Books: The Guest of Quesnay
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Booth Tarkington >> The Guest of Quesnay
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I made my evening ablutions removing a Joseph's coat of dust and paint;
and came forth from my pavilion, hoping that Professor Keredec and his
friend would not mind eating in the same garden with a man in a corduroy
jacket and knickerbockers; but the gentlemen continued invisible to the
public eye, and mine was the only table set for dinner in the garden.
Up-stairs the curtains were carefully drawn across all the windows of
the east wing; little leaks of orange, here and there, betraying the
lights within. Glouglou, bearing a tray of covered dishes, was just
entering the salon of the "Grande Suite," and the door closed quickly
after him.
"It is to be supposed that Professor Keredec and his friend are fatigued
with their journey from Paris?" I began, a little later.
"Monsieur, they did not seem fatigued," said Amedee.
"But they dine in their own rooms to-night."
"Every night, monsieur. It is the order of Professor Keredec. And with
their own valet-de-chambre to serve them. Eh?" He poured my coffee
solemnly. "That is mysterious, to say the least, isn't it?"
"To say the very least," I agreed.
"Monsieur the professor is a man of secrets, it appears," continued
Amedee. "When he wrote to Madame Brossard engaging his rooms, he
instructed her to be careful that none of us should mention even his
name; and to-day when he came, he spoke of his anxiety on that point."
"But you did mention it."
"To whom, monsieur?" asked the old fellow blankly.
"To me."
"But I told him I had not," said Amedee placidly. "It is the same
thing."
"I wonder," I began, struck by a sudden thought, "if it will prove quite
the same thing in my own case. I suppose you have not mentioned the
circumstance of my being here to your friend, Jean Ferret of Quesnay?"
He looked at me reproachfully. "Has monsieur been troubled by the people
of the chateau?"
"'Troubled' by them?"
"Have they come to seek out monsieur and disturb him? Have they done
anything whatever to show that they have heard monsieur is here?"
"No, certainly they haven't," I was obliged to retract at once. "I beg
your pardon, Amedee."
"Ah, monsieur!" He made a deprecatory bow (which plunged me still deeper
in shame), struck a match, and offered a light for my cigar with a
forgiving hand. "All the same," he pursued, "it seems very mysterious--
this Keredec affair!"
"To comprehend a great man, Amedee," I said, "is the next thing to
sharing his greatness."
He blinked slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel,
then very properly ignored it, reverting to his puzzle.
"But is it not incomprehensible that people should eat indoors this fine
weather?"
I admitted that it was. I knew very well how hot and stuffy the salon of
Madame Brossard's "Grande Suite" must be, while the garden was fragrant
in the warm, dry night, and the outdoor air like a gentle tonic.
Nevertheless, Professor Keredec and his friend preferred the salon.
When a man is leading a very quiet and isolated life, it is
inconceivable what trifles will occupy and concentrate his attention.
The smaller the community the more blowzy with gossip you are sure to
find it; and I have little doubt that when Friday learned enough
English, one of the first things Crusoe did was to tell him some scandal
about the goat. Thus, though I treated the "Keredec affair" with a
seeming airiness to Amedee, I cunningly drew the faithful rascal out,
and fed my curiosity upon his own (which, as time went on and the
mystery deepened, seemed likely to burst him), until, virtually, I was
receiving, every evening at dinner, a detailed report of the day's
doings of Professor Keredec and his companion.
The reports were voluminous, the details few. The two gentlemen, as
Amedee would relate, spent their forenoons over books and writing in
their rooms. Professor Keredec's voice could often be heard in every
part of the inn; at times holding forth with such protracted vehemence
that only one explanation would suffice: the learned man was delivering
a lecture to his companion.
"Say then!" exclaimed Amedee--"what king of madness is that? To make
orations for only one auditor!"
He brushed away my suggestion that the auditor might be a stenographer
to whom the professor was dictating chapters for a new book. The
relation between the two men, he contended, was more like that between
teacher and pupil. "But a pupil with gray hair!" he finished, raising
his fat hands to heaven. "For that other monsieur has hair as gray as
mine."
"That other monsieur" was farther described as a thin man, handsome, but
with a "singular air," nor could my colleague more satisfactorily define
this air, though he made a racking struggle to do so.
"In what does the peculiarity of his manner lie?" I asked.
"But it is not so much that his manner is peculiar, monsieur; it is an
air about him that is singular. Truly!"
"But how is it singular?"
"Monsieur, it is very, very singular."
"You do not understand," I insisted. "What kind of singularity has the
air of 'that other monsieur'?"
"It has," replied Amedee, with a powerful effort, "a very singular
singularity."
This was as near as he could come, and, fearful of injuring him, I
abandoned that phase of our subject.
The valet-de-chambre whom my fellow-lodgers had brought with them from
Paris contributed nothing to the inn's knowledge of his masters, I
learned. This struck me not only as odd, but unique, for French servants
tell one another everything, and more--very much more. "But this is a
silent man," said Amedee impressively. "Oh! very silent! He shakes his
head wisely, yet he will not open his mouth. However, that may be
because"--and now the explanation came--"because he was engaged only
last week and knows nothing. Also, he is but temporary; he returns to
Paris soon and Glouglou is to serve them."
I ascertained that although "that other monsieur" had gray hair, he was
by no means a person of great age; indeed, Glouglou, who had seen him
oftener than any other of the staff, maintained that he was quite young.
Amedee's own opportunities for observation had been limited. Every
afternoon the two gentlemen went for a walk; but they always came down
from the gallery so quickly, he declared, and, leaving the inn by a rear
entrance, plunged so hastily into the nearest by-path leading to the
forest, that he caught little more than glimpses of them. They returned
after an hour or so, entering the inn with the same appearance of haste
to be out of sight, the professor always talking, "with the manner of an
orator, but in English." Nevertheless, Amedee remarked, it was certain
that Professor Keredec's friend was neither an American nor an
Englishman. "Why is it certain?" I asked.
"Monsieur, he drinks nothing but water, he does not smoke, and Glouglou
says he speaks very pure French."
"Glouglou is an authority who resolves the difficulty. 'That other
monsieur' is a Frenchman."
"But, monsieur, he is smooth-shaven."
"Perhaps he has been a maitre d'hotel."
"Eh! I wish one that _I_ know could hope to dress as well when he
retires! Besides, Glouglou says that other monsieur eats his soup
silently."
"I can find no flaw in the deduction," I said, rising to go to bed. "We
must leave it there for to-night."
The next evening Amedee allowed me to perceive that he was concealing
something under his arm as he stoked the coffee-machine, and upon my
asking what it was, he glanced round the courtyard with histrionic
slyness, placed the object on the table beside my cap, and stepped back
to watch the impression, his manner that of one who declaims: "At last
the missing papers are before you!"
"What is that?" I said.
"It is a book."
"I am persuaded by your candour, Amedee, as well as by the general
appearance of this article," I returned as I picked it up, "that you are
speaking the truth. But why do you bring it to me?"
"Monsieur," he replied, in the tones of an old conspirator, "this
afternoon the professor and that other monsieur went as usual to walk in
the forest." He bent over me, pretending to be busy with the coffee-
machine, and lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. "When they
returned, this book fell from the pocket of that other monsieur's coat
as he ascended the stair, and he did not notice. Later I shall return it
by Glouglou, but I thought it wise that monsieur should see it for
himself."
The book was Wentworth's Algebra--elementary principles. Painful
recollections of my boyhood and the binomial theorem rose in my mind as
I let the leaves turn under my fingers. "What do you make of it?" I
asked.
His tone became even more confidential. "Part of it, monsieur, is in
English; that is plain. I have found an English word in it that I know--
the word 'O.' But much of the printing is also in Arabic."
"Arabic!" I exclaimed.
"Yes, monsieur, look there." He laid a fat forefinger on "(a + b)2 = a2
+ 2ab + b2." "That is Arabic. Old Gaston has been to Algeria, and he
says that he knows Arabic as well as he does French. He looked at the
book and told me it was Arabic. Truly! Truly!"
"Did he translate any of it for you?"
"No, monsieur; his eyes pained him this afternoon. He says he will read
it to-morrow."
"But you must return the book to-night."
"That is true. Eh! It leaves the mystery deeper than ever, unless
monsieur can find some clue in those parts of the book that are
English."
I shed no light upon him. The book had been Greek to me in my tender
years; it was a pleasure now to leave a fellow-being under the
impression that it was Arabic.
But the volume took its little revenge upon me, for it increased my
curiosity about Professor Keredec and "that other monsieur." Why were
two grown men--one an eminent psychologist and the other a gray-haired
youth with a singular air--carrying about on their walks a text-book for
the instruction of boys of thirteen or fourteen?
The next day that curiosity of mine was piqued in earnest. It rained and
I did not leave the inn, but sat under the great archway and took notes
in colour of the shining road, bright drenched fields, and dripping sky.
My back was toward the courtyard, that is, "three-quarters" to it, and
about noon I became distracted from my work by a strong self-
consciousness which came upon me without any visible or audible cause.
Obeying an impulse, I swung round on my camp-stool and looked up
directly at the gallery window of the salon of the "Grande Suite."
A man with a great white beard was standing at the window, half hidden
by the curtain, watching me intently.
He perceived that I saw him and dropped the curtain immediately, a speck
of colour in his buttonhole catching my eye as it fell.
The spy was Professor Keredec.
But why should he study me so slyly and yet so obviously? I had no
intention of intruding upon him. Nor was I a psychological "specimen,"
though I began to suspect that "that other monsieur" WAS.
CHAPTER V
I had been painting in various parts of the forest, studying the early
morning along the eastern fringe and moving deeper in as the day
advanced. For the stillness and warmth of noon I went to the very
woodland heart, and in the late afternoon moved westward to a glade--a
chance arena open to the sky, the scene of my most audacious endeavours,
for here I was trying to paint foliage luminous under those long shafts
of sunshine which grow thinner but ruddier toward sunset. A path closely
bordered by underbrush wound its way to the glade, crossed it, then
wandered away into shady dingles again; and with my easel pitched in the
mouth of this path, I sat at work, one late afternoon, wonderful for its
still loveliness.
The path debouched abruptly on the glade and was so narrow that when I
leaned back my elbows were in the bushes, and it needed care to keep my
palette from being smirched by the leaves; though there was more room
for my canvas and easel, as I had placed them at arm's length before me,
fairly in the open. I had the ambition to paint a picture here--to do
the whole thing in the woods from day to day, instead of taking notes
for the studio--and was at work upon a very foolish experiment: I had
thought to render the light--broken by the branches and foliage--with
broken brush-work, a short stroke of the kind that stung an elder
painter to swear that its practitioners painted in shaking fear of the
concierge appearing for the studio rent. The attempt was alluring, but
when I rose from my camp-stool and stepped back into the path to get
more distance for my canvas, I saw what a mess I was making of it. At
the same time, my hand, falling into the capacious pocket of my jacket,
encountered a package, my lunch, which I had forgotten to eat,
whereupon, becoming suddenly aware that I was very hungry, I began to
eat Amedee's good sandwiches without moving from where I stood.
Absorbed, gazing with abysmal disgust at my canvas, I was eating absent-
mindedly--and with all the restraint and dignity of a Georgia darky
attacking a watermelon--when a pleasant voice spoke from just behind me.
"Pardon, monsieur; permit me to pass, if you please."
That was all it said, very quietly and in French, but a gunshot might
have startled me less.
I turned in confusion to behold a dark-eyed lady, charmingly dressed in
lilac and white, waiting for me to make way so that she could pass.
Nay, let me leave no detail of my mortification unrecorded: I have just
said that I "turned in confusion"; the truth is that I jumped like a
kangaroo, but with infinitely less grace. And in my nervous haste to
clear her way, meaning only to push the camp-stool out of the path with
my foot, I put too much valour into the push, and with horror saw the
camp-stool rise in the air and drop to the ground again nearly a third
of the distance across the glade.
Upon that I squeezed myself back into the bushes, my ears singing and my
cheeks burning.
There are women who will meet or pass a strange man in the woods or
fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if
he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took
place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind.
Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being;
and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy
only, however, and admitted no reference to the fact that at the first
sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked a camp-stool twenty
feet, and now stood blushing, so shamefully stuffed with sandwich that I
dared not speak.
"Thank you," she said as she went by; and made me a little bow so
graceful that it almost consoled me for my caperings.
I stood looking after her as she crossed the clearing and entered the
cool winding of the path on the other side.
I stared and wished--wished that I could have painted her into my
picture, with the thin, ruddy sunshine flecking her dress; wished that I
had not cut such an idiotic figure. I stared until her filmy summer hat,
which was the last bit of her to disappear, had vanished. Then,
discovering that I still held the horrid remains of a sausage-sandwich
in my hand, I threw it into the underbrush with unnecessary force, and,
recovering my camp-stool, sat down to work again.
I did not immediately begin.
The passing of a pretty woman anywhere never comes to be quite of no
moment to a man, and the passing of a pretty woman in the greenwood is
an episode--even to a middle-aged landscape painter.
"An episode?" quoth I. I should be ashamed to withhold the truth out of
my fear to be taken for a sentimentalist: this woman who had passed was
of great and instant charm; it was as if I had heard a serenade there in
the woods--and at thought of the jig I had danced to it my face burned
again.
With a sigh of no meaning, I got my eyes down to my canvas and began to
peck at it perfunctorily, when a snapping of twigs underfoot and a
swishing of branches in the thicket warned me of a second intruder, not
approaching by the path, but forcing a way toward it through the
underbrush, and very briskly too, judging by the sounds.
He burst out into the glade a few paces from me, a tall man in white
flannels, liberally decorated with brambles and clinging shreds of
underbrush. A streamer of vine had caught about his shoulders; there
were leaves on his bare head, and this, together with the youthful
sprightliness of his light figure and the naive activity of his
approach, gave me a very faunlike first impression of him.
At sight of me he stopped short.
"Have you seen a lady in a white and lilac dress and with roses in her
hat?" he demanded, omitting all preface and speaking with a quick
eagerness which caused me no wonder--for I had seen the lady.
What did surprise me, however, was the instantaneous certainty with
which I recognised the speaker from Amedee's description; certainty
founded on the very item which had so dangerously strained the old
fellow's powers.
My sudden gentleman was strikingly good-looking, his complexion so clear
and boyishly healthy, that, except for his gray hair, he might have
passed for twenty-two or twenty-three, and even as it was I guessed his
years short of thirty; but there are plenty of handsome young fellows
with prematurely gray hair, and, as Amedee said, though out of the world
we were near it. It was the new-comer's "singular air" which established
his identity. Amedee's vagueness had irked me, but the thing itself--the
"singular air"--was not at all vague. Instantly perceptible, it was an
investiture; marked, definite--and intangible. My interrogator was "that
other monsieur."
In response to his question I asked him another:
"Were the roses real or artificial?"
"I don't know," he answered, with what I took to be a whimsical
assumption of gravity. "It wouldn't matter, would it? Have you seen
her?"
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."
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