“No, certainly they haven’t,” I was obliged to retract at once. “I beg your pardon, Amedee.”
“Ah, monsieur!” He made a deprecatory bow (which plunged me still deeper in shame), struck a match, and offered a light for my cigar with a forgiving hand. “All the same,” he pursued, “it seems very mysterious—this Keredec affair!”
“To comprehend a great man, Amedee,” I said, “is the next thing to sharing his greatness.”
He blinked slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, reverting to his puzzle.
“But is it not incomprehensible that people should eat indoors this fine weather?”
I admitted that it was. I knew very well how hot and stuffy the salon of Madame Brossard’s “Grande Suite” must be, while the garden was fragrant in the warm, dry night, and the outdoor air like a gentle tonic. Nevertheless, Professor Keredec and his friend preferred the salon.
When a man is leading a very quiet and isolated life, it is inconceivable what trifles will occupy and concentrate his attention. The smaller the community the more blowzy with gossip you are sure to find it; and I have little doubt that when Friday learned enough English, one of the first things Crusoe did was to tell him some scandal about the goat. Thus, though I treated the “Keredec affair” with a seeming airiness to Amedee, I cunningly drew the faithful rascal out, and fed my curiosity upon his own (which, as time went on and the mystery deepened, seemed likely to burst him), until, virtually, I was receiving, every evening at dinner, a detailed report of the day’s doings of Professor Keredec and his companion.
The reports were voluminous, the details few. The two gentlemen, as Amedee would relate, spent their forenoons over books and writing in their rooms. Professor Keredec’s voice could often be heard in every part of the inn; at times holding forth with such protracted vehemence that only one explanation would suffice: the learned man was delivering a lecture to his companion.
“Say then!” exclaimed Amedee—“what king of madness is that? To make orations for only one auditor!”
He brushed away my suggestion that the auditor might be a stenographer to whom the professor was dictating chapters for a new book. The relation between the two men, he contended, was more like that between teacher and pupil. “But a pupil with gray hair!” he finished, raising his fat hands to heaven. “For that other monsieur has hair as gray as mine.”