The story of Fifine

by Bernard Capes

CHAPTER XII

Throughout Provence and Languedoc there are accredited songsters, severally honoured in the districts which gave them birth. They may be tillers of the soil or owners of it; propriétaires or ploughboys—it is no matter: they are expected and accepted quite simply and seriously, much as our own village folk-lorists are accepted as the legitimate inheritors of an age-long tradition. They continue a succession never broken since the days of de Borneil, Daniel, Riquier, and those other glorious primitives who, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, exalted the dialect of Romance to a metrical art. Yet, though they wear the shoes of their lyrical forefathers, these latter-day minstrels are to be likened for the most part rather to the jongleurs, or hired singing-men, who were used to voice their masters’ productions, than to the producers themselves, the genuine troubadours who originated the songs. They play, or at best do little more than ring new changes on, antique themes. Still, now and again, a solitary figure, on whom the Paraclete of ancient inspiration would appear in some light measure to have laid hands, will stand out from the rest, and to that extent that his fame will presently enlarge from the purely local to the departmental; and, proportionately, perhaps, his vanity. They are “throw-backs,” in the true poetic sense.

Such, I take it, had been the case with this Carabas Cabarus. He was quite a natural bard, individual in his way, and with a real gift for extempore. To do him that justice is right, for all, I think, the admission redounds to my credit; for the man came to be an entire nuisance to me. His skin was as thick as his vanity was sensitive. He seemed to have a congenital incapacity for diffidence, as regarded both himself and his wares. It never occurred to him that he could possibly be de trop anywhere.

Well, Fifine and I, having viewed our bedrooms and hurried through a necessary toilette, descended hunger-sharp to the midday meal. Joyful in the novelty of all things, Fifine was prepared to find ambrosia in the thin broth with a sop of toast in it, and the divine savour of the chèvre d’or himself in tough and smoky cutlets. But even she could not idealise the “vin compris.” Throughout Provence that way lies disenchantment, and the traveller who would keep glowing in his breast the comfortable lamp of romance should by no means drink the wine, the red in particular, which is invariably provided free of charge. It has a peculiar rankness in it which penetrates through all the acidity, and a single glassful is enough to quench the hottest visionary ardour. I laughed, seeing the face my comrade pulled, and called for the carte-des-vins. One has to pay in these matters nothing or a good deal; but the extravagance is a necessary one, and I had come prepared against it.

After déjeuner we sallied forth at ease to see the amphitheatre and the Maison Carrée. It was opening October—perhaps, saving June, the ideal Provençal month—and one could bask in the sunshine without a thought of enervation.

“Where are you going to take me to first?” said Fifine.

“To the chemist’s,” I answered, “for a box of pastilles-moustiques. You must burn one by your bedside, Fifine, if you do not want to come down to-morrow with a face like a plum-pudding. And you must shut your window before turning up the light. I marked those trees close outside, and I tell you what I know.”

It was a necessary precaution; and we had just effected it, and were issuing from the shop, when we saw an open fly coming down the street towards us. I don’t know what moved me to the irrelevant reflection, but I said suddenly: “I wonder what has become of Carabas Cabarus. Thank the powers at least we have given him the slip.”

The carriage came on, drawn by a horse with a most curious action. He advanced down the incline towards us, flinging his legs inwards with a sort of jolly buccaneering roll which was quite captivating—a free nonchalant big-boned hack, who took the world swaggeringly, though conscious of bowling at his tail no better than a mouldy voiture-de-place. And as the thing approached us, there was Carabas seated inside it.

He was the same, and yet not the same—he had a hat on. Now, taking him all in all, his raiment and his pose, I should have expected here the right Mistral finish, the typical head-gear of the Provençal peasant, limp black felt, and very slightly raked. Instead, to my exhilaration was exhibited a mottled straw hat with an absurdly narrow brim, and a little tail of black ribbon waggling aft of it in the breeze. It was flattened down upon the abundant mane, and I will not swear was not kept in place by an elastic under the chin.

He recognised us, and waved his hand—even with a suggestion of a kiss blown to Fifine. It needed a Frenchman at once to wear that hat and blow that kiss. If you ask why, you have missed one side of the Frenchman—his innocence. I laughed out as I turned away.

“What are you laughing at?” said Fifine.

“The hat,” said I.

“What was the matter with it?” she asked.

I laughed again.

“Nothing was the matter with it, of course. It was a charming hat. You might have worn it yourself.”

She looked puzzled.

“Well,” she said. “But it was funny, wasn’t it, his appearing just at that moment. ‘Talk of the wolf, and you’ll see the tip of his tail.’”

“I did,” said I, “and it wagged. But, Fifine, bear what I say in mind. We have not seen the last of Carabas. He has been hunting us through all the Hôtels and restaurants of Nîmes, and he is about to run us to earth.”

“Well, it is something to be so sought after for our young attractions,” was all she answered, and we continued our way to the amphitheatre.

In the grip of that vast relic a spirit of glowing abstraction seemed to settle upon my comrade. As we sat high up among the shattered tiers, her eyes were the only utterers of the dreams that moved her. I watched them for some time in silence.

“What are you thinking of, Fifine?” I said at last.

She sighed and turned to me.

“What did he mean by that golden goat?” she asked irrelevantly.

“He? Who?” I exclaimed. “That Cabarus? It seems you have made a conquest of him to some purpose. Why, child, he meant nothing more than an old Provençal superstition, which you will fine related in Daudet’s Lettres de mon Moulin, in the Legendes of Charles-Roux, and elsewhere. The goat is merely the symbol of that unquenchable something in us which refuses to be satisfied with the material and the finite. However high or far we may reach, there is always something vague and elusive to be sought higher or further. We find that mysterious object typified in the marsh candle which Jacques Bonhomme follows through the mire; in the jewelled cup buried at the foot of the rainbow; in the sangreal, and in a host of other fanciful forms. We all follow it, one way or the other.”

“Yes,” said Fifine. Her chin was propped upon her hand; her eyes looked across the gleaming spaces of sunlight; she rested content with that monosyllable.

“If appearances are to be trusted,” said I, “you may flatter yourself that, for the moment at least, you are M. Cabarus’s golden goat.”

She shrugged her shoulders, with a little impatient “allons donc!” then turned suddenly and looked at me.

“And what is yours, Felix?”

“My what? My present ideal?”

“Yes.”

“Bouille-abaisse,” I answered promptly.

“What is that?” she demanded.

“It is a Provençal dish. I came here to eat it.”

“Will you not be serious, please?”

“It is perfectly true, Fifine. I shall not be happy till you have tasted it.”

“O! So your ideal is to gratify me. That is something, then.”

“It is everything, I think. And now it is your turn to confess your ideal.”

She looked at me very steadily. “It is to see you realise yours.”

“Bouille-abaisse?”

“Something,” she said, ignoring my comment—“some dream which you and that man, however much you may laugh at and despise him, may share in common. I cannot say what it is, but I can trace your pursuit of it through all of your works that I have seen. You are shy and proud, mon ami; you affect to laugh at the heroic in yourself; you meet the rebuffs of the world with a pretence of their being justified towards incompetence. But all the time you know the world is wrong, though the great in you will not condescend to parly with it as to your merits. Better, you think, to give up the struggle, to cease your pursuit of the inaccessible, and, falling into line with your detractors, hunt for bouille-abaisse, as the sort of perfection we can all understand and attain. I would sooner be a dog and sniff for truffles.”

I sat silent for awhile, a little surprised, a little amused; then answered quietly:—

“The inaccessible is the inaccessible, Fifine. Perhaps it takes a grown man to find that out.”

“You might as well say,” she replied, “that the stars are not to be searched because they are beyond our reach.”

“Well, what has astronomy done for us?”

“It has made astronomers.”

“A musty lot.”

“I think they are the finest people in the world—spirits almost more than men. Think of their uplifted vigils, night after night, while we are sleeping earthbound.”

“Shall I be an astronomer, then, to please you?”

“You will please me by being yourself, by following your own particular star. You know, Felix—yes, you do, that the real ecstasy is in the pursuit, into whatever pains and difficulties it may lead you. I want to see you great, and greatness is all in endeavour, because there can never be achievement.”

“M’amie,” I said very gravely, “what have I done to bring upon myself this lecture?”

“You have done nothing.”

“Ah! I see—that is it. You think me idle.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, perhaps I am. And so you take this accident of Carabas Cabarus, with his goats and golden bubbles, to belabour me for my sins.”

“He set me thinking, Felix; I admit it. And there is something in this place, too, that makes me think.”

“A ruin is a poor illustration of the value of endeavour.”

“I think it is the very best. It shows how greatness would not be debarred itself although it wrought with perishable things in a perishable world.”

I sat silent again; then turned suddenly upon her.

“So that is your ideal,” I said—“to see me passionate in the pursuit of what you think is mine—or should be. Have you none, then, for yourself?”

She looked down and away, tracing a pattern with her fingers in the crumbled stone.

“I do not quite say that,” she said, in a low voice.

“But you are willing to sacrifice it for the other? That is very unselfish of you.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is very unselfish of me.”

There was something so strange in her tone that I looked at her in surprise. What was her meaning? What was that mysterious aspiration of hers which she would so gladly forego, provided my self-realisation were contingent on its sacrifice? And then, still looking away, she said a stranger thing.

“Do you think men of genius ought to marry?”

“How can I speak for them?” I answered.

“I say you can and shall.”

“Very well, then,” I replied. “I think, if you ask me, that they should not. A man’s imagination is his mistress. He cannot keep his mistress in the same house with his wife. They would be sure to quarrel, and naturally the mistress, having no orthodox title to remain, would be the one to go.”

“But—but, supposing it no question of a wife?”

“Then, it is no question at all. Love makes no contracts and is bound by none. It is worldly policy that does all that part. Do you think I would debar my man of genius that best stimulus to his imagination—an unfettered passion? It is all the difference between the golden goat and the poor Billy tethered to a stake in the backyard.”

She sat quiet for a long time after that, her face still averted, her fingers playing with the stones. Then suddenly she stirred, and, with a sigh, rose to her feet.

“Are we not wasting our time?” she said. “I feel that there is so much to see. And yet it is so beautiful here.”

We were quite alone in the vast amphitheatre. As she stood up, the picture she made—her face, half in glow half in shadow, the vivid life of her contrasting with the golden ruins of the walls—wrought with such ardour upon my imagination, that I felt that, if I failed in that moment to take advantage of the creative impulse its beauty awoke in me, I deserved to be writ down for ever more the emasculate cypher of her strictures. So very quietly I got out the block, pencils, and a handful of coloured crayons which I made it my constant practice to carry about with me.

“Fifine,” I said, “don’t move: stand just as you are. I am going to immortalise you.”

She gave a little start; just glanced at me; then, neither stirring nor posing, obeyed. I was in happy pin: mood, model and place were all in one luminous harmony, and the thing came out as I had conceived it, automatically, almost without effort. It took me but a few minutes.

“There,” I exclaimed. “Nemausea of the golden amphitheatre! What do you think of yourself?”

Her face flushed up as she looked.

“You have made a pagan of me,” she said—“or the stones have. Perhaps they shall hold you excused for the little freedoms you have taken. But how clever you are, mon ami; and—and how forgiving to me!”

There was a queer little sound in her voice, and she turned away rather hurriedly. I said nothing; but when, having disposed and repocketed my effects, I got up and joined her, the signs of some emotion were still visible on her face.

“Are all the ruins about here of this lovely colour?” she asked, though with an effort, I could see.

“Throughout Provence,” I answered. “The sunset of dead Rome lingers upon them all. They stand up in its afterglow, very old and very quiet, the last great witnesses to the glory of its past.”

“The glory!” she murmured, rather awfully. “But think of the things that were done here! O, how could they! To build it—this, for just a human shambles, and make it beautiful—one huge great torture chamber, and open to the sky—and God!”

“No, that it was not,” I said. “There are the sockets for its awning-poles still existing. Come, and I will show them to you.”

“I should not like to stand here in the moonlight,” she said, not noticing me. “It makes me think of the Towers of Silence. Felix, have you ever seen, or read about them?”

“No. What are they?”

“I once came across a description of them. They are the charnel houses of the Parsees, the sun-worshippers—great lonely buildings, on the tops of which they lay their dead to be eaten by vultures. So in this Tower of Silence here the human vultures once sat and gloated, feasting on the carnage. And they, too, worshipped the sun.”

“Very far from being a tower of silence sometimes,” I answered. “You should see it in high festival, Fifine, when they have bull-fights—the real thing, you know—à la mort. No need, then, to reconstruct the past, as you are doing; it stands in sanguinary evidence before you. But these are morbid dreams, young lady. Rome was not all circuses, nor is Nîmes all Courses de Taureaux. I shall have to confine you to the boulevards Gambetta and Victor Hugo and their like if you take to this sort of thing.”

Fifine laughed, and we made our way again into the streets, on exploration bent. Most that was to be seen we saw, and near dusk rested in the beautiful gardens of the Fountain, and drank iced grenadine through straws under the broken shadows of the Temple of Diana. Then we returned to the hôtel in time for the seven o’clock dinner.

As usual in these coffee-rooms, there was the one long table and the many smaller supernumerary. We secured a minor affair in a corner, from which we could command a view of the company. That was fairly numerous—commercial gents mostly—and I confess that the obvious admiration it betrayed for my companion was a source of some secret gratification to me. True, my own interest in her was not a vested one, so to speak; but it is always agreeable to command, even in the abstract, the control of a covetable thing. It had perhaps never occurred to me to regard her so much in that light as now when I recognised myself for the subject of general masculine envy. Fifine, as an admired personal possession, went up fifty per cent. in my estimation—that was only human nature.

We had reached to the chicken and salad course, when Carabas came in. We both saw him at once, and I turned to my comrade, with a snigger.

“Quand je vous le disais, Mam’selle?”

“Hush!” she said: “Don’t attract his attention.”

But he could not very well have imposed himself on our narrow quarters. In point of fact he did not see us directly, but established himself, with something of an air, at the opposite end of the long table. Then, as, tucking with protruded jaw his napkin under his chin, his eyes wandered abroad, he suddenly spied us, and instantly posed for his part. He invited Fifine quite obviously to observe the deference with which the waiters hurried to attend him, and the hauteur with which he accepted or waved aside their ministrations. “Witness,” he said in effect, “the honour in which I am held, and realise, in shame and humiliation, the outrage you perpetrated on a famed child of genius in likening him to a bird-catcher!”

Thenceforth, if he did not eat nicely, he ate consciously, not so much with an eye to Fifine as with a two-fold stare. He appeared oblivious of my presence; he actually, in mute pantomime, drank to her in a glass of that execrable vin de table; though I regarded him with cool amused eyes, he ignored me as entirely as though I were a mere indifferent intruder on the private understanding established between them. And, when we got up to go, he lifted his glass again, and ogled her hideously over the rim of it.

In the hall outside, as I waited to light my pipe, I questioned the landlord, who made his sociable appearance, as to M. Carabas Cabarus, mentioning how we had encountered him in the train.

“Ah! truly?” he answered. “He is on his way from Paris, whither he has been to negotiate the publication of his poems. A native of Montpelier, Monsieur, where his father was a coachbuilder. Hence his name, given him, perhaps, in irony, for he was a stupid child. But the race is not always to the swift, nor bread to the wise. He who was slow is the first at the goal, and, being there, is poor.”

“First at the goal? You regard him highly, then?”

“Surely, Monsieur. There is none better of his kind in Provence. He is of the great succession—a minstrel worthy to be compared with Raymond Ferraud, both for his verse and his excessive gallantry.”

Fifine and I went out for a final stroll before bedtime, which in the vagabond’s life comes early.

“That landlord,” I said, “is a well-informed man. I have read of that Raymond—a distinguished rascal, who actually persuaded a lady president of the puissant Court of Love at les Baux to share his melodious wanderings with him. They called one another in these connexions commère—or gossip, as we might say. It is a good thought, Fifine: supposing we adopt it? But, as to this Carabas, the fellow promises to be a nuisance, and I propose that we rid ourselves of him with all possible despatch. I do not intend staying here long: Nîmes is only the antechamber to fruitfuller delights. So to-morrow we will finish with it, and the morning after, very quietly and unostentatiously, slip over to the station with our rücksack, and take train south for Aigues-Mortes and the wilderness. What do you say, gossip?”

“That I am entirely in your hands, gossip,” answered Fifine.