Simon the Jester Part 34

I turned round. She had raised a crushed face from the pillows, and looked at me haggardly. I noticed a carafe of brandy and a siphon by the bedside. I mixed her a strong dose, and, before replying, made her drink it.

"They'll place him under restraint, that's all. He's not responsible for his actions."

"He did that once before--I told you--but without the knife--I wish I could cry--I can't--You don't think it heartless of me--but my brain is on fire--I shall always see it--I wish to G.o.d I had never asked him to come--Why did I? My G.o.d, why did I?--It was my fault--I wanted to see him--to judge for myself how much of the old Andre was left--there was good in him once--I thought I might possibly help him--There was nothing for me to do in the world--Without you any kind of old h.e.l.l was good enough--That's why I sent for him--When he came, after a bit, I was afraid, and sent for you----"

"Afraid of what?" I asked.

"He asked me at once what money I had--Then there seemed to be no doubt in his mind that I would join him--We spoke of you--the friend who could advise me--He never said--what he said afterwards--I thought it kind of him to consent to see you--I rang the bell and sent the cha.s.seur for you. I supposed Anastasius had gone home--I never thought of him. The poor little man was sweet to me, just like a dog--a silent, sympathetic dog--I spoke to him as I would to something that wouldn't understand--all sorts of foolish things--Now and then a woman has to empty her heart"--she shivered--her hands before her face.

"It's my fault, it's my fault."

"These things are no one's fault," I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked sc.r.a.ps of plat.i.tude I could collect--the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life--the door opened and the manager announced that the police had arrived.

We went through the ordeal of the _proces-verbal_. Anastasius, confronted with his victim, had no memory of what had occurred. He shrieked and shrank and hid his face in Lola's dress. When he was forced to speak he declared that the dead man was not Captain Vauvenarde.

Captain Vauvenarde was at the Cercle Africain. He, himself, was seeking him. He would take the gendarmes there, and they could arrest the Captain for the murder of Sultan of which his papers contained indubitable proofs. Eventually the poor little wretch was led away in custody, proud and smiling, entirely convinced that he was leading his captors to the arrest of Captain Vauvenarde. On the threshold he turned and bowed to us so low that the brim of his silk hat touched the floor. Then Lola's nerve gave way and she broke into a pa.s.sion of awful weeping.

The _commissaire de police_ secured the long thin knife (how the dwarf had managed to conceal it on his small person was a mystery) and the bundle of doc.u.ments, and accompanied me to my room to see whether he had left anything there to serve as a _piece de conviction_. We found only the crumpled picture of the horse Sultan neatly pinned against my bedroom wall, and on the floor a ribbon tied like a garter with a little bell opposite the bow. On it was written "Santa Bianca," and I knew it was the collar of the beloved cat which he must have been carrying about him for a talisman. The _commissaire_ took this also.

If you desire to know the details of the judicial proceedings connected with the murder of Andre Marie-Joseph Vauvenarde, ex-Captain in the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, and the trial of Anastasius Papadopoulos, I must refer you to the Algerian, Parisian, and London Press. There you will find an eagerly picturesque account of the whole miserable affair. Now, not only am I unable to compete with descriptive verbatim reporters on their own ground, but also a consecutive statement, either bald or graphic, of the tedious horrors Lola Brandt and I had to undergo, would be foreign to the purpose of these notes, however far from their original purpose an ironical destiny has caused them to wander. You know nearly all that is necessary for you to know, so that when I am dead you may not judge me too harshly. The remainder I can summarise in a few words. At any rate, I have told the truth, often more naively than one would have thought possible for a man who prided himself as much as I did on his epicurean sophistication.

These have been days, as I say, of tedious horror. There have been endless examinations, reconstructions of the crime, exposures in daring publicity of the private lives of the protagonists of the lunatic drama.

The French judges and advocates have accepted the account given by Lola and myself of our mutual relations with a certain mocking credulity. The Press hasn't accepted it at all. It took as a matter of course the view held by the none too n.o.ble victim. At first, seeing Lola shrug her shoulders with supreme indifference as to her own reputation, I cared but little for these insinuations. I wrote such letters to my sisters and to Dale as I felt sure would be believed, and let the long-eared, gaping world go hang. Besides, I had other things to think of. Physical pain is insistent, and I have suffered d.a.m.nable torture. The pettiness of the legal inquiry has been also a maddening irritation. Nothing has been too minute for the attention of the French judiciary. It seemed as though the whole of the evil gang of the Cercle Africain were called as witnesses. They testified as to Captain Vauvenarde's part proprietorship of the h.e.l.l--as to wrong practices that occurred there--as to the crazy conduct of both Anastasius and myself on the occasion of my insane visit. Officers of the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique were compelled further to blacken the character of the dead man--he had been a notorious plucker of pigeons during most of his military career, and when at last he was caught red-handed palming the king at _ecarte_, he was forced to resign his commission. Arabs came from the slums with appalling stories. Even the stolid Saupiquet, dragged from Toulon, gave evidence as to the five-franc bribe and the debt of fifteen sous, and identified the horse Sultan by the crumpled photograph. Lola and I have been racked day after day with questions--some, indeed, prompted by the suspicion that Vauvenarde might have met his death directly by our hand instead of that of Anastasius. It was the Procureur-general who said: "It can be argued that you would benefit by the decease of the defunct." I replied that we could not benefit in any way. My sole object was to effect a reconciliation between husband and wife. "Will you explain why you gave yourself that trouble?" I never have smiled so grimly as I did then.

How could I explain my precious pursuit of the eumoirous to a French Procureur-general? How could I put before him the point of view of a semi-disembodied spirit? I replied with lame lack of originality that my actions proceeded from disinterested friendship. "You are a pure altruist then?" said he. "Very pure," said I... . It was only the facts of the scabbard of the knife having been found attached to the dwarf's person beneath his clothes, and of certain rambling menaces occurring in his Sultan papers that saved us from the indignity of being arrested and put into the dock... .

During all this time I remained at the hotel at Mustapha Superieur. Lola moved to a suite of rooms in another hotel a little way down the hill. I saw her daily. At first she shrank from publicity and refused to go out, save in a closed carriage to the town when her presence was necessary at the inquiries. But after a time I persuaded her to brave the stare of the curious and stroll with me among the eucalyptus woods above. We cut ourselves off from other human companionship and felt like two lost souls wandering alone through mist. She conducted herself with grave and simple dignity... . Once or twice she visited Anastasius in prison.

She found him humanely treated and not despondent. He thought they had arrested him for the poisoning of the horse, and laughed at their foolishness. As they refused to return him his dossier, he occupied himself in reconstructing it, and wrote pages and pages of incoherence to prove the guilt of Captain Vauvenarde. He was hopelessly mad... .

The bond of pain bound me very close to Lola.

"What are you going to do with your life?" I asked her one day.

"So long as I have you as a friend, it doesn't greatly matter."

"You forget," I said, "that you can't have me much longer."

"Are you going to leave me? It's not because I have dragged you through all this dirt and horror. Another woman might say that of another man--but not I of you. Why are you going to leave me? I want so little--only to see you now and then--to keep the heart in me."

"Can't you realise, that what I said in London is true?"

"No. I can't. It's unbelievable. You can't believe it yourself. If you did, how could you go on behaving like anybody else--like me for instance?"

"What would you do if you were condemned to die?"

She shuddered. "I should go mad with fear--I----" She broke off and remained for some moments reflective, with knitted brow. Then she lifted her head proudly. "No, I shouldn't. I should face it like you. Only cowards are afraid. It's best to show things that you don't care a hang for them."

"Keep that sublime _je m'en fich'isme_ up when I'm dead and buried,"

said I, "and you'll pull through your life all right. The only thing you must avoid is the pursuit of eumoiriety."

"What on earth is that?" she asked.

"The last devastating vanity," said I.

And so it is.

"When you are gone," she said bravely, "I shall remember how strong and true you were. It will make me strong too."

I acquiesced silently in her proposition. In this age of flippancy and scepticism, if a human soul proclaims sincerely its faith in the divinity of a rabbit, in G.o.d's name don't disturb it. It is _something_ whereto to refer his aspirations, his resolves; it is a court of arbitration, at the lowest, for his spiritual disputes; and the rabbit will be as effective an oracle as any other. For are not all religions but the strivings of the spirit towards crystallisation at some point outside the environment of pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes which is the flesh, so that it can work untrammelled: and are not all G.o.ds but the accidental forms, conditioned by circ.u.mstance, which this crystallisation takes?

All G.o.ds in their anthropo-, helio-, thero-, or what-not-morphic forms are false; but, on the other hand, all G.o.ds in their spiritual essence are true. So I do not deprecate my prospective unique position in Lola Brandt's hagiology. It was better for her soul that I should occupy it.

Even if I were about to live my normal life out, like any other hearty human, marry and beget children, I doubt whether I should attempt to shake my wife's faith in my heroical qualities.

This was but a fragment of one among countless talks. Some were lighter in tone, others darker, the mood of man being much like a child's balloon which rises or falls as the strata of air are more rarefied or more dense. Perhaps during the time of strain, the atmosphere was more often rarefied, and our conversation had the day's depressing incidents for its topics. We rarely spoke of the dead man. He was scarcely a subject for panegyric, and it was useless to dwell on the memory of his degradation. I think we only once talked of him deeply and at any length, and that was on the day of the funeral. His brother, a manufacturer at Clermont-Ferrand, and a widowed aunt, apparently his only two surviving relatives, arrived in Algiers just in time to attend the ceremony. They had seen the report of the murder in the newspapers and had started forthwith. The brother, during an interview with Lola, said bitter things to her, reproaching her with the man's downfall, and cast on her the responsibility of his death.

"He spoke," she said, "as if I had suggested the murder and practically put the knife into the poor crazy little fellow's hand."

The Vauvenardes must have been an amiable family.

"Before I came," she said a little while later, "I still had some tenderness for him--a woman has for the only man that has been--really--in her life. I wish I could feel it now. I wish I could feel some respect even. But I can't. If I could, it would lessen the horror that has got hold of me to my bones."

It was a torture to her generous soul that she could not grieve for him.

She could only shudder at the tragedy. In her heart she grieved more for Anastasius Papadopoulos, and in so doing she was, in her feminine way, self-accusative of callous lack of human feeling. It was my attempt to bring her to a more rational state of mind that caused us to review the dead man's career, and recapitulate the unpleasing incidents of the last interview.

Of Captain Vauvenarde, no more. He has gone whither I am going. That his soul may rest in peace is my earnest prayer. But I do not wish to meet him.

Lola went tearless and strong through the horrible ordeal of the judicial proceedings. She said I gave her courage. Perhaps, unconsciously, I did. It was only when the end came that she broke down, although she knew exactly what the end would be. And I, too, felt a lump in my throat when they sentenced Anastasius Papadopoulos to the asylum, and I saw him for the last time, the living parody of Napoleon III, frock-coated and yellow-gloved, the precious, newly written dossier in his hand, as he disappeared with a mournful smile from the court, after bowing low to the judge and to us, without having understood the significance of anything that had happened.

In the carriage that took us home she wept and sobbed bitterly.

"I loved him so. He was the only creature on earth that loved me. He loved me as only a dog can love--or an angel."

I let her cry. What could I say or do?

These have been weeks of tedious horror and pain. With the exception of Colonel Bunnion, I have kept myself aloof from my fellow creatures in the hotel, even taking my meals in my own rooms, not wishing to be stared at as the hero of the scandal that convulsed the place. And with regard to Colonel Bunnion shall I be accused of cynicism if I say that I admitted him--not to my confidence--but to my company, because I know that it delighted the honest but boring fellow to prove to himself that he could rise above British prejudice and exhibit tact in dealing with a man in a delicate position? For, mark you, all the world--even those nearest and dearest to me as I soon discovered--believed that the wife of the man who was murdered before my eyes was my mistress. Colonel Bunnion was kind, and he meant to be kind. He was a gentleman for all his wearisomeness, and his kindness was such as I could accept. But I know what I say about him is true. Ye G.o.ds! Haven't I felt myself the same swelling pride in my broadmindedness? When a man is going on my journey he does not palter with truth.

Though I held myself aloof, as I say, from practically all my fellow creatures here, I have not been cut off from the outside world. My sisters, like this French court in Algiers, have accepted my statement with polite incredulity. Their letters have been full of love, half-veiled reproach, anxiety as to their social position, and an insane desire to come and take care of me. This I have forbidden them to do.

The pain they would have inflicted on themselves, dear souls, would have far outweighed the comfort I might have gained from their ministrations.

Then I have had piteous letters from Dale.

"... Your telegram rea.s.sured me, though I was puzzled. Now I get a letter from Lola, telling me it's all off--that she never loved me--that she valued my youth and my friendship, but that it is best for us not to meet again. What is the meaning of it, Simon? For Heaven's sake tell me.

I can't think of anything else. I can't sleep. I am going off my head... ."

Again. "... This awful newspaper report and your letter of explanation--I have them side by side. Forgive me, Simon. I don't know what to believe, where to turn... . I have looked up to you as the best and straightest man I know. You must be. Yet why have you done this? Why didn't you tell me she was married? Why didn't she tell me? I can't write properly, my head is all on a buzz. The beastly papers say you were living with her in Algiers--but you weren't, were you? It would be too horrible. In fact, you say you weren't. But, all the same, you have stolen her from me. It wasn't like you... . And this awful murder. My G.o.d! you don't know what it all means to me. It's breaking my heart... ."

And Lady Kynnersley wrote--with what object I scarcely know. The situation was far beyond the poor lady's by-laws and regulations for the upbringing of families and the conduct of life. The elemental mother in her battled on the side of her only son--foolishly, irrationally, unkindly. Her exordium was as correct as could be. The tragedy shocked her, the scandal grieved her, the innuendoes of the Press she refused to believe; she sympathised with me deeply. But then she turned from me to Dale, and feminine unreason took possession of her pen. She bitterly reproached herself for having spoken to me of Madame Brandt. Had she known how pa.s.sionate and real was this attachment, she would never have interfered. The boy was broken-hearted. He accused me of having stolen her from him--his own words. He took little interest in his electioneering campaign, spoke badly, unconvincingly; spent hours in alternate fits of listlessness and anger. She feared for her darling's health and reason. She made an appeal to me who professed to love him--if it were honourably possible, would I bring Madame Brandt back to him? She was willing now to accept Dale's estimate of her worth. Could I, at the least, prevail on Madame Brandt to give him some hope--of what she did not know--but some hope that would save him from ruining his career and "doing something desperate"?

And another letter from Dale: