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