As the child was crying bitterly and the father was self-reproachful—he had taken the mioche to see her aunt, and coming back had met some friends who had enticed him into the Café of the Mère Diridieu, where they had given him some poisoned, leg-dislocating alcohol—Martin took the child in his arms, and trudged back to the rock-dwellings where the drunkard lived. On the way Boucabeille, relieved of paternal responsibility, the tired child now snuggling sleepily and comfortably against Martin’s neck, grew confidential and confessed, with sly enjoyment, that he had already well watered his throttle before he started. The man, he declared, with the luminousness of an apostle, who did not get drunk occasionally was an imbecile denying himself the pleasures of the Other Life. Martin recognised in Boucabeille a transcendentalist, no matter how muddle-headed. The sober clod did not know adventures. He did not know happiness. The path of the drunkard, Boucabeille explained, was strewn with joy.
The anxious wife who met them at the door called Martin a saint from heaven and her husband a stream of unmentionable things. He staggered under the outburst and laid his hand again on Martin’s shoulder.
“Monsieur Martin, I have committed a fault. I take you to witness”—his wife paused in her invective to hear the penitent—“if I was more drunk I wouldn’t pay attention to anything she says. I have committed a fault. I haven’t got drunk enough.”
“Sale cochon!” cried the lady, and Martin left them, meditating on the philosophy of drunkenness. Quo me rapis Bacche, plenum tui? To what godlike adventure? But the magic word was plenum—right full to the lips. No half-and-half measures for Bacchus. Apparently Boucabeille had failed in his adventure and had missed happiness by a gill. Browning’s lines about the little more and the little less came into his head, and he laughed. Both the poet and the muddle-headed quarryman were right. Adventures not brought through to the end must be dismal fiasco. . . . His mind wandered a little. His shoulder was ever such a trifle stiff from carrying the child; but he missed the warmth of her grateful little body, and the trusting clasp of her tiny arms. It had been an insignificant adventure, an adventure, so to speak, in miniature; but it had been complete, rounded off, perfect. The proof lay in the glow of satisfaction at the thing accomplished. Materially, there was nothing to complain about. But from a philosophic standpoint the satisfaction was not absolute. For the absolute is finality, and there is no finality in mundane things. From a thing so finite as human joy eternal law decreed the evolution of the germs of fresh desires. There had been a strange sweetness in the clasp of those tiny arms. How much sweeter to a man would be the clasp, if the arms were his own flesh and blood? Martin was shocked by the suspicion that things were not going right with him as a human being.
The pleasant mass of the Hôtel des Grottes looming dimly white against its black background came into view. The lights in an uncurtained and unshuttered window, above the terrace, were visible. A figure passed rapidly across the room and sent drunkards and adventures and curly-headed five-year-olds packing from his mind. But he averted his eyes and walked on and came to the Pont de Dronne, and then halted to light a cigarette. The frosty silence of sharp moonlight hung over the town. The silver shimmer reflected from reaches of water and from slated roofs invested it with unspeakable beauty and peace. A little cold caressing wind came from the distant mountains, seen in soft outline. Near black shelves of rock and dark mysteries of forest and masses of houses beyond the bridge-end closed other horizons. He remembered his first impression of Brantôme, when he had sat with Corinna on the terrace, a mothering shelter from all fierce and cruel things.
“And yet,” thought he, as he puffed his cigarette smoke in the clear air, “beyond this little spot lies a world of unceasing endeavour and throbbing pulses and women of disturbing beauty. Such a woman on her meteoric passage from one sphere of glory to another has flashed before my eyes to-night. Why am I here pursuing an avocation, which, though honest, is none the less greasy and obscure?”
Unable to solve the enigma, he sighed and threw his cigarette, which had gone out during his meditation, into the river. A patter of quick footsteps at the approach of the bridge caused him to turn his head, and he saw emerge from the gloom into the moonlight a tall, fur-clad figure advancing towards him. She gave him a swift look of recognition.
“Monsieur Martin——”
He raised his cap. “Good evening, Miss Merriton.”
She halted. “My good host and hostess are gone to bed. I couldn’t sit by my window and sentimentalise through the glass; so I came out.”