Books: The Guest of Quesnay
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Booth Tarkington >> The Guest of Quesnay
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"With all my heart," I said.
"Ha! I wish you to know my young man," Keredec went on. "You will like
him--no man of feeling could keep himself from liking him--and he is
your fellow-countryman. I hope you will be his friend. He should make
friends, for he needs them."
"I think he has a host of them," said I, "in Professor Keredec."
My visitor looked at me quizzically for a moment, shook his head and
sighed. "That is only one small man in a big body, that Professor
Keredec. And yet," he went on sadly, "it is all the friends that poor
boy has in this world. You will dine with us to-night?"
Acquiescing cheerfully, I added: "You will join me at the table on my
veranda, won't you? I can hobble that far but not much farther."
Before answering he cast a sidelong glance at the arrangement of things
outside the door. The screen of honeysuckle ran partly across the front
of the little porch, about half of which it concealed from the garden
and consequently from the road beyond the archway. I saw that he took
note of this before he pointed to that corner of the veranda most
closely screened by the vines and said:
"May the table be placed yonder?"
"Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone."
"Ha, that is good," he exclaimed. "It is not human for a Frenchman to
eat in the house in good weather."
"It is a pity," I said, "that I should have been such a bugbear."
This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt
that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as
complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the
young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions
were altogether due to my presence at the inn.
And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance
repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their nature
I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever they
were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased
Professor Keredec's mind in regard to them. At least, his anxiety was
sufficiently assuaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen of
honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes. So much was evident.
"The reproach is deserved," he returned, after a pause. "It is to be
wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if we
had the courage, or the slyness"--he laughed--"to investigate."
I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his
back as he rose.
"Ha, I am old! old! Rheumatism in warm weather: that is ugly. Now I must
go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon. The poor fellow! I
think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in summer!"
He replaced his pipe in its case, and promising heartily that it should
not be the last he would smoke in my company and domain, was making
slowly for the door when he paused at a sound from the road.
We heard the rapid hoof-beats of a mettled horse. He crossed our vision
and the open archway: a high-stepping hackney going well, driven by a
lady in a light trap which was half full of wild flowers. It was a quick
picture, like a flash of the cinematograph, but the pose of the lady as
a driver was seen to be of a commanding grace, and though she was not in
white but in light blue, and her plain sailor hat was certainly not
trimmed with roses, I had not the least difficulty in recognising her.
At the same instant there was a hurried clatter of foot-steps upon the
stairway leading from the gallery; the startled pigeons fluttered up
from the garden-path, betaking themselves to flight, and "that other
monsieur" came leaping across the courtyard, through the archway and
into the road.
"Glouglou! Look quickly!" he called loudly, in French, as he came; "Who
is that lady?"
Glouglou would have replied, but the words were taken out of his mouth.
Amedee awoke with a frantic start and launched himself at the archway,
carroming from its nearest corner and hurtling onward at a speed which
for once did not diminish in proportion to his progress.
"That lady, monsieur?" he gasped, checking himself at the young man's
side and gazing after the trap, "that is Madame d'Armand."
"Madame d'Armand," Saffren repeated the name slowly. "Her name is Madame
d'Armand."
"Yes, monsieur," said Amedee complacently; "it is an American lady who
has married a French nobleman."
CHAPTER VIII
Like most painters, I have supposed the tools of my craft harder to
manipulate than those of others. The use of words, particularly, seemed
readier, handier for the contrivance of effects than pigments. I thought
the language of words less elusive than that of colour, leaving smaller
margin for unintended effects; and, believing in complacent good faith
that words conveyed exact meanings exactly, it was my innocent
conception that almost anything might be so described in words that all
who read must inevitably perceive that thing precisely. If this were
true, there would be little work for the lawyers, who produce such
tortured pages in the struggle to be definite, who swing riches from one
family to another, save men from violent death or send them to it, and
earn fortunes for themselves through the dangerous inadequacies of
words. I have learned how great was my mistake, and now I am wishing I
could shift paper for canvas, that I might paint the young man who came
to interest me so deeply. I wish I might present him here in colour
instead of trusting to this unstable business of words, so wily and
undependable, with their shimmering values, that you cannot turn your
back upon them for two minutes but they will be shouting a hundred
things which they were not meant to tell.
To make the best of necessity: what I have written of him--my first
impressions--must be taken as the picture, although it be but a gossamer
sketch in the air, instead of definite work with well-ground pigments to
show forth a portrait, to make you see flesh and blood. It must take the
place of something contrived with my own tools to reveal what the
following days revealed him to me, and what it was about him (evasive of
description) which made me so soon, as Keredec wished, his friend.
Life among our kin and kind is made pleasanter by our daily platitudes.
Who is more tedious than the man incessantly struggling to avoid the
banal? Nature rules that such a one will produce nothing better than
epigram and paradox, saying old, old things in a new way, or merely
shifting object for subject--and his wife's face, when he shines for a
circle, is worth a glance. With no further apology, I declare that I am
a person who has felt few positive likes or dislikes for people in this
life, and I did deeply like my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons.
Liking for both men increased with acquaintance, and for the younger I
came to feel, in addition, a kind of championship, doubtless in some
measure due to what Keredec had told me of him, but more to that half-
humourous sense of protectiveness that we always have for those young
people whose untempered and innocent outlook makes us feel, as we say,
"a thousand years old."
The afternoon following our first dinner together, the two, in returning
from their walk, came into the pavilion with cheerful greetings, instead
of going to their rooms as usual, and Keredec, declaring that the open
air had "dispersed" his rheumatism, asked if he might overhaul some of
my little canvases and boards. I explained that they consisted mainly of
"notes" for future use, but consented willingly; whereupon he arranged a
number of them as for exhibition and delivered himself impromptu of the
most vehemently instructive lecture on art I had ever heard. Beginning
with the family, the tribe, and the totem-pole, he was able to
demonstrate a theory that art was not only useful to society but its
primary necessity; a curious thought, probably more attributable to the
fact that he was a Frenchman than to that of his being a scientist.
"And here," he said in the course of his demonstration, pointing to a
sketch which I had made one morning just after sunrise--"here you can
see real sunshine. One certain day there came those few certain moment'
at the sunrise when the light was like this. Those few moment', where
are they? They have disappeared, gone for eternally. They went"--he
snapped his fingers--"like that. Yet here they are--ha!--forever!"
"But it doesn't look like sunshine," said Oliver Saffren hesitatingly,
stating a disconcerting but incontrovertible truth; "it only seems to
look like it because--isn't it because it's so much brighter than the
rest of the picture? I doubt if paint CAN look like sunshine." He turned
from the sketch, caught Keredec's gathering frown, and his face flushed
painfully. "Ah!" he cried, "I shouldn't have said it?"
I interposed to reassure him, exclaiming that it were a godsend indeed,
did all our critics merely speak the plain truth as they see it for
themselves. The professor would not have it so, and cut me off.
"No, no, no, my dear sir!" he shouted. "You speak with kindness, but you
put some wrong ideas in his head!"
Saffren's look of trouble deepened. "I don't understand," he murmured.
"I thought you said always to speak the truth just as I see it." "I have
telled you," Keredec declared vehemently, "nothing of the kind!"
"But only yesterday--"
"Never!"
"I understood--"
"Then you understood only one-half! I say, 'Speak the truth as you see
it, when you speak.' I did not tell you to speak! How much time have you
give' to study sunshine and paint? What do you know about them?"
"Nothing," answered the other humbly.
A profound rumbling was heard, and the frown disappeared from Professor
Keredec's brow like the vanishing of the shadow of a little cloud from
the dome of some great benevolent and scientific institute. He dropped a
weighty hand on his young friend's shoulder, and, in high good-humour,
thundered:
"Then you are a critic! Knowing nothing of sunshine except that it warms
you, and never having touched paint, you are going to tell about them to
a man who spends his life studying them! You look up in the night and
the truth you see is that the moon and stars are crossing the ocean. You
will tell that to the astronomer? Ha! The truth is what the masters see.
When you know what they see, you may speak."
At dinner the night before, it had struck me that Saffren was a rather
silent young man by habit, and now I thought I began to understand the
reason. I hinted as much, saying, "That would make a quiet world of it."
"All the better, my dear sir!" The professor turned beamingly upon me
and continued, dropping into a Whistlerian mannerism that he had
sometimes: "You must not blame that great wind of a Keredec for
preaching at other people to listen. It gives the poor man more room for
himself to talk!"
I found his talk worth hearing.
I would show you, if I could, our pleasant evenings of lingering, after
coffee, behind the tremulous screen of honeysuckle, with the night very
dark and quiet beyond the warm nimbus of our candle-light, the faces of
my two companions clear-obscure in a mellow shadow like the middle tones
of a Rembrandt, and the professor, good man, talking wonderfully of
everything under the stars and over them,--while Oliver Saffren and I
sat under the spell of the big, kind voice, the young man listening with
the same eagerness which marked him when he spoke. It was an eagerness
to understand, not to interrupt.
These were our evenings. In the afternoons the two went for their walk
as usual, though now they did not plunge out of sight of the main road
with the noticeable haste which Amedee had described. As time pressed, I
perceived the caution of Keredec visibly slackening. Whatever he had
feared, the obscurity and continued quiet of LES TROIS PIGEONS reassured
him; he felt more and more secure in this sheltered retreat, "far out of
the world," and obviously thought no danger imminent. So the days went
by, uneventful for my new friends,--days of warm idleness for me. Let
them go unnarrated; we pass to the event.
My ankle had taken its wonted time to recover. I was on my feet again
and into the woods--not traversing, on the way, a certain poppy-
sprinkled field whence a fine Norman stallion snorted ridicule over a
wall. But the fortune of Keredec was to sink as I rose. His summer
rheumatism returned, came to grips with him, laid him low. We hobbled
together for a day or so, then I threw away my stick and he exchanged
his for an improvised crutch. By the time I was fit to run, he was able
to do little better than to creep--might well have taken to his bed. But
as he insisted that his pupil should not forego the daily long walks and
the health of the forest, it came to pass that Saffren often made me the
objective of his rambles. At dinner he usually asked in what portion of
the forest I should be painting late the next afternoon, and I got in
the habit of expecting him to join me toward sunset. We located each
other through a code of yodeling that we arranged; his part of these
vocal gymnastics being very pleasant to hear, for he had a flexible,
rich voice. I shudder to recall how largely my own performances partook
of the grotesque. But in the forest where were no musical persons (I
supposed) to take hurt from whatever noise I made, I would let go with
all the lungs I had; he followed the horrid sounds to their origin, and
we would return to the inn together.
On these homeward walks I found him a good companion, and that is
something not to be under-valued by a selfish man who lives for himself
and his own little ways and his own little thoughts, and for very little
else,--which is the kind of man (as I have already confessed) that I
was--deserving the pity of all happily or unhappily married persons.
Responsive in kind to either a talkative mood or a silent one, always
gentle in manner, and always unobtrusively melancholy, Saffren never
took the initiative, though now and then he asked a question about some
rather simple matter which might be puzzling him. Whatever the answer,
he usually received it in silence, apparently turning the thing over and
over and inside out in his mind. He was almost tremulously sensitive,
yet not vain, for he was neither afraid nor ashamed to expose his
ignorance, his amazing lack of experience. He had a greater trouble, one
that I had not fathomed. Sometimes there came over his face a look of
importunate wistfulness and distressed perplexity, and he seemed on the
point of breaking out with something that he wished to tell me--or to
ask me, for it might have been a question--but he always kept it back.
Keredec's training seldom lost its hold upon him.
I had gone back to my glade again, and to the thin sunshine, which came
a little earlier, now that we were deep in July; and one afternoon I sat
in the mouth of the path, just where I had played the bounding harlequin
for the benefit of the lovely visitor at Quesnay. It was warm in the
woods and quiet, warm with the heat of July, still with a July
stillness. The leaves had no motion; if there were birds or insects
within hearing they must have been asleep; the quivering flight of a
butterfly in that languid air seemed, by contrast, quite a commotion; a
humming-bird would have made a riot.
I heard the light snapping of a twig and a swish of branches from the
direction in which I faced; evidently some one was approaching the
glade, though concealed from me for the moment by the winding of the
path. Taking it for Saffren, as a matter of course (for we had arranged
to meet at that time and place), I raised my voice in what I intended
for a merry yodel of greeting.
I yodeled loud, I yodeled long. Knowing my own deficiencies in this art,
I had adopted the cunning sinner's policy toward sin and made a joke of
it: thus, since my best performance was not unsuggestive of calamity in
the poultry yard, I made it worse. And then and there, when my mouth was
at its widest in the production of these shocking ulla-hootings, the
person approaching came round a turn in the path, and within full sight
of me. To my ultimate, utmost horror, it was Madame d'Armand.
I grew so furiously red that it burned me. I had not the courage to run,
though I could have prayed that she might take me for what I seemed--
plainly a lunatic, whooping the lonely peace of the woods into
pandemonium--and turn back. But she kept straight on, must inevitably
reach the glade and cross it, and I calculated wretchedly that at the
rate she was walking, unhurried but not lagging, it would be about
thirty seconds before she passed me. Then suddenly, while I waited in
sizzling shame, a clear voice rang out from a distance in an answering
yodel to mine, and I thanked heaven for its mercies; at least she would
see that my antics had some reason.
She stopped short, in a half-step, as if a little startled, one arm
raised to push away a thin green branch that crossed the path at
shoulder-height; and her attitude was so charming as she paused,
detained to listen by this other voice with its musical youthfulness,
that for a second I thought crossly of all the young men in the world.
There was a final call, clear and loud as a bugle, and she turned to the
direction whence it came, so that her back was toward me. Then Oliver
Saffren came running lightly round the turn of the path, near her and
facing her.
He stopped as short as she had.
Her hand dropped from the slender branch, and pressed against her side.
He lifted his hat and spoke to her, and I thought she made some quick
reply in a low voice, though I could not be sure.
She held that startled attitude a moment longer, then turned and crossed
the glade so hurriedly that it was almost as if she ran away from him. I
had moved aside with my easel and camp-stool, but she passed close to me
as she entered the path again on my side of the glade. She did not seem
to see me, her dark eyes stared widely straight ahead, her lips were
parted, and she looked white and frightened.
She disappeared very quickly in the windings of the path.
CHAPTER IX
He came on more slowly, his eyes following her as she vanished, then
turning to me with a rather pitiful apprehension--a look like that I
remember to have seen (some hundreds of years ago) on the face of a
freshman, glancing up from his book to find his doorway ominously
filling with sophomores.
I stepped out to meet him, indignant upon several counts, most of all
upon his own. I knew there was no offence in his heart, not the remotest
rude intent, but the fact was before me that he had frightened a woman,
had given this very lovely guest of my friends good cause to hold him a
boor, if she did not, indeed, think him (as she probably thought me) an
outright lunatic! I said:
"You spoke to that lady!" And my voice sounded unexpectedly harsh and
sharp to my own ears, for I had meant to speak quietly.
"I know--I know. It--it was wrong," he stammered. "I knew I shouldn't--
and I couldn't help it."
"You expect me to believe that?"
"It's the truth; I couldn't!"
I laughed sceptically; and he flinched, but repeated that what he had
said was only the truth. "I don't understand; it was all beyond me," he
added huskily.
"What was it you said to her?"
"I spoke her name--'Madame d'Armand.'"
"You said more than that!"
"I asked her if she would let me see her again."
"What else?"
"Nothing," he answered humbly. "And then she--then for a moment it
seemed--for a moment she didn't seem to be able to speak--"
"I should think not!" I shouted, and burst out at him with satirical
laughter. He stood patiently enduring it, his lowered eyes following the
aimless movements of his hands, which were twisting and untwisting his
flexible straw hat; and it might have struck me as nearer akin to
tragedy rather than to a thing for laughter: this spectacle of a grown
man so like a schoolboy before the master, shamefaced over a stammered
confession.
"But she did say something to you, didn't she?" I asked finally, with
the gentleness of a cross-examining lawyer.
"Yes--after that moment."
"Well, what was it?"
"She said, 'Not now!' That was all."
"I suppose that was all she had breath for! It was just the inconsequent
and meaningless thing a frightened woman WOULD say!"
"Meaningless?" he repeated, and looked up wonderingly.
"Did you take it for an appointment?" I roared, quite out of patience,
and losing my temper completely.
"No, no, no! She said only that, and then--"
"Then she turned and ran away from you!"
"Yes," he said, swallowing painfully.
"That PLEASED you," I stormed, "to frighten a woman in the woods--to
make her feel that she can't walk here in safety! You ENJOY doing things
like that?"
He looked at me with disconcerting steadiness for a moment, and, without
offering any other response, turned aside, resting his arm against the
trunk of a tree and gazing into the quiet forest.
I set about packing my traps, grumbling various sarcasms, the last
mutterings of a departed storm, for already I realised that I had taken
out my own mortification upon him, and I was stricken with remorse. And
yet, so contrarily are we made, I continued to be unkind while in my
heart I was asking pardon of him. I tried to make my reproaches gentler,
to lend my voice a hint of friendly humour, but in spite of me the one
sounded gruffer and the other sourer with everything I said. This was
the worse because of the continued silence of the victim: he did not
once answer, nor by the slightest movement alter his attitude until I
had finished--and more than finished.
"There--and that's all!" I said desperately, when the things were
strapped and I had slung them to my shoulder. "Let's be off, in heaven's
name!"
At that he turned quickly toward me; it did not lessen my remorse to see
that he had grown very pale.
"I wouldn't have frightened her for the world," he said, and his voice
and his whole body shook with a strange violence. "I wouldn't have
frightened her to please the angels in heaven!"
A blunderer whose incantation had brought the spirit up to face me, I
stared at him helplessly, nor could I find words to answer or control
the passion that my imbecile scolding had evoked. Whatever the barriers
Keredec's training had built for his protection, they were down now.
"You think I told a lie!" he cried. "You think I lied when I said I
couldn't help speaking to her!"
"No, no," I said earnestly. "I didn't mean--"
"Words!" he swept the feeble protest away, drowned in a whirling
vehemence. "And what does it matter? You CAN'T understand. When YOU want
to know what to do, you look back into your life and it tells you; and I
look back--AH!" He cried out, uttering a half-choked, incoherent
syllable. "I look back and it's all--BLIND! All these things you CAN do
and CAN'T do--all these infinite little things! You know, and Keredec
knows, and Glouglou knows, and every mortal soul on earth knows--but _I_
don't know! Your life has taught you, and you know, but I don't know. I
haven't HAD my life. It's gone! All I have is words that Keredec has
said to me, and it's like a man with no eyes, out in the sunshine
hunting for the light. Do you think words can teach you to resist such
impulses as I had when I spoke to Madame d'Armand? Can life itself teach
you to resist them? Perhaps you never had them?"
"I don't know," I answered honestly.
"I would burn my hand from my arm and my arm from my body," he went on,
with the same wild intensity, "rather than trouble her or frighten her,
but I couldn't help speaking to her any more than I can help wanting to
see her again--the feeling that I MUST--whatever you say or do, whatever
Keredec says or does, whatever the whole world may say or do. And I
will! It isn't a thing to choose to do, or not to do. I can't help it
any more than I can help being alive!"
He paused, wiping from his brow a heavy dew not of the heat, but like
that on the forehead of a man in crucial pain. I made nervous haste to
seize the opportunity, and said gently, almost timidly:
"But if it should distress the lady?"
"Yes--then I could keep away. But I must know that."
"I think you might know it by her running away--and by her look," I said
mildly. "Didn't you?"
"NO!" And his eyes flashed an added emphasis.
"Well, well," I said, "let's be on our way, or the professor will be
wondering if he is to dine alone."
Without looking to see if he followed, I struck into the path toward
home. He did follow, obediently enough, not uttering another word so
long as we were in the woods, though I could hear him breathing sharply
as he strode behind me, and knew that he was struggling to regain
control of himself. I set the pace, making it as fast as I could, and
neither of us spoke again until we had come out of the forest and were
upon the main road near the Baudry cottage. Then he said in a steadier
voice:
"Why should it distress her?"
"Well, you see," I began, not slackening the pace "there are
formalities--"
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