translated into terms of jewelled gold and
azure. And overhead, in a sky green as deep water, hung a large bright
moon, already swelling to its full. There was no breath of wind to vex
the quiet of the lovely scene; and only a voice here and there,
sounding strange and unreal through the hollow silences, broke like a
ripple on the universal peace. I heard Fifine sigh--a song without
words, with which I felt in full concord and content.
I take these impressions, as they arise, without order or sequence.
Time for a brief space stood still with us, and there are no
milestones to mark his way. St. Trophime, into which one enters
through a grey façade flush with its neighbour houses--as it might be
only number so-and-so in the row--to find beyond deep caverns of
antique craftsmanship, and sombre vaulted glooms spangled with gems,
and, still further, long fretted cloisters arching away into the
inmost recesses of sunlight: the ruined theatre which, sunk in its
green oasis among the houses, gave its pagan bones to prop those very
cloisters, and yet, shattered and desolate as it stands, speaks more
eloquently of the unconquerable pride of the past than any relic I
have known elsewhere: the Aliscamps, that old, old place of
Roman-Christian sepulture, so sacred--having been consecrated by
Christ Himself in a vision--that to be buried there ensured one
salvation, for which reason the unhallowed dead, being set afloat on
rafts all up the Rhone, would drift down, the _drue de mourtalage_ in
their stiffened fingers, to find redemption at the hands of careful
watchers--all these were subjects for our curious inquisition, and
many smaller interests.
Mention of the Aliscamps, or Champs Elysées, recalls a minute
incident, which has often recurred to me since, and will again. We
were loitering down the lane of tombs--a long alley lined with thin
shrubs and trees, and before them on either side set ranks of stone
sarcophagi--when, stopping awhile to regard some prospect, as I turned
to speak to Fifine I found she was gone. She had utterly vanished; the
lane stretched both ways devoid of life; there was no trunk large
enough for her to have slipped behind to hide herself. I stood
astonished; I hunted up and down, stooping and peering; finally I
shouted her name. A little laugh answered me, and she rose from a
tomb. In a spirit of mischief she had tiptoed from me, and stretched
herself flat in a deep sarcophagus. As I brushed the dust and moss
from her clothes, I asked her what on earth had induced her to such an
insane prank. “I wanted to play at being dead,” she said; “and to
wonder how you would feel if I were.”
“A pretty thought,” I said--“only with a moral a little like that of
the frogs stoned by the boys in the fable. Don’t play such tricks
again, if you love me.”
There was just that in my voice which I could not entirely control.
She put an impulsive hand on my arm, looked as if about to answer me
in kind, but withdrew it without a word.
One whole morning we devoted to a visit to St. Gilles, that town of
one considerable church and fifty considerable smells; another to a
trip to Montmajour, tramping the three miles to the latter on foot,
for the day was pleasant and we were wayfarers after all. There is a
little light railway (of whose vagaries more anon), running over the
plain, and we had designed to return by that; but after, having left
the ruins, we had discovered the _halte_--a task of some difficulty,
for it consisted of nothing more than a casual bench in a field by the
side of the single line track--and had waited there for our train some
three quarters of an hour beyond its scheduled time, we decided that
we would rather foot it back than risk the loss of lunch, and so
started off--only, of course, to espy the abominable thing approaching
when we were just too far away to make a successful return run for it.
However, the morning was worth its labour.
It is a ruin to remember among the most striking of its kind, that of
the vast shattered Abbey crowning its mighty crag, which rises
abruptly from the plain, lonely and austere, like an inland Mont St.
Michel. It was surrounded by water once, and could be reached only by
boat--a meet and mighty sentinel to command the approaches to that
great stone-hewn city of the rocks, les Baux, which can just be
descried, some nine miles north-east, fretting the low clouds with its
hundred jagged splinters. And yet, whatever strategic advantages it
might appear to possess, this Montmajour had to wait, it seems, for a
soldier of Christ to realise and turn them to account. For it was
hither clomb Trophimus--disciple of Paul and first teacher of
Christianity in the Roman Prefecture of Arles, or Arelate--to excavate
on the height his little chapel of the rocks with its confessional and
cell, and there make converts, who, according to tradition, flocked to
him in such numbers as to leave him scarce leisure for grace or meat.
It is a curious little burrow that chapel, and yet, with its single
cell--the protoplast from which all the vast superincumbent fabric of
the Abbey was to develop itself--by far the most impressive corner of
the ruins. There still may be seen, shelving upwards from the back of
the tiny follicle, the narrow fissure in the rock through which
Trophimus scuttled into hiding like a rabbit, what time the Cæsarean
soldiers were on his track. We had not the enterprise to climb and
slither the way he went; but no doubt, in the deep dead silence of
that retreat, we might have distinguished the throb of a Saint’s
heart-beats still haunting its dark recesses. The waste pomp and
circumstance of the Titanic remains above made no appeal to the
imagination like that of the little underground chapel, on whose
credit and interest they rested.
So those days return to me, full of the sunshine of both heart and
climate. We were lucky in our weather from first to last, never
tasting but in fitful spasms the curse of that mistral which dries the
kindly marrow in men’s bones. They were days to remember; yet not
altogether in the unbroken sequence in which I have recorded them.
They came and passed; but there were interludes, while still the sun
shone, of a moral atmosphere less satisfying. And again Carabas was
the cause.
He had soon reappeared, that most persistent and uncrushable of
troubadours. He could not believe in the reality of his
cold-shouldering; but, like some other people I have met, seemed to
think that it was only one’s imperfect realisation of his attractions
which prevented one’s complete enslavement by them. To know him was
the one necessity: the rest _must_ ensue thereon. So he haunted us--in
the streets, in the hotel vestibule, at our table in the
salle-à-manger--which, by the way, looked out straight on a little
shop in the Rue de Palais, whose windows, full of bric-à-brac, silver
tea-strainers, and old embroidered cap ribbons, were a perpetual
apéritif to me. He would interrogate us volubly from his place at the
long board, enquiring of our sight-seeing, and condescending thereon
from the height of his superior knowledge; sometimes he would come
over and talk, but always addressing Fifine through me, with shrewd
sidelong glances to note the impression his eloquence was making on
her. For myself, I met his advances genially enough; I had no quarrel
with the man, and his unshakable self-sufficiency was a pure joy to
me. But with Fifine it was different. She was as cold and distant to
him as the north. I have known a single awkwardness in a man lose him
the wife he coveted--turn the balance of her wavering mind from liking
to contempt; so, I supposed, that one little solecism of a too smug
self-confidence had dished M. Carabas’s chances for him.
Good sooth, I pitied the creature: he was so patently perplexed,
distressed, at a loss to understand what could have so suddenly turned
against him this charming stranger, on the strength of whose tender
condescension he had been flattering in himself God knows what dreams
of romantic achievement. Certainly Fifine was very ungrateful, seeing
the use she had allowed herself to make of his sudden infatuation. I
told her so one day, and she wanted to know why.
“One ought not to accept gifts,” I said, “and then snub the giver.”
“Gifts!” she exclaimed.
“Yes, certainly,” I answered. “What are his fables, his imagery, his
storied eloquence but the highest gifts a genius can bestow on his
fellows? They are as much his exclusive property as diamonds would be,
and in accepting them you laid yourself under as great an obligation
as if you had accepted a costly necklace from him.”
She laughed a little; then looked grave.
“I think, do you know, Felix,” she said, “that you are rather stupid.”
“Very likely I am,” I answered; “but why?”
“Not to see,” she began--and stopped. Then suddenly she went on: “I
thought anyhow I was considering you in adopting this attitude.”
“In that case,” I said, “please to consider me a gentleman.”
“And the moral of that is,” she said, “that my treatment of M. Cabarus
proves me to be not a lady.”
“I never dreamt of implying such a thing, or of thinking it.”
“Well, anyhow I am not a lady in the sense that you are a gentleman. I
accept presents from strangers and then snub them. Very well. I cannot
return M. Cabarus his magnificent gifts, but I can at least return him
what he, I am sure, thinks much more important--his magnificent
attentions. You shall see.”
“Nonsense,” I answered; but she was as good as her word, and
thenceforth Carabas, restored to her smiles and graces, was like a
soul renewed, strutting in a seventh heaven of confidence and
gratified vanity. I had asked Fifine for a breeze, and she had
answered womanlike with a gale, with the result that the fellow was
blown up to an inordinate figure of pride--of bounce, I might say, in
that inflated connection. He assumed a sort of amative proprietorship
over my companion, while he tolerated rather than patronised me. And
I was the one cold-shouldered now, Fifine seeming to relish that
fatuous devotion the more, the more she was besieged by it.
So, I might congratulate myself, were things obligingly accommodating
themselves to the exact end I had in view; and, better still, it was
now plain to me that my apprehensions as to the state of the young
lady’s feelings had been wholly without justification. It was all, in
fact, as it should be and as I would have it, I told myself; and,
though it might appear characteristically feminine to forget sober
services such as mine in the intoxication wrought of a flattering
pursuit, I was not going to make a sex squabble of the matter. Woman’s
capacity for absorbing flummery was notoriously beyond man’s gauging,
and if in that respect quality counted for anything, it was merely the
quality which could untiringly repeat itself. And there, I was sure,
Carabas was infinitely my superior: his resources in the way of
picturesque lip-homage were no doubt inexhaustible. So altogether I
resolved to take advantage of the opening the gods had given me to
shake free of a possible embarrassment. I would let it appear that I
felt not the slightest resentment over the young woman’s behaviour, or
assumed to myself the least authority over, or personal concern in,
her preferences. And then, of course, I was quite satisfied in my mind
and happy.
But, before this state of things came wholly to pass--and it was a
matter of some days’ growth--the poor troubadour had to run his
gauntlet, erst-mentioned, of bitter snubs and mortifications. I really
commiserated him, as I have said, in his dole, which nevertheless he
persisted in courting with the most unblenching stoicism. In these sad
hours he even showed towards me a certain spirit of propitiation,
though never to the extent of seeming to allow me the least of
proprietary interests in the object of his adoration. He regarded me
rather as the thorn in the wilderness, which, troublesome in itself,
had yet acquired a sort of spurious importance through its connexion
with the rose of his desire. Once or twice, when Fifine was not by, we
exchanged amenities of a sort; and once I was actually bold enough to
question him on a detail of his tenderer confidences.
“That was a pretty legend,” I said, “you told Mademoiselle Dane.”
“Which legend, Monsieur?” he answered, pricking up his ears at the
name.
“That of Bérard and Briande Sans-fleur.”
“Ah!” he said, “I can charm a skeleton into life; from a little seed I
can produce a fruitful vine. That is to be what I am. Into the alembic
of this mind one puts a pinch of dust; and, lo! I return it to him, a
golden nugget. Mademoiselle was transported?”
“She liked it anyhow, well enough to tell it me again. Only one point
she failed over--Bérard’s song.”
“She would fail,” he said; “but not from want of appreciation. It
moved her?”
“I daresay it did.”
“Ah! its music sleeps in the whorls and dimples of that little ear, as
the voice of old seas haunts the shell; but from the ear to the lips
is a journey impossible to most--even to lips so sweetly eloquent as
hers. Yet I fain would hear that honeysuckle strive to repeat its
lesson of the sun and dew, however brokenly--” he sighed
dismally--“but it is not for me.”
“The legend,” I said, “stands therefore incomplete so far as I am
concerned. Will you not do me the favour, Monsieur, to supply the
broken link?”
“You wish for the song?”
“Assuredly, if you will be so good.”
“It was extempore--but that is nothing.” He looked at me--there is no
other word for it but balefully. “You wish, no doubt,” he said, “to
snigger in your sleeve over what you will be pleased to call the
meretricious rhapsodies of an improvisatore? It will certainly be more
sound than sense, you think, taking refuge from reason under a
professed imaginativeness. So are some built, impervious to the
spirituality underlying all things, blind to what they cannot see,
deaf to what they cannot hear. I tell you, Monsieur, that those who
are for ever questioning the truth of literature are incapable of
understanding the truth of life.”
He seemed almost in a passion. It was positively petrifying.
“I am quite at a loss, Monsieur,” I said, “for the reason of this
jeremiad, or to understand how it is justified by anything I said. I
am certainly no captious critic of either life or literature, and as
to Imagination, I try myself to be her humble minister. But leave the
song by all means unrepeated. The loss, being mine, need not trouble
you.”
He was really a little ashamed of himself, I think; though he would
not admit it.
“No, Monsieur,” he said, gnawing his knuckles--“no. In justice to
myself and the completeness of my art I will gratify you. Listen,
then: it went somewhat this way.”
He chaunted rather than spoke the lines, lyric interspersed with
prose, a song of the fashion called in Provençal “_Cansounetto émé
parla_.” I do not attempt to reproduce the verse, which was quite
picturesque and musical. Its sense was more or less as follows:--
“I followed Beauty as the shadow of a flying bird across the sward. It
seemed to wing and settle; and, lo! as I ran to grasp it, it was but a
shadow, the shadow of a song that rose into the sky. Quivering it
rose, and the shadow quivered to its ecstasy. And as both wing and
voice receded up the heights, so did their shadow pale and die from
out the grass. Only the shadow of a shadow remained to vex my heart.
“Like the flowers of the _saladelle_ were my love’s eyes. It was in
the chill of winter they gave their blue heaven to my soul. Returning
from the long harvest, in summer I resought them, and behold! they
were red to me. There is no truth in mortal beauty.
“I followed Beauty in a lonely place; and one, staying me, asked
whither. ‘I follow a maid,’ I said. ‘Quick,’ he answered, ‘or you will
never find her.’
“O, elusive is that golden quarry! Headlong we rush over the brink of
death, and are still pursuing it. I met a sage, who laughed and said,
‘It is the blind side of the eye you set to externals. Will mortals
never understand that? The other side it is that sees the truth. Hunt
inwards, fool, where Truth and Beauty hide from you secure and
unsuspected.’
“Lady, I have never doubted him till now.”
Such was the substance of the song which Bérard, or Carabas, sang to
Briande, or Fifine. It was marked by the sort of mystic symbolism
characteristic of the old-time cantefable and the rather vague
rhapsodies of the early troubadours, and, if really first uttered
impromptu, vindicated something of the singer’s claim to a genuine
inheritance. At the end I said:--
“That was a fine improvisation, Monsieur. I congratulate myself on the
favour bestowed on me.”
“You have perhaps reason to,” answered the poet loftily--and did you
ever know the like of that for vanity?
It was to prove the sole favour of its kind, however; for thereafter
soon came to pass the creature’s re-establishment in Fifine’s good
graces, and my consequent second cold-shouldering by the two. That was
to be, I suppose, though without any question of preordination, in
which I don’t believe. Chance governs the world, and life is a long
chapter of unforeseen accidents. In this case, no doubt, Destiny, bent
to a particular purpose, seized on the first instrument at hand to
effect it. It is the way of Destiny, whom the vulgar call Haphazard.
He hears the hour strike, and straight he catches at any chance
weapon--it may be a fly in the milk-jug to choke a Pope withal, an
avalanche to crush an infant, a piece of orange-peel cast down to
throw a giant. On that supposition, and that supposition alone, could
Carabas’s unasked and monstrous intrusion into our privacy be
accounted for. It is true he was a blunt instrument; but then, as no
particular harm was intended, he served to do his work perhaps better
than another and a sharper.
One morning I said to Fifine:--
“I propose for myself a day at Les Saintes Maries. Do you wish to
come?”
“Why not?” she answered quietly.
“Very well,” I said. “Only, from a purely personal point of view, I am
bound to make a stipulation--that M. Cabarus does not form one of our
party.”
“If he chooses to come,” said Fifine, “how can I possibly prevent
him?”
“I must leave that to you, m’amie.”
“But that is unfair, Felix--” She broke off, her face flushed, and she
made as if to leave me, but altered her mind and turned again. “I have
no right whatever to dictate to him as to his movements. Felix”--she
put a hesitating hand on my arm--“you said you would take me there.”
There was a look of hurt in her face, and of something more--an
emotion I could not fathom; but it helped me back to instant sanity.
The perversity of my attitude struck me all at once as being in the
last degree ridiculous, and it behoved me to hasten to amend it if I
would not lose all faith in myself as a reasonable and consistent
being. How could Fifine, a child sixteen years my junior, be expected
to hold herself the exclusive property of a companion so sober and
mature, or to waive on my behoof her perfectly natural instincts for
coquetry and flirtation? The thing was harmless; and moreover
agreeable to my plans. I uttered a clearing laugh.
“What a dog in the manger you must think me!” I said. “Never mind what
I stipulated. Ask him to come, if you like.”
“But I never said I did like,” she answered. “Cannot we give him the
slip somehow, and get to the station without his knowing?”
And that is what we did; though it meant a pretty panic run in the
open, the little Gare de la Camargue lying across the river, with the
whole stretch of the iron suspension bridge between. However, we
reached it and got off undetected, and were quickly on our way again
into the wilderness.
And here, indeed, was the real thing--no case of those half measures
we had known on the Aigues-Mortes route, which takes one only along
the civilised edge of the Camargue. This hour and a half’s run in the
dancing and reeling little train, which winds up its iron thread of
leagues across the very mid-loneliness of the delta, is a far wilder
experience, more melancholy, more desolate, and at the same time
infinitely fuller of the mystery which inhabits desolations. It is
common to hear strange voices, to catch glimpses of strange faces, on
hills or in wooded solitudes; but the spirits that peer and flit on
lonely wastes are no less in certain evidence because we neither see
nor hear them. Only we know that beyond this bent or that, peering
through the reeds on the pool’s rim, or watching our receding
footsteps from behind some bush we have just passed, is something
which would not be there if we went to look. Here we learn the story
that there is in far horizons: there is no end to its sadness; nor to
its sweetness nor hope. And the sky is one vast iridescent dome, like
a bubble floating on water, with the flat earth for its floor; and,
underneath, what unfathomable secrets!
But I am encroaching on Carabas’s preserves, and must decline from
rhapsody to commonplace. The prosaic fact is that the light railway
from Arles to Les Saintes Maries bisects, roughly, the Camargue, and
that the most of one’s journey by it is made through a monotonous and
unpeopled solitude. It is a very impressive solitude, for those who
can appreciate the charm of league-wide isolation from an overcrowded
world, and its outstanding features are such as we should expect it to
display, the natural offspring of primeval incoherence and
desolation--the booming bittern; the mournful curlew; flamingoes
(though we were too late to see them), silently trailing their
lengths, like whisps of rosy sunset, against a pearly sky, and
bill-clapping frog-eating cranes. Reeds are its prominent growth,
with, everywhere, unending thickets of tamarisk and juniper; and
water, in ponds, in pools, in the little irrigating canals which they
call _roubines_, blots the surface eternally. Now and again a clump of
silver poplars, or of that most beautiful of its family the
umbrella-pine, will rise to trance the austerity with its lovelier
mood; but they are rare benedictions. For the most part one seems to
travel on the near-barren margin between Life and Death--and so to the
symbol and expression of it all, the solitary fortress-church on the
edge of the sea.
That is where God and man have closed to try conclusions--power mortal
and power immortal locked in one embrace. It is the quaintest,
loneliest church in the world--a temple and a stronghold in one. Long,
narrow, and crowned with battlements, its crest was lifted to defy
what its heart was opened to cherish, the spirit of Christian love and
forbearance. There, above, its wardens bristled for the fight, while
below slept in eternal peace the bones of those who had inherited
direct from the Saviour His lessons of charity and forgiveness. You
may see at this day the casket which is said to contain them. It is
lowered periodically by machinery, from a chamber above the altar, for
the worship of pilgrims. And there is even an odder worship connected
with the place--that of Sarah, the Egyptian, who, according to
tradition, accompanied the three Marys hither as their servant. She is
buried, so it is reported, in the crypt chapel, a deep and darksome
cavern excavated underneath the chancel, to which, on a certain day in
October, flock from all quarters crowds of gypsies, to pay homage at
the shrine of their ancestress.
The whole church is a picture of isolation without and gloom within.
It is barely lighted by its few narrow windows; its little lamps are
mere glow-worms in a vast concavity; there it stands by the salt sea,
solemn and forgotten, like the scapegoat of all religion. It has a
village about it, a little village, by now the smallest debris of its
past estate. Still it has its great days--and I was thankful we had
not alighted on one of them. It was hugely more impressive as it
stood.
Fifine was disappointed in it. She could by no means bring herself to
associate this forlorn relic with Briande’s tender pilgrimage. And the
presbytery, when we found it, did not fit in with the poet’s
description at all. It was an illusion laid, I fear, though I did what
I could to claim for romantic licence its prerogatives. But the
bitterest moment came with the discovery in the good curé himself of
the shrewdest of caterers in the matter of picture-postcards, crosses,
medals, and other such local baits for the curious or the pious, with
which his office was stocked. An original charter of King Réné,
which he produced for our benefit, did little to mend the
disenchantment, so interminably and so drily did he drawl over it,
while we were suffering to escape. The day, I felt, was a failure.
We were no longer good gossips--that, I think, was the truth of it.
There had come something between us, which Fifine was too proud, and I
too diplomatic, to own. The fact is a grievance cannot be patched, and
there was a grievance here unconfessed. It had to be admitted and
pulled to pieces before anything could be affected in the way of an
understanding. So, though we were nominally on the usual terms, it was
really the false coin of comradeship we were interchanging. We
pretended sympathetic goodfellowship, and what was only perfectly
obvious was the pretence.
We had brought our lunch with us and eaten it in the train. More than
an hour remained to us after we had finished with the curé, and it
passed slowly, though it had been killed merrily enough under the old
circumstances. There was nothing whatever of interest in the place
beyond the church, and we loitered aimlessly in the direction of
nowhere. I am sure we both sighed our relief when the time came to
return to the station.
In the train, while Fifine pretended to sleep, I sat chewing the cud
of injurious reflection. “She is comparing her day,” I thought, “with
what it might have been had that fulsome yarn-slinging impostor
accompanied us. I think, on the whole, and under the circumstances,
she might have endured me more benignly. But I suppose it is
impossible to woman to yield a point graciously, and without at least
some negative nagging in the shape of a self-sacrificial,
smiling-martyrdom pose.” And that led me to launch out in mental
eulogy of the spacious vision which sees at once when all that it is
necessary to say has been said--the broad mind which omits to dwell on
little grievances, but can show all forbearance and accept all excuses
within the royal compass of its catholicity--until it suddenly
occurred to me that, while on the subject, I had better perhaps extend
the limits of my own vision. And at that I was able to laugh at
myself, if a little ruefully, and to re-utter the now rather mechanic
formula that everything was working as it should, and as I had the
best of reasons in the world for wishing that it should.
We did not reach our hotel until near seven o’clock, and there, of
course, was Carabas, seated smoking a disconsolate cigarette on one of
the two benches placed on either side the steps. His hat sat on his
head like a penwiper; he was lounging at rest, when, seeing us, he
heaved himself forward; but the weight of his poetic bow-window
carried him back again, and he had to make a second attempt, which
brought him to his feet with a stagger and his hat over one eye. Once
on his legs, however, his face assumed a mixed expression of relief
and plaintive upbraiding.
“Ah, Mademoiselle!” he said, taking possession of my companion; “but
this has been a desolate day for some of us.”
“Et d’autre part,” says Miss, with a naughty smile, “for some of us, a
very bright one. You should have come to Les Saintes Maries de la Mer,
where the sun shone all day in the sky and in our hearts.”
He drooped his head, protruded his lower lip, and regarded her from
the top of his eyeballs. It was designed for an expression of despair,
and was quite sweetly laughable.
“Les Saintes Maries!” he whispered hoarsely. “There is a stab,
Mademoiselle, in your every word. I should have come? Ah, truly! But
by what instinct, seeing I was kept uninformed of your intentions? But
doubtless that was deliberate, and in order to keep me from
interposing my shadow between the sun and your happiness. It is well;
then. And yet it is possible my company might have proved not
altogether profitless. It is a desert spot, which yet the Magician’s
wand can make to flower. Truly, Mademoiselle, I think you did
perversely in discarding your most attached cicerone.”
I laughed, and ran up the steps, leaving Fifine to make her peace as
she chose with her injured follower.