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?”