Books: The Guest of Quesnay
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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 other 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?"
"But if you will pardon me," I said, "where did you get the notion that
Les Trois Pigeons is one of the regular sights?"
"Ain't it in all the books?"
"I don't think that it is mentioned in any of the guide-books."
"NO! I didn't say it WAS, m' friend," he retorted with contemptuous
pity. "I mean them history-books. It's in all o' THEM!"
"This is strange news," said I. "I should be very much interested to
read them!"
"Lookahere," he said, taking a step nearer me; "in oinest now, on your
woid: Didn' more'n half them Jeanne d'Arc tamales live at that hotel
wunst?"
"Nobody of historical importance--or any other kind of importance, so
far as I know--ever lived there," I informed him. "The older portions of
the inn once belonged to an ancient farm-house, that is all."
"On the level," he demanded, "didn't that William the Conker nor NONE o'
them ancient gilt-edges live there?"
"No."
"Stung again!" He broke into a sudden loud cackle of laughter. "Why! the
feller tole me 'at this here Pigeon place was all three rings when it
come t' history. Yessir! Tall, thin feller he was, in a three-button
cutaway, English make, and kind of red-complected, with a sandy MUS-
tache," pursued the pedestrian, apparently fearing his narrative might
lack colour. "I met him right comin' out o' the Casino at Trouville,
yes'day aft'noon; c'udn' a' b'en more'n four o'clock--hol' on though,
yes 'twas, 'twas nearer five, about twunty minutes t' five, say--an'
this feller tells me--" He cackled with laughter as palpably
disingenuous as the corroborative details he thought necessary to
muster, then he became serious, as if marvelling at his own wondrous
verdancy. "M' friend, that feller soitn'y found me easy. But he can't
say I ain't game; he passes me the limes, but I'm jest man enough to
drink his health fer it in this sweet, sound ole-fashioned cider 'at
ain't got a headache in a barrel of it. He played me GUD, and here's TO
him!"
Despite the heartiness of the sentiment, my honest tourist's enthusiasm
seemed largely histrionic, and his quaffing of the beaker too
reminiscent of drain-the-wine-cup-free in the second row of the chorus,
for he absently allowed it to dangle from his hand before raising it to
his lips. However, not all of its contents was spilled, and he swallowed
a mouthful of the sweet, sound, old-fashioned cider--but by mistake, I
was led to suppose, from the expression of displeasure which became so
deeply marked upon his countenance as to be noticeable, even in the
feeble lamplight.
I tarried no longer, but bidding this good youth and the generations of
Baudry good-night, hastened on to my belated dinner.
"Amedee," I said, when my cigar was lighted and the usual hour of
consultation had arrived; "isn't that old lock on the chest where Madame
Brossard keeps her silver getting rather rusty?"
"Monsieur, we have no thieves here. We are out of the world."
"Yes, but Trouville is not so far away."
"Truly."
"Many strange people go to Trouville: grand-dukes, millionaires, opera
singers, princes, jockeys, gamblers--"
"Truly, truly!"
"And tourists," I finished.
"That is well known," assented Amedee, nodding.
"It follows," I continued with the impressiveness of all logicians,
"that many strange people may come from Trouville. In their excursions
to the surrounding points of interest--"
"Eh, monsieur, but that is true!" he interrupted, laying his right
forefinger across the bridge of his nose, which was his gesture when he
remembered anything suddenly. "There was a strange monsieur from
Trouville here this very day."
"What kind of person was he?"
"A foreigner, but I could not tell from what country."
"What time of day was he here?" I asked, with growing interest.
"Toward the middle of the afternoon. I was alone, except for Glouglou,
when he came. He wished to see the whole house and I showed him what I
could, except of course monsieur's pavilion, and the Grande Suite.
Monsieur the Professor and that other monsieur had gone to the forest,
but I did not feel at liberty to exhibit their rooms without Madame
Brossard's permission, and she was spending the day at Dives. Besides,"
added the good man, languidly snapping a napkin at a moth near one of
the candles, "the doors were locked."
"This person was a tourist?" I asked, after a pause during which Amedee
seemed peacefully unaware of the rather concentrated gaze I had fixed
upon him. "Of a kind. In speaking he employed many peculiar expressions,
more like a thief of a Parisian cabman than of the polite world."
"The devil he did!" said I. "Did he tell you why he wished to see the
whole house? Did he contemplate taking rooms here?"
"No, monsieur, it appears that his interest was historical. At first I
should not have taken him for a man of learning, yet he gave me a great
piece of information; a thing quite new to me, though I have lived here
so many years. We are distinguished in history, it seems, and at one
time both William the Conqueror and that brave Jeanne d'Arc--"
I interrupted sharply, dropping my cigar and leaning across the table:
"How was this person dressed?"
"Monsieur, he was very much the pedestrian."
And so, for that evening, we had something to talk about besides "that
other monsieur"; indeed, we found our subject so absorbing that I forgot
to ask Amedee whether it was he or Jean Ferret who had prefixed the "de"
to "Armand."
CHAPTER VII
The cat that fell from the top of the Washington monument, and scampered
off unhurt was killed by a dog at the next corner. Thus a certain
painter-man, winged with canvases and easel, might have been seen to
depart hurriedly from a poppy-sprinkled field, an infuriated Norman
stallion in close attendance, and to fly safely over a stone wall of
good height, only to turn his ankle upon an unconsidered pebble, some
ten paces farther on; the nose of the stallion projected over the wall,
snorting joy thereat. The ankle was one which had turned aforetime; it
was an old weakness: moreover, it was mine. I was the painter-man.
I could count on little less than a week of idleness within the confines
of Les Trois Pigeons; and reclining among cushions in a wicker long-
chair looking out from my pavilion upon the drowsy garden on a hot
noontide, I did not much care. It was cooler indoors, comfortable
enough; the open door framed the courtyard where pigeons were strutting
on the gravel walks between flower-beds. Beyond, and thrown deeper into
the perspective by the outer frame of the great archway, road and fields
and forest fringes were revealed, lying tremulously in the hot sunshine.
The foreground gained a human (though not lively) interest from the
ample figure of our maitre d'hotel reposing in a rustic chair which had
enjoyed the shade of an arbour about an hour earlier, when first
occupied, but now stood in the broiling sun. At times Amedee's upper
eyelids lifted as much as the sixteenth of an inch, and he made a hazy
gesture as if to wave the sun away, or, when the table-cloth upon his
left arm slid slowly earthward, he adjusted it with a petulant jerk,
without material interruption to his siesta. Meanwhile Glouglou, rolling
and smoking cigarettes in the shade of a clump of lilac, watched with
button eyes the noddings of his superior, and, at the cost of some
convulsive writhings, constrained himself to silent laughter.
A heavy step crunched the gravel and I heard my name pronounced in a
deep inquiring rumble--the voice of Professor Keredec, no less. Nor was
I greatly surprised, since our meeting in the forest had led me to
expect some advances on his part toward friendliness, or, at least, in
the direction of a better acquaintance. However, I withheld my reply for
a moment to make sure I had heard aright.
The name was repeated.
"Here I am," I called, "in the pavilion, if you wish to see me."
"Aha! I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir." With that the
professor's great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside.
"I have come to condole with you, if you allow it."
"To smoke with me, too, I hope," I said, not a little pleased.
"That I will do," he returned, and came in slowly, walking with
perceptible lameness. "The sympathy I offer is genuine: it is not only
from the heart, it is from the latissimus dorsi" he continued, seating
himself with a cavernous groan. "I am your confrere in illness, my dear
sir. I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back."
"I hope it is not painful."
"Ha, it is so-so," he rumbled, removing his spectacles and wiping his
eyes, dazzled by the sun. "There is more of me than of most men--more to
suffer. Nature was generous to the little germs when she made this big
Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war."
"You'll take a cigarette?"
"I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe."
He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened, disclosing
a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and, fitting it with
a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister tobacco from a pouch.
"Always my pipe for me," he said, and applied a match, inhaling the
smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of cigarettes. "Ha, it is
good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is good for the soul." And
clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on Mont Blanc as he
concluded, with gusto, "It is my first pipe since yesterday."
"That is being a good smoker," I ventured sententiously; "to whet
indulgence with abstinence."
"My dear sir," he protested, "I am a man without even enough virtue to
be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary
repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am
temperate now."
"He has never smoked, your young friend?" I asked, glancing at my
visitor rather curiously, I fear.
"Mr. Saffren has no vices." Professor Keredec replaced his silver-rimmed
spectacles and turned them upon me with serene benevolence. "He is in
good condition, all pure, like little children--and so if I smoke near
him he chokes and has water at the eyes, though he does not complain.
Just now I take a vacation: it is his hour for study, but I think he
looks more out of the front window than at his book. He looks very much
from the window"--there was a muttering of subterranean thunder
somewhere, which I was able to locate in the professor's torso, and took
to be his expression of a chuckle--"yes, very much, since the passing of
that charming lady some days ago."
"You say your young friend's name is Saffren?"
"Oliver Saffren." The benevolent gaze continued to rest upon me, but a
shadow like a faint anxiety darkened the Homeric brow, and an odd notion
entered my mind (without any good reason) that Professor Keredec was
wondering what I thought of the name. I uttered some commonplace
syllable of no moment, and there ensued a pause during which the seeming
shadow upon my visitor's forehead became a reality, deepening to a look
of perplexity and trouble. Finally he said abruptly: "It is about him
that I have come to talk to you."
"I shall be very glad," I murmured, but he brushed the callow formality
aside with a gesture of remonstrance.
"Ha, my dear sir," he cried; "but you are a man of feeling! We are both
old enough to deal with more than just these little words of the mouth!
It was the way you have received my poor young gentleman's excuses when
he was so rude, which make me wish to talk with you on such a subject;
it is why I would not have you believe Mr. Saffren and me two very
suspected individuals who hide here like two bad criminals!"
"No, no," I protested hastily. "The name of Professor Keredec--"
"The name of NO man," he thundered, interrupting, "can protect his
reputation when he is caught peeping from a curtain! Ha, my dear sir! I
know what you think. You think, 'He is a nice fine man, that old
professor, oh, very nice--only he hides behind the curtains sometimes!
Very fine man, oh, yes; only he is a spy.' Eh? Ha, ha! That is what you
have been thinking, my dear sir!"
"Not at all," I laughed; "I thought you might fear that _I_ was a spy."
"Eh?" He became sharply serious upon the instant. "What made you think
that?"
"I supposed you might be conducting some experiments, or perhaps writing
a book which you wished to keep from the public for a time, and that
possibly you might imagine that I was a reporter."
"So! And THAT is all," he returned, with evident relief. "No, my dear
sir, I was the spy; it is the truth; and I was spying upon you. I
confess my shame. I wish very much to know what you were like, what kind
of a man you are. And so," he concluded with an opening of the hands,
palms upward, as if to show that nothing remained for concealment, "and
so I have watched you."
"Why?" I asked.
"The explanation is so simple: it was necessary."
"Because of--of Mr. Saffren?" I said slowly, and with some trepidation.
"Precisely." The professor exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Because I am
sensitive for him, and because in a certain way I am--how should it be
said?--perhaps it is near the truth to say, I am his guardian."
"I see."
"Forgive me," he rejoined quickly, "but I am afraid you do not see. I am
not his guardian by the law."
"I had not supposed that you were," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because, though he puzzled me and I do not understand his case--his
case, so to speak, I have not for a moment thought him insane."
"Ha, my dear sir, you are right!" exclaimed Keredec, beaming on me, much
pleased. "You are a thousand times right; he is as sane as yourself or
myself or as anybody in the whole wide world! Ha! he is now much MORE
sane, for his mind is not yet confused and becobwebbed with the useless
things you and I put into ours. It is open and clear like the little
children's mind. And it is a good mind! It is only a little learning, a
little experience, that he lacks. A few months more--ha, at the
greatest, a year from now--and he will not be different any longer; he
will be like the rest of us. Only"--the professor leaned forward and his
big fist came down on the arm of his chair--"he shall be better than the
rest of us! But if strange people were to see him now," he continued,
leaning back and dropping his voice to a more confidential tone, "it
would not do. This poor world is full of fools; there are so many who
judge quickly. If they should see him now, they might think he is not
just right in his brain; and then, as it could happen so easily, those
same people might meet him again after a while. 'Ha,' they would say,
'there was a time when that young man was insane. I knew him!' And so he
might go through his life with those clouds over him. Those clouds are
black clouds, they can make more harm than our old sins, and I wish to
save my friend from them. So I have brought him here to this quiet place
where nobody comes, and we can keep from meeting any foolish people.
But, my dear sir"--he leaned forward again, and spoke emphatically--"it
would be barbarous for men of intelligence to live in the same house and
go always hiding from one another! Let us dine together this evening, if
you will, and not only this evening but every evening you are willing to
share with us and do not wish to be alone. It will be good for us. We
are three men like hermits, far out of the world, but--a thousand
saints!--let us be civilised to one another!"
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