The story of Fifine

by Bernard Capes

CHAPTER XVIII

I awoke, somewhat late, and stretched myself with a sense of luxurious felicity. Then I clasped my hands under my head, and lay luminously dreaming. It was very still. The sun came in at my open window, filtered through a confusion of vivid leaves, and made of my common coverlet a woodland tapestry, intricately woven of gold and grey. Half closing my eyes, the oblong of light became to them crystal and liquescent, as if it were water blotted with innumerable globes of oily green. Those floated and travelled spasmodically, whisking back, as soon as started, on the movement of an eyelash, but always venturing again on voyages of insistent discovery. It was their business to carry little cargoes of sunshine and emerald into my brain; and presently I ceased to resist them, and they swam one by one into port and unloaded.

That betokened a surrender on my part to the delicious inconsequence of the hour. Self was entitled to consider self an imponderable quantity, in that interval of suspension between the attractions of night and day, and I let mine swing to what bias it listed, only blissfully watching, as it were, its direction. There was no question about that; nor did I desire there should be. It took me into glowing reveries which I indulged to the full, so long as that sense of irresponsible neutrality lasted. Yet it did not last long; bias itself was fatal to it, for bias must sooner or later convey a sense of weight, and a sense of weight brings us promptly to earth.

I came to earth presently, with a renunciatory yawn—and than a vast physical yawn there is nothing more dispelling to illusionment. I sat up in bed, and called to Fifine through the frail partition.

“Are you awake?”

She answered, “Yes,” and I demanded again, “Is your blind up?”

“Yes,” she said; and I put it to her thereupon:—

“Do you remember that waking impression of mine, that puzzled you so, of the plane trees seen outside a window on a bright morning? If you do, wink once and blink once at your window, and then tell me what is the visual effect on you.”

There was a pause; and then, “O, I have winked a fly into my eye!” wailed Fifine.

I burst out laughing.

“Shall I come and remove it for you?” I asked.

“No,” she answered—“you mustn’t. It will be all right in a minute.”

“Bon!” I muttered to myself, à propos the momentary impulse which had thrilled my nerves. “She is wise in the daylight, God bless her!”

We joined company below, even with something a sense of an old comradeship recovered, though Fifine’s cheek flushed a little when she first saw me. I drew her out for a stroll while our coffee was preparing, and we walked together happily, tacitly eschewing all perilous topics. It was a lovely glowing morning, and the little village, sitting in its slipper of the hills, unfolded its simple charms prettily before us, rebuking our gloomy estimate of its last night’s inhospitality. But there was not much to detain us; and, breakfast finished, we were soon on our way for the mountain stronghold, which was the true siderite of our desires.

A siderite, in sooth, it appeared, burning sky-high. We were climbing all the way, and I had to strain like a pack-horse, loaded as I was.

“Is the knapsack heavy?” said Fifine. “But really, do you know, Felix, we are justifying its existence for the first time.”

“I shouldn’t mind that,” I said, “if it didn’t take such advantage of the favour shown it. Now I know why the rack in the train creaked.”

“Poor man,” she said. “Shall I help you?”

“Yes, take the rücksack, Fifine, and I will carry you. M. Cabarus would call that halving the burden to double the joy.”

It was a mistake to utter his name—and ironically. I don’t know why I did it—from natural perversity, I suppose. It re-created between us a little shadow, which was never wholly dissipated during the remainder of our walk.

At about a mile from Paradou we came, always climbing, to a sign-post, and thence, making to the right, in a moment there opened out before us the veritable wild glen of our pilgrimage, a vision from end to end of tumultuous beauty.

Is any description of les Baux wanted in these days? I suppose during the last dozen years or so it has been more “exploited” than throughout the whole interval of centuries dividing it from its heyday of power and prosperity, when the singing-men came flocking from all quarters of the land to its exotic love-pastures. Once and for long its towering silences existed but in vague report for the ordinary traveller. He heard of them, but as things not easily attainable—hazards a little remote from his purpose of orthodox sight-seeing. But the motor-car has altered all that; it has rendered accessible, to the read-as-it-runs class of tourist, fastnesses hitherto respected for their isolation and inhospitality. He whirls over from St. Remy, stops an hour to lunch, bolts a hasty snack of local gallimaufry, and rushes on again. Sadie and Goldshtein, with their voices nasal and nosey, invade the austere solitudes; and, though they may vex them but fitfully, the aggregate of their gothicisms must have done something to take its keen edge off the strangeness and romance of the place.

However, that desecration is relative, and, after all, quite inconsiderable. One may still spend a week, a month, a year, in les Baux, and never, if one likes, know more of the casual demons than is conveyed through the distant low of a horn, or the vision of gliding heads above a stone wall. And in time, no doubt, the speed-lust will spend itself, and these casemated defences of the mountains return to their primal loneliness—to be once more periodically discovered by earnest schoolmistresses and sentimental poets desiring copy.

Now, right in our front as we clomb, rose a mighty forehead of cliff. It was as the face of a sphinx, veiling the mysteries of the hills beyond. We passed it, and their stupendous contours unfolded themselves before us—rock upon rock, lifting to the sky, in derision of the toiling road, which struggled vainly to put itself on terms with that impossible ascent.

And as it toiled, so did we, atoms perspiring in the dust. The little farms, the patches of vine, the olive and the mulberry gardens in the valley below, sunk ever deeper and deeper as we laboured up and on. There was heavy green on the Titan groups across the glen; they were furred with thick pelt of juniper, and spike-lavender, and bushy rosemary. But on our side all appeared near naked rock, clambering by way of scarp and shelf and overhanging boulder to a giddy altitude, where it broke against the sky in a wave of jagged masonry, hardly to be distinguished from the mountain which gave it birth.

There clung the shattered stronghold, a city in itself, still rooted in the rock from which, manured by blood, it first grew rich and lusty. It bred fierce hawks and gladsome swallows once; it breeds them still. The old life contest between the gentle and the cruel is not ended there, but Berald, in the form of a hen-harrier, will still swoop on the little dove-wife Françoiso to drive his cruel beak into her heart. The hill of colossal ruin, like his wood to the melancholy lover in “Maud,” remains “a world of plunder and prey,” though its vivid antique spirits, bad and good, be all harlequinaded in these days into their fairy similitudes. Do you seek Guilhem de Beauvoire, who walled up his own mother for her sins, or Raymond de Seillans, who made his wife eat unknowingly of the heart of her lover? Turn this stone or that, and you will likely find them squatting in the shape of little scorpions underneath. There, in the sanctimonious form of a praying mantis, stands a false priest—rapacious, hypocritical. And as for the frailties—Briande, Béregère, Iseult, Bels, Midons, Etiennette, and what not—are not their very names become butterflies, as pretty and as light, on which the spider and the lizard will feed if they get the chance.

The lovely things came down and looped about our heads as we climbed on—commas, like baroque tortoiseshells, pale clouded yellows, Bath whites for every one of which, if netted in England, a collector would have given a small fortune. They danced before us, like giddy laughing girls, taking us, no doubt, with our pack, for some wandering jongleur and his commère—perhaps Raymond Ferraud himself and the beautiful Alète de Mauleon—and beckoning us on to the appreciative Courts of les Baux. And indeed we were only suffering to attain them, magnificent as the prospect about us was.

However, for myself, I was now on familiar ground, and could calculate the remainder way. It ran up to the valley end, where, above a tumbled sea of boulders, rose a sheer wall of rock, against which it appeared to fling itself and cease. But in reality, short of the cliff it turned on a sharp curve like that of a hairpin, and, mounting thence at a steeper gradient, brought us in brief space to the village eyrie and the comfortable hostelry de la Reine Jeanne.

We were glad and content to have reached our goal at last. It looked an unpretentious house from the outside—painted stone grey, and entered up a little double-sided flight of steps put parallel with its front. But, within, everything, though on a modest scale, was bright and clean, and the slim young landlord as inviting as his surroundings. He saluted us with cheery hospitality (Madame his wife was, alas, indisposed—her first!), and answered our request for rooms with the smiling alacrity of a right host. He could speak some English too, having served his term as waiter in a Marseilles hotel—which seemed rather wonderful in that context of wild rocks and praying mantises—and was altogether rather an admirable Boniface to have alighted on in the wilderness. There was only a single difficulty, he said—which after all was doubtless not insuperable—the difficulty of accommodation. The house, as one might understand, was of limited capacities, and circumstances had further curtailed those. There was but one exclusive bedroom, and that was already bespoken. What remained consisted of two rooms in one—that was to say, as it were, a bedroom, and bed-dressing-room, but with a door between. To leave the second, it was necessary to go through the first. Still, if Monsieur, and—

Monsieur filled up the tentative hiatus in the manner which occurred to him as the most tactical and uncompromising: “And his belle-sœur”—and turned to Fifine:—

“What do you say, m’amie?”

I was just apprehensive that she might flush and look down; but I did her intelligence an injustice.

“Il ne choisit pas qui emprunte,” she said, turning away, with a little laugh. “It is either that, I suppose, or the troglodyte caves” (a number of which I had pointed out to her by the road). “Let us go and see the rooms anyhow.”

She exclaimed with pleasure when she did see them—not on account of their really luxurious comfort and cleanliness, but because of the view from their windows. And truly it was magnificent, looking, as we did, from the back of the house over the way we had come, and the whole extended panorama of the valley.

“It must be the little room for me,” said Fifine steadily in a moment.

“As you will,” I answered.

“Obviously,” she said, “as you will arrive later to bed, and leave it earlier than I.”

The landlord was all gratification.

“It is, after all, just a matter of sentiment,” said he; “and there is no particular virtue in a corridor. Still, if Mademoiselle prefers it, M. Cabarus, who announced your forthcoming, would doubtless exchange with Mademoiselle.”

Fifine turned to me.

“Would you like, Felix?”

“No,” I answered shortly. “I don’t fancy a poet for a neighbour. He would talk in his sleep. It will do very well as it stands.”

I left her to her toilette, while I descended with the landlord. There was a small smoking-room off the salle-à-manger, and we sat there and talked together over a bottle of wine. The man was new to me, and, comparatively, to the place; and the one fault I had to find with him was that he was a modern product, and as such anxious to popularise his position. Still, if that ambition spurred him to no worse than he had already effected, it gave one small ground for complaint. Trim comfort and fresh white sheets were by no means regrettable innovations in les Baux.

“This M. Cabarus,” I said presently, “is a great man with you, I suppose?”

He laughed a little—actually. He was not born Provençal, you see; and his reverence for its traditions was a matter of policy.

“He brings custom, Monsieur,” he said. “Yes, he is a very important man to me.”

“Does he often visit here?”

“I should think, Monsieur, there is no one individual more constant. The hills inspire him, it is there he most seeks his beautiful chimeras; he knows every foot of them; he is out on them now. You are familiar with them yourself, perhaps—the Roman Camp, the Val d’Enfer, the Château above us? You should take Mademoiselle up to the Camp opposite. It is there one obtains one’s finest view of the ruins.”

“Ah, yes! I will take her, maybe; but it is a long climb for her, and I do not know the way very well. These chimeras, then—what are they?”

Again the landlord shrugged out a little smile:—

“What are they? I do not know; you do not know; he does not know. The Almighty He produces everything out of nothing: M. Cabarus he produces nothing out of everything, and spends all his life hunting for what does not exist. It is the way with poets. Someday, perhaps, he will walk over a precipice in the fog, and find what he seeks at the bottom. It is certain he will never reach it else.”

But the virtue lay in the chase, I concluded. That was where Fifine would have discovered it. In the meantime, the landlord being called away, I awaited her descent with impatience. We might at least enjoy a last little exploration together, before the chimera-hunter returned to re-sight in her his mystic quarry. And then?—Well, the virtue was in the chase—and the flattery, no doubt, in being chased by the virtue. It must be gratifying to know oneself the provocation to what most became a man—endeavour. And, as for me, I was simply contemptible in my lack of ambition.

I yawned, and dawdled, and fingered some antiquated literature on a side-table. There was a six months old copy of the London Spectator among it, left probably by some newly-travelled curate in process of cutting his wisdom teeth. Bulwark of orthodox respectability, it seemed curiously out of place in this context of harping troubadours, and wild love-courts, and Nature in her most recklessly disordered mood. One associates the Spectator somehow with nothing so much as the British Sabbath—on which day it is mostly read—and its decent conventions of silk hat, black coat and decorous Church parade. It never sins against the established or the social rubric; it is the incorruptible champion of common sense; in Mr. Sparkler’s phrase, it has “No nonsense about it.” Sometimes, even, I have a suspicion that the Creator figures to it as Himself wearing the regulation coat and tall hat on Sundays; whereas my god wears nothing in particular, and is not at all prone to pontifical complacencies in the matter of social law-giving. Les Baux to my eyes seemed a little profaned by this practical-minded interloper, as no doubt the interloper considered itself profaned by les Baux. I felt, for myself, that it was censoring me, in a way that no free-born Briton ought to endure; so I took the liberty of tearing it into quarters, which I dropped into the waste-paper basket. Then I felt as if I were free to do what I liked.

Fifine still delayed to come, and I strolled out to the steps overlooking the street. All above me went heaping up into the blue sky a massive confusion of rock and ruin, so commingled that one had to gaze hard to distinguish shattered wall from shattered scarp. To my left descended the steep road we had mounted—and, rising into view along it, appeared the perspiring form of M. Carabas Cabarus.

He detected me at once, and came on at a quickened pace. His waistcoat was opened, revealing a bosom of grey flannel shirt and braces well bowed over it; in one hand he held his straw hat, in the other a bandana handkerchief, with which he mopped his face incessantly. He made a hurried gesture to me, of recognition, of detention, and fairly ran at last. He was so hoarsely breathed when he reached me, that for a minute he could not speak.

“You have arrived, then, Monsieur,” he laboured out at length.

“We have arrived,” I responded.

“Ah! We!” Confident satisfaction expressed itself in his tone. “Voilà qui est excellent!”

He turned away a moment, fanning his face with his handkerchief, then addressed me again: “Mademoiselle is resting from her fatigue?”

“It would seem so.”

“Bon! The occasion is opportune.” He poked a fat forefinger at me. “Would you favour me, Monsieur, with a few minutes’ private conversation.”

Surprised on the moment, I foresaw the next what was coming.

“Why not?” I answered. “Let us go up the hill, Monsieur. Among the ruins we shall not be interrupted.”

He came, I thought, reluctantly. Perhaps he had had enough of the rocks for one morning. We climbed the irregular street, and, passing by the church, sought the open hill-side above, where, beside a heap of fallen masonry, we rested.

“Now, Monsieur,” said I, “for your communication.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed, like one having the advantage of me in his knowledge of a flattering secret. He dwelt on its taste a moment before inviting me to share in it.

“I am waiting, Monsieur,” I said.

He propped one foot on a stone, and his right arm over his bent knee, and standing thus, his handkerchief drooping from the pendent fingers, apostrophised space rather than me:—

“There comes a time in the life of the spiritual enthusiast, the most ardent pursuer of the sublime and the ideal, when, in the presence of some ravishing beauty, not perfect, yet halting only on the threshold of perfection, he must pause and say to himself, ‘The conditions of this life are fatal to my success. Why for ever drop the substance for the shadow?’ This passion for the elusive, the unattainable, has perhaps its closest analogy in human love, by way of which, though we may not reach the stars, we may attain to a nearer view of them. There is the heart, as well as the soul, to consider, and perhaps, aspiring together in unison, they may touch altitudes hitherto inaccessible to the one alone. The chimney-corner knows the worn huntsman, the tired mountaineer comes down from his heights to sit beside his hearth, and, in dreams of wife and child, project his vision into the beyond of his unsatisfied longings. So why should not I? I am weary of the unfulfilled solitudes, and the sense of man returns upon me as I descend. If the grail is not for me, because of that human weakness in my blood, my search for it has at least shewn me the means by which I may yet doubly strive to approach the nearer precincts of its mystery. Though I am not Parsifal, Parsifal may come to call me father.”

He flourished his handkerchief, blew his nose, and gazed into the infinite.

“M. Cabarus,” I said, “you have my sympathy in all this, and as much of my understanding as I dare exercise. But I am a practical person myself, and I must really ask you to be more explicit.”

His pale blue eyes slewed themselves slowly round to regard me.

“Precisely,” he said. “It was to be expected.”

“Am I right in assuming that what you are proposing, and reconciling, to yourself, is a descent from your heights upon matrimony?”

“With your permission, Monsieur,” he said.

“What has my permission to do with it?”

He waved his hand airily.

“Much, Monsieur—or nothing, as it may be. I put the proposition to you formally, as to the one who appears to stand in the position of legal custodian to the object of my devotion.”

“You allude to——?”

“Precisely, Monsieur. To your sister.”

“Why do you say ‘appears to stand’?”

He shrugged his shoulders renunciatory.

“Doubtless,” he said, “marked discrepancies will appear between children of the same parents.”

“What! You challenge me on a question of family honour?”

“Monsieur, Monsieur,” he answered hastily: “I do not challenge you at all. The world is too full of problems for one to quarrel on a point of resemblance.”

I laughed.

“What if I were to tell you that Mademoiselle is my step-sister?”

“Then the problem would be no more than one of coincidence.”

“What coincidence?”

“That she bears your name.”

I laughed again, getting out my pipe to fill it.

“Truly, it seems the long arm, Monsieur,” I said. “But, assuming that you are right in approaching me in the matter, your proposition amounts to no more than that you are desirous of marrying my—ward.”

“With all my heart, Monsieur.”

“And is she to have no voice in the matter?”

“I am not so arrogant,” he said, with a sovereign uplifting of himself which belied his words. “It would be false modesty in me, on the other hand, to feign an unconsciousness of the gifts, of the reputation, I could offer her as an equivalent for the priceless gift of herself. Still, for the present, I ask no more than unrestricted permission to make my proposals to that sympathetic paragon of womanhood; and if I assert some confidence as to the result, knowing with what favour she already regards me, I beg you not to attribute it to any conceit of my qualities, but to the sure conviction that Destiny has allotted to us, in conscious affinity, the realisation of the unborn Parsifal.”

“Well, that is enough, Monsieur,” I answered—though with difficulty. “All I can say is, go in and win.”

He looked at me, like a café-chantant monarch, bestowing, by accepting, a favour.

“I have your permission to pay my court?”

“Absolutely. I answer nothing, of course, for the result.”

He waved that remark away, as inconsiderable and not worthy of note.

“More,” I said. “You shall have every opportunity you can desire to do so; and there is no time like the present. Go back to her now; say what you will, and without fear of interruption from me. I want to explore those hills across the valley—particularly the Roman Camp—and I shall probably be absent most of the day. Tell her so; say that I will take food with me, and that she is not to expect me back till I appear. You two can lunch together, walk together, bill and coo together, if it suits you. So au revoir, Monsieur, and bon chance.”

He detained me an instant as I was going from him.

“Do you know the hills?”

“A little; not much.”

“Do not stop on them too late, then. They are full of dangers and pitfalls for the ignorant. Moreover, if I am not mistaken, there will be mist to-night. Take warning, Monsieur.”

“A word to the wise is enough,” said I, and turned and left him.