CHAPTER XXI
I am not going to relate in detail the processes of our homeward journeying. One must necessarily in leaving Paradise put on the common vesture of mortality; and, though the deathless glamour of past days remained to us for all eternity, a sense of the finite conditions of life, of its partings and uncertainties, returned to possess us, like a premonition, the moment we stepped beyond the bounds of our love-haunted Eden. Wherefore, having fully depicted that sovereign realm of delight, it would be a work of rather sad supererogation to dwell at length on our sojournings, as we made our way easily northward, in the subkingdoms of happiness. Beautiful it all was, but with a beauty more of evening than of sunrise. We were drawing to the night that has no voice but that of lonely introspection.
From les Baux we walked over the Alpines, six miles or so, to St. Remy, passing by the way those two famous fragments, tomb and triumphal arch, which are all that remains of a once prosperous Roman town. Standing solitary under the hills, they would seem to have been spared, in their chance juxtaposition, as a symbol and epitome to all future generations of the glory and vanity of the human story: Life’s victory, Death’s victory over Life, and Time, the last and mightiest, the conquerer of both. I might have read into them, had I possessed the seer’s vision, the moral of all idylls in the world, including our own.
From St. Remy the balmy we took, having lunched and wandered an hour or two about the place, the prosaic motor-omnibus to the fruity little town of Châteaurenard, whence we bowled by the long white road, dusty and monotonous with its eternal plantations of esparto grass, into Avignon, reaching that city after dark, and in comfortable time for dinner at the Hôtel du Louvre, where we had elected to pitch our camp. Old house of the Templars (one meals, actually, in the very vaulted refectory of that ancient order), we felt, enjoying its pleasant hospitality, so little remote as yet from the spirit of antique romance, that our ex-Paradisian “fall” was hardly enough to disturb or abash us. We had fallen “soft,” indeed, and, during the three or four days we stayed there, lived in a somewhat renewed glamour of enchantment. The year was now drawing on and in, closing upon the last days of October; but still the season moved in golden accord with our mood, showering peace and quiet sunshine upon our heads. Fifine had of course as a child lifted her trivial skirts and pointed her pretty toes to the “L’on y danse tout en rond,” and nothing now in all the grey old city delighted her so much as the broken bridge, on whose imagined stones the feet of countless generations of infants have danced and pattered. It moved her more than the mighty palace of the Popes, than the Cathedral, than the stupendous ramparts, than the great ruined fort of St. André, looming misty and gigantic on its hill across the river—though there, when we came to visit it, the old baker’s dies for stamping the loaves of bread outside the ovens did fascinate her almost as much. They impressed her so, she said, with their suggestion of domestic fitness and tidiness.
For Fifine was tidy: have I never remarked upon it? Our difference in that respect was her perpetual lament. She could never be at ease in the presence of casual litter; a piece of paper flung in a grate, a picture hung crooked on a wall, would spoil the whole æsthetic value of a room to her; she folded her clothes at night; her toilette accessories had each its definite place on her dressing table, and any natural disorder was no sooner done with than she must be removing its evidences. Tidying-up was an obsession with her; I used to laugh at her about it, but it was no good.
“What is the use,” I would say, “of sweeping up dust only to resettle, of making clear spaces for the fresh deposits that are sure to follow? It is a purely human monomania that of tidiness; nothing in nature sets us the example.”
“I daresay,” she would answer. “But dogs and cats and birds and trees have no sense of preparing for anything; and I, as a human being, have.”
“What are you preparing for?”
“I don’t know—the next world perhaps. It is just an instinct, like washing your hands.”
“Washing your hands isn’t an instinct, you goose. It is an acquired superstition.”
“Well, so perhaps is tidiness. But anyhow it is a superstition founded on the Bible.”
“How?”
“Isn’t there something in it about keeping your house swept and garnished?”
I hooted. “No, that won’t do. That was the house that proved so attractive to the unclean spirit and his brethren. You are hoist with your own petard, I am afraid, my Fifinette.”
“O!” said Fifine. “Well, anyhow you won’t make me believe that tidiness is a sin.”
“No, it is only a ‘preparation’—for what? fresh untidiness, say I. When you have paid all your bills, and filed the receipts, and checked and balanced your bank book, and swept the hearth clean, and sat down with a satisfied sense of accumulated scores settled, and of being able to start again with a clean slate, what follows? Why, the falling of new ashes into the fender, and the recovering of the slate with the same old fatuous irreconcilabilities between receipt and expenditure.”
“Well, you know at least periodically how you stand, and where,” said Fifine; “and that is a consolation.”
How was it a consolation? How can a coat removed from the floor, say, and hung on a peg make one feel more sure of one’s position? I have often tried to understand, and cannot. Or is there really in the instinct some subtle feeling of the temporary sojourner in a strange land, prepared for eventualities, ready, because unencumbered, to move on at a moment’s notice? Travellers, explorers, are often the tidiest of men, clearing up behind them, as they advance, having its place for every article of their kit, and scrupulous to maintain it. To me, nevertheless, it is no comfort to know how I stand, if the result is to prove every item in the ledger against me. I am interested in my own solvency or insolvency, moral or material, only as regards their practical effects, and those occur automatically without my troubling my head with anticipations, or with manœuvrings for or against them. At the same time I am quite willing to admit an argument in favour of the super-natural instinct of tidiness, since Nature herself is atrociously untidy. Those who possess it may be spirits, finer than the common, who bring unconsciously from some other sphere the desire to mend, in their little piecemeal, the lamentable disorder of things mundane. Then human tidiness may be, in fact, the surest evidence of immortality; and indeed I hope it is. For if I laughed at it in Fifine, I loved its staid pretty manifestations enough to desire with all my soul to find now in their memory some comfort and assurance.
One entire day we devoted to a visit to the Pont-du-Gard, a super-impressive experience, since, owing to the lateness of the season, we had the whole stupendous mise-en-scène, lovely valley and striding aqueduct, to ourselves. We lunched gaily, sitting on the flat rocks of the river, and then climbed the hill, and walked through the huge artery of the bridge, which, drawing from the heart of Usèz, once flushed with life all the ramifying veins of Nîmes. The conduit is dry now, drained of its living force with the decay and death of the ancient city it supplied; but one still thinks of it somehow as a thing animate, a thing actually organic and sentient in the days when the throbbing of its mighty pulses shook the league-long hills by which it travelled.
That was our last ex-mural expedition; and the next morning, with a sigh of regret for what we were leaving, and of reluctance in the thought of the further stage it meant for us away from Paradise, and towards the uneasy problem of Paris, we shouldered our pack (figuratively) and took the train north to Orange.
This was, however, an event of its kind, since—ostensibly, at least—it stood for the mid-maze of our enterprise. We were travelling, if you remember, with the main purpose to visit Fifine’s birthplace, and I could not but be, secretly, a little curious to learn how she proposed to herself to deal with a rather nervous question. It was hardly to be assumed but that, as the offspring of one of the richest and most powerful nobles in the land, her advent would have occurred amid environments the most notable the town could boast; whereas—but it is true I knew nothing as to the facts of her origin.
However, she resolved the difficulty quite quietly and naturally, and in the most convincing way possible; though I thought a little flush came to her cheek with the explanation. We got in about eleven o’clock of the morning, and were walking up the long avenue that leads from the station to the town, when I said to her:—
“Well, m’amie; how about the site of Fifine’s nest? In what direction are we to seek it?”
“Indeed,” she answered, “I know no more than you.”
“You do not?”
“I was a baby at the time, you see.”
“But not always a baby?”
“Always, as long as I was here. I remember nothing, absolutely nothing—only the oddest, most shadowy little impression, like a dream, of a great thing like a curtain, and a confusion of pots and pans, and dark people moving about among them.”
I laughed. “It is queer, isn’t it, that survival of first impressions—what decides it. Accident, perhaps; the accident of their alighting on a peculiarly sensitive patch of brain-matter. Hullo!”
We had been walking at haphazard, and had emerged suddenly into a broad open Place, which, dominated by the huge blind façade of the Roman Theatre, suggested somehow, with its scintillating crowds, an operatic stage before the rise of the curtain.
“There is your impression,” said I—“realised to the life!”
It was actually so. Strewed all about the ground, with little alleys of commerce dividing the groups, was an infinite confusion of pottery—jugs, dishes, cooking utensils, and what not; and, pervading it, a number of picturesque figures, swarthy of face, hot-dyed of dress and neckerchief, the whole constituting a sort of gypsies’ fair. Fifine stood as if dumbstricken.
“Perhaps now,” I said, “the clue of memory taken up will lead you back to your birthplace?”
She shook her head. “No. But it—O, mon ami, I feel as if I want to cry!”
“You shall cry, Fifine, when we reach our quarters. Come; we will go to the best I know.”
It was at the Hôtel de la Poste we put up; and I specify the fact for three particular reasons: it was from the window of my bedroom, in the Pension attached to that hotel, that I had had—as I was able now to point out to Fifine—my earlier impression of the plane-trees; it was in its salle-à-manger that I found my first opportunity to introduce to her the delectable mysteries of bouille-abaisse; it was in that room also that occurred—but let me come to it.
This dining-room was not, perhaps, of the cheeriest. It was ill-lighted, far from spacious, and fairly crowded, when we entered it, with a mixed assemblage of farmers, shop-keepers, and bagmen. A certain commercial importance attaches, I fancy, to Orange; and moreover market-day, had, no doubt, contributed its quota to the complement. Anyhow we had some difficulty in securing places at a table in a dark corner; but, once established, we prepared, after our custom, to enjoy ourselves thoroughly. And, lo! the first item on the menu was bouille-abaisse.
I crowed. “Tiens! The goal of our long romantic quest lies revealed to us at last. We are about to achieve our ideal; the spirit of abstract beauty offers to materialise before us. Eat of this ambrosia, my gossip, and count for its sake the toil well vindicated.”
Fifine laughed, rosily, but in her little sedate way.
“Poor M. Cabarus!” she said. “It is a shame so to mock at his ideals. They were not the less fine and sincere because his personality failed to recommend them. It was a great soul, was it not, Felix, in a grotesque setting? But externals ought not to influence us. They mean nothing.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I have known the most abstemious men libelled in their waistcoats.”
She laughed again, with a little protesting “tais-toi”—and the bouille-abaisse was placed before us. I watched her taste that Provençal delicacy, trifle a moment with it, put down her fork and lean back.
“You do not like it?” I asked, grinning.
“I think it is simply horrid,” she said, making a face.
So we had come to Provence for nothing after all. However, for myself, I swallowed my disappointment with relish.
It was towards the end of our meal, when the company was somewhat thinning, that the event occurred. I was conscious of a sudden convulsive pressure of Fifine’s shoulder against mine; looked up—and there was Carabas entering the room. We sat aghast and spellbound, but he did not observe us in our dusk corner. He sat himself down, as usual, at the long table, pulled off his gloves (brown kid gloves, and extensively worn), placed them, with his straw hat, on the chair beside him, examined the menu, looked up from his scrutiny with a full sigh of gratification, and round on his immediate company, self-conscious, challenging, and summoned the waiter with a gesture. That garçon, prompt, deferential, relaid the accessories, swept away contiguous crumbs, retreated, and reappeared—with a dish of veal.
“Bouille-abaisse!” exclaimed Carabas, in a voice that all might hear.
“Ah, pardon, Monsieur,” apologised the waiter. “There is none left.”
“It is on the menu.”
“It is, in fact, as Monsieur says. But it is not in the kitchen.”
“But this is infamous,” said the visitor, very loud and indignant. “It is here, but it is not there, you say?”
“The demand, Monsieur will comprehend, has been excessive. There is not so much as a spoonful remaining.”
“No demand should discover a good landlord unprepared. It is his business to keep faith with his guests. Tell him to come and explain.”
The landlord came, apologised, expressed a thousand regrets. All propitiation was in vain. The disappointed troubadour fumed, refused, with many venomous “Bahs” and sarcastic “Chahs,” every offer of an alternative plat, expressed his mortification in a growing fury of speech and emphasis, finally snatched up his hat and gloves from the chair beside, and stalked out of the room, followed by the still protesting hôtelier.
And so he disappeared from our lives, never to enter them again. We sat without a word, quiet as mice. Presently I looked at Fifine, my eyes twinkling. She responded, still silent, to the unspoken suggestion, rose, and we went out together.
“Now for the Roman theatre,” I said, in a suppressed voice.
And it was not until we had penetrated into that august ruin, and climbed the tiers of seats, and sat ourselves down on the highest, in commanding view of the mighty proscenium and of the distant slopes of Mont Ventoux, that she permitted herself to give way, and broke into a fit of laughter which presently threatened to become hysterical.
“O—O!” she cried—“his libelled waistcoat! and after all I had said about his ideals!”
“Now, gossip,” said I, putting my arm about her, for we sat there quite alone. “You must be reasonable, if you please.”
She obeyed at once, dear child, and lay panting against me, only crying and laughing together now a little, and whispering words of love and remorse into my ear; and in a very little she was her own sane self once more.
We stayed in Orange only long enough to familiarise ourselves with its two noblest antiquities, the magnificent theatre and the arch that stands on the Lyons road; then went on by Valence to Vienne, where we lay a couple of nights, and visited the fine Cathedral, and the little temple like the Maison Carrée but not near so satisfying, and went to look down on the Rhone from the heights of Pipet—a lovely vision at sunset. Thence another day’s journey, by way of the Côte Rôtie, and through the rich deep heart of the vine country, carried us to Dijon, town of cakes and cassis and mustard, where, in Burgundian streets, with the high-pitched tile-patterned roofs rising loftily above us, we seemed to realise, as never yet, the sense of an alien atmosphere, not unromantic yet not Paradise, and chill with the shadow of approaching change. Passed and gone were the tamarisk, and the rosemary, and the wild sweet aspic; passed were the ruby-fruited pomegranates, the fig-trees hung thick with purple pendents, coldly luscious to the thirsty palate, the great cypress rows, packed close to screen the gardens from the mistral; passed were the little brisk black bulls, the teams of slow white oxen ploughing in the fields, the be-ribboned sheep, the ranks of gourds, orange and ivory and palest blue, ripening in the open. They were not for our eyes again; but in their place, and in place of the luxuriant hills, peaceful pastures, and endless plains, and the interminable poplars of northern France stretching everywhere. The phantom roar of Paris already echoed in our hearts; and presently, impatient over its insistence, uneasy but allured, we came to a decision, and entered upon the final stage of our journey.
Fifine was very quiet during that stage. She sat most of the time in her corner by the window, looking out on the flowing landscape; sometimes, when she thought I did not observe her, letting her eyes rest on my face, mute, questioning, pathetic; occasionally rousing to enthusiasm over some picturesque detail of the paysage—a leafy farm; a town built on a gentle eminence, which just lifted it shapely above the levels; a group of poplars, singularly effective in its place. These poplars paid everywhere a largesse to the late season, scattering their gold over a bereaved land, and so freely, that only their royal crowns remained to them of all their profuse sovereignty. One could read into them a score of dreamy fantasies—here a silver stem bursting high overhead into a sparkling constellation, there a misty coppice, streaming ashy purple, and ridged with a running fire of stars. They thronged the subdued landscape, just emphasising with their soft radiance its autumn melancholy. Nowhere did they figure so beautiful as in the neighbourhood of Sens, which we passed at a short distance at twilight. Mirrored in the placid waters of the Yonne, the old town first appeared to us, lifting the velvet umber of its tower and huddled buildings against a lemon sky. A poplar or two hung above the river for foreground; there was hardly a ripple there to shake the pictured rushes; it was as lovely an impression of antique peace as I have ever encountered. Fifine, after we had passed it all, made a little gesture to me, and I came and sat by her side, when she stole her hand into mine. I thought I knew what was in her heart—something emotional, a little piteous, the sense of a loveliness spent and of doubts to come. I pressed the soft palm in reassurance.
And so at last—Paris. The benediction of the season remained with us to the end. As we turned under the archway in the Rue de Fleurus, we left behind us the memory of a quiet little moon rising over the towers of Notre Dame.
Madame Crussol appeared to greet us as we passed the conciergerie.
“Ah! So you are back,” she said. “It is a time ill-chosen for those who would seek Paris for its comfort and its safety. You had better have remained with your savages in the south.”
Her manner was severe, if her utterance was cryptic. But I was confident in her secret regard for me; and I believe she had always a soft place in her heart for Fifine. Nevertheless I was startled for the moment.
“What is all that?” I said; “and why and with what are we threatened, ma bonne?”
And she told us.