He stooped to brush the brambles from his trousers, sending me a sidelong glance from his blue eyes, which were brightly confident and inquiring, like a boy’s. At the same time it struck me that whatever the nature of the singularity investing him it partook of nothing repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him “different” and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think him odd enough.
“Isn’t your description,” I said gravely, thinking to suit my humour to his own, “somewhat too general? Over yonder a few miles lies Houlgate. Trouville itself is not so far, and this is the season. A great many white hats trimmed with roses might come for a stroll in these woods. If you would complete the items—” and I waved my hand as if inviting him to continue.
“I have seen her only once before,” he responded promptly, with a seriousness apparently quite genuine. “That was from my window at an inn, three days ago. She drove by in an open carriage without looking up, but I could see that she was very handsome. No—” he broke off abruptly, but as quickly resumed— “handsome isn’t just what I mean. Lovely, I should say. That is more like her and a better thing to be, shouldn’t you think so?”
“Probably — yes — I think so,” I stammered, in considerable amazement.
“She went by quickly,” he said, as if he were talking in the most natural and ordinary way in the world, “but I noticed that while she was in the shade of the inn her hair appeared to be dark, though when the carriage got into the sunlight again it looked fair.”
I had noticed the same thing when the lady who had passed emerged from the shadows of the path into the sunshine of the glade, but I did not speak of it now; partly because he gave me no opportunity, partly because I was almost too astonished to speak at all, for I was no longer under the delusion that he had any humourous or whimsical intention.
“A little while ago,” he went on, “I was up in the branches of a tree over yonder, and I caught a glimpse of a lady in a light dress and a white hat and I thought it might be the same. She wore a dress like that and a white hat with roses when she drove by the inn. I am very anxious to see her again.”
“You seem to be!”
“And haven’t you seen her? Hasn’t she passed this way?”
He urged the question with the same strange eagerness which had marked his manner from the first, a manner which confounded me by its absurd resemblance to that of a boy who had not mixed with other boys and had never been teased. And yet his expression was intelligent and alert; nor was there anything abnormal or “queer” in his good-humoured gaze.
“I think that I may have seen her,” I began slowly; “but if you do not know her I should not advise—”
I was interrupted by a shout and the sound of a large body plunging in the thicket. At this the face of “that other monsieur” flushed slightly; he smiled, but seemed troubled.
“That is a friend of mine,” he said. “I am afraid he will want me to go back with him.” And he raised an answering shout.
Professor Keredec floundered out through the last row of saplings and bushes, his beard embellished with a broken twig, his big face red and perspiring. He was a fine, a mighty man, ponderous of shoulder, monumental of height, stupendous of girth; there was cloth enough in the hot-looking black frock-coat he wore for the canopy of a small pavilion. Half a dozen books were under his arm, and in his hand he carried a hat which evidently belonged to “that other monsieur,” for his own was on his head.
One glance of scrutiny and recognition he shot at me from his silver-rimmed spectacles; and seized the young man by the arm.
“Ha, my friend!” he exclaimed in a bass voice of astounding power and depth, “that is one way to study botany: to jump out of the middle of a high tree and to run like a crazy man!” He spoke with a strong accent and a thunderous rolling of the “r.” “What was I to think?” he demanded. “What has arrived to you?”
“I saw a lady I wished to follow,” the other answered promptly.
“A lady! What lady?”
“The lady who passed the inn three days ago. I spoke of her then, you remember.”
“Tonnerre de Dieu!” Keredec slapped his thigh with the sudden violence of a man who remembers that he has forgotten something, and as a final addition to my amazement, his voice rang more of remorse than of reproach. “Have I never told you that to follow strange ladies is one of the things you cannot do?”
“That other monsieur” shook his head. “No, you have never told me that. I do not understand it,” he said, adding irrelevantly, “I believe this gentleman knows her. He says he thinks he has seen her.”
“If you please, we must not trouble this gentleman about it,” said the professor hastily. “Put on your hat, in the name of a thousand saints, and let us go!”
“But I wish to ask him her name,” urged the other, with something curiously like the obstinacy of a child. “I wish—”
“No, no!” Keredec took him by the arm. “We must go. We shall be late for our dinner.”
“But why?” persisted the young man.
“Not now!” The professor removed his broad felt hat and hurriedly wiped his vast and steaming brow — a magnificent structure, corniced, at this moment, with anxiety. “It is better if we do not discuss it now.”
“But I might not meet him again.”
Professor Keredec turned toward me with a half-desperate, half-apologetic laugh which was like the rumbling of heavy wagons over a block pavement; and in his flustered face I thought I read a signal of genuine distress.
“I do not know the lady,” I said with some sharpness. “I have never seen her until this afternoon.”
Upon this “that other monsieur” astonished me in good earnest. Searching my eyes eagerly with his clear, inquisitive gaze, he took a step toward me and said:
“You are sure you are telling the truth?”
The professor uttered an exclamation of horror, sprang forward, and clutched his friend’s arm again. “Malheureux!” he cried, and then to me: “Sir, you will give him pardon if you can? He has no meaning to be rude.”
“Rude?” The young man’s voice showed both astonishment and pain. “Was that rude? I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to be rude, God knows! Ah,” he said sadly, “I do nothing but make mistakes. I hope you will forgive me.”
He lifted his hand as if in appeal, and let it drop to his side; and in the action, as well as in the tone of his voice and his attitude of contrition, there was something that reached me suddenly, with the touch of pathos.
“Never mind,” I said. “I am only sorry that it was the truth.”
“Thank you,” he said, and turned humbly to Keredec.
“Ha, that is better!” shouted the great man, apparently relieved of a vast weight. “We shall go home now and eat a good dinner. But first—” his silver-rimmed spectacles twinkled upon me, and he bent his Brobdingnagian back in a bow which against my will reminded me of the curtseys performed by Orloff’s dancing bears— “first let me speak some words for myself. My dear sir” — he addressed himself to me with grave formality— “do not suppose I have no realization that other excuses should be made to you. Believe me, they shall be. It is now that I see it is fortunate for us that you are our fellow-innsman at Les Trois Pigeons.”
I was unable to resist the opportunity, and, affecting considerable surprise, interrupted him with the apparently guileless query:
“Why, how did you know that?”
Professor Keredec’s laughter rumbled again, growing deeper and louder till it reverberated in the woods and a hundred hale old trees laughed back at him.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he shouted. “But you shall not take me for a window-curtain spy! That is a fine reputation I give myself with you! Ho, ho!”
Then, followed submissively by “that o
ther monsieur,” he strode into the path and went thundering forth through the forest.
CHAPTER VI
NO DOUBT THE most absurd thing I could have done after the departure of Professor Keredec and his singular friend would have been to settle myself before my canvas again with the intention of painting — and that is what I did. At least, I resumed my camp-stool and went through some of the motions habitually connected with the act of painting.
I remember that the first time in my juvenile reading I came upon the phrase, “seated in a brown study,” I pictured my hero in a brown chair, beside a brown table, in a room hung with brown paper. Later, being enlightened, I was ambitious to display the figure myself, but the uses of ordinary correspondence allowed the occasion for it to remain unoffered. Let me not only seize upon the present opportunity but gild it, for the adventure of the afternoon left me in a study which was, at its mildest, a profound purple.
The confession has been made of my curiosity concerning my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; however, it had been comparatively a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so suddenly and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine, I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying over and over aloud, “What is wrong with him? What is wrong with him?”
This was the sillier inasmuch as the word “wrong” (bearing any significance of a darkened mind) had not the slightest application to “that other monsieur.” There had been neither darkness nor dullness; his eyes, his expression, his manner, betrayed no hint of wildness; rather they bespoke a quick and amiable intelligence — the more amazing that he had shown himself ignorant of things a child of ten would know. Amedee and his fellows of Les Trois Pigeons had judged wrongly of his nationality; his face was of the lean, right, American structure; but they had hit the relation between the two men: Keredec was the master and “that other monsieur” the scholar — a pupil studying boys’ textbooks and receiving instruction in matters and manners that children are taught. And yet I could not believe him to be a simple case of arrested development. For the matter of that, I did not like to think of him as a “case” at all. There had been something about his bright youthfulness — perhaps it was his quick contrition for his rudeness, perhaps it was a certain wistful quality he had, perhaps it was his very “singularity” — which appealed as directly to my liking as it did urgently to my sympathy.
I came out of my vari-coloured study with a start, caused by the discovery that I had absent-mindedly squeezed upon my palette the entire contents of an expensive tube of cobalt violet, for which I had no present use; and sighing (for, of necessity, I am an economical man), I postponed both of my problems till another day, determined to efface the one with a palette knife and a rag soaked in turpentine, and to defer the other until I should know more of my fellow-lodgers at Madame Brossard’s.
The turpentine rag at least proved effective; I scoured away the last tokens of my failure with it, wishing that life were like the canvas and that men had knowledge of the right celestial turpentine. After that I cleaned my brushes, packed and shouldered my kit, and, with a final imprecation upon all sausage-sandwiches, took up my way once more to Les Trois Pigeons.
Presently I came upon an intersecting path where, on my previous excursions, I had always borne to the right; but this evening, thinking to discover a shorter cut, I went straight ahead. Striding along at a good gait and chanting sonorously, “On Linden when the sun was low,” I left the rougher boscages of the forest behind me and emerged, just at sunset, upon an orderly fringe of woodland where the ground was neat and unencumbered, and the trimmed trees stood at polite distances, bowing slightly to one another with small, well-bred rustlings.
The light was somewhere between gold and pink when I came into this lady’s boudoir of a grove. “Isar flowing rapidly” ceased its tumult abruptly, and Linden saw no sterner sight that evening: my voice and my feet stopped simultaneously — for I stood upon Quesnay ground.
Before me stretched a short broad avenue of turf, leading to the chateau gates. These stood open, a gravelled driveway climbing thence by easy stages between kempt shrubberies to the crest of the hill, where the gray roof and red chimney-pots of the chateau were glimpsed among the tree-tops. The slope was terraced with strips of flower-gardens and intervals of sward; and against the green of a rising lawn I marked the figure of a woman, pausing to bend over some flowering bush. The figure was too slender to be mistaken for that of the present chatelaine of Quesnay: in Miss Elizabeth’s regal amplitude there was never any hint of fragility. The lady upon the slope, then, I concluded, must be Madame d’Armand, the inspiration of Amedee’s “Monsieur has much to live for!”
Once more this day I indorsed that worthy man’s opinion, for, though I was too far distant to see clearly, I knew that roses trimmed Madame d’Armand’s white hat, and that she had passed me, no long time since, in the forest.
I took off my cap.
“I have the honour to salute you,” I said aloud. “I make my apologies for misbehaving with sandwiches and camp-stools in your presence, Madame d’Armand.”
Something in my own pronunciation of her name struck me as reminiscent: save for the prefix, it had sounded like “Harman,” as a Frenchman might pronounce it.
Foreign names involve the French in terrible difficulties. Hughes, an English friend of mine, has lived in France some five-and-thirty years without reconciling himself to being known as “Monsieur Ig.”
“Armand” might easily be Jean Ferret’s translation of “Harman.” Had he and Amedee in their admiration conferred the prefix because they considered it a plausible accompaniment to the lady’s gentle bearing? It was not impossible; it was, I concluded, very probable.
I had come far out of my way, so I retraced my steps to the intersection of the paths, and thence made for the inn by my accustomed route. The light failed under the roofing of foliage long before I was free of the woods, and I emerged upon the road to Les Trois Pigeons when twilight had turned to dusk.
Not far along the road from where I came into it, stood an old, brown, deep-thatched cottage — a branch of brushwood over the door prettily beckoning travellers to the knowledge that cider was here for the thirsty; and as I drew near I perceived that one availed himself of the invitation. A group stood about the open door, the lamp-light from within disclosing the head of the house filling a cup for the wayfarer; while honest Mere Baudry and two generations of younger Baudrys clustered to miss no word of the interchange of courtesies between Pere Baudry and his chance patron.
It afforded me some surprise to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under his arm; altogether equipped to such a high point of pedestrianism that a cynical person might have been reminded of loud calls for wine at some hostelry in the land of opera bouffe. He was speaking fluently, though with a detestable accent, in a rough-and-ready, pick-up dialect of Parisian slang, evidently under the pleasant delusion that he employed the French language, while Pere Baudry contributed his share of the conversation in a slow patois. As both men spoke at the same time and neither understood two consecutive words the other said, it struck me that the dialogue might prove unproductive of any highly important results this side of Michaelmas; therefore, discovering that the very pedestrian gentleman was making some sort of inquiry concerning Les Trois Pigeons, I came to a halt and proffered aid.
“Are you looking for Madame Brossard’s?” I asked in English.
The traveller uttered an exclamation and faced about with a jump, birdlike for quickness. He did not reply to my question with the same promptness; however, his deliberation denoted scrutiny, not sloth. He stood peering at me sharply until I repeated it. Even then he protracted his examination of me, a favour I was unable to return with any interest, owing to the circumstance of
his back being toward the light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert, well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his whole little person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether unknown about certain “American Bars” of Paris, and usually connected (more or less directly) with what is known to the people of France as “le Sport.”
“Say,” he responded in a voice of unpleasant nasality, finally deciding upon speech, “you’re ‘Nummeric’n, ain’t you?”
“Yes,” I returned. “I thought I heard you inquiring for—”
“Well, m’ friend, you can sting me!” he interrupted with condescending jocularity. “My style French does f’r them camels up in Paris all right. ME at Nice, Monte Carlo, Chantilly — bow to the p’fess’r; he’s RIGHT! But down here I don’t seem to be GUD enough f’r these sheep-dogs; anyway they bark different. I’m lukkin’ fer a hotel called Les Trois Pigeons.”
“I am going there,” I said; “I will show you the way.”
“Whur is’t?” he asked, not moving.
I pointed to the lights of the inn, flickering across the fields. “Yonder — beyond the second turn of the road,” I said, and, as he showed no signs of accompanying me, I added, “I am rather late.”
“Oh, I ain’t goin’ there t’night. It’s too dark t’ see anything now,” he remarked, to my astonishment. “Dives and the choo-choo back t’ little ole Trouville f’r mine! I on’y wanted to take a LUK at this pigeon-house joint.”
“Do you mind my inquiring,” I said, “what you expected to see at Les Trois Pigeons?”
“Why!” he exclaimed, as if astonished at the question, “I’m a tourist. Makin’ a pedestrun trip t’ all the reg’ler sights.” And, inspired to eloquence, he added, as an afterthought: “As it were.”
“A tourist?” I echoed, with perfect incredulity.
“That’s whut I am, m’ friend,” he returned firmly. “You don’t have to have a red dope-book in one hand and a thoid-class choo-choo ticket in the other to be a tourist, do you?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 97