AWEEK passed and Fortinbras did not come. Corinna wrote to him. He replied: “Have patience, cultivate Martin’s sense of humour and make Félise give you lessons in domestic economy. The cook might instruct you in the various processes whereby eggs are rendered edible and you might also learn how to launder clothes without disaster to flesh or linen. I am afraid you are wasting your time. Remember you’re not like Martin who needs this rest to get his soul into proper condition. I will come whither my heart draws me—for I yearn to see my little Félise—as soon as I am allowed to do so by my manifold avocations and responsibilities.”
Corinna, in a fury, handed the letter to Martin and asked him what he thought of it. He replied that, in his opinion, Fortinbras gave excellent advice. Corinna declared Fortinbras to be an overbearing and sarcastic pig and rated Martin for standing by and seeing her insulted.
“You gave him five francs for putting you on the road to happiness,” he replied. “He has done his best, and seems to keep on doing it—without extra charge. I think you ought to be grateful. His suggestions are full of sense.”
“Confound his suggestions,” cried Corinna.
“I think our friend Bigourdin would be pleased if you followed them.”
“I don’t see what our friend Bigourdin has to do with it.”
“He would give you all the help he could. A Frenchman likes a woman to know how to do things.”
“I won’t wash clothes,” said Corinna defiantly.
“You might rise superior to a brand of soap,” retorted Martin.
She turned her back on him and went her way. His gross sense of humour required no cultivation. It was a poisonous weed. And what did he mean by dragging in Bigourdin? She would never speak to Martin again, after his disgraceful innuendo. It took the flavour from the sympathetic relations that had been set up between her host and herself during the past week. A twinge of conscience exacerbated her anger against Martin. She certainly had encouraged Bigourdin to fuller professions of friendship than is usual between landlord and guest. The fresh flowers he had laid by her plate at every meal she wore in her dress. Only the night before she had ever so delicately hinted that Martin was capable of visiting the Café de l’Univers without a bear-leader, and the huge and poetical man had sat with her in the moonlight and in terms of picturesque philosophy had exposed to her the barren loneliness of his soul. She had enjoyed the evening prodigiously, and was looking forward to other evenings equally exhilarating. Now Martin had spoiled it all. She called Martin names that would have shocked Mrs. Hastings and caused her father to mention her specially during family prayers.
Then she defended herself proudly. Who was there to talk to in that Nowhere of a place? The conversation of Félise stimulated as much as that of a ten-year-old child. Martin she had sucked dry as a bone during their seven weeks companionship. He of course could hob-nob with men at the café. He also had picked up a curious assortment of acquaintance, male and female in the town, and had acquired a knack of conversing with them. A day or two ago she had come upon him in one of the rock dwellings discussing politics with a desperate villain who worked in the freestone quarries, while the frowsy mistress of the house lavished on him smiles and the horrible grey wine of the country which he drank out of a bowl. She, Corinna, had no café; nor could she find anything in common with desperadoes of quarrymen and their frowsy wives; to enter their houses savoured of district visiting, a philanthropic practice which she abhorred with all the abhorrence of a parson’s rebellious daughter. Where was she to look for satisfying human intercourse? She knew enough of the French middle-class manners and customs to be aware that she might live in Brant?me a thousand years before one lady would call on her—a mere question of social code as to which she had no cause for resentment. But she craved the stimulus, the give-and-take of talk, such as had been her daily food in Paris for the last three years. Huge, not at all commonplace, but somewhat of an enigma, Bigourdin lumbered on to her horizon. His first-hand knowledge of men and things was confined to Brant?me and Lyons. But with that knowledge he had pierced deep and wide. He had read little but astonishingly. He had a grasp of European, even of English internal affairs that disconcerted Corinna, who airily set out to expound to him the elements of world politics. Two phases of French poetry formed an essential factor of his intellectual life—the Fifteenth Century Amorists, and the later romanticists. He could quote Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Théodore de Banville by the mile. When stirred he had in his voice disquieting tones. He recited the “Chanson de Fortunio” and the “Chanson de Barberine” in the moonlight, and Corinna caught her breath and felt a shiver down her spine. It was a new sensation for Corinna to feel shivers down her spine at the sound of a man’s voice.
Mais j’aime trop pour que je die
???Qui j’ose aimer,
 
Et je veux mourir pour ma mie
???Sans la nommer.
She went to bed with the words singing in her ears like music.
Altogether it was much more comforting to talk to Bigourdin than to take lessons in household management from Félise.
At last the day came when she plucked up courage and demanded of Martin an account of his stewardship. He tried to evade the task by flourishing in her face a bundle of notes. They had heaps, said he, to go on with. But Corinna pressed her enquiry with feminine insistence. Had he kept any memoranda of expenditure? Of course methodical Martin had done so. Where was it? Reluctantly he drew a soiled note book from his pocket and side by side at a little table on the verandah, her fair hair brushing his dark cheek, they added up the figures and apportioned and divided and eventually struck the balance. Corinna was one franc seventy-five centimes in Martin’s debt. She had not one penny in the world. She had one franc seventy-five centimes less than nothing. She rose white-lipped.
“You ought to have told me.”
“Why?” asked Martin. “There’s plenty of money in the common stock.”
“There never was any such thing as a common stock.”
“I thought there was,” said Martin. “I thought we had arranged it with Fortinbras. Anyhow, there’s one now.”
“There isn’t,” she cried indignantly. “Do you suppose I’m going to live on your money? What kind of a girl do you take me for?”
“An unconventional one,” said Martin.
“But not dishonourable. To assert my freedom and live by myself in Paris and run about France alone with you may be unconventional. But for a girl to accept support from a man when—when she gives him nothing in return—is a different thing altogether.”
They argued for some time, and at the end of the argument neither was convinced. She upbraided. Martin ought to have struck a daily balance. He continued to put forward the plea of the common stock to which she had apparently given her tacit agreement.
“Well, well,” said Martin at last, “there’s no dishonour in a loan. You can give me an I.O.U. That’s a legal document.”
“But how do you suppose I am ever going to pay you?”
“That, my dear Corinna,” said he, “is a matter which doesn’t interest me in the least.”
She turned on him furiously. “Do you know what you are? Would you like me to tell you? You’re the most utterly selfish man in the wide, wide world.”
She flung away through the empty salle-à-manger, and left Martin questioning the eternal hills of the Limousin. “I offer,” said he, in effect, “to share my last penny, in all honour and comradeship, with a young person of the opposite sex whom I have always treated with the utmost delicacy, who is absolutely nothing to me, who would scoff at the idea of marrying me and whom I would no more think of marrying than a Fifth of November box of fireworks, who has heaped on me all sorts of contumelious epithets—I offer, I repeat, to divide my last crust with her, and she calls me selfish. Eternal hills, resolve the problem.” But the hills enfolded themselves majestically in their autumn purple and deigned no answer to the little questionings of man.
Unsuccessful he strolled through the dining-room and vestibule and at the hotel entrance came upon the ramshackle hotel omnibus and the grey, raw-boned omnibus horse standing unattended and forlorn. To pass the time the latter shivered occasionally in order to jingle the bells on his collar and scatter the magenta fly-whisk hung between his eyes. Martin went up and patted his soft muzzle and put to him the riddle. But the old horse, who naturally thought that these overtures heralded a supply of bodily sustenance, and, in good faith, had essayed an expectant nibble, at last jerked his head indignantly and refused to concern himself with such insane speculation. Martin was struck by the indifferent attitude of hills and horses towards the queer vagaries of the human female.
Then from the doorway sallied forth a flushed Corinna booted and spurred for adventure. I need not tell you that a woman’s boots and spurs are on her head and not on her feet. Corinna wore the little hat with the defiant pheasant feather which she had not put on since her last night in Paris. A spot of red burned angrily on each cheek. Martin accustomed to ask: “Where are you going?” was on the point of putting the mechanical question when he was checked by one of her hard glances. Obviously she would have nothing to do with him. She passed him by and walked down the hill at a brisk pace. Martin watched her retreating figure until a turn in the road hid it from his view and then retiring into the house, went up to his room and buried himself in Montaigne, to which genial author, it may be remembered, he had been recommended by Fortinbras.
They did not meet till dinner, when she greeted him, all smiles. She apologised for wayward temper and graciously offered, should she need money, to accept a small loan for a short period. What her errand had been when she set forth in her defiant hat she did not inform him. He shrewdly surmised she had gone to the Postes et Télégraphes in the town; but he was within a million miles of guessing that she had despatched a telegram to Bordeaux.
The meal begun under these fair auspices was enlivened by a final act of depravity on the part of the deboshed waiter, Polydore. He had of late given more than usual dissatisfaction, to the point of being replaced by the chambermaid and Félise when fashionable motordom halted at the H?tel des Grottes. Once Martin himself, beholding through the terrasse doorway Félise struggling around a large party of belated and hungry Americans, came to her assistance and lent an amused hand. The guests taking him for a deputy landlord, explained their needs in bad French. Félise thanked him in blushing confusion, while Bigourdin, as he had done a hundred times before, gave a week’s notice to Polydore, who, acting scullion, was breaking plates and dishes with drunken persistency. And now the truth is out as regards Polydore. With the sins of sloth, ignorance, and uncleanliness he combined the sin of drunkenness. Polydore was nearly always fuddled. Yet because of the ties of blood, the foster-sisterdom of respective grandmothers, Bigourdin had submitted to his inefficiency. Once more he revoked the edict of dismissal. Once more Polydore kept sober for a few days. Then once more he backslided. And he backslided irretrievably this night at dinner.
All went fairly well at first. It was a slack night. Only three commis-voyageurs sat at the long table, and thus there were only seven persons on whom to attend. It is true that his eye was somewhat glazed and his hand somewhat unsteady; but under the awful searchlight of Bigourdin’s glance, he nerved himself to his task. Soup and fish had been served satisfactorily; then came a long, long wait. Presently Polydore reeled in. As he passed by Bigourdin’s table he held up the finger of a dirty hand bound with a dripping bloody rag.
“Pardon, je me suis coupé le doigt,” he announced thickly and made a bee-line to Corinna, with the ostensible purpose of removing her plate. But just as he reached her, the extra dram that he must have taken to fortify himself against the shock of his wound, took full effect. He staggered, and in order to save himself clutched wildly at Corinna, leaving on her bare neck his disgusting sanguine imprint. She uttered a sharp cry and simultaneously Bigourdin uttered a roar and, rushing across the room, in a second had picked up the unhappy varlet in his giant arms.
“Ah, cochon!”—he called him the most dreadful names, shaking him as Alice shook the Red Queen. “En voilà la fin! I will teach you to dare to spread your infamous blood. I will break your bones. I will crush your skull, so that you’ll never set foot here again. Ah! triple cochon!”
A flaming picture of gigantic wrath, he swept with him to the door, whence he hurled him bodily forth. There was a dull thud. And that, as far as the three commercial travellers (standing agape with their napkins at their throats), Corinna, Martin, Félise and Bigourdin were concerned, was the end of Polydore. Bigourdin, with an agility surprising in so huge a man, was in an instant by Corinna’s side with finger bowl full of water and a clean napkin.
“Mademoiselle, that such a bestial personage should have dared to soil your purity with his uncleanness makes me mad, makes me capable of assassinating him. Permit me to remove his abominable contamination.”
“Let me do it, mon oncle,” said Félise, who had run across.
But Bigourdin waved her aside, and with reverent touch, as though she were a goddess, he cleansed Corinna. She underwent the operation in her cool way and when it was over smiled her thanks at Bigourdin.
“Mademoiselle Corinna,” he cried, “what can I say to you? What can I do for you? How can I repair such an outrage as you have suffered in my house? You only have to command and everything I have is yours. Command—insist—ordain.” He spread his arms wide, an agony of appeal in his eyes.
Martin, who had started to his feet, in order to save Corinna from the grip of the intoxicated Polydore, but had been anticipated by the impetuous rush of Bigourdin, gazed for a moment or two at his host and then gasped, as his vision pierced into the huge man’s soul. This perfervid declaration was not the good innkeeper’s apology for a waiter’s disgusting behaviour. It was the blazing indignation of a real man at the desecration inflicted by another on the body of the woman he loved. A shiver of comprehension of things he had never comprehended before swept through Martin from head to foot. He knew with absolute knowledge that should she rise and, with a nod of her head, invite Bigourdin to follow her to the verandah, she could be mistress absolute of Bigourdin’s destiny. He held his breath, for the first time in his dull life conscious of the meaning of love of women, conscious of eternal drama. He looked at Corinna smiling with ironic curl of lip up at the impassioned man. And he had an almost physical feeling within him as though his heart sank like a stone. But a week ago she had declared, with a vulgarity of which he had not thought her capable, that she had had the flirtation of her life with Bigourdin. She must have known then, she must know now that the man was in soul-strung earnest. What was her attitude to the major things of Life? His brain worked swiftly. If, in her middle-class English snobbery, she despised the French innkeeper, why did she admit him to her social plane on which alone flirtation—he had a sensitive gentleman’s horror of the word—was possible? If she accepted him as a social equal, recognising in him, as he, Martin, recognised, all that was vital in modern France—if she accepted him, woman accepting man, why that infernal smile on her pretty face? I must give you to understand that Martin knew nothing whatever about women. His ignorance placed him in this dilemma. He watched Corinna’s lips eager to hear what words would issue from them.
She said coolly: “So long as this really is the end of Polydore, honour is satisfied.”
Bigourdin stiffened under her gaze, and collecting himself, bowed formally.
“As to that, Mademoiselle,” said he, “I give you my absolute assurance.” He turned to the commercial travellers. “Messieurs, I ask your pardon. You will not have to wait any longer. Viens, Félise.”
And landlord and niece took Polydore’s place for the rest of the meal.
“Bigourdin’s a splendid fellow,” said Martin.
Elbow on table she held a morsel of bread to her lips. “He waits so well, doesn’t he?” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. What was the use of arguing with a being with totally different standards and conception of values? Some little wisdom he was beginning to acquire. He spent the evening at the Café de Périgueux with Bigourdin, who, with an unwonted cloud on his brow, abused the Government in atrabiliar terms.
The next morning Corinna, attired in her daintiest, wandered off to sketch lonely and demure. At déjeuner she made a pretence of eating and entertained Martin with uninteresting and (to him) unintelligible criticism of Parisian actors. Bigourdin passed a moment or two of professional commonplace at the table and retired. An inexperienced young woman of the town, with the chambermaid’s assistance, replaced the villain of last night’s tragedy. Corinna continued her hectic conversation and took little account of Martin’s casual remarks. A mind even less subtle than her companion’s would have assigned some nervous disturbance as a reason for such feverish behaviour. But of what nature the disturbance? Vaguely he associated it with the Sundayfied raiment. Could it be that she intended, without drum or trumpet, to fly from Brant?me?
“By the way, Martin,” she said suddenly, when the last wizened grape had been eaten, “have you ever taken those snapshots of the Chateau at Bourdeilles?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t,” said he.
“You promised to get them for me.”
“I’ll go over with my camera one of these days,” said Martin.
“That means aux Kalendes Grecques. Why not this beautiful afternoon?”
“If you’ll come with me.”
“I’ve rather a headache—or I would,” said Corinna. “As it is, I think I’ll have to lie down. But you go. It would do you good.”
“Aha!” thought Martin astutely, “she wants to get rid of me, so that she can escape by the afternoon train to Paris.” Aloud he said, “I’ll go to-morrow.”
“Why not to-day?”
“I don’t feel like it,” said he.
Not for the first time she struck an obstinate seam in Martin. He turned a deaf ear both to her cajolings and her reproaches. To some degree he felt himself responsible for Corinna, as a man must do who acts as escort or what you will to an attractive and penniless young woman. If she had decided to rush home to England, it was certainly his duty to make commodious arrangements for her journey.
“I’m going to loaf about to-day,” he announced.
“Like the selfish pig you always are,” said Corinna.
“Comme tu veux,” said Martin cheerfully.
“Can’t you see I want you to go away for the afternoon?” said Corinna angrily.
“Any idiot could see that,” replied Martin.
“Then why don’t you?”
“I want to keep an eye on you.”
She flushed scarlet and rose from the table. “All right. Spy as much as you like. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Once more she left him with a dramatic whirl of skirts. The procedure having become monotonous impressed Martin less than on previous occasions. He even smiled at the conscious smile of sagacity. There was something up, he reflected, with Corinna, or he would eat his hat. She contemplated some idiotic action. Of that there could be no doubt. It behoved him, as the only protector she had in the world, to mount guard. He mounted guard, therefore, over cigarette and coffee in the vestibule of the hotel, and for some time held entertaining converse with Bigourdin on the decadence of Germanic culture, and while Martin was expounding the futile vulgarity of the spectacle of Sumurum which, on one of his rare visits to places of amusement, he had witnessed in London, the word of Corinna’s enigma was suddenly and dustily flashed upon him.
From a dusty two-seater car that drew up noisily at the door, sprang a dusty youth with a reddish face and a little black moustache.
“Is Mademoiselle Hastings in the hotel?” he asked.
“Yes, monsieur,” said Bigourdin.
“Will you kindly let her know that I am here—Monsieur Camille Fargot?”
“Monsieur Fargot,” repeated Bigourdin.
“Mademoiselle Hastings expects me,” said the young man.
“Bien, monsieur,” said Bigourdin. He retired, his duty as a good innkeeper compelling him.
Martin, comfortable in his cane chair, lit another cigarette and with dispassionate criticism inspected Monsieur Camille Fargot, who stood in the doorway, his back to the vestibule, frowning resentfully on the little car.
This then was the word of Corinna’s enigma. To summon him by telegraph had been the object of her sortie in the hat with the pheasant’s plume. To welcome him had been the reason of her festive garb. In order to hold unembarrassed converse she had tried to send Martin away to photograph Bourdeilles. This then was the famous student in medicine who was supposed to have won Corinna’s heart. Martin who had of late added mightily to his collection of remarkable men thought him as commonplace a young student as he had encountered since the far off days of Margett’s Universal College. He seemed an indeterminate, fretful person, the kind of male over whom Corinna in her domineering way would gallop and re-gallop until she had trampled the breath out of him. Being a kindly soul, he began to feel sorry for Camille Fargot. He was tempted to go up to the young fellow, lay a hand on his shoulder and say: “If you want to lead a happy married life, my dear chap, drive straight back to Bordeaux and marry somebody else.” By doing so, he would indubitably contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings and would rank among the philanthropists of his generation. But Martin still retained much of his timidity and he also had a comradely feeling towards Corinna. If she regarded this dusty and undistinguished young gentleman as the rock of her salvation, who was he, powerless himself to indicate any other rock of any kind, to offer objection?
So realising the absurdity of standing on guard against so insignificant a danger as Monsieur Camille Fargot, student in medicine, and not desiring to disconcert Corinna by his presence should she descend to the vestibule to meet her lover, he courteously begged pardon of the frowning young man who blocked the doorway, and, passing by him, walked meditatively down the road.