Pagan

by Morris, W. F. ;

  The man chuckled. “A good stratagem, M’sieu!” he boomed as his hand closed over the note that was pressed into it. He touched his cap. “Merci bien!” And he turned away chuckling, “Un bon stratagème!”

  Pagan heaved a sigh of relief and picked up the dressing case which he had put down during the latter part of his romantic explanation; but as he turned again into the corridor, the outer door facing him opened and the girl herself climbed up. And her face as she rose above the level of the corridor almost touched the distinctive morocco leather dressing case which Pagan held in his right hand. Her eyes went down to it and travelled back to Pagan’s face. “That is my bag you have,” she said.

  Pagan took off his hat with his left hand and nodded. “Yes, I know,” he said cheerfully “And your porter very nearly arrested me for stealing it.”

  Her face gave no clue to her thoughts; only her eyes were calmly judicial. “You were not going to steal it then?”

  Pagan shook his head vigorously. “Oh no,” he laughed. “I was only going to put it on the rack in the next compartment.”

  Her brows met in a little frown of perplexity which Pagan found very charming. “I am afraid I don’t understand the object of this—er—porterage,” she said coldly.

  Pagan smiled whimsically. “Well, you see, it was a brain wave of mine which your confounded porter upset. I thought you would come along, see your bag on the rack in the next compartment, and sit down there without realising that it was the next compartment.”

  Her eyes were still hostile, but a shade less so than at first he thought. “And why was I to sit in the next compartment when I had chosen this one?” she asked.

  Pagan smiled engagingly. “Well, all the other seats here are taken by children, and I mean to say, children can be an awful curse on a journey—especially French kids. Whereas next door it’s much nicer—no crowd—only one other person besides myself. I thought it was a jolly good idea,” he confessed.

  “Rather an impudent one, don’t you think?” she asked coldly. But Pagan thought he detected a covert gleam of amusement in her steady grey eyes. “And I have only your word for it that you are not a thief. Do you expect me to believe you?”

  “Well, the porter did,” he answered blandly.

  “So you told the porter this ridiculous story too!”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite the same story,” confessed Pagan cautiously.

  “Oh!” Suspicion awoke again in her eyes. “The whole story is all lies then!”

  “Oh no, no,” answered Pagan in tones of injured innocence. “What I told you is the truth—honour bright.” He nodded his head earnestly.

  “Then if the story you told the porter was different it must have been untrue,” she persisted.

  Pagan produced an expressive French gesture. “Well, I mean to say, he turned up in the doorway so sudden like that I was all taken aback. Is this a porter I see before me the handle towards my hand, sort of thing. I ask you—one minute there was nothing, and the next—well, there he was—all pink and peevish. I hadn’t time to hoik old mother Truth out of her well. Lies come so much more readily in a crisis, don’t you think?” he asked agreeably.

  She did not venture an opinion upon that point. “What did you tell the porter?” she demanded.

  For a moment Pagan hesitated. “Well, as a matter of fact, he asked me if it was my bag.”

  “Rather an awkward question,” she commented.

  “Yes; that was what I thought,” agreed Pagan. “So I said, yes, it was—in a way.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “In a way! In what way, pray?”

  “That was just what he wanted to know,” answered Pagan dryly.

  “Well?” she asked when he did not continue. “What did you tell him?”

  “I … er … I persuaded him that it was mine—in a way.”

  Her brows contracted in that look of perplexity that he had previously admired. “You persuaded him that the bag was yours?” she echoed. “Why, he put it on the rack for me himself!”

  Pagan nodded. “I know. It was rather a good effort on my part,” he chuckled.

  “What did you tell him?” she asked firmly.

  Pagan looked embarrassed. “I … er … I … well I proved it to him by logic, you know.”

  “What did you say?” she demanded.

  Pagan regarded his finger nails solemnly and shot a covert half-comic look at her from under his lowered eyebrows. “I … er … well, as a matter of fact, I told him that you were my fiancée.”

  “What!”

  “And therefore what was yours, was mine—in a way. Quite a brain wave—what! And,” he went on quickly as she started to speak, “I said we had quarrelled, and I was going to put the bag in my compartment, so that I could explain and make it up. He was awfully taken with the idea. He called it a bon stratagem. I think it really was rather a good one, don’t you?” he suggested modestly.

  She was choking either with indignation or amusement; Pagan was not sure which. “Rather cheek on my part, I know,” he murmured, “but you see I had to tell him something.”

  “Rather cheek!” she gasped. “Well! And what on earth made you think of saying such—such an impertinent thing?”

  “Oh … er … I don’t know. I expect the wish was father to the jolly old thought, you know.”

  She turned abruptly. “I think you had better put my bag on the rack,” she said quietly.

  Pagan put on his hat and moved towards the next compartment.

  “This one,” she cried firmly.

  Pagan stopped. “Really? I mean to say—all those kids …”

  “This one,” she repeated firmly. “I like children.”

  “So do I,” he agreed cheerfully. “Jolly little beggars—when they are not all smothered in jam and affection.”

  He put the bag on the rack, and paused with his hand on it. “You know,” he said, “if that porter comes along and finds us in different compartments he will think we have quarrelled again!”

  Her calm grey eyes met his. “Mr… . er …” she began.

  “Pagan—Charles Pagan,” he supplemented.

  “Mr. Pagan,” she said quietly, “in the circumstances I have treated you quite handsomely, don’t you think? And now please we will consider this the end.”

  He raised his eyebrows and looked at her appealingly, but she met his beseeching gaze unflinchingly and nodded her head firmly. He smiled wryly. “I go and it is done,” he quoted sadly. “M’selle, your bag is on the rack.” He bowed and left her.

  The train moved out of the station through the sunny vineyards towards the barrier of wooded hills that rose all green and golden in the afternoon sunlight. Through an ancient village at their foot it went by way of the narrow, winding main street, its bell clanging raucously and its slowly moving coaches so close to the yellow-washed walls of the gabled houses that Pagan could have rapped upon the old carved sun-bleached doors by merely putting his arm out of the window. He did not do so, however; he was too occupied in noting that the shadow of the houses enabled him again to catch provocative glimpses of the girl in the next compartment.

  The reflection disappeared when the train left the narrow confines of the street and skirted the foot of a vine-terraced hill that formed one of the outlying bastions of the valley; and strong-mindedly he moved to the other side of the compartment and gazed out of the window. The train came to rest in a little tree-shaded station hard by the mellow weed grown walls of an ancient watch tower. He recognized it as belonging to the lower end of the village in which he was to spend the night, but since Baron had got out at the other little station at the upper end, he decided to do the same.

  The train moved on again, puffing noisily uphill as it skirted the mouldering defensive walls of the village, and came to rest in the tiny station at the upper end. Pagan got out. He noted in passing that the girl was no longer in her compartment, and he smiled whimsically to himself as he turned on to the cobbled road into the village. It seemed like
ly that they would meet again, for evidently she had got out at the other station.

  The combined porter, stationmaster and ticket collector informed him that the Hotel de la Cigogne was at the lower end of the village, and that he too should have got out at the previous station. He was doubly sorry that he had not done so. The village was a long one. The road twisted and turned unceasingly between the enclosing hills whose vine-terraced slopes rose close behind the ancient gables: and the round grey tower of a castle ruin perched upon a green hill shoulder appeared at times to the left above the jumbled roofs, at times to the right and at times directly ahead.

  And the village itself was picturesque. Many of the houses had half-timbered upper stories with recessed balustraded balconies beneath the carved gables. Great stone arched doorways with massive timber doors gave entrance to the wine growers’ cobbled courtyards, each with its ancient stone well and the pillars and carved balustrades of its wooden balconies draped in leafy vines. And all the odd shaped old chimneys were capped with a flat raised platform designed for the accommodation of storks’ nests.

  He crossed the boulder-littered bed of a stream by a fortified bridge with high loop-holed parapets and a fire step for archers, and found himself suddenly in a narrow cobbled square facing the church, whose tall, dome-capped tower rose tawny gold against the vivid green background of the vine-clad hills.

  The hotel was at the lower end of the street beyond the church, and he found Baron lounging by an old stone well in the tiny tree-shaded courtyard. With him was a tall, slim, handsome youth dressed in plus fours and a pullover. Pagan planked the parcel down on the worn stone lip of the well.

  “There is your clean bib and tucker,” he said as he flopped into a chair. “And now for the love ye bear me, bring hither a drink cool as a cucumber and long as a loofah.”

  “This is Cecil Lindsey,” said Baron, indicating the tall youth. “Charles Pagan—a thirsty soul as you have probably gathered from his shrieks for nourishment.”

  The tall youth nodded languidly without removing his hands from his pockets.

  “As cold waters in a thirsty land, so is good beer in a far country,” murmured Pagan. “You are not tramping up these awful hills, I hope.”

  “He is roaming round in a car,” said Baron.

  Pagan nodded approvingly. “Oh wise young man; how I do envy thee! Baron thinks it’s virtuous to walk, even when there is a perfectly good train going the same way. But I am like you: I consider that a seven horsepower Austin is better than a two footpower Pagan any day—especially on an alleged holiday.”

  “You are dropping bricks, Charles,” warned Baron. “Cecil runs a Bentley—about two squadron power.”

  “And this is not really a holiday,” added the youth. “I have to see people in this part of the country on behalf of my firm; but I am taking a few days off to show my sister round.”

  Pagan merely nodded his head and said nothing, but he regarded the youth with sudden interest over the top of his glass.

  “Anything interesting in Colmar, Charles?” asked Baron.

  Pagan regarded his glass with a whimsical smile. “No—not now,” he answered enigmatically.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw that a girl with a book under her arm had come out of the low arched doorway of the hotel. She wore no hat and was dressed in a light-coloured frock, but that peculiar air of grooming and daintiness was unmistakable.

  Baron turned his head and saw her. “Hullo, Clare!” he cried. “My fellow hobo has returned. This is Charles Pagan—who helped me to win the Great War.”

  Pagan rose with a twinkle in his eye and bowed.

  “But we have already met,” she exclaimed in her low clear voice, as she held her hand. “Mr. Pagan was good enough to help me with my luggage at Colmar.”

  “I am glad you were useful if not ornamental, Charles,” commented Baron.

  Pagan smiled with becoming modesty. “It was really nothing,” he murmured magnanimously.

  “The stupidity of a porter,” explained Clare with a twinkle.

  “A little explanation put it right,” added Pagan with a grin.

  Baron guffawed. “What, in your ‘no bon compree’ French! Clare was pulling your leg, Charles. She speaks the lingo like a native.”

  Clare sat down in one of the deck chairs. “Dicky, you exaggerate,” she admonished. And then with a glance at Pagan. “I assure you Mr. Pagan’s French is equal to any emergency.”

  “Charles is equal to anything so long as it is talking and not working,” agreed Baron.

  Pagan changed the subject. “That libellous remark,” he complained, “is because I insisted on taking a train this afternoon instead of walking. But I put it to you, Miss Lindsey, as one doomed for a certain term to walk this earth, that when a man has borne the heat and burden of the day down an exceeding high mountain and he arrives at a perfectly good station, who, I ask you would fardels bear to grunt and sweat another weary mile?”

  “We are supposed to be on a walking tour,” growled Baron.

  “But Mr. Pagan prefers to sleep in hotels and take trains?” smiled Clare.

  “Certainly,” agreed Pagan stoutly. “Certainly—if there happens to be a train going the same way or an hotel in the dusky offing. Otherwise we go carolling along the highways of France like twin Tetrazzinis and lay our little heads in sleep beneath a simple bush.”

  Baron snorted.

  “It sounds very romantic but terribly rheumatic,” exclaimed Clare. “Where did you sleep last night—under a hedge or at the village inn?”

  “At an inn—a strange and lonely inn!” cried Pagan in a stage whisper.

  “Part of the night within the inn; most of the night without the inn,” put in Baron.

  “A most mysterious inn,” continued Pagan.

  “That’s why we spent most of the night outside it—trying to solve the mystery,” explained Baron.

  “Look here,” said Pagan sternly. “Am you telling this ’ere story or are I?”

  “But you, my dear Charles, quoth he politely.”

  “Then there is no need for you to broadcast a running commentary,” growled Pagan.

  “Don’t quarrel,” admonished Clare severely.

  “That will be the end of our running commentary,” announced Pagan. “And Baron’s Court is now closing down.”

  “And now we are taking you over to Pagan’s restaurant to listen to dance music …” began Baron.

  “Somebody kick that fellow in the stomach,” commanded Pagan.

  “Meanwhile I am dying to hear about this mysterious inn,” sighed Clare.

  “You shall,” asserted Pagan with a fierce look at Baron. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. It was a dark and stormy night upon the Caucasus.”

  “Vosges,” corrected Baron.

  “Vosges. Darkness was falling, rain was falling …”

  “The barometer was falling,” suggested Baron.

  Pagan continued in tones of burlesque tragedy. “Upon a lonely mountain top thousands of feet above the sea, foot-sore, fed-up and far from home we were tramping through the night.”

  “Left, right; right, left; left, right,” chanted Baron.

  “We weren’t fox-trotting you idiot,” growled Pagan. “Mountains to right of us, mountains to left of us—invisible in the darkness. Minutes passed. Hours passed. A light appeared ahead. Was it a mirage of the desert or a miasma of the mountains? No. A shadowy building took shape in the gloom—an inn, dark and shuttered.”

  “Then the light was a miasma after all!” commented Baron.

  Pagan ignored the interruption. “We rapped upon the door. It was opened a fraction of an inch and a voice, a woman’s voice, demanded our business. I answered boldly that we were travellers in a strange land and craved a morsel of food, a mouthful of water and somewhere to lay our heads. She who had opened the door, one Bertha by name, provided all three.”

  “My dear Charles, we didn’t lay our heads on Bertha,” protest
ed Baron.

  “Provided all three,” repeated Pagan firmly. “Though somewhat reluctantly I thought. We ate our morsel of food, drank our mouthful of water.”

  “Tasting slightly of bock,” put in Baron.

  “And went to our simple rooms—I to sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care; he of the guilty conscience to brood upon a mis-spent youth. Wearying anon of this melancholy watch, he bethinks him of the map and the morrow’s journey. But the map is downstairs in the pocket of my coat, which, because of its exceeding dampness, Bertha dries for us before the fire. He turns the handle of his door. It will not open. He tries mine; that, too, will not open. They are locked.” He flung out his hands in an exaggerated gesture.

  “Locked!” exclaimed Clare.

  “Ay, lady, ’twas my word. Both locked—on the outside.”

  “That was strange,” she said.

  “Passing strange,” agreed Pagan.

  “And what did you do?”

  “Do? Well, believing that there is some soul of goodness in things evil would men observingly distil it out, I restrained his vulgar impetuosity which would have broken open the door, and have alarmed the gentle Bertha and her sire. I decided to match cunning with cunning; to get a secret glimpse of the mysterious something that was evidently going on downstairs. In brief, we knotted the bell-pulls and curtain ropes together and climbed out of the window.”

  “Well?” asked Clare when Pagan paused. “What did you see?”

  “Nothing, absolutely nothing,” complained Baron. “The window blinds were all drawn so closely that we could not see in.”

  “But how terribly tiresome,” exclaimed Clare.

  “Terribly—we spent the night wandering about in the dark when we might have been in our little warm beds,” growled Baron disgustedly.

  “You forget the figure on the hillside,” said Pagan soberly.

  Baron shrugged his shoulders. Clare looked from one to the other. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “Oh, Charles swears he saw a figure on the hillside. It had a queer face or no face at all according to him; but then Charles has a wonderful imagination.”

  She looked at Pagan. “I know that,” she said with a ghost of a smile.