Part 2

He reflected for a moment. There was a horse, there was a thing on wheels. The logical procedure was to harness the horse and travel on, all the more because no earthly purpose could be served by remaining stationary in the wilderness. It was only when he had attached the animal, in the most business-like way, between the shafts, that he began to wonder how the deuce he had managed to do it. His life had been passed remote from horses. Never had he driven or ridden, still less, harnessed one. It was amazing.

Stooping down he picked up the silver flageolet which he had all but forgotten. How went the air which he had played that morning and which had brought back those clear pictures of his garden in Ealing? He could not remember. Even with the instrument to his lips and his fingers on the stops he could not recall it. It had gone like elfin music heard in a dream.

‘It’s all damned queer,’ said he.

For a while past there had been a scant traffic along the endless road; farmers’ carts, lumbering waggons and here and there a brisk little ramshackle motor-car. He clambered to the platform above the shafts, took the reins and the horse moved on at a sober walk. He lit another pipe and reconstructed his elusive history. And now, having got his brain into working order, he concentrated it on the facts such as he knew them. The key in his pocket, the singularly unclean shirt that he was wearing, proved that he had journeyed straight from Ealing to his present position near Chartres. He had therefore mysteriously disappeared from his home. He grasped at the sudden realization of what this must have meant to Martha.

He dropped the reins and sat, feet dangling, horror-stricken, while the horse plodded stolidly on. For the twenty years of their married life, during his brief and rare absences from home, she had never been without full news of his whereabouts. She must have been, must still be, frantic with anxiety. He must telegraph to her at once. Why not leave this ridiculous gipsy van on the road and beg a lift from the first passing car to Chartres? Possibly, if one had passed just then, he would have obeyed the impulse. But these were days long before the war, when small busy cars were not yet as ants along the roads of France.

By the time one rattled by, his exact mind had grappled with the circumstances. That he should be the hero of a ‘mysterious disappearance’ was incredible. Martha, a capable woman, would at once have put the police on his track. A well-known man dressed in golf clothes and without any luggage couldn’t make his way from London to Folkestone to Boulogne, without leaving behind him a thousand traces of his passing. People didn’t disappear in such simple and casual fashion. The sensitive network of civilization rendered it an impossibility. If he had been wandering about suffering from loss of memory, some tactful messenger would have discovered him and brought him home.

Well, he would send his telegram, give the caravan to the first blind beggar, and start at once for England. How he should manage to account for his defection in the matter of ‘Phillibert _v._ Phillibert, Cohen & Smith,’ he did not know. But he surely could get back in time for the re-opening of the Courts--the Trinity sittings--and leave the necessary excuses to the wit of his excellent clerk. He had a heavy couple of months before him. The old sixteen hours a day grind. Loss of memory or not, he must have had a marvellous holiday to put him in this pink of physical condition.

‘Poor old Martha _must_ know,’ said he.

He found himself all at once in a low, whitewashed village straggling on each side of the road. Outside an _estaminet_ decorated with the double dice box indicating that it was also a _débit de tabac_ hung a row of newspapers in a tin file. It struck him that he had not seen a paper for some days. He descended and bought one.

It bore the date of the tenth of September.

The horse, without his conscious guidance, took the bewildered man to Chartres. There he pulled new-found wits together. He took his midday meal in the _salle à manger_ of a humble inn full of country folk who had come for the morrow’s fair. His caravan he had left by the wayside on the entrance avenue of plane-trees, in charge of a shock-headed boy, one of a family owning a yellow-and-red-striped caravan, apparently in an analogous line of business with his own. In those far-off blissful days, a five-franc piece shone vast and silvery before lowly eyes.... He had entered the humble inn instinctively, as one accustomed to such accommodation, without giving a thought to the pretentious Hôtel du Grand Monarque on the _great_ place, where the refined of all nations naturally sought their sustenance.

He sat down at a crowded table between a wizened, blue-bloused peasant with a cropped white head and a neck like that of a moulting parrot craning over a dingy white collar around which was tied a half-inch of black ribbon by way of cravat, and a buxom farm-wife in spotless head-gear, brilliant silk neckerchief and great gold earrings. They ate lusciously with great clatter and prestidigitation of knives, and drank the little grey stony wine, and talked of crops and cattle and marriages and deaths.

And Paradyne, as brown and dusty and with as little outer pretensions to gentility as any of them, found himself talking to his neighbours of these elemental things with a familiarity born of custom. And then from the lady: ‘Monsieur was a stranger in the _pays_?’ Yes, he was a _marchand forain_, a hawker. He sold a bit of everything and went where he thought the market was best. She opined that one must make _pas mal_--a tidy bit--of money. But for herself she did not like the adventurous life. Not that she had tried it. She could not conceive happiness outside the family. _Tiens_, she had a husband--she made a movement of her head towards a food-absorbing male by her side--and five children. She lived at Gallardon eighteen kilometres off, and had no desire to travel. Once had she been to Paris; but _oh, là, là!_ No, truly the family was the only thing. But he must have a family somewhere?

Like Peter he denied instantly. No, he was alone, taking his food where he could find it. In her Gaulish fashion she twitted him with having families scattered along the highroads of France. This delicate impeachment he again denied, whereupon the lady, with a laughing glance out of dark eyes, and an ‘_allons donc!_’ thrust an arch elbow into his ribs. And when her husband claimed her attention, he talked to the old farmer about weather and wheat and apples and _rillettes_, the sausages that were served to them, and all the other wonders of La Beauce. And Cosmo Paradyne knew that for three months he had been leading this life of open air and earth and primitive interests, and, in some odd way, had fallen victim to its fascination.

On a hurried, worried holiday some years before he had visited Chartres with his wife, and had made his intellectual man’s pilgrimage to the cathedral.

Be it insisted on here, by the way, that no haggis was more tightly stuffed with giblets and oatmeal than was Cosmo Paradyne with knowledge. From pre-Winchester days onwards he had been the paragon of examinees. His career had been one of meteoric brilliance. In his course he had made himself easy master of three foreign languages, German, Italian and French; his musical ear, his one æsthetic gift, had caught and assimilated the accents; after a day or two among a foreign peasantry he could reproduce their intonations, and his marvellous memory could store the patois words which he picked up.... So was he master of the historical or archæological side of the arts of painting and architecture. His mind had ever been receptive of facts, and, tenaciously holding them, of co-ordinating them into an imperishable crystallization. With such mental qualities, is it to be wondered at that, at forty-two, he was one of the leaders of the Chancery Bar? ‘What a judge the little devil will make when he’s sick of making money!’ said his brethren.

On his previous visit therefore to the Cathedral of Chartres, Cosmo Paradyne, drawing from the vast stores of his learning, gave his wife an accurate account of the history of the fabric. He showed her that portion which dated from the middle of the thirteenth century, the stained glass of the same period, the Renaissance screen, the difference between the one twelfth-century spire and the other of the sixteenth century. The Cathedral was, to him, an agglomeration of fascinating facts. Martha had listened distractedly and eventually had replied:

‘Yes. That’s very interesting; but I think it’s rather pretty, all the same.’

Having nothing to do, he strolled through the rising ground from which the stupendous edifice commands the plain whose horizon is as vast as that of mid-ocean. Suddenly the tricksy memory that had been playing the devil with him of late captured, unsummoned, the air of the silver flageolet. He hummed it, and somewhat impatiently dismissed it from his thoughts, as he entered the wonder of heaven-seeking piers and shafts of vast spaces and of stained colours of glass through which the sun of the September afternoon streamed ineffably.

He sat on a rush-bottomed chair near the font and drank the glory in like a man parched by a lifelong thirst. He went out very tired, hanging his head, feeling half-drunken. He sat on the low parapet of the parvis and remembered words of long ago flitted through his brain: ‘You see that masonry--restored after the fire----’ and so on, and so on; and Martha’s acid voice: ‘Rather pretty, all the same.’

He spread out his hands drunkenly and rushed into the cathedral again and gave himself up to the immensity of its loveliness.

Later he called at the Post Office seeking the answer to a long, explanatory telegram which he had sent to Martha from the village where he had learned the date. He must obtain news of her before starting on his homeward journey.

In the cathedral he had been so happy; drenched in a sensuous envelopment of beauty. In the crude hall of the Post Office, before the wire-surrounded pigeon-hole, existence shrivelled into sordidness.

As a piece of identification he handed his hawker’s licence through the aperture and waited, while search was made, with a grim smile on his face. Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., was developing a sense of humour. A scrubby official in a dirty brown holland smock handed him a gummed-up bit of blue paper.

He read:

‘In view previous telegrams cannot believe loss of memory story. Conduct disgraceful. Have kept up fiction of nervous breakdown and foreign holiday for the family’s sake. To avoid scandal am willing to receive you. Wire date arrival so that I can announce beforehand. Martha.’

He reeled out of the Post Office. What were the telegrams to which she alluded?

However, his deduction had been exact. Martha had known where he was. There had been no mysterious disappearance to make a newspaper sensation. All that was to the good. Martha had also saved his face. Doubtless, the excellent Gregson had returned his briefs with satisfactory explanations. He could go back and take up his work in the most natural way in the world. He could go back and take up Martha who was ‘willing to receive’ him.

He noted that the telegram bore the place name Paddington. It was characteristic of Martha not to trust to the Ealing Post Office, but to take the train in order to send the message from the London Terminus.

Martha was not sympathetic. Obviously she distrusted him; and, her mind being on the track of an imaginary paramour, she would add a rasp to a life that only mutual indifference had kept smooth. Well, he certainly had suffered some mental disturbance, and, if he had followed anybody it was not a woman, but must have been the easy young man with the silver flageolet. But Martha would never believe it, even though he showed her the instrument and played the bewitching tune.

It was dusk when he reached his caravan by the wayside of the plane-tree avenue. His neighbours courteously informed him of their jealous care of his possessions. They had watered and fed the horse, and had guarded the vehicle as though it had been the Ark of the Covenant. Paradyne again bestowed largess on the shock-headed boy. The family sprawled on the grass eating their evening meal. The sight reminded him of his own healthy hunger. He unlocked his door and produced his rough store of food, the main part of which was his sturdy twelve inches of sausage and a bottle of red wine which he discovered with two others, wrapped up for safety’s sake in his golfing knickerbockers. He sat on the steps and ate his supper with an enjoyment that, in his memory, had never attended physical things. He had despised the men who wasted their time and talk on flavours of food and wine. He could not tell old port from new, nor had it mattered to him whether he drank it with walnuts or with mackerel. But that evening a great truth dawned on him. The salty, pungent, garlicky sausage and the new coarse wine were predestined for each other in Heaven’s Buttery. He ate and drank with an almost palpitating joy.

He filled his pipe with cheap French tobacco and the first puff or two fell into harmony with the wine and the sausage. Its perfume mingled with that of dust and beasts and the warm September smell that arose in the gathering night from the near city and the vast, environing plain.

‘My God,’ said he, ‘it’s good to be alive.’

And as he said it, his memory flashed back to the inexplicable words of Martha on the night of Viola’s wedding: ‘----it isn’t funny looking after a dead man.’

‘What the devil did she mean by that?’ he had asked himself.

Now came a glimmering of the answer in the form of another question: was he so sure that then, and, indeed, all his life before, he hadn’t been a dead man?

The phrase worried him for a while. He had a dim, uneasy feeling that he had used it, as Viola’s and the young man’s remark about Ealing, in the forgotten telegrams. Well, well. He shrugged his shoulders. What did it matter? In a day or two he must inevitably learn their purport. Sufficient for the night was the beauty thereof. A damned queer thing, beauty. He mused. He had known it, of course, as an intellectual conception. But now, it was an emotional matter. It plucked at things within his inmost being and swept unimagined chords. The Cathedral. This dreamy fruitful plain, panting for the soon-coming swell of moonlight.

Yes, he must go back. But things would never be quite the same.

The friendly neighbours in the red-and-yellow-striped caravan busied themselves with preparations for departure. They must take up early position in the fair-ground, according to police regulations. They advised Monsieur to do the same. Monsieur, smoking contentedly, replied that he had plenty of time before him, and watched them start. They made polite farewells.

The last to do so was the obvious sister of the shock-headed boy, a half-gipsy wench in the early twenties, artlessly clad in soiled and scanty raiment, but superb in the flowing contours of her lithe youth, and in her coarse loveliness.

‘_A demain, Monsieur._’

‘_A demain et bonsoir, Mademoiselle_,’ said he with a smile and a bow.

She lingered a few instants holding him with eyes half-mocking, half-alluring. Then, with an ironical toss of her head, she turned and faded into the dusk. Only when she had gone, did he realize that, during his meal, his gaze had rested pleasurably and conjecturingly upon her; and now her startling picture was imprinted on his mind. She was but a slatternly wild thing, unwashed, unkempt; the only external note of the picturesque about her being a flaming orange neckerchief; living on the fringe of civilization, with possibly no morals to speak of. But, God! She was alive!

For the first time in his cramped existence, he grew vehemently aware of the wonder of woman as magnificent woman, of her wonder as elemental complement of man. It had been only the flash of a dark-eyed drab across his vision. But the flash awakened him, so that he gasped, to the mighty potentialities of life. God! That girl was alive in all her sensuous and animal mystery. And he--he smote his brow--he, too, was alive. Lustily alive.... The thought stole into his brain: Martha--Martha who had twitted him with being a dead man--had she ever been anything else but a dead woman? What of the physical mystery of the flesh, which this girl of naught had suddenly proclaimed, had he ever dreamed of conjecturing from the cold and acid woman whose lips conventionally kissed had been as unresponsive as the hem of her garment? Nothing. As woman, newly revealed, Martha was dead. And she loved her living death, gloried in it, strove to maintain all who came near her within the sphere of its blight.

His ears heard the roar, and his eyes beheld the welter of the vast waters of strange emotions and fierce passions and intolerable joys that had ever beaten against the arid fortress in which he had been content to have his bleak and indifferent being.

He wiped the sweat from his brow and leaned dejected against the jamb of the caravan door. What a mighty and dreadful power was Fate. No wonder the Greeks made their gods bow down before its supremacy. The irony of it. Again a Greek conception. The Greeks were right. How otherwise could he explain the staggering situation in which he found himself? What but the relentless cruelty of Fate compelled him, at that moment when the world revealed itself in terms of vital beauty and infinite meaning, to return as return he must, to the old withered life of Ealing and the blight of Martha, and the routine of brain-exhausting, nerve-atrophying, soul-killing, meaningless drudgery in the Court of Chancery? What single hour’s happiness had he, intellectual automaton, ever got out of it? What had his brain-cramped life held that could compare with that morning’s thrill of intense physical fitness, with that evening’s leap towards the Unknown of Passion?

‘Oh, damn!’ he said despondently.

According to his duty as husband and man of grave responsibilities, he ought even now to be on his way to Paris. But he had been too weary of spirit to make the effort; at any rate too much in love with the day’s strange freedom. Besides, how could he leave caravan and horse adrift? The caravan he might have abandoned. Its value was of no account to a man of his fortune. But the horse was a living thing, a creature of responsive sentiment, like a dog. It rubbed its muzzle against his arm as though to manifest fondness. He must make fair and square provision for the horse. To-night’s friendly encounter had showed him the way. To-morrow, at the fair, would he sell for a song the whole outfit to his late kindly neighbours; and then the stern and relentless journey back to England.

The gradual traffic going fair-wards passed him by. But he did not hear it, wrapped in his despairing thoughts. The night wore on. The full moon arose, and, shining through the over-arching vault of foliage, fantastically diapered the white road.

From his breast pocket, at last, he drew the silver flageolet and looked at it in wistful perplexity. He put it to his lips, at first idly and then with a quivering sense of mastery. And lo! he played the whole of the melody through from beginning to end with its song of birds and its elfin laughter and its longings and haunting mockery just as the young man had played it in the starlight of his garden. And, as he played, his heart was uplifted in a strange exultation, such as--he now remembered dimly--had inspired him once before when he had put the flageolet to his lips. He caught at an elusive memory and gripped it hard, and stared wide-eyed before him with open mouth.

A bit of waste land by the roadside under the starlight. It looked like a brick-field. They sat on some scattered rubbish. He could just see the young man’s clear-cut, humorous face. ‘Sir, for my music I’ll take what you like to give me. But my flageolet no money can buy. On the other hand, to him who can play my composition through without fault, I yield it gladly.’

Yes; he had played it through from beginning to end.

The young man bowed:

‘It is yours,’ said he....

‘But what will you do without it?’

‘I have a new tune in my head more suited to the piccolo which I carry in my pocket, and which, indeed, I prefer as an instrument.’

‘This,’ laughed Paradyne, fingering the silver keys and stops, ‘is good enough for me.’

‘Perhaps for the present. But you will grow more fastidious. It has none of the woodland softness. The shepherds of Theocritus, if you remember, piped not into metal but into reed that sprang from organic life.’

He pulled out the homeliest little piccolo in the world. Paradyne stretched out a hand. The young man laughed.

‘Not yet,’ said he. Then suddenly: ‘Where are you going?’

‘For a walk.’

‘So am I. First through France. Then through Italy, then Sicily.’

‘France, Italy, Sicily----’ the faint echo of his murmured response floated back. ‘Fortunate young man!’

‘Why should you be less fortunate than I? The road is open. Come with me,’ said the young man, and laid a hand upon his arm.

Then, as always, the rift in the curtain that veiled the past three months closed suddenly. But the vision, as far as it went, had been startlingly complete.

He laughed aloud as he gazed on the shimmering pipe, and his laughter was informed with the thrill of pride. It had come to him not as a thing chaffered for and sordidly purchased; but as a minstrel’s prize, such as, in the times of which Theocritus sang, he might have been awarded by a challenging god.

France. Italy. Sicily. _Theocritus_--‘O Singer of Persephone----’ How did Wilde’s Villanelle go?

‘Slim Lacon keeps a goat for thee, For thee the jocund shepherds wait; O Singer of Persephone! Dost thou remember Sicily?’

He repeated the final quatrain two or three times, enjoying its flavour. Then, suddenly, inspired with new strength and purpose, he jumped to the ground, harnessed the horse to the caravan, and started down the moonlit avenue to the town of Chartres. But he did not stay at the fair-ground. He passed through and, casting a humorous glance at the yellow-and-red-striped caravan in which the vivid girl lay presumably asleep, blew a kiss to her with his fingers, as to a symbol, and made his slow progress through the narrow streets of the sleeping city.

The dawn found him, with the shining eyes of one awakened to Life’s promise, jogging southward on an irrevocable way, never, in this life, to retrace his steps.

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Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious errors in accents and punctuation have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.

Some illustrations have been moved slightly to better fit the ebook format.