Jason: A Romance

by Justus Miles Forman

He looked at his watch and it was half-past twelve. There was nothing to be done, he considered, but wait--get through the day somehow; and so, presently, he went out to lunch. He went up the rue Vavin to the Boulevard Montparnasse and down that broad thoroughfare to Lavenue's, on the busy Place de Rennes, where the cooking is the best in all this quarter, and can, indeed, hold up its head without shame in the face of those other more widely famous restaurants across the river, frequented by the smart world and by the travelling gourmet.

He went through to the inner room, which is built like a raised loggia round two sides of a little garden, and which is always cool and fresh in summer. He ordered a rather elaborate lunch, and thought that he sat a very long time at it, but when he looked again at his watch only an hour and a half had gone by. It was a quarter-past two. Ste. Marie was depressed. There remained almost all of the afternoon to be got through, and Heaven alone could say how much of the evening, before he could have his consultation with Richard Hartley. He tried to think of some way of passing the time, but although he was not usually at a loss he found his mind empty of ideas. None of his common occupations recommended themselves to him. He knew that whatever he tried to do he would interrupt it with pulling out his watch every half-hour or so and cursing the time because it lagged so slowly. He went out to the terrace for coffee, very low in his mind.

But half an hour later, as he sat behind his little marble-topped table, smoking and sipping a liqueur, his eyes fell upon something across the square which brought him to his feet with a sudden exclamation. One of the big electric trams that ply between the Place St. Germain des Prés and Clamart, by way of the Porte de Versailles and Vanves, was dragging its unwieldy bulk round the turn from the rue de Rennes into the boulevard. He could see the sign-board along the impériale--"Clamart-St. Germain des Prés," with "Issy" and "Vanves" in brackets between.

Ste. Marie clinked a franc upon the table and made off across the Place at a run. Omnibuses from Batignolles and Menilmontant got in his way, fiacres tried to run him down, and a motor-car in a hurry pulled up just in time to save his life, but Ste. Marie ran on and caught the tram before it had completed the negotiation of the long curve and gathered speed for its dash down the boulevard. He sprang upon the step, and the conductor reluctantly unfastened the chain to admit him. So he climbed up to the top and seated himself, panting. The dial high on the façade of the Gare Montparnasse said ten minutes to three.

He had no definite plan of action. He had started off in this headlong fashion upon the spur of a moment's impulse, and because he knew where the tram was going. Now, embarked, he began to wonder if he was not a fool. He knew every foot of the way to Clamart, for it was a favorite half-day's excursion with him to ride there in this fashion, walk thence through the beautiful Meudon wood across to the river, and from Bellevue or Bas-Meudon take a Suresnes boat back into the city. He knew, or thought he knew, just where lay the house, surrounded by garden and half-wild park, of which Olga Nilssen had told him; he had often wondered whose place it was as the tram rolled along the length of its high wall. But he knew, also, that he could do nothing there, single-handed and without excuse or preparation. He could not boldly ring the bell, demand speech with Mile. Coira O'Hara, and ask her if she knew anything of the whereabouts of young Arthur Benham, whom a photographer had suspected of being in love with her. He certainly could not do that. And there seemed to be nothing else that--Ste. Marie broke off this somewhat despondent course of reasoning with a sudden little voiceless cry. For the first time it occurred to him to connect the house on the Clamart road and Mlle. Coira O'Hara and young Arthur Benham (it will be remembered that the man had not yet had time to arrange his suddenly acquired mass of evidence in logical order and to make deductions from it), for the first time he began to put two and two together. Stewart had hidden away his nephew; this nephew was known to have been much enamoured of the girl Coira O'Hara; Coira O'Hara was said to be living--with her father, probably--in the house on the outskirts of Paris, where she was visited by Captain Stewart. Was not the inference plain enough--sufficiently reasonable? It left, without doubt, many puzzling things to be explained--perhaps too many; but Ste. Marie sat forward in his seat, his eyes gleaming, his face tense with excitement.

"Is young Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?"

He said the words almost aloud, and he became aware that the fat woman with a live fowl at her feet and the butcher's boy on his other side were looking at him curiously. He realized that he was behaving in an excited manner, and so sat back and lowered his eyes. But over and over within him the words said themselves--over and over, until they made a sort of mad, foolish refrain.

"Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road? Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?" He was afraid that he would say it aloud once more, and, he tried to keep a firm hold upon himself.

The tram swung into the rue de Sevres, and rolled smoothly out the long, uninteresting stretch of the rue Lecourbe, far out to where the houses, became scattered, where mounds and pyramids of red tiles stood alongside the factory where they had been made, where an acre of little glass hemispheres in long, straight rows winked and glistened in the afternoon sun--the forcing-beds of some market gardener; out to the Porte de Versailles at the city wall, where a group of customs officers sprawled at ease before their little sentry-box or loafed over to inspect an incoming tram.

A bugle sounded and a drum beat from the great fosse under the wall, and a company of piou-pious, red-capped, red-trousered, shambled through their evolutions in a manner to break the heart of a British or a German drill-sergeant. Then out past level fields to little Vanves, with its steep streets and its old gray church, and past the splendid grounds of the Lycée beyond. The fat woman got down, her live fowl shrieking protest to the movement, and the butcher's boy got down, too, so that Ste. Marie was left alone upon the impériale save for a snuffy old gentleman in a pot-hat who sat in a corner buried behind the day's Droits de l'Homme.