Widdershins Part 28

"But," he stammered presently, "you are speaking of generalities--horrible theories--things diabolically conceivable to be done--"

"What?" cried Marsden, checked for a moment in his horrible triumph. "No, by G.o.d! I've done 'em, done 'em! Don't you understand? If you don't, question me!..."

"No, no!" cried Romarin.

"But I say yes! You came for this, and you shall have it! I tried to stop you, but you wanted it, and by G.o.d you shall have it! You think your life's been full and mine empty? Ha ha!... Romance! I had the conviction of it, and I've had the courage too! I haven't told you a tenth of it!

What would you like? Chamber-windows when Love was hot? The killing of a man who stood in my way? (I've fought a duel, and killed.) The squeezing of the juice out of life like _that_?" He pointed to Romarin's plate; Romarin had been eating grapes. "Did you find me saying I'd do a thing and then drawing back from it when we--" he made a quick gesture of both hands towards the middle of the restaurant floor.

"When we fought--?"

"Yes, when we fought, here!... Oh no, oh no! I've lived, I tell you, every moment! Not a t.i.tle, not a degree, but I've lived such a life as you never dreamed of--!"

"Thank G.o.d--"

But suddenly Marsden's voice, which had risen, dropped again. He began to shake with interior chuckles. They were the old, old chuckles, and they filled Romarin with a hatred hardly to be borne. The sound of the animal's voice had begun it, and his every word, look, movement, gesture, since they had entered the restaurant, had added to it. And he was now chuckling, chuckling, shaking with chuckles, as if some monstrous t.i.t-bit still remained to be told. Already Romarin had tossed aside his napkin, beckoned to the waiter, and said, "M'sieu dines with me...."

"Ho ho ho ho!" came the drunken sounds. "It's a long time since M'sieu dined here with his old friend Romarin! Do you remember the last time? Do you remember it? _Pif, pan_! Two smacks across the table, Romarin--oh, you got it in very well!--and then, _brrrrr_! quick! Back with the tables--all the fellows round--Farquharson for me and Smith for you, and then to it, Romarin!... And you really don't remember what it was all about?..."

Romarin had remembered. His face was not the face of the philosophic master of Life now.

"You said she shouldn't--little Pattie Hines you know--you said she shouldn't--"

Romarin sprang half from his chair, and brought his fist down on the table.

"And by Heaven, she didn't! At least that's one thing you haven't done!"

Marsden too had risen unsteadily.

"Oho, oho? You think that?"

A wild thought flashed across Romarin's brain.

"You mean--?"

"I mean?... Oho, oho! Yes, I mean! She did, Romarin...."

The mirrors, mistily seen through the smoke of half a hundred cigars and cigarettes, the Loves and Shepherdesses of the garish walls, the diners starting up in their places, all suddenly seemed to swing round in a great half-circle before Romarin's eyes. The next moment, feeling as if he stood on something on which he found it difficult to keep his balance, he had caught up the table-knife with which he had peeled the pear and had struck at the side of Marsden's neck. The rounded blade snapped, but he struck again with the broken edge, and left the knife where it entered. The table appeared uptilted almost vertical; over it Marsden's head disappeared; it was followed by a shower of gla.s.s, cigars, artificial flowers and the tablecloth at which he clutched; and the dirty American cloth of the table top was left bare.

But the edge behind which Marsden's face had disappeared remained vertical. A group of scene-shifters were moving a flat of scenery from a theatre into a tumbril-like cart...

And Romarin knew that, past, present, and future, he had seen it all in an instant, and that Marsden stood behind that painted wing.

And he knew, too, that he had only to wait until that flat pa.s.sed and to take Marsden's arm and enter the restaurant, _and it would be so_. A drowning man is said to see all in one unmeasurable instant of time; a year-long dream is but, they say, an instantaneous arrangement in the moment of waking of the molecules we a.s.sociate with ideas; and the past of history and the future of prophecy are folded up in the mystic moment we call the present....

_It would come true_....

For one moment Romarin stood; the next, he had turned and run for his life.

At the corner of the street he collided with a loafer, and only the wall saved them from going down. Feverishly Romarin plunged his hand into his pocket and brought out a handful of silver. He crammed it into the loafer's hand.

"Here--quick--take it!" he gasped. "There's a man there, by that restaurant door--he's waiting for Mr. Romarin--tell him--tell him--tell him Mr. Romarin's had an accident--"

And he dashed away, leaving the man looking at the silver in his palm.

THE CIGARETTE CASE

"A cigarette, Loder?" I said, offering my case. For the moment Loder was not smoking; for long enough he had not been talking.

"Thanks," he replied, taking not only the cigarette, but the case also.

The others went on talking; Loder became silent again; but I noticed that he kept my cigarette case in his hand, and looked at it from time to time with an interest that neither its design nor its costliness seemed to explain. Presently I caught his eye.

"A pretty case," he remarked, putting it down on the table. "I once had one exactly like it."

I answered that they were in every shop window.

"Oh yes," he said, putting aside any question of rarity.... "I lost mine."

"Oh?..."

He laughed. "Oh, that's all right--I got it back again--don't be afraid I'm going to claim yours. But the way I lost it--found it--the whole thing--was rather curious. I've never been able to explain it. I wonder if you could?"

I answered that I certainly couldn't till I'd heard it, whereupon Loder, taking up the silver case again and holding it in his hand as he talked, began:

"This happened in Provence, when I was about as old as Marsham there--and every bit as romantic. I was there with Carroll--you remember poor old Carroll and what a blade of a boy he was--as romantic as four Marshams rolled into one. (Excuse me, Marsham, won't you? It's a romantic tale, you see, or at least the setting is.) ... We were in Provence, Carroll and I; twenty-four or thereabouts; romantic, as I say; and--and this happened.

"And it happened on the top of a whole lot of other things, you must understand, the things that do happen when you're twenty-four. If it hadn't been Provence, it would have been somewhere else, I suppose, nearly, if not quite as good; but this was Provence, that smells (as you might say) of twenty-four as it smells of argela.s.se and wild lavender and broom....

"We'd had the d.i.c.kens of a walk of it, just with knapsacks--had started somewhere in the Ardeche and tramped south through the vines and almonds and olives--Montelimar, Orange, Avignon, and a fortnight at that blanched skeleton of a town, Les Baux. We'd nothing to do, and had gone just where we liked, or rather just where Carroll had liked; and Carroll had had the _De Bello Gallico_ in his pocket, and had had a notion, I fancy, of taking in the whole ground of the Roman conquest--I remember he lugged me off to some place or other, Pourrieres I believe its name was, because--I forget how many thousands--were killed in a river-bed there, and they stove in the water-casks so that if the men wanted water they'd have to go forward and fight for it. And then we'd gone on to Arles, where Carroll had fallen in love with everything that had a bow of black velvet in her hair, and after that Tarascon, Nimes, and so on, the usual round--I won't bother you with that. In a word, we'd had two months of it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the communal washing-fountains under the dark plane-trees, singing _Magali_ and the _Que Cantes_, and Carroll yarning away all the time about Caesar and Vercingetorix and Dante, and trying to learn Provencal so that he could read the stuff in the _Journal des Felibriges_ that he'd never have looked at if it had been in English....

"Well, we got to Darbisson. We'd run across some young chap or other--Rangon his name was--who was a vine-planter in those parts, and Rangon had asked us to spend a couple of days with him, with him and his mother, if we happened to be in the neighbourhood. So as we might as well happen to be there as anywhere else, we sent him a postcard and went. This would be in June or early in July. All day we walked across a plain of vines, past hurdles of wattled _cannes_ and great wind-screens of velvety cypresses, sixty feet high, all white with dust on the north side of 'em, for the mistral was having its three-days' revel, and it whistled and roared through the _cannes_ till scores of yards of 'em at a time were bowed nearly to the earth. A roaring day it was, I remember.... But the wind fell a little late in the afternoon, and we were poring over what it had left of our Ordnance Survey--like fools, we'd got the unmounted paper maps instead of the linen ones--when Rangon himself found us, coming out to meet us in a very badly turned-out trap.

He drove us back himself, through Darbisson, to the house, a mile and a half beyond it, where he lived with his mother.

"He spoke no English, Rangon didn't, though, of course, both French and Provencal; and as he drove us, there was Carroll, using him as a Franco-Provencal dictionary, peppering him with questions about the names of things in the patois--I beg its pardon, the language--though there's a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this Felibrige business will be in a good many pieces when Frederic Mistral is under that Court-of-Love pavilion arrangement he's had put up for himself in the graveyard at Maillanne. If the language has got to go, well, it's got to go, I suppose; and while I personally don't want to give it a kick, I rather sympathise with the Government. Those jaunts of a Sunday out to Les Baux, for instance, with paper lanterns and Bengal fire and a fellow spouting _O blanche Venus d'Arles_--they're well enough, and compare favourably with our Bank Holidays and Sunday League picnics, but ... but that's nothing to do with my tale after all.... So he drove on, and by the time we got to Rangon's house Carroll had learned the greater part of _Magali_....

"As you, no doubt, know, it's a restricted sort of life in some respects that a young _vigneron_ lives in those parts, and it was as we reached the house that Rangon remembered something--or he might have been trying to tell us as we came along for all I know, and not been able to get a word in edgeways for Carroll and his Provencal. It seemed that his mother was away from home for some days--apologies of the most profound, of course; our host was the soul of courtesy, though he did try to get at us a bit later.... We expressed our polite regrets, naturally; but I didn't quite see at first what difference it made. I only began to see when Rangon, with more apologies, told us that we should have to go back to Darbisson for dinner. It appeared that when Madame Rangon went away for a few days she dispersed the whole of the female side of her establishment also, and she'd left her son with n.o.body to look after him except an old man we'd seen in the yard mending one of these double-cylindered sulphur-sprinklers they clap across the horse's back and drive between the rows of vines.... Rangon explained all this as we stood in the hall drinking an _aperitif_--a hall crowded with oak furniture and photographs and a cradle-like bread-crib and doors opening to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor. He had also, it seemed, to ask us to be so infinitely obliging as to excuse him for one hour after dinner--our postcard had come unexpectedly, he said, and already he had made an appointment with his agent about the _vendange_ for the coming autumn.... We, begged him, of course, not to allow us to interfere with his business in the slightest degree. He thanked us a thousand times.

"'But though we dine in the village, we will take our own wine with us,'

he said, 'a wine _surfin_--one of my wines--you shall see--'

"Then he showed us round his place--I forget how many hundreds of acres of vines, and into the great building with the presses and pumps and casks and the huge barrel they call the thunderbolt--and about seven o'clock we walked back to Darbisson to dinner, carrying our wine with us.

I think the restaurant we dined in was the only one in the place, and our gaillard of a host--he was a straight-backed, well-set-up chap, with rather fine eyes--did us on the whole pretty well. His wine certainly was good stuff, and set our tongues going....