I do not know how long I sat at my window in the empty neighbouring compartment, smoking, and looking with vacant gaze on the rush of impalpable things without. Gradually, as I stared, the gliding telegraph wires, sleekly gleaming past in modulations of high and low, resolved themselves in my brain into an endless stave of music, with posts for bars and insulators for notes, the gathered consonance of which, entering into the rhythmic clack of the wheels, seemed to leap into a wild chorus at each recurrent bar-line, and thence to subside and rise again to vault the next. Weariful to madness grew that rocking chaunt, with its flapping regular punctuations, and the stunning prospect of my being doomed to an eternity of it was already beginning to settle hideously on my soul, when of a sudden the strain tailed off into a hollow drum of thunder, which I recognised curiously for the wash and fall of far-away breakers. Walking towards those, and always to hear them receding, I tripped, stumbled, and sank at once into oblivion. And thereafter consciousness was mine but at long intervals, when the grinding of brakes, jarring into the booming rhythm of things, spoke of stoppages at provincial stations, and one’s lids were lifted to a heavy knowledge of shooting lights, and shadowy forms drifting, and a pallid fog of steam condensing in the cold air, and one’s ears resentfully awakened to a sound of voices, hooting sometimes, or singing, and potential of disgusting intrusions on one’s privacy. Yet nobody disturbed us; and in the end I slept so soundly that I came, after all, to be the laggard.
It was Fifine’s soft voice calling to me that roused me at length from my stupor. It was clear daylight, and she was standing, glad and fresh, in the outer corridor, looking on the gracious panorama of hills and streams which unwound itself before her. Her hat was off; the rug was wrapped about her shoulders; a strand of hair hung over her slumberous eyes. She made a very picture of dear disorder.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said, in a low satisfied voice. “O, I’m glad we came!”
We had awakened, no doubt, to the cream of it all—those long passages of the mountains after the monotonous flats were spent. The sun had no power as yet to dissipate the ponds of mist which lay in the hollows and choked the deep ravines; but that was only to have our strange land half lapped in enchantment, and to try to penetrate with delight the mysteries of its gleaming floors. They were shy and sly, those mysteries—here, an up-reaching shadow just seen and snatched away; there, white things that moved and vanished; everywhere sparkles of frosty green, and over all, billowing remotely, or frowning imminent, the slopes and scarps of mighty hills. High up in the air we ran, through thundering gorges and over wideflung valleys, and always to perpetual change and perpetual beauty. The railway took the line of least resistance, following the conformations of the range; and yet with such obstacles had Nature striven to thwart its builders, we were hardly ever out of one tunnel before we were into another. All the way, for scores of miles, they pierced the vast and rocky buttresses, and once, when within a given time we tried to strike an average, we gave up impatiently, having counted into the third dozen, and dismissed the silly effort. The line of the hundred tunnels we called it; and indeed I believe that number is but a fraction short of the truth.
Now, as the sun gained strength, the scene, fired by it, grew out to us like a writing on white paper in invisible ink. Soft iridescences were resolved and identified for flowering pastures or fruiting trees; hanging woods detached themselves from clouds; tiny farms, and steadings, and little foreshortened churches were confessed, each in its green place, for what they were; and the cattle, black, or white, or dappled like half-ripe chestnuts, walked on visible hoofs. Sometimes turbulent floods were seen crashing far beneath us; sometimes placid pools mirrored the blue; but most beautiful were the shallow bends of streams, where, tumbling garrulously over white stones and silt, the little broken waters took on the most heavenly hues of lazulite and aquamarine, streaked with transparent green.
Fifine was enraptured with it all. She had first risen, it appeared, about the time of Prades St. Julien, and had feasted her eyes on that old picturesque monastery-crowned scarp, with its calvary and flower-pot tiled buildings, with the delighted relish of an unspoiled appetite. And thence had followed a very procession of enchantments—mediæval strongholds set high on lonely crags, and appearing above the ground-fog like islands in a quiet sea; quaint church-towers, surmounted by bells in wrought-iron cages; turret-gated farms; mystic townlets, seen through the gaps of hills, hanging pearly and opalescent in an amber haze; and everywhere, for foreground, rock and forest and river and mountain, always changing, always unfolding new beauties, spied from a giddy altitude. Twenty times had she been moved to wake me to share in her innocent delight, and twenty times refrained, from timidity or pity for my weariness.
Well, I felt rewarded now. Her enthusiasm was so whole, so fresh, so lovely infectious, it justified, I thought, my happiest predictions. It seemed a golden interval that stretched between now and our return.
At Langogne we got out to drink coffee at the extempore buffet—and thereby hangs a tale. It had chanced that, pacing the corridor of our carriage once or twice during the earlier hours of my waking, I had spied an uncouth figure rolled up on the seat of an adjacent compartment. There was nothing remarkable in that, nor in the fact that this stranger, by evidence of a knapsack resting in the rack above his head, was a foot-wayfarer like myself. The peculiarity—for there was one—lay, as presently revealed to us, in the creature’s appearance alone. For, as we approached Langogne, we heard him bestirring and uncoiling himself, with a sound of vast stretchings and yawnings; and suddenly he was in the doorway. I had a glimpse of him, wild-haired and red-eyed; and then, as we alighted for our twelve-minutes’ respite, he followed us out. We encountered again at the buffet, and he drank his coffee quite close to us, his lips protruded abstractedly, his eyes staring inflammatory over the rim of his glass at Fifine. Observing which, I took note of him.
He was rather a short man, with a suspicion of a rounded paunch; and he was dressed in a grey waistcoat, going very high under the throat, loose grey trousers, inclining to the pegtop, and a baggy alpaca coat with brass buttons. A weeping bow of black silk, knotted into what we should call an Oxford collar, not over-clean, dropped five inches down his chest, and his head for the moment was hatless, displaying a huge crop of ginger-brown hair, rather wild than long. An untidy chin-beard, or Napoleon, and a free moustache, raked up a l’Henri Quatre, both of the same hue, somewhat over-clothed a small face a little poodle-like in suggestion; but the utter self-complacency of the creature’s bearing was a thing to marvel over and worship. He strutted, he straddled—though displaying thereby some weakness of knee; he preened his coffee-damped moustache: “Look at me,” he seemed to be saying; “make the most of this accident, which gives you henceforth the claim to boast to your friends of having once in your life rubbed shoulders with the renowned, the incomparable Carabas Cabarus!”
For that, as we came to learn presently, was his name—the Cabarus, the latter-day Provençal songbird, the poet of “native woodnotes wild,” the gallant, the amorous, the very last of the troubadours. His eyes—large, watery, prominent, of a pale blue, and really expressive of some mystic melancholy—had already, over the brink of his glass, marked down, and made a provisional capture of, Fifine. Henceforth he walked, pegtops and all, “in aureate dawns of ecstasy, his rhythmic heart one lyric.”