Beggars on Horseback Part 1

Beggars on Horseback.

by F. Tennyson Jesse.

A SHEPHERDESS OF FAUNS

Archie Lethbridge arrived in Provence thoroughly satisfied with life. He had just sold a big picture; was contemplating, with every prospect of success, giving a "one-man-show" in London of the work he would do in Provence; and the girl he loved had accepted him.

Miss Gwendolen Gould was eminently eligible--her income, though comfortable, was not large enough to brand her husband as a fortune-hunter; she was pretty in a well-bred way that satisfied the eye without causing it to turn and gaze after her; and above all, she could be relied upon never to do, say, or think an unusual thing. Like all painters, when they are conventionally minded, Archie was the fine flower of propriety--he owned to enough wild oats of his own sowing to save him from inferiority in the society of his fellow-men, and he held exceedingly rigid views on the subject of his womenkind. Gwendolen might--doubtless had, for she was one of the large army of young women brought up to no profession save that of s.e.x--give this or that man a kiss at a dance, but she would never have saved all of pa.s.sion and possibilities for one man, and lavished them on him, regardless of suitable circ.u.mstances. Archie's name (that he hoped one day to adorn with some coveted letters at which he now pretended to sneer) would be perfectly safe with Gwendolen.

The only drawback to his complete content was that his fair, sleek person showed signs of getting a trifle too plump--for he was only young as a man who is nearly "arrived" counts youth. On the whole, however, it was with a feeling of settled attainment that Archie left Nice and proceeded to strike up into the Alpes Maritimes, totally unprepared for any bizarre or inexplicable event--he would have laughed satirically at the bare idea.

To do him justice, he worked hard, and he had a tremendous facility and a certain charm that concealed his lack of true artistic sensitiveness.

There is probably nothing more difficult to interpret in paint than an olive-tree--the incredible grey brilliance of the thing, each leaf set at a slightly different angle, and refracting the light till the whole tree seems made of blown mist and sharp-cut shadows. Archie painted olives under every effect; sparkling in the sun, fog-grey on a grey day, and pale with the shimmering under-side of straining leaves against a storm-dark sky. He also painted very dirty children picking the ranked violets and stocks that grew along the olive terraces, and this he achieved without once descending into the realms of the "pretty-pretty,"

while at the same time infusing just the right amount of sentiment to ensure a sale.

He painted here and there from Gra.s.se to Le Broc, and then one day, feeling he had taken all he could from the soft-scented land of olives and flowers, he hired a motor to convey him up into the Back o' Beyond, and drop him there. Once he met a couple of women bearing on their heads the sheaves of tight little red rosebuds that look exactly like bundles of radishes, and caught a whiff of the strange, bitter-sweet smell of the newly cut stems. Then he pa.s.sed an old shepherd in a cloak of faded blue, with sheepskin legs cross-gartered to the knee, taking his lean, golden-brown flock up into the mountains.

After that he saw no living thing, neither bird nor beast nor human, for many miles. Rounded hills, opening out from each other in endless succession and covered from crest to base with harsh yellow gra.s.s, and strewn with grey boulders. Deep gullies that at one time had been set alight and now were scorched and brown like plague-pits, with here and there a patch of pale stones showing up lividly from the charred thorns and blackened soil. Archie shivered, partly because of the keen wind blowing down from the great plateau beyond the hills, partly because something savage in the scene gripped at him.

The car throbbed on, higher and higher, till the road, winding acutely along the edge of precipices, developed a surface that caused his chauffeur to swear gently to himself. Valley after valley opened out, long and narrow, and Archie noticed signs of a long-past cultivation in the curved terraces into which the bed of each valley was cut, forming an endless series of semicircles. There was no trace of any crop, and the whole effect was as of some rude amphitheatre where prehistoric man had sat and watched gladiatorial shows.

The car, sticking now and then in a rut, or jolting violently over stones, finally crested the last rise, and Archie found himself on a vast stretch of land ringed in by sharp-edged hills, like some dead, gigantic crater; to the right, far away on a slope of the mountain ring, lay a grey straggling town that looked hacked out of the hardened lava. The only sign of life was in a patch of vividly green gra.s.s near at hand, where hundreds of crocuses had burned their way up through the earth and showed like a bed of thin blue flames.

Archie directed the contemptuous chauffeur towards the town, and they finally drew up at the inn--a little green-shuttered affair, with a stone-flagged pa.s.sage, and a tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat drowsing beside the door. Outside a _buvette_ opposite was a marble-topped table at which sat a couple of workmen drinking cider. An evanescent gleam of sun shone out, and the tawny liquid caught and held it, making each gla.s.s throw on to the table a bubble of gold fire enmeshed in the delicate shadow of the vessel itself. Archie stood transfixed for a moment with pleasure, then, as the gleam faded and died, he entered the inn.

Like most people with the creative temperament, Archie Lethbridge was the prey of environment. The unborn child is not more influenced by the surroundings of its mother than a book or picture by those of its creator. Draginoules took such a deep, sure grip of Archie that it did more than merely affect his work--it began to upset his neatly arranged values, and, since Nature abhors a vacuum, to subst.i.tute fresh ones in their place. Draginoules, in short, behaved like a master of scenic effects; it allowed a couple of days for the background to permeate Archie's consciousness, and, when he was ripe for it, introduced the human element, which, to a man of his type, means a woman.

It was one morning when he was washing brushes in the dim inn kitchen that he saw her first. She came out of the _buvette_ to serve some workmen, and Archie stopped dead in the act of swirling a cobalt-laden brush round and round in the hollowed yellow soap he held. He always saw the whole scene in memory as clearly as he saw it then--the low-fronted _buvette_, the gla.s.s of the door refracting the light as it still quivered from her pa.s.sage; the pools of blue shadow that lay under the table and chairs on the pavement; the blouse-clad figures of the workmen, particularly a young man with a deeply burnt back to his neck; and the girl herself, holding aloft a tray of liqueur gla.s.ses, that winked like little eyes. All this he saw framed by the darkness of the kitchen and cut sharply into squares by the black bars of the window; then, as he mechanically went on frothing blue-stained bubbles out of the soap, he said to himself, "I must paint that girl."

He soon found out that she was the niece of the stout couple who kept the _buvette_, and that her name was Desiree Prevost. As they mentioned her most people shrugged their shoulders. Oh, no, there was nothing against the girl--though it was true her eyebrows met in a thick bar across her nose, and old people had always said that was a sign of the Loup-Garou; enlightened moderns, however, did not really hold by that.

The town was proud of her looks, for it considered her _tres bien_, the highest expression of praise from a Provencal, who is a dour kind of person, taking his pleasures as sadly as the proverbial Englishman, and whose chief aim in life is to place one sou on the top of another, and when possible insert a third in between.

Archie approached the aunt of Desiree on the subject of sittings with some trepidation, but met with an agreeable pliancy from her, and a calm though indifferent a.s.sent from Desiree herself. She had a high opinion of her own value, and no amount of appreciation surprised her.

Scanning her afresh as they stood on the pavement making final arrangements, Archie inwardly congratulated himself. From the heavy bra.s.s-coloured hair ma.s.sed with a sculptured effect round her well-poised head, to the firmly planted feet, admirably proportioned to the rest of her, she was entirely right for his purpose--she seemed the spirit of Draginoules incarnate. Owing to the opaque pallor of her skin, her level bar of fair eyebrow and heavily folded lids, her big, finely modelled nose and faintly tinted mouth, all took on a sculptured quality that made for repose; the very shadows of her face were delicate in tone, mere breaths of shadows. Yet she was excessively vital, but it was a smouldering, restrained vitality suggestive of a quiescent crater. Her face was too individual to be perfect--the nose over big; the brow too narrow for the full modelling across the cheekbones, but she had an egg-like curve from turn of jaw to pointed chin. When she laughed her teeth showed large and strong, and her throat was the loveliest Archie had ever seen--magnificently big--and she had a trick of tilting her head back that made the smoothly knitted muscles of her neck swell a little under the white skin. As he painted her Archie used to find himself racking his brains for some speech that would make her head take that upward poise, so that he could watch the play of throat.

He chose his background well; a sheltered spot in a fold of hill just beyond the town, where a slim young oak sapling still retained its copper-hued autumn leaves, that seemed almost fiery against the deep, soft blue of the sky. He had conceived of her as standing under the oak-tree, so that, to him, working lower down on the slope she too showed against the sky, seemingly caught in a network of delicate boughs. Being below her he was also the richer by the soft, three-cornered shadow under her chin, and the whole of her became a tone of exquisite delicacy, as of shadowed ivory, in the setting of sky--that sky of southern spring which seems literally drenched in light. The tawny note of the oak-leaves was to be repeated in some sheep, which, though kept subservient to the figure of Desiree, were to supply the motive of the picture--or so Archie thought till the sudden freak that made him introduce the fauns.

Desiree was all for robing herself in her best--a black silk bodice with a high collar, and a be-trained, jet-spangled skirt, but Archie coaxed her into wearing the dress he first saw her in; a mere wrapper of indefinite prune colour, belted in at the waist to show the lines of her deep chested, long flanked figure, and cut so low as to leave her throat bare from the pit of it. Her sleeves were rolled back to the elbow and her arms showed milk-white as far as the reddened wrists and the big, work-roughened hands that held a hazel switch across her thighs.

Archie was Anglo-Saxon enough to feel a slight stiffness at the first sitting, but Desiree was a stranger to the sensation of tied tongue.

"I like the English," she announced. "Not many of them come here, but I have not spent my life in Draginoules, no, indeed! I was in a laundry once at La Madeleine. Do you know it? It is where they take in the washing of Nice. So I used to go much into Nice, and an English lady there painted me. She had a talent! She made me look beautiful. In Draginoules, do you know what they call me? They call me _l'Anglaise manquee_!"

"Because you like the English so?" asked Archie. His French was considerably purer than hers, she spoke it with the Provencal accent that sounds exactly like a c.o.c.kney tw.a.n.g.

"Because I have the nature, the habits of an English woman. Oh, I a.s.sure you! I like to live out of doors--to be out all day with one's bread and a bottle of wine and sleep on the hillside--that is what I call living.

I always open my window at night, though my aunt says it is a folly. I could go to England if I chose, as a maid. My English lady would have me. Ah! how I long to see England. One gets so tired with Draginoules."

"But your friends--you would be sorry to leave them?"

"Oh, for that, I do not care about the people of Draginoules. It was my mother's place, not mine. I was born in Lyons, where my father was a silk-weaver. But he was a bad kind of man, so I came to my aunt to live.

I do not think much of the people of Draginoules. They all like me, but I do not like them!"

"Why don't you go to England, then? Though I think you are far better here!" quoth Archie, on whom the glamour of the place was strong.

"My fiance would kill himself," said Desiree serenely.

"Oh--you are fiancee?" murmured Archie, wondering why he felt that absurd mingling of relief and regret.

"To Auguste Colombini. He is a mechanician in Nice. We are to marry when he gets a rise. _Helas! je ne serai plus fille!_"

Her words, so simply and directly spoken, caught at Archie's imagination--"_Helas! je ne serai plus fille!_"

"What a _vierge farouche_!" he said to himself. "If I can get that feeling into my picture!" Aloud he said: "And your fiance--he is very devoted, then?"

"He adores me. It is a perfect folly, see you, to feel for anyone what he does for me. He is mad about me."

She spoke with a calm arrogance that was very effective. How sure she was of her man! Was it a peculiarity of temperament in her or her fiance that made such confidence possible? Archie flattered himself he was something of a student of human nature, and he absorbed all of Desiree that he could get in a spirit positively approaching that of the journalist.

When a man and woman fall into the habit of discussing the intimate things, such as love and marriage; and, above all, of comparing the s.e.xes; disaster, even if only a temporary one, is apt to follow. Archie returned to the themes next time she posed for him.

"So you think a man can care too much for a woman?" he asked, and stopped for a moment with raised brush to watch her answer. She shrugged her shoulders slightly, yet enough to make the folds of her wrapper strain upward for a fleeting moment.

"As to that I think women are worth it. But it is foolish to care everything for one person."

"You could care for others, then--as well as M. Colombini?" asked Archie with a sudden stir at his pulses.

"I? One can care a little--here and there. But commit a folly for a man, that is a thing I would never do. And I am very fond of Auguste. If I did not think we should be happy and faithful I should not marry him. I look round on all the married people I know, and see nothing but betrayal everywhere. Here a husband plays his wife false, there she in her turn cheats him. Bah!--it is not good, that!"

"How right you are!" said Archie virtuously. "But you do not then think it necessary to care as much for Auguste as he cares for you?"

"_Damme_, no! How should I? He pleases me, and he is good--I can respect him. And I like him to kiss me . . ." the most charming look of self-consciousness mingled with reminiscence flitted over her face--"but for him--he is mad when he kisses me. Women do not care like that. It is a folly. And it is always happier, Monsieur, when it is the husband who cares the most. That is how men are made."

Oh, yes, thought Archie, she was a woman after all, this _vierge farouche_, and more unashamedly woman, franker in her admissions of knowledge--for she admitted in her expressive face and gestures more than she actually said--than any woman of his world. He worked in silence for a while then told her to rest.

She flung herself on the turf with an abandonment of limb and muscle usually only seen in young animals, and he came and lay a little below her and lit a cigarette. Desiree lay serenely, her face upturned, and he studied her thoughtfully.

"Surely very few of your countrywomen are as blonde as you?" he asked her. "Your eyes are blue, and your brows and lashes a faint brown and your hair is----"

He paused, at a loss how to describe her hair. It was not golden, rather that strong bra.s.s-colour that, had he seen it on a sophisticated townswoman he would have dubbed "peroxide." It was oddly metallic hair, not only in its colour, but in the carven ripples of it where she wore it pulled across her low brow and ma.s.sed in heavy braids round her head.

That way of wearing her hair right down to her brows, except for a narrow white triangle of forehead showing, boy-like, at one side, gave her an oddly animal look--using the word in its best sense. A look as of some low-browed, heavy-tressed faun, fearless and unashamed--it was only in her eyes that mystery lay.

"My hair?" she exclaimed, showing her big white teeth in a laugh as frank as a boy's; "but that, you know, is not natural! It was an accident!"