CHAPTER XIII
The sight of Joanna froze Paragot into momentary sobriety. He stood rigid for a few seconds and then swayed into a chair by one of the tables and sat with his head in his hands. I went up to Joanna.
"He can't come to-night, Madame."
"Why not?"
"He is not fit."
As she realised my meaning a look of great pain and repulsion passed over her face.
"But he must come. Perhaps he will be better presently. You will accompany us and help me, Mr. Asticot, won't you?"
As usual the frost melted from her eyes and her voice—the silvery English voice—went to my heart. I bent over Paragot and whispered.
"Take her from this pigstye and the sight of the hog," muttered Paragot. His hands were clenched in a mighty effort to concentrate his wits. Joanna approached and touched him on the shoulder.
"Gaston."
Suddenly he relaxed his grip and broke into a stupid laugh.
"Very well. What does it matter? Sorry haven't got—velveteen suit."
"What does he say?" she asked turning to me.
"That he will come, Madame," said I.
Hercule aided me to frog-march him out of the café and across the pavement to the waiting carriage. Joanna took her seat by his side and I sat opposite. Hercule shut the carriage door and we drove off. Paragot relapsed into stupor.
"I don't know how to ask you to forgive me, Mr. Asticot, for keeping you out of your bed at this time of night," said Joanna. "But I am very friendless here in Paris."
We went along the Boul' Mich' by the quais to the Pont de la Concorde, crossed the vast and now silent expanse of the Place de la Concorde and, going by the Rue Royale and the long dull Boulevard Malesherbes and the Boulevard Haussmann, entered the Avenue de Messine. It is a long drive under the most cheerful circumstances; but at one o'clock in the morning in the company of the dearest thing in the world to me half drunk, and the dear lady whom he worshipped horrified and disgusted at the thought thereof, it seemed interminable. At last we arrived at No. 7. At my ring the door swung open drawn by the concierge within. I helped Paragot out of the carriage. He made a desperate effort to stand and walk steadily. Heaven knows how he managed to clamber with not too great indecency up the stairs to the Comte de Verneuil's flat on the first floor. Joanna opened the door with her latch key and we entered a softly-lit drawing room.
"Let me sit down," said Paragot. "I shall be better presently."
He sank an ashamed heap on a sofa by the wall, and with his fingers through his long black hair fought for mastery over his intoxication. The Comtesse de Verneuil left us and presently returned, having taken off her hat and evening wrap. She brought a little silver tray with Madeira wine and biscuits.
"We need something, Mr. Asticot," she said graciously.
We drank the wine and sat down to wait for Paragot's recovery. Although it was late May, a wood fire glowed beneath the great chimney-piece. This made of blue and white ware with corbels of cherubs caught my attention. I had seen things like it in the stately museums of Italy.
"But this is Della Robbia," I exclaimed.
She smiled, somewhat surprised. "You are a connoisseur as well as a philosopher, Mr. Asticot? Yes, it is Della Robbia. The Comte de Verneuil is a great collector."
Then for the first time I looked about the room, and I caught my breath as I realised its wealth and luxury. For a time I forgot Paragot, lost in a dream of Florentine tapestries, priceless cabinets, porcelain, silver, pictures, richly toned rugs, chairs with rhythmic lines, all softened into harmonious mystery by the shaded light of the lamps. At the end of a further room just visible through the looped curtains a great piece of statuary gleamed white. I had never entered such a room in my life before. My master had taken me through the show apartments of great houses and palaces, but they were uninhabited, wanted the human touch. It had not occurred to me that men and women could have such wonder as their daily environment, or could invest it with the indefinable charm of intimacy. I turned and looked at Joanna as she sat by the Della Robbia chimney-piece, gracious and distinguished, and Joanna became merged in the Countess de Verneuil, the great lady, as far removed from me as my little bare attic from this treasure house of luxury. She wore the room, so to speak, as I wore the attic. Overcome by sudden timidity I could barely reply to her remarks.
She was in no mood for conversation, poor lady; so there dropped upon us a dead silence, during which she stared frozenly into the fire while I, afraid to move, occupied the time by storing in my memory every bewitching detail of her dress and person. The oil sketch of her I made a day or two afterwards hangs before me as I write these lines. I prided myself on having caught the colour of her hair—black with the blue reflections like the blue of cigarette smoke.
Suddenly the quietness was startled by loud groans of agony and unintelligible speech coming from some room of the flat. Paragot staggered noisily to his feet, a shaking, hairy, dishevelled spectre, blinking glazed eyes.
Madame de Verneuil started and leaned forward, her hands on the arms of her chair.
"My husband," she whispered, and for a few seconds we all listened to the unearthly sounds. Then she rose and turned to me.
"You had better see it through."
She crossed to Paragot.
"Are you better now?"
"I can do what is required of me," said my master, humbly, though in his ordinary voice. He was practically sober.
"Then come," said Joanna.
We followed her out of the room, through softly carpeted corridors full of pictures and statues and beautiful vases, and entered a dimly lit bedroom. A nurse rose from a chair by the bed, where lay a bald-headed, beaky-nosed man groaning and raving in some terrible madness. Joanna gripped my arm as Paragot went to the bedside.
"I am Gaston de Nérac," said he.
The Comte de Verneuil raised himself on his elbow and looked at him in a wild way. I too should have liked to grip someone's arm, for the sight of the man sent a shudder through me, but I braced myself up under the consoling idea that I was protecting Joanna.
"You are not dead then? I did not kill you?" said the Comte de Verneuil.
"No, since I am here to tell you that I am alive."
The sweat poured off the man's face. He lay back exhausted.
"I do not know why," he gasped, "but I thought I had killed you." He closed his eyes.
"That is enough," said the nurse.
Without a word, we all returned to the drawing-room. It was an astounding comedy.
"I am grateful," said Joanna to my master. "I wish there were some means of repaying you."
"I thought," said he, with a touch of irony which she did not notice, "that it was I who was paying for a wrong I did you."
She drew herself up and surveyed him from head to foot, with a little air of disdain.
"I forget," she said icily, "that you ever did me any wrong."
"And I can't," said he; "I wish to heaven I could. You beheld me to-night in the process of trying—an unedifying sight for Madame la Comtesse de Verneuil."
"An unedifying sight for anybody," said Joanna.
He bowed his head. Something pathetic in his attitude touched her. She was a tender-hearted woman. Her hand caught his sleeve.
"Gaston, why have you come down to this? You of all men?"
"Because I am the one poor fool of all poor fools who takes life seriously."
Joanna sighed. "I can't understand you."
"Is there any necessity?"
"You belong to a time when one wanted to understand everything. Now nothing much matters. But curiously in your case the desire has returned."
"You understood me well enough to be sure that when you wanted me I would be at your service."
"I don't know," she said. "It was a desperate resort to save my husband's reason. Oh, come," she cried, moving to the chairs by the fire, "let us sit and talk for five minutes. The other times you came and went and we scarcely spoke a word. Besides," with a forced laugh, "it would not have been convenable. Now Mr. Asticot is here as chaperon. It doesn't seem like real life, does it, that you and I should be here? It is like some grotesque dream in which all sorts of incoherences are mixed up together. Don't you at least find it interesting?"
"As interesting as toothache," replied Paragot.
"If it is pain for you to talk to me, Gaston, I will not detain you," said Joanna, rising from her chair.
"Forgive me," said he; "I suppose my manners have gone with the rest. You may help me to recover them if you allow me to talk to you."
He passed his hand wearily over his face, which during the last minute or two had been overspread by a queer pallor. He looked ghastly.
"Tell me," said he, "why you come to that boozing-ken of a place? A note would reach me and I would obey."
She explained that there was no time for letter-writing. The Comte's attacks came on suddenly at night. To soothe him it was necessary to find the chief actor in the absurd comedy at once, at any cost to her reputation. Besides, what did it matter? The only person who knew of her escapade was the coachman, an old family servant of the Comte, as discreet as death.
"How long have these attacks been going on?" asked my master.
Joanna poured out her story with the pathetic eagerness of a woman who has kept hateful secrets in her heart too long and at last finds a human soul in whom she can confide. I think she almost forgot my presence, for I sat modestly apart, separated from them by the wide cone of light cast by the shaded lamp.
The first symptoms of mental derangement, she said, had manifested themselves two years ago. They had gradually increased in frequency and intensity. During the interval the Comte de Verneuil went about the world a sane man. The attacks, as she had explained, came on suddenly, always at night, and his fixed idea was that he had killed Gaston de Nérac. Before Paragot had appeared they lasted two or three days, till they spent themselves leaving the patient in great bodily prostration. When she had met me taking the Spring outside the Hôtel Bristol, a wild idea had entered her head that the confrontation of the Comte with the living Gaston de Nérac might end his madness. On the occasion of the next attack she had rushed in eager search for Paragot, had brought him to the raving bedside, and the result had been magical. She had thought the cure permanent; but a fortnight later the attack returned, as it had returned again and again, and as it had returned to-night.
"It is charitable of you to have come, Gaston," she said, in her sweet way, "and I must ask you to forgive me for anything unkind I may have said."
He made some reply in a low voice which I did not hear, and for a little time their talk was pitched in the same tone. I began to grow sleepy. I aroused myself with a jerk to hear Joanna say,
"Why did you play that detestable tune from 'Orphée aux Enfers'?"
"To see if you would recognise it. Some mocking devil prompted me. It was the last tune you and I heard together—the night of our engagement party. The band played it in the garden."
"Don't—don't!" exclaimed Joanna, putting up her hands to her face.
This then was why each had cried out at Aix-les-Bains against the merry little tune. It was interesting. I saw however that it must have jangled horribly on tense nerves.
She dashed away her hands suddenly and strained her face towards him.
"Why, Gaston—why did you?"
He rose with a deprecating gesture and there was a hunted look in his eyes. During all this strange scene he was no longer Paragot, my master, but Gaston de Nérac whom I did not know. His wild, picturesque speech, his dear vagabond manner had gone. The haggardness of some desperate illness changed his features and I grew frightened. I came to his side.
"Master—we must take a cab. Have you any money?"
"Yes," he said faintly, "let us go home."
"But you are ill! You look as white as a ghost!" cried Joanna, in alarm.
"I had a dinner of herbs—in the liquid form of absinthe," said my master with a clutch at Paragot. "How does it go? Better a dinner of herbs where love is——"
"Ah! Monsieur has not yet gone," said the nurse, hurrying into the room. "Monsieur le Comte begs me to give this to Monsieur."
She held out a letter.
"Monsieur le Comte made me open his despatch box, Madame," she added apologetically.
She left the room. Paragot stood twirling the letter between his fingers. Joanna bade him open it. It might be something important Paragot drew from the envelope half a sheet of note-paper. He looked at it, made a staggering step to the door and fell sprawling prone upon the carpet.
Joanna uttered a little cry of fright, and, as I did, cast herself on her knees beside him. He had fainted. Abstinence from food, drink, his tremendous effort of will towards sobriety, the strain of the interview, had brought him to the verge of the precipice, and it only required the shock of the letter to send him toppling over. We propped his head on cushions and loosened his collar.
"What can we do?" gasped my dear lady.
"I will call the nurse from Monsieur le Comte's room," said I.
"She will know," said Joanna hopefully.
I went to the Comte's room, opened the door and beckoned to the nurse. She gave a glance at her sleeping patient and joined me in the corridor. On my explanation she brought water and sal-volatile and returned with me to the drawing-room. It was a night of stupefying surprises. The quartier would have called it abracadabrant and they would not have been far wrong. There was necromancy in the air. I felt it, as I followed the nurse across the threshold. I anticipated something odd, some grotesque development. In the atmosphere of those I loved in those days I was as sensitive as a barometer.
Paragot lay still as death, his wild hairy head on the satin cushions, but Joanna was crouching on her knees in the midst of the cone of light cast by the shaded lamp, reading, with parted lips and blanched face, the half sheet of note-paper. As we entered she turned and looked at me and her eyes were frozen hard blue. The nurse bent over by my master's side.
Joanna stretched out her arms full length towards me.
"Read," she cried, and her voice was harsh with no silvery tone in it at all. I took the paper wonderingly from her fingers.
Why she should have shown it to me, the wretched little pasty-faced gutter-bred art student, I could not conceive for many of the after years during which I wrestled with the head- and heart-splitting perplexities of women. But experience has taught me that human beings, of whichever sex they may be, will do amazing things in times of spiritual upheaval. I have known the primmest of vicar's churchwardens curse like a coal-heaver when a new incumbent chose in his stead a less prim man than he.
I was just a human entity, I suppose, who had strayed into the sacred and intimate sphere of her life—the only one perhaps in the world who had done so. She was stricken to the soul. Instinct compelled my sharing of her pain.
She commanded me to read. I was only nineteen. Had she commanded me to drink up eisel or eat a crocodile, I would have done it. I read.
The address of the letter was Eaton Square: the date, the 20th of June thirteen years before. The wording as follows:—
"In consideration of the sum of Ten thousand pounds I the undersigned Gaston de Nérac promise and undertake from this moment not to hold any communication by word or writing with Miss Joanna Rushworth for the space of two years—that is to say until midnight of the 20th June 18—. Should however Miss Joanna Rushworth be married in the meantime, I solemnly undertake on my honour as a gentleman not of my own free will to hold any communication with her whatever as long as I live, or should circumstances force us to meet, not to acquaint her in any way with the terms of this agreement, whereof I hold myself bound by the spirit as well as by the letter. Gaston de Nérac."
My young and unpractised mind required some minutes to realise the meaning of this precious agreement. When it had done so I stared blankly at Joanna.
The nurse in her businesslike fashion drew the curtains and flung the French windows wide open.
"He has only fainted. He will soon come round."
She returned to Paragot's side. Joanna and I remained staring at each other. She rose, took me by the sleeve and dragged me to the fireplace.
"The writing is my husband's," she said in a whisper. "The signature is his," pointing to Paragot. "He sold me to my husband for ten thousand pounds on the evening of our engagement party. What am I to do? I haven't a friend in this hateful country."
I longed to tell her she had at least one friend, but as I could neither help nor advise her I said nothing.
"No wonder he has a banking account," she said with a bitter laugh. I noticed then that a strained woman's humour is unpleasant. She sat down. The corners of her kind lips quivered.
"The world is turned upside down," she said piteously. "There is no love, honour or loyalty in it. I felt this evening as if I could forgive him; but now—" She rose and wrung her hands and exclaimed sharply, "Oh, it's hateful, it's hateful for men to be so base!"
That it was a base action to sell Joanna for any sum of money, however bewildering in largeness, I could not deny. But that Paragot should have been guilty of it I would not have believed had the accusation come from Joanna's own lips. The confounded scrap of paper, however, was proof. Therein he had pledged himself to give up Joanna for ten thousand pounds, and the scaly-headed vulture had paid the money. I turned away sadly and went to help the nurse minister to my master.
He opened his eyes and whispered that I must fetch a cab.
"Or a dung-cart," he added, characteristically.
Glad of action I went out into the long quiet avenue and after five minutes' walk hailed a passing fiacre. The nurse admitted me when I rang the bell. I found Paragot sitting on the sofa by the wall, and Joanna where I had left her, by the Della Robbia chimney-piece. Apparently they had not had a very companionable five minutes. He rose as I entered.
"I thought you were never coming," said he. "Let us go."
"I must say good-bye to Madame."
"Be quick about it," he whispered.
I crossed the room to Joanna's chair and made a French bow according to my instruction in manners.
"Good night, Madame."
She held out her hand to me—such a delicate soft little hand, but quite cold and nerveless.
"Good night, Mr. Asticot. I am sorry our friendship has been so short."
I joined Paragot. He said from where he stood by the door:—
"Good night, Madame la Comtesse."
She made no reply. Instinctively both of us lingered a second on the threshold, filling our eyes with the beauty and luxury that were all part and parcel of Joanna, and as the door closed behind us we felt like two bad angels turned out of Paradise.
CHAPTER XIV
I came across him the next afternoon sitting on a stone bench in the Luxembourg Gardens. His hat was slouched forward over his eyes. His hand supported his chin so that his long straggling beard protruded in a curious Egyptian horizontality. His ill-laced boots innocent as usual of blacking, for he would not allow Blanquette to touch them, were stuck out ostentatiously, and to the peril of the near passers-by. He had never during our acquaintance manifested any sense of the dandified; on our travels he had worn the casual, unnoticeable dress of the peasant, save when he had masqueraded in the pearl-buttoned velveteens; in London a swaggering air of braggadocio had set off his Bohemian garb: but never had the demoralised disreputability of Paragot struck me until I saw him in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Everything else wore a startlingly fresh appearance, after the heavy rains. The gravel walk had the prim neatness of a Peter de Hoogh garden path. The white balustrades and flights of steps around the great circle, the statuary and the fountains in the middle lake, flashed pure. The enormous white caps of nurses, their gay silk streamers fluttering behind them, the white-clad children, the light summer dresses of women; the patches of white newspaper held by other loungers on the seats; a dazzling bit of cirro-cumulus scudding across the clear Paris sky; the pale dome of the Panthéon rising to the East; the background of the Luxembourg itself in which one was only conscious of the high lights on the long bold cornices; all set the key of the picture and gave it symphonic value. The eye rejected everything but the whites and the pearl greys, subordinating all other tones to its impression of fantastic purity.
And there like an ink blot splashed on the picture, sat Paragot. The very foulest odd-volume of Montesquieu's "Esprit des Lois" which could be picked up on the quays lay unopened on his knee. Not until Narcisse, who was sleeping at his feet, jumped up and barked a welcome around me did Paragot notice my approach. He held out his hand, and the finger-nails seemed longer and dirtier than ever. He drew me down to the seat beside him.
"You were asleep when I ran in this morning, Master," said I apologetically, for it was the first time I had seen him that day.
"Since then I have been thinking, my little Asticot. It is a vain occupation for a May afternoon, and it makes your head ache. I should be much better employed carting manure for Madame Dubosc. We earned two francs. Do you remember?"
"I remember that my back ached terribly afterwards," said I laughing.
"Ah, but the ease and comfort in your soul! Perhaps there's nothing much the matter with yours yet, is there?"
"I think it's all right," I answered.
"Something must be wrong with mine," he remarked meditatively, "because at a crisis in my life I haven't had an inspiration. It is sluggish. I want a soul pill."
This time it was I who had an inspiration—one of terrifying audacity.
"Master, perhaps absinthe isn't good for it," said I all in a breath.
"Infant Solomon," replied Paragot ironically, "where have you gathered such a store of wisdom? Have you a scrap of paper in your pocket?"
"Yes, Master," said I, producing a sketch-book and preparing to tear out a leaf. He stopped my hand.
"Leave it in. All the better. As I am sure you don't remember the passage from Cicero's De Natura Deorum which I quoted to you some time ago, since you are unacquainted with the Latin tongue, I will dictate it to you, and you can learn it by heart and say it like a Pater or an Ave morning and evening."
I wrote down at his dictation the passage concerning the impossibility of judging between the false and true. And that is how I was able to set it down in its proper place in a previous chapter.
"Do you know why I have made you do this?"
"Yes, Master," said I, for I knew that he referred to the sale of Joanna for ten thousand pounds.
"Circumstance flattens a man out sometimes," said he, "like a ribbon—as if he had been carefully ironed by a hot steam roller. I suppose a flattened man can't have an inspiration. I am my own tomb-stone and you can chalk across me 'Hic jacet qui olim Paragotus fuit.'"
His tone was so dejected that I felt a sinking at my heart, a scratchiness in my nose and a wateriness in my eyes. I suffered the pangs of suppressed sympathy. What could a boy of nineteen say or do in order to restore rotundity to a flattened hero?
"Years ago," he continued after a pause, "I found the world a Lie and I started off to chase the wild goose of Truth. I captured nothing but a taste for alcohol which brought me eventually beneath the steam roller. Were it not the silliest legend invented by man, I should say to you 'Beware of the steam roller.' But if a man's sober he can see the thing himself; if he isn't, he can't read the warning. I can only tell you to be unalcoholic and you'll be happy. You see, my little son Asticot, to what depths I have descended in that I can be the Apostle of the Platitudinous."
He leaned forward, chin on knuckles, and his beard again stuck out horizontally. Happy people passed us by. For many the work of the day was already over and they had the lingering magic of the sunshine for their own. A young blue-bloused workman and a girl hanging on his arm brushed close by our seat.
"Si, nous aurons des enfants, et de beaux enfants," she cried.
"I hope they will," said Paragot, looking at them wistfully. Then after a pause: "Has the Comtesse de Verneuil any children?"
"No, Master," said I in a tone of conviction. It struck me later that I had spoken from blank ignorance. But at the moment the question seemed preposterous. In many ways I had still the unreasoning instincts of a child. Because I had never contemplated my dear lady Joanna in the light of a mother, I unhesitatingly proclaimed her childless. As a matter of fact I was right.
Paragot, satisfied with my reply, watched the endless stream of cheerful folk. Once he quoted to himself:—
"'The golden foot of May is on the flowers'—and on the heads of all but me."
Suddenly he sat back and seized me by the arm.
"Asticot, you are a man now, and you must see things with the eyes of a man. I have loved you like my son—if you should turn away, thinking evil things of me, like someone else, it would break my heart. Neither she nor you ought to have seen that accursed paper. You and Blanquette and the dog are all I have in the world to care for, and I want you all to think well of me."
Then the tears did spring into my eyes, for my beloved master's appeal went home to that which was truest and best in me. I stammered out something, I know not what; but it came from my heart. It pleased him. He jumped to his feet in his old impetuous way.
"Bravo, petit Asticot de mon cœur! The nightmare is over, and we can enjoy the sunshine again. We will drag Blanquette from the Rue des Saladiers which does not lay itself out for jollity, and we will dine at a reckless restaurant. Blanquette shall eat the snails which she adores and I shall eat pig's feet and you an underdone beefsteak to nourish your little body. And we shall all eat with our dinner 'le pain bénit de la gaîté.'"
He strode off eager as usual to put his idea into immediate execution. He talked all the way to the Rue des Saladiers. Poor Blanquette! He had been neglecting her. A girl of her age needed some amusement; we would go to the Théâtre, the Porte Saint-Martin, like good bourgeois, and see a melodrama so that Blanquette could weep.
"They are playing 'Les Eventreurs de Paris.' I hear they rip each other up on the stage and everybody is reeking with blood—good honest red blood—carried in bladders under their costumes, my son. You turn up what you can of your snub little superior artistic nose—but Blanquette will be in Paradise."
Blanquette was in the slip of a kitchen and a flurried temper when we entered.
"But, Master, you said you would not be home for dinner. There is nothing in the house—only this which I was cooking for myself," and she dived her fork into the pot and brought up on the prongs a diminutive piece of beef. "And now you and Asticot demand dinner, as if dinners came out of the pot of their own accord. Ah men! They are always like that."
I put my arm round her waist. "We are all dining out together, Blanquette; but if you don't want to come, you shall stay at home."
"And without dinner," said Paragot, taking the fork from her hand and throwing the meat to Narcisse.
"Ah, mais non!" cried Blanquette, whose sense of economy was outraged. But when Narcisse sprang on the beef and finding it too hot, lay growling at it until it should cool, she broke out laughing.
"After all, it would have been very tough," she admitted.
"Then why in the sacred name of shoe leather were you going to eat it?" asked Paragot.
"Food is to be eaten, not thrown away, Master," she replied sententiously.
We took the omnibus and crossed the river and went up the Grands Boulevards, an unusual excursion for Paragot who kept obstinately to the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the poorer streets of the quartier, through fear, I believe, of meeting friends of former days. A restaurant outside the Porte Saint-Martin provided a succulent meal. The place was crowded. Two young soldiers sat at our table, and listened awe-stricken to Paragot's conversation and were prodigiously polite to Blanquette, who, they discovered, was from Normandy, like themselves. And when they asked, after the frank manner of their kind, which of us had the honour to be the lover of Mademoiselle, and she cried with scarlet face, "But neither, Monsieur!" we all shouted together and laughed and became the best friends in the world. Happy country of fraternity! The little soldiers—they were dragoons and wore helmets too big for them and long horsehair plumes—accompanied us with clanking sabres to the gallery of the theatre, and at Paragot's invitation sat one on each side of Blanquette, who, what with the unaccustomed bloodshed of the spectacle and the gallantry of her neighbours, passed an evening of delirious happiness. In those days I had an æsthetic soul above the 'Eventreurs de Paris,' and I made fun of it to Paragot, whose thoughts were far away. When I perceived this, I kept my withering sarcasm to myself, and realised that a flattened man cannot be blown like a bladder into permanent rotundity even by the faith and affection of a little art-student. But I marvelled all the more at his gaiety during the intervals, when we all went outside into the thronged boulevard and drank bocks on the terrace of the café, and I learned how great a factor in the continued existence of humanity is the Will-to-Laugh, which I think the German philosopher has omitted from his system.
I mention this incident to show how Paragot defied the effects of the steam roller and became outwardly himself again. He did not visit the Café Delphine that night, but went soberly home with Blanquette, and I believe read himself to sleep with his tattered odd volume of Montesquieu. The following evening however found him in his usual seat under the lee of Madame Boin's counter, arguing on art, literature and philosophy and consuming a vast quantity of ill-assorted alcohols. And then his life resumed its normal course.
It was about this time that Madame Boin seeing in Paragot an attractive adjunct to her establishment and, with a Frenchwoman's business instinct, desiring to make it permanent, paralysed him by an offer of marriage.
"Madame," said he, as soon as he had recovered, "if I accepted the great honour which you propose, you would doubtless require me to abandon certain personal habits which are dear to me, and also to trim my hair and beard and cut my finger-nails of whose fantastic length I am inordinately proud."
"I think I should ask you to cut your nails," said Madame Boin reflectively.
"Then, Madame," said Paragot, "it would be impossible. Shorn of these adornments I should lose the power of conversation and I should be a helpless and useless Samson on your hands."
"I don't see what long nails have to do with talking," argued Madame Boin.
"They give one the necessary thirst," replied Paragot.
"My son," said he when relating to me this adventure, "do not cultivate a habit of affability towards widows of the lower middle classes. There was once a murderer's widow of Prague—"
"I know," said I.
"How?"
"There was an old stocking."
"I forgot," said he, and his laughing face darkened and I saw that he fell to thinking of Joanna.
Although much of my leisure was absorbed by the companionship of my beloved Master and Blanquette, I yet had an individual life of my own. I made dozens of acquaintances and one or two friends. I had not a care in the world. Bisard, the great man attached to the life school in Janot's atelier, proclaimed me one of the best of my year, and sent my heart leaping sky-high. I worked early and late. I also played the fool as (worse luck) only boyhood can. With my fellows, arm in arm through the streets, I shouted imbecile songs. I went to all kinds of reprehensible places—to the bals du quartier, for instance, where we danced with simple-minded damsels who thought choucroute garnie a generous supper and a bottle of vin cacheté as setting the seal of all that was most distinguished upon the host. With the first five francs that I made by selling a drawing I treated Fanchette, the little model I kissed on the stairs, to a trip to Saint-Cloud. Five francs went prodigiously far in those days. They had to, as some of us were desperately poor and could afford but one meal a day. Fortunate youth that I was, whenever money ran short, instead of borrowing or starving, I had only to climb to Blanquette and open my mouth like a young bird and she filled it with nice fat things. Poor sandalled Cazalet of the yellow hair, on the other hand, lived sometimes for a week on dry bread and water. It was partly his own fault; for had he chosen to make saleable drawings he too might have had five francs wherewith to take Fanchette to Saint-Cloud. Pretty little Pierrettes in frills and pointed caps are more attractive to the cheap purchaser than ugly souls writhing in torment; and really they are quite as artistic. We quarrelled fiercely over this one day, and he challenged me to a duel. I replied that I had no money to buy pistols. Neither had he, he retorted, but I could borrow a sabre. He himself had one. His father had been an officer. Whereupon the studio bawled in gleeful unison "Voici le sabre, le sabre de mon père," and dragged us in tumult to the Café opposite where we swore eternal friendship over grogs américains.
From this I do not mean you to infer that I was a devil of a fellow, the mention of whose name spread a hush over godly families. God wot! I did little harm. I only ate what Murger calls "the Blessed bread of gaiety," the food of youth. Remember, too, it was the first time in my life that I had companions of my own age. Indeed, so nearly had I modelled myself on Paragot the ever young, that my comrades laughed at my old fashioned ideas, and I found myself hopelessly behind the times. Youth hops an inch sideways and thinks it has leaped a mile ahead. All is vanity, even youth.
'Tis a pleasant vanity though, on which the wise smile with regretful indulgence; and therein lay the wisdom of Paragot.
"Ah! confounded little cock-sparrow—I haven't seen you for a week," he said one morning, shaking me by the shoulders till my teeth chattered. "What about the other little sparrow you neglected me for on Sunday? Is she at least good-looking? A model? And she is a good girl and supports her widowed mother and ten brothers and sisters, I suppose? And she calls herself Fanchette? Narcisse, the lady of Monsieur Asticot's affections has the singular name of Fanchette."
Whereupon Narcisse uncurled himself from slumber and planted himself on his hindquarters in front of me and grinned at me with lolling tongue.
"But she is quite a different kind of girl from all the other models!" I cried eagerly.
"What does she pose for?"
"Well—of course—you know how it is—" I stammered, reddening.
Paragot laughed and quoted something in Latin about an ingenuous boy.
"Would she be a fit companion for Blanquette and Narcisse and myself?"
Having deep convictions as to the essential virtues of Fanchette, I swore that she could not disgrace so respectable a company.
"We will all picnic together in the woods of Fontainebleau on Sunday," said he.
We picnic-ed. Fanchette had no shynesses. She found Paragot peculiarly diverting, and though I enjoyed the day prodigiously, I realised afterwards that I had spent most of it in the company of Blanquette.
"My son," said he, "there never was a model so like all the other models that have posed for the well-of-course-you-know-how-it-is, since the world began."
A week later, when I found my particular friend Ewing, whom as a tongue-tied Englishman I had relieved of many embarrassments, and for whom I had secured an easel, branding it myself in twenty places with his name, and for whom I had engineered a good position next to mine in the Life School—when I saw Ewing hugging Fanchette on the stairs, on the very landing sacred to my embraces, I knew that Paragot was right, and that Fanchette was just a fickle, naughty little model like the others. But if Paragot had not taken her measure before my eyes at Fontainebleau and made a figured drawing so to speak of her heart and soul, shewing their exiguous dimensions, I might have cast myself beneath the wheels of an omnibus like the pig Népomucène, or blacked the eyes of Ewing who was smaller than myself. As it was, I put my hands in my trousers' pockets and surveyed the abashed couple in Paragot's best manner.
"Amuse yourselves well, my children," I laughed, in French, and turned away heart-whole.
This is an instance of the wisdom of Paragot. He smiled on the vanity of my youth, and personally conducted me to the barrenness whither it led. In this particular case the result was more positive still. Ewing in admiration of my magnanimity at the time, and a fortnight later of my profound knowledge of women—for he in his turn witnessed the alien osculations of Fanchette—cultivated my friendship to the extent of urging me to spend some of the summer recess at his father's country vicarage in Somerset.
"But you'll have to get some other togs," said he, eyeing my attire dubiously. "If you come like that to church on Sunday, my governor would forget and want to baptise you. He was once a missionary, you know."
When I mentioned the invitation, Paragot insisted on acceptance.
"The Latin Quarter confers an exuberance of tone which conflicts with the reposeful ideal of manners required in the beau monde which I destined you to grace when I took you from the maternal soapsuds. You will find an English Parsonage exerts a repressive influence. But for Heaven's sake don't fall in love with Ewing's eldest sister, who, I am sure, is addicted to piety and good works. She will try to make a good work of you and thus all my labour will have been in vain."
In his heart, however, I believe he was immensely proud at having trained me to meet gentlefolk on more or less equal terms. Ewing's invitation was a tribute to himself. To fit me for church on Sunday and other functions of civilisation he took Ewing (as counsellor) and myself to a tailor's and plunged enthusiastically into the details of my outfit. I can see him now, shaggy and shabby, fingering stuffs with the anxious solicitude of a woman at a draper's counter.
"That's a nice country suiting. It expresses its purpose, suggests the right gaiety of mood. What says Arbiter elegantiarum?"
"Don't you think it might make the cart-horses shy?" says Ewing, and Paragot drops reluctantly the thunder-and-lightning check that has seized his unaccustomed fancy.
My wardrobe included a dress suit.
At Paragot's bidding, I donned it when it arrived, and on my way to him transfixed the Rue des Saladiers with awe and wonder. Upstairs, Paragot twirled me slowly round as if I were a mannequin on a pivot, and called Blanquette to admire, and uttered strange oaths in the dozen languages of which he was master. Was I not beautiful?
Blanquette admitted that I was. All that was most beautiful; without a doubt. I resembled the stylish people who went to expensive funerals. In fact, she added with a sigh, I was too beautiful.
She saw her brother Asticot transfigured into the resplendent gentleman beyond her sphere, and sighed womanlike at my apotheosis. She could no longer walk by my side, bareheaded, in the streets. The dress suit was a symbol of change detested by woman. She gave the matter however her practical attention.
"He ought to have patent-leather shoes," she observed.
"That's true," said Paragot, pulling his beard reflectively. "Ewing should have mentioned it; but I have noticed a singular lack of universality in the sons of English clergymen."
"And now my son," said he on the eve of my departure, "I too have the nostalgia of green fields and the smell of hay and manure and the fresh earth after rain. I have at last an inspiration. As this confounded ankle will not let me walk, I shall hire a donkey and let him take me whither he will. Narcisse shall accompany me."
"And Blanquette, will she trudge beside the donkey?"
"I have arranged for Blanquette to go into villégiatura at the farm of La Haye."
"With Monsieur and Madame Dubosc?"
"Your logical faculty does you credit, my son. They are most excellent people, although they could not tell me how many towers the Cathedral of Chartres possessed. You will remember an excursion we made on Sunday, and I lectured learnedly on the archæology of the fabric. My learning impressed them less than my skill in curing a pig according to a Dalmatian recipe. They will board and lodge Blanquette for ten francs a week and she will be as happy as Marie Antoinette while haymaking at the Petit Trianon. She will occupy herself with geese and turkeys while I shall be riding my donkey."
"Master," said I, "I only have one fear. You will adopt that donkey and bring it to live in the Rue des Saladiers."
Paragot laughed, drained his glass of absinthe and ordered another.
CHAPTER XV
Thus the three of us were again separated. Blanquette was enjoying herself amongst the pigs and ducks of La Haye, whence she wrote letters in which her joy in country things mingled with anxiety as to the neglected condition of the Master; I led a pleasant but somewhat nervous life in Somersetshire, spending hours in vain attempts to reconcile the cosmic views of Paragot and an English vicar, and learning sometimes with hot humiliation the correctitudes of English country vicarage behaviour; and Paragot, his long legs dangling on each side of his donkey, rode, as I thought, picturesquely vagrant, through the leafy byways of France.
A fortnight after my arrival, however, he informed me by letter of his resolve to stay in Paris. He had failed to find an ass of the true vagabond character. The ideal ass he sought should be a companion as well as a means of locomotion. He would not take an urban donkey into the country against its will. To force any creature, man, woman, or ass, out of the groove of its temperament were a crime of which he could not be guilty. Then, again, Narcisse did not enter into the spirit of the pilgrimage. He laid his head along his forepaws and glowered sullenly instead of barking with enthusiasm. Again, when he announced his intention of leaving Paris, Hercule groaned aloud and Madame Boin wept so profusely that sitting beneath her counter he had to put up a borrowed umbrella. Cazalet too, and a few others too poor for railway fares, were staying in town. Also the Café Delphine had spoiled him for the horrible alcohols of wayside cafés. And, lastly, what did it matter where the body found itself so long as the soul had its serene habitations?
The letter depressed me. I was beginning to see Paragot with the eyes of a man. I felt that this inability to carry out an inspiration was a sign of decay. The springs of action had weakened. Though the spirit thirsted for sweet things, habit chained him to the squalor of the Café Delphine. When the quiet Somersetshire household knelt around the drawing-room for evening prayers, I speculated on the stage of intoxication at which my lonely master had arrived.
I was a million miles from speculating on what was really happening, and when I received a curt uncharacteristic note from Paragot a fortnight later begging me to return to Paris at once, a day or two before the formal expiry of my visit, it only occurred to me that he might be ill.
The crowded train steamed into the Gare Saint-Lazare at half past seven in the morning. I was desperately anxious to get to Paragot, and bag in hand I stood with a sickening feeling of suspense by the open door, waiting for the train to slow down. I sprang out. In an instant the line of porters were odd dots of blue in the throng that swarmed out of the carriages. I became a mere ant in the heap, and struggled with the others towards the barrier. After giving up my ticket, I set down my bag to rest my strained arm for a minute, and looked around me. Then I noticed a stranger approaching whose smiling face had an air of uncanny familiarity. Where had I seen the long gaunt man before? He wore a silk hat and a frock coat. My acquaintance with silk-hatted gentlemen in Paris was limited. I picked up my bag.
"Ah! My little Asticot," cried the stranger. "How good it is to see you."
I dropped my bag. I dropped my jaw. I would have dropped my brains had they been loose. This cadaverous image of respectability was Paragot—but a Paragot transmogrified beyond recognition even by me. His hair was cropped short. His face was clean shaven. On his transfigured head shone a flat brimmed silk hat. He wore a villainously fitting frock coat buttoned across his chest, with long wrinkly creases stretching horizontally from each button. His hands were encased in lemon coloured gloves a size too large for him. When he extended his hand even my bewilderment did not blind me to the half-inch of flat dead tips to the fingers. Beneath his arm was an umbrella—on a broiling August morning! He wore spats—in mid-summer! His trousers were fawn coloured. I could only gape at him as he wrung me by the hand.
"You are surprised, my son."
"I did not expect you to meet my train, Master," said I.
"If one could anticipate all the happenings of life it would lose its fascination. My son, go your way and do your duty, but believe in the unexpected."
"But what has happened?" I asked, again surveying his ill-fitting glory.
"The Comte de Verneuil is dead," he answered.
"Are you going to his funeral?"
"In these?" he cried holding up the lemon kids, "and this cravat?"
I noticed that he wore a floppy purple tie adorned with yellow spots, outside the lapels of his coat. It required more than two glances to take in all his detail.
"Besides," he added, "my distinguished patient was buried a fortnight ago."
He looked at me with an amused smile, enjoying my mystification like a child.
"You didn't know me."
"No, Master." I rubbed my eyes. "In fact I scarcely recognise you now."
"That is because I am again Gaston de Nérac," said he magnificently.
I had an idea that he must have come into the family fortune. But what had the death of the Comte de Verneuil to do with it? I picked up my bag again and walked with him to the exit. The hurrying crowd of passengers by my train and of clerks and work-people pouring from suburban platforms rendered conversation impossible.
At the station gates Paragot stood and watched the brisk life that swarmed up and down the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue du Havre. Paris awakens a couple of hours earlier than London. Clerks hurried by with flat leather portfolios under their arms. Servants trotted to market, or homewards, with the end of a long golden loaf protruding from their baskets. Work-girls sped by in all directions. Omnibuses lumbered along as at midday. Before the great cafés opposite, the tables were already set out on the terrace and the awnings lowered, and white-aproned waiters stood expectant. The whole scene was bathed in the gay morning sunshine.
"It is good to be alive, Asticot," said my master. "It is good to be in Paris. It is good to get up early. It is good to see the world's work beginning. It is also good to feel infernally hungry and to have the means of satisfying one's desires. But as, in the absence of Blanquette, my establishment is disorganised, I think we had better have our breakfast at a crêmerie than in the Rue des Saladiers. We can talk over our coffee."
I accompanied him across the street in a muddled condition of intellect, casting sidelong glances at him from time to time, as if to assure myself that he was real. Having just come from an English environment where the niceties of costume were as rigidly observed as the niceties of religion, I could not help marvelling at Paragot's attire. He looked like a tenth-rate French provincial actor made up to represent a duke, and in a country where none but actors and footmen are clean-shaven this likeness was the more accentuated. Also the difference between Paragot hairy and bearded and Paragot in his present callow state was that between an old unbroken hazel nut and its bald, shrivelled kernel.
We entered the crêmerie, sat down and ordered our coffee and crisp horse-shoe loaves. I think the petit déjeuner at a crêmerie is one of the most daintily served meals in France. The morning dew glistens so freshly on the butter, the fringed napkin is so spotless, the wide-mouthed cups offer themselves so delicately generous. If everyone breakfasted there crime would cease. No man could hatch a day's iniquity amid such influences.
When we were half-way through, Paragot unbuttoned his frock coat and took from his pocket a black-edged letter which he flourished before my eyes. It was then that I noticed, to my great surprise, that he had cut his finger-nails. I thought of Madame Boin.
"It is from the Comtesse de Verneuil, and it gives you the word of the enigma."
"Yes, Master," said I, eyeing the letter.
"Confess, my little Asticot," he laughed, "that you are dying of curiosity."
"You would tell me," said I, "that it was no death for a gentleman."
"You have a way of repeating my unsaid epigrams which delights me," said he, throwing the letter on the table. "Read it."
I read as follows: