by W. F. Morris
“What do you think about that, Charles?” asked Baron presently with a nod towards a notice which was pinned to one of the posts supporting the awning.
The notice stated that there was a special cabaret performance on an upper floor of the café. Below the notice was a framed photograph of some half-dozen girls with their hands resting on each other’s shoulders.
Pagan cocked an eye at the photograph and yawned. “Are they good to look upon?” he murmured.
“I don’t know,” answered Baron. “I can’t see from here. But there seems to be a good display of leg.”
“Your tastes are low,” retorted Pagan virtuously. “But as you are on a holiday, I suppose we must indulge them,” he added with a resigned air. He emptied his glass and rose languidly.
They passed up two flights of stairs, and were directed by a patriarchal waiter to a door labelled “Cabaret.” On the other side of the door their first impression was of many red-shaded lights reflected upon the polished floor and a faint blue haze of cigarette smoke. It was a long room, with a bar on a low raised platform at the far end. A few people were sitting on high stools at the bar. On the shelves behind it was an imposing array of bottles in which the various liquids twinkled like many-coloured lanterns. Down one side of the room ran a long, low, comfortably padded seat with short branches jutting from it at right-angles about every two yards, forming a series of little open alcoves in each of which stood a small table. On each of these little tables stood a card bearing the notice, “Reserved for Champagne.”
Baron nodded towards them. “There you are, Charles; if you want to get stung, now is your chance. Sweet champagne at two hundred francs a bottle is as good a method as any of chucking your money about.”
Apparently other people thought the same; for the little alcoves were unoccupied except for one small party and three or four ladies of the house who sat together combing their shingled hair with the aid of their small handbag mirrors. The other people sat on the long settee on the opposite side of the room or on the chairs and chesterfields at the end.
“Yes, the Englishman may take his pleasures sadly,” remarked Pagan as he sank into one of the chesterfields, “but the Frenchman takes his cannily. He is not such a fool as to go there.” He nodded towards the champagne-reserved alcoves. “Those notices should read, ‘reserved for Les Anglais and Les Américains.’”
The orchestra struck up, and several people rose and began to dance. Pagan ordered drinks and they sat idly watching the dancers.
Suddenly Baron exclaimed, “There’s young Cecil over there. By jove, yes, and Clare.” He gripped Pagan’s arm tightly. “And, my God, yes—Vigers! He’s got the mask on.”
Pagan had not seen Vigers since that tragic scene in the inn, and he found it difficult to believe that he was the tall, handsome man in dress clothes, sitting between Clare and Cecil. “Looks pretty all right from here,” he said at last.
Baron nodded his head abstractedly. “Yes,” he answered in a low voice. “It’s really very like he used to be; it gave me the devil of a jar for a moment. But it’s so … so dead. Poor Clare.”
They sat in silence for some moments, and then Baron stirred. “Well, hadn’t we better go over, Charles?” he suggested.
Pagan hesitated a moment and then nodded abruptly. Avoiding the dancers, they passed along the end of the room and up the other side.
“I am grieved to find you in these low haunts!” chaffed Baron as he halted before Clare.
She looked up at him and smiled. Her eyes travelled slowly from him to Pagan, lingered a moment, and then moved back again.
“Hullo, Dicky,” exclaimed Vigers. He nodded to Pagan. “Evening, Pagan. Yes, you find us leading a gay life.” His blue eyes smiled, but the expression of his marvellously lifelike face remained unchanged. He made room for Baron beside him. Pagan sat down on the far side of Cecil.
“Now that you have got away from me, Dicky, I hope you are not being too wild and dissolute!” smiled Clare.
“Well, I did think old Charles was a bit young for this sort of thing,” laughed Baron. “But having seen that photograph of all those legs outside, wild bison couldn’t hold him back.”
“I don’t believe you tried very hard, Dicky, did you?” she asked with a smile. “Cecil pretends to be bored with the whole proceeding,” she went on, “but I believe really he is thrilled to the marrow.”
“And so he ought to be,” said Vigers heartily. “When I was his age, a good leg shook me to the core.”
“Me too,” agreed Baron. “Only in those days the girls kept them all covered up.”
“Nowadays these young cubs have got blasé about it,” declared Vigers. “Whereas in my day when we did by chance catch a glimpse of one, we thanked God for it and looked the other way, didn’t we, Dicky?”
“We thanked God for it anyway,” agreed Baron.
A dark-haired little lady, beautifully dressed and with a very pleasing and attractive face, halted before them with a tray of roses. The tray was supported round her neck by a dark red ribbon, and she offered it to them very prettily, standing with her little feet close together.
Clare picked a dark red rose, and both Vigers and Baron thrust their hands into their pockets. Baron withdrew his with a grin. “Sorry. Of course it’s Roger’s prerogative now.”
“It is neither his nor yours,” retorted Clare with pretended pique. “I am buying this rose myself. I will leave you and Roger to buy them for the leggy ladies you talk so much about.”
She pinned the rose in her frock, and paid for it in that attractive way of hers that seemed to receive rather than confer a favour. The girl tilted her tray and offered it prettily to Baron, but he smiled and shook his head.
“You have not bought one, Dicky!” exclaimed Clare when the girl had passed on.
“I don’t know any of the ‘leggy ladies’,” laughed Baron.
“But if I were a man I simply could not refuse a pretty girl like that,” said Clare. “I think she is charming, absolutely charming.”
Baron watched the girl walk down the room. “She certainly is very nice,” he admitted.
“Of course she is, Dicky. You must dance with her later on.”
Presently the floor was cleared, and a troupe of six young girls did their acrobatic dance turn. Then the general dancing began again.
“Ask the pretty rose girl, Dicky,” prompted Clare.
“No,” replied Baron gallantly, “I am going to ask you.”
She shook her head. “I am not dancing to-night. Ask that charming little person.”
Baron hesitated, and Vigers exclaimed, “Good lord, Dicky, you used not to be so slow.”
Baron grinned. “Ask her yourself,” he retorted.
Vigers glanced across the room at the girl, who had laid aside the tray of roses and was sitting in a chair. Then he looked back at Clare. “She is rather nice, isn’t she!” he said, and his blue eyes smiled.
She smiled back at him, and her eyes were gentle and kind. She nodded her small head. “Yes, go along, Roger.”
Vigers heaved his tall straight form out of the seat and walked across the room. He halted before the little dark lady, and with his heels together, made her a bow. She turned her head quickly and as her eyes fell on his face she shrank back involuntarily in her chair. But the movement lasted but a fraction of a second. A moment later she was on her feet, her head daintily on one side, thanking him prettily and saying that she would be charmed to dance with him.
Back on the other side of the room, Cecil was talking golf to an inattentive Pagan; and Baron and Clare sat in embarrassed silence. Now that Vigers was not with her, he noticed a look of strain and weariness in her face. “Won’t you really dance?” he asked gently.
“Just this one then,” she conceded.
Cecil’s golf biography came to an end at last. “When are you going back?” he asked suddenly.
Pagan told him. “We thought we would have the last three days here,” he said. “
We both like Strasbourg.”
“Not too bad a spot,” conceded Cecil. “But I have heard rumours of trouble here before long.”
“What sort of trouble?” asked Pagan.
“Political, you know. Things are working up to a head, from all accounts.”
Pagan nodded. “We ran in for a spot of it at Colmar,” he said. “But it did not come to much; though I thought there was probably plenty more wherever that came from.”
“Mostly hot air here too, I expect,” said Cecil.
When the music ceased, Clare and Baron sat down again. Vigers came back down the room and picked up his long cigarette holder. Clare looked up at him, and her face relaxed again into a kindly, affectionate smile. His eyes smiled back at her devotedly.
“Well, you have missed a lot, Dicky,” he said chaffingly as he sat down. “She dances divinely—almost as well as Clare. Her name is Yvonne, and …” He held out his hands and threw back his head in exaggerated rapture. “And she nestles against one like a … like a …”
“Bird,” suggested Baron with a grin.
Clare laughed.
“It was very nice, anyway,” said Vigers emphatically.
“I think I shall have to dance with her,” said Cecil suddenly. And he rose and strolled languidly across the room amid the subdued cheers of Baron and Vigers. Vigers rose and took Cecil’s vacant seat beside Pagan.
Pagan had taken but little part in the conversation. Marooned on the far side of Cecil, he had had little opportunity of doing so, even had that been his wish. He had spoken no more than half a dozen words to Clare, and those of a most banal kind. But now between him and her, he felt, there was no mean between banality and those deeper things that were forbidden.
With Vigers, however, conversation was less difficult. There was the common meeting ground of the war, and they were soon chatting easily about those bygone days in which they had so much in common.
“Vigers seemed very cheerful, I thought,” remarked Pagan as they walked back to their hotel through the deserted streets.
Baron nodded his head without conviction. “Yes—almost too cheerful to be genuine,” he added gloomily.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BARON and Vigers sat one night at a café on the great square before the station. It was late and few people were about. The cafés at the foot of the tall blocks of buildings threw a cheerful glow upon the pavements and ringed the dim open space with a narrow ribbon of light. Above them, the tall dark buildings themselves showed dimly, cliff-like against the stars. Now and then a brightly lighted tramcar emerged from one of the tributary streets and cruised across the dim deserted space like a liner making for the open sea.
Baron smothered a yawn and glanced at the watch on his wrist. Vigers seemed loath to move. He lounged in his chair with one arm hanging loosely over the back and gazed across at the distant lights that twinkled on the long front of the station.
“I like that fellow Pagan,” he said at last.
Baron nodded and blew a smoke ring from his pipe. “Yes, old Charles is one of the very best,” he affirmed.
Vigers pulled out his tobacco pouch and leaned forward to fill his pipe with his elbows resting upon his knees. “Do you think, Dicky,” he said presently without looking up, “that if you had not run across me again, he and Clare might have made a match of it?”
Baron glanced at him sharply. “What makes you ask that?” he said at last.
Vigers went on filling his pipe very deliberately. “I don’t know—just an idea, that’s all. What do you think?”
Baron sucked jerkily at his pipe. “How should I know?” he said evasively. “There was no understanding whatever between them, if that’s what you mean. I know that.”
Vigers rolled up his pouch and returned it to his pocket. “I know that too,” he said. “But I ask you, Dicky, as man to man, do you think that anything might have matured if I had not turned up again?”
Baron leaned forward in his chair. “Look here, Roger old boy, what is the point of all this? Does it matter now, anyway?”
Vigers paused with a lighted match held above the bowl of his pipe and looked at Baron with his clear blue eyes. “Dicky,” he said quietly, “you used to be a friend of mine. In those old days in the line when I had plenty of pals you never let me down. Are you going to let me down now when you are the only pal I have?”
Baron stirred uncomfortably in his chair. “Roger,” he mumbled, “you know damn well I’d never let you down.”
Vigers nodded. “I know, old lad,” he said kindly. He struck another match and lighted his pipe. “Tell me then, do you think they would have made a match of it?”
“They might have,” answered Baron reluctantly.
“You think they would have? Come now, Dicky—as man to man.”
Baron’s troubled eyes met Vigers’; he gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. “Yes—I think they would have,” he answered miserably.
Vigers nodded without speaking. A lighted tramcar was slowly ploughing its way across the deserted square. He watched its progress with blue, inscrutable eyes. “Is Pagan the good fellow he appears to be—all through, I mean?” he asked suddenly.
Baron took his pipe from his mouth and frowned at the bowl. “I have known old Charles getting on for twenty years now,” he said earnestly. “In fair weather and in foul: in the line and out of it: and except you, old Roger, there is no man I would rather have with me in a tight corner. He may talk like a damned fool at times, but Charles Pagan never let anyone down in his life.”
Vigers nodded. “I’m glad of that.”
“But why all this, Roger,” protested Baron earnestly. “There is nothing wrong, is there?”
Vigers shook his head, and his eyes smiled at Baron’s troubled face. “No, nothing wrong. Only I realize more than ever that I was right all those years ago when I chose to stay—up there.” He jerked his head southwards towards the invisible mountains.
“I think you are talking rot,” said Baron miserably. “Clare loves you and always has loved you. You know that.”
Vigers raised his fearless blue eyes to Baron’s face. “I know that. I believe she always will love me—God bless her,” he said simply. He stared out across the dim square and went on after a moment or two. “But the love she has for me now cannot be the same as the love she had. How could it be? The one was the love of a young healthy girl for a healthy man—the mating love, Dicky, that comes to most of us at least once in a lifetime. The other love isn’t like that; it can’t be. It is more like the love of a mother or a sister or of an old friend. That is the only sort of love a fellow like me can inspire.”
Baron fidgeted in his chair. “Don’t be an ass, Roger,” he said gruffly. “You are getting morbid about—about that knock you got and you are imagining things.”
Vigers shook his head. “No, Dicky. Believe me, I am not morbid, nor bitter nor any of those things,” he said quietly. “I am just facing facts. And the fact is that the whole thing is a mistake. Mask or no mask I am not a pretty sight, I know that; and in any case one cannot wash out a dozen years of life and begin again as though those years had never existed. I am not the same man even outwardly; and I am certainly not inwardly.”
“Surely it does not make all that difference,” mumbled Baron.
Vigers placed his pipe on the table. “Do you think the war changed you much?” he asked.
“I suppose it did a good bit,” admitted Baron. “But that was an abnormal experience.”
“And was not my life up there abnormal?” persisted Vigers with another jerk of his head towards the invisible mountains. “How much of the war did you have?”
Baron moved restlessly in his chair. “From the end of ’fourteen to the armistice, with a break of six months in hospital.”
“Four years at the outside,” commented Vigers. “I had three times as long as that up there. Do you think it has not made any difference? Twelve odd years alone with one’s thoughts in a dug-out isn’
t too good a training for modern life.”
Baron stared out gloomily across the square. A torn newspaper flapped forlornly at the foot of a lamp post. In the distance an engine whistled shrilly.
Vigers took up his pipe again. “I was right all those years ago when I made my decision, and I knew it. I ought to have stuck to it; only I was persuaded against my better judgment.”
Baron roused himself. “I think you are talking rot,” he protested with some show of conviction.
“You don’t think so at all, Dicky,” retorted Vigers quietly. “You know I am talking sense, and you agree with me.”
Baron turned his glass round and round on the table and stared at the pavement. “I don’t know why you should think that,” he said without looking up.
Vigers regarded him for a moment in silence, and his eyes smiled kindly. “Dicky,” he said presently. “It was my handwriting which gave me away, wasn’t it?”
Baron nodded.
“But it was Griffin’s babbling that gave the show away to Clare.” He paused, and then went on in accusing tones, “Then it was Charles Pagan who for his own reasons persuaded you not to tell her?”
“He was all for telling her,” retorted Baron quickly. “There is nothing like that about old Charles.”
Vigers blue eyes smiled at the success of his little trap. “I know that,” he said. “Then it was you who agreed with me?”
Baron was silent.
“It only showed your common sense, Dicky,” went on Vigers kindly. “And showed that you were the good friend to Clare and to me that I always took you to be. You were absolutely right. It would have been far better if neither Clare nor I had ever known.”
He gazed out again across the open square. “But the difficulty is to get back to the status quo. Unfortunately one cannot cut out the last fortnight any more than one can cut out the last twelve years.
“You see, if I put it to Clare that it would be better for us to go our separate ways, she would never consent; and even if she did, the idea that I might not be happy up there would always stick in her throat. Of course if I were the hero of a play,” he went on with a little mirthless laugh, “I should go the pace, get tight and all that in order to put her right off me. But I fancy she would see through that, and if it did come off it would cause her a lot of pain.” His eyes smiled sadly. “And in any case I am not altruistic enough for that sort of thing, I’m afraid. I would like her always to think well of me.” He struck another match and went on calmly and thoughtfully. “You see, almost anything I could do, Clare would guess I was doing it for her; and then she wouldn’t have it. If I pretended to fall in love with another girl, for instance, she would see through that … unless I married the girl. There is one I could. But that wouldn’t be cricket to the girl.” He stared at his glass. “There does not seem to be any way out of it; unless I die gracefully!”